Liz's Funeral

Liz and my daugher Aña at St. Joseph's Abbey

A number of people have asked that I post the brief reflection I offered at Liz's funeral. I am happy to do so, for I hope it will remind my friends and the friends of the Cornerstone Forum to keep Liz and her heartbroken husband in your prayers. My mantra-like prayer has been this:

O Holy Trinity, surround Liz with Your love and with mine, and give her peace and joy.

Here are the comments I made at Liz's funeral:

We are here to commend Liz to God’s mercy and care and to thank God for the privilege of having known and loved her, and not to drown these our bitter-sweet Christian responsibilities in a sea of reminiscence. We will have an opportunity to reminisce later today. But if a grieving husband can be allowed a reminiscence or two, I would like to say a few words about Liz.

To keep from rambling, as you can see, I have taken the precaution of organizing my thoughts; I hope you will not think them less heartfelt for that. I hope as well that you will forgive me for not being excessively morose. As a Christian I am enjoined by the apostle Paul not to grieve as the pagans do. I hope what follows will be an example of what Saint Paul calls “godly grief,” that is to say: grief suffused with the light of Easter. Liz would surely have it no other way.

Anyone who knew Liz knows what a unique person she was. No one who knew Liz at all well will ever be heard to say: “Ah, yes, Liz … Liz reminds me of so-and-so.” There are no so-and-sos out there bearing even a remote likeness to Liz, and all of us who knew her realize this. Liz was in a category of one. One of the unique things about Liz, however, was the fact that she neither particularly admired uniqueness nor ever aspired to it. If she aspired to anything, it was social invisibility. To be the object of social attention was one of her greatest fears. No, Liz acquired her uniqueness the hard way: though the experience of sadness and suffering and the intimacy with God that sadness and suffering can make possible.

The first thing that struck me about Liz when we met was that she had a depth that one only finds in those who have been brought to their knees by heavy crosses, so I was not surprised to learn, as we got to know each other, that hers had not been an easy life. Her mother’s long and distressing illness – and its lingering emotional repercussions in Liz’s life – the tragic and untimely death of the younger brother to whom she had tried to be both sister and mother, and an adult life plagued with frequent devastatingly painful migraine headaches … Liz was someone who knew suffering.

Of all the images of the Virgin Mary that Liz treasured, the one she revered most was Mary the Mother of Sorrows. In her last days on this earth, she gazed long at the Mother of Sorrows icon that she asked me to hang at the foot of the bed in which she spent her last weeks.

John of the Cross, the great Carmelite whose religious writings Liz loved, once said: “The deeper the wound the greater the healing,” a mystery that the contemporary poet Leonard Cohen expressed when he wrote:

There is a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.

When I first met Liz at a retreat I was giving in Connecticut, in addition to sensing that she knew suffering, another thing that struck me was her love for the Church. I move in circles where one occasionally bumps into people who love the Church, but Liz’s love for the Church had a special quality about it. It was not so much that she loved the Church – in the perfunctory way we often love old familiar things – rather her love for the Church was spontaneous, unaffected and, most remarkable of all, entirely unproblematic. She loved the Church with the kind of love that has been all but eradicated by the spirit of our age, a spirit which is so antithetical to the Catholic sensibilities which were so alive in Liz.

Sensing how remarkable Liz was, how uncontaminated she was by the spiritual toxins of our time, I found myself wondering: Where has this woman been keeping herself, that her Catholic sensibilities are so fresh and alive?

Where, indeed, had she been keeping herself? As I was soon to learn, Liz’s love for the Church had a local habitation and a name: St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, which had been her spiritual home all her adult life. In the aftermath of an early life altering religious experience, and thanks to a suggestion by her friend Michael Boover, Liz discovered the Abbey in her early 20s and shortly thereafter almost literally shoved her foot in the door long enough to get a few minutes with Fr. Mark Delery. The few minutes turned into a few weeks, then a few months, then a few years, then a few decades. Fr. Mark, the senior concelebrant at today’s Mass was Liz’s spiritual director all her adult life.

Since there is nothing not to love about St. Joseph’s Abbey, Liz’s love of it was not as extraordinary as her love for that great gargoyled wonder we call Mother Church. Nevertheless, as C. S. Lewis once said: heaven is an acquired taste, and not everyone has the patience and poverty of spirit it takes to be nourished, as Liz was, by the Cistercian life of prayer and worship.

But as Liz and I corresponded after that first meeting, and as I was occasionally on the East Coast and could stop by for a visit, I discovered something even more astounding, namely that Liz actually loved God. I mean, she actually loved God.

Now, like most of you, I had learned from my sainted mother to believe in God, and I had been taught by the Sisters of Mercy to pray to God, and I had heard the first of Jesus’ two great commandments countless times, and I even fancied that I was more or less obeying it. It was not until I met Liz that I realized how extraordinarily rare it is to find someone who actually does what Jesus commands, who actually loves God. Liz loved God. The more I realized this, the more astonishing it was to behold.

As Liz’s friends and family probably know, having a friend or family member who loves God the way Liz did can be confusing and sometimes exasperating. God’s ways are not our ways, and those who passionately love God are often a complete puzzle others. Jesus’ friends and family thought his behavior more than a little strange if you’ll remember.

Befriending someone who loves God is a little like taking a walk in the woods with a hound dog. Every now and then, the dog stops dead in his tracks – his nose to the ground, panting for no apparent reason – or he darts off frantically in a direction perpendicular to the path on which his companion is trudging. Repeated attempts to convince him to give up his foolishness are useless. The dog has found something far more interesting than whatever hum-drum plans for the day his companion might have had. If the dog had one ounce of attention to spare – which of course he wouldn’t – he would probably feel pity for the poor creatures who have to slog through life with noses that are almost entirely useless.

Irreverent as it may be to say so, that’s the way it is with people who love God the way Liz did. The Spirit blows where it will, and long experience teaches them to be prepared to go perpendicular to the flow of things – or vertical to it – on a moment’s notice.

This is one of the reasons why those who love God often do the world the courtesy of going off by themselves – as Liz did – or huddling together in some remote spot, as the monastic lovers of God do. I’m sure my friends the monks of St. Joseph’s Abbey who are with us here this morning will forgive me for saying so but monasteries are asylums for the lovers of God. If these extraordinary and exasperating people were allowed to roam the world un-chaperoned , they might frighten the natives. By staying on their reservations these lovers of God can inflict the idiosyncrasies of their vocation on each other, leaving the rest of us to our sundry distractions. Liz, bless her heart, had the soul of a monastic without an explicit monastic vocation. She had to carry her monasticism around with her the way a turtle carries his home on his back.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the 20th century’s towering theological giants, says somewhere: “The only part of earthly love to survive [death] will be the heavenly love that has become incarnate in it.”

If there was a laboratory in which Liz and I transmuted earthly love into heavenly love, it was what we came to call our “port time.” The whole time we were married, unless I was off on one of my travels, at 5 p.m. sharp, we would stop whatever we were doing to pray together and chat quietly for while. It was more prayer time than port time, but it almost always included a glass of port, thus its nickname. Each evening we prayed the Divine Office and a few other prayers. We prayed specifically for those we loved and those we felt were in special need of prayer. We often prayed for those who suffer the worst poverty of all, namely those who have no one to pray for them. We then talked for a while about what we were working on during the day: Liz’s poetry or the memories she was collecting, or some lecture I was preparing or piece of writing I was struggling to get right. Often we read passages to each other from things we had read that day that had left an impression on us.

By beginning our day with Lauds and Mass at St. Joseph’s Abbey and ending it with these unforgettable moments of “port-time,” the earthly love Liz and I had for one another became the vessel in which we distilled – drop by daily drop – a heavenly love of the sort that survives death.

I will continue to begin my day at the Abbey as Liz and I always did and end it, as we did, with “port time,” but especially at port-time I’m sure I will feel, in addition to Liz’s spiritual presence, her physical absence. It is then that I will most miss the truly amazing and utterly unique woman who was for a few short years my dearest friend in all the world. May she rest in Christ’s peace.

And may God bless all of you for being here today and reward you for your many kindnesses to Liz.

Lord, now you let your servant go in peace ...

Elizabeth Bailie
January 4, 1954 - February 18, 2007

Wake:
Wednesday, February 21
(Ash Wednesday)
5:00 to 8:00 p.m.
(Rosary at 5:00 followed by wake)
O’Connor Brothers Funeral Home
592 Park Avenue
Worcester, MA 01603
MAP

Funeral Mass:
Thursday, February 22
10:00 a.m.
Immaculate Conception Parish
353 Grove Street
Worcester, MA 01605
MAP

Interment:
Immediately following the funeral Mass
Notre Dame Cemetery
162 Webster Street
Worcester, MA 01603
MAP

Throughout her adult life,
St. Joseph's Cistercian Abbey was Liz's spiritual home.

Contributions in lieu of flowers can be made to:

St. Joseph's Abbey
167 North Spencer Road
Spencer, MA 01562-1233

Liz circa 1962

May she rest in peace.

The Storm is Howling ...

For the last few weeks, as Liz has lost physical function, we have been “camping out” in our living room, where Liz can be in front of the fireplace and see the birds on the bird-feeder from her bed. She sleeps in a motorized hospital bed, and I sleep in a twin-bed next to her, half awake to any changes in her breathing that may need my attention.

I was awakened this morning just before 4 a.m. by the sound of a blizzard swirling around our house. We live on a hill, and storms buffet our house with greater force than they do the houses in more sheltered areas. As I lay in bed unable to sleep, worrying about Liz and worrying as well about losing power in our house. The first lines of Yeats’ poem “A Prayer for My Daughter” came unbidden into my mind. As Liz has become completely dependent on me physically, and as her mental horizon has narrowed and become endearingly childlike, our relationship has evolved into something like that between a father and an infant daughter. So the poem had resonance with my present situation.

I have long loved the Yeats poem. I committed it to memory many years ago, thanks to which its opening lines gave my pre-dawn anxieties a local habitation and a name.

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

And then a second poetic guest arrived, perhaps because of the father-daughter theme of the first. For as I turned over in my mind what I might do if the storm isolates us or causes the loss of power to our home, again unbidden, Lear’s words to Cordelia came into my head:

Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,--
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;--
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.

Paris Graffiti

Before we were married, Liz and I were in Paris visiting René and Martha Girard and taking in the sites. (The Girard's -- who know Paris intimately -- gave us an unbelievable walking tour, dinner at a quintessentially Parisian restaurant included.)

In a variation on Jesus' admonition to his disciples to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves, like many genuine and unaffectedly holy people, Liz is a bewildering combination of ageless, ancient, world-weary wisdom, on one hand, and giddy teen-age spontaneity, on the other. While we were in Paris, I came down one morning (Liz and I had separate hotel rooms, scandalizing our Parisian innkeepers), I found Liz, chalk dust on her hands, standing triumphantly over this sidewalk masterpiece:


Sitting next to Liz the other morning as she slept, her physical and mental condition declining steadily, I picked up a book at random. As it happened it was one of Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theo-Drama volumes. I began reading where the bookmark was. The first words I read where these:

Eros contains a promise (described not only by pagans such as Shelley and Keats, but also by Christians such as Claudel) which is always pointing beyond the sentiment that sighs "Abide a while, thou art so beautiful!" and which, therefore, if it is not transposed onto the Christian level, must condemn itself to eternal melancholy and self-consumption. This total structure of beauty can be redeemed only if the risen Lover is again met at the other side of death -- the risen Lover who does not disappoint with his blessed Noli me tangere [Do not cling to me] and with his withdrawal at the Ascension, the Lover who leaves no shadow of sorrow behind him, but who snatches up the loving and adoring heart and carries it away with him: where your treasure, where your darling is, there also is your heart.

"Eros contains a promise" which points beyond itself, and which Liz astutely and intuitively acknowledged in the "in Christ" footnote on her lovely little piece of graffiti.

Memento Mori

As Mel Gibson's Mary wiped the blood of Jesus' scourging from the stone pavement, similarly powerless to do much else, I post an occasional weblog, not to violate the intimacy of what Liz and I are now experiencing, but to honor the communio which sustains it. For, as St. Paul insisted:

None of us lives for himself, and no one dies for himself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's. (Romans 14:7-8)

So this from Hans Urs von Balthasar:

There are many ways in which even that death which is appointed for the body, although it is a physical event, can be assimilated in advance to that spiritual event that it is meant to be (and shall be, whether or not one wishes it to be), namely, the handing over of corporality to the Giver who fashioned the dust of the earth into a human instrument (Gen. 2:7). The Christian's attitude to the body will be governed by this final sacrifice, which he is to perform as a conscious act; even in health and active life he will make the coming final surrender of corporality the inner meaning of all his action.

The word "instrument" is quintessential von Balthasar: Everyone is called to a specific mission, and every mission is inherently christological in nature and cruciform in structure. Christian faith leads not to the happiness we experience when we get our way, but to the joy that we experience when we realize that we were not meant to.

Mary's Passion

My response to Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ was that it should have been called Mel Gibson's Pieta. Among the film's most heartrending and memorable scenes depicts Mary, her heart exploding with grief, wiping Jesus' blood from the stone pavement of the torture chamber where he had been scourged. The scene captures perfectly something what those who accompany their loved ones at the end of life experience to some degree, namely: the need to do something even when there is nothing one can do. What I am doing is writing this to you.

Suffering, writes Hans Urs von Balthasar, "is not entry into alienation, but an exit from it. On a deeper level, suffering is a participation in the suffering of the one who leads us out of alienation.”

Please keep Liz in your prayers.

The Unfinished Creature

As I have often said from the podium, it helps to clear away the "spirit of the age" clutter to ask: Why are we here? Or: What are humans for?

Now that I've violated the one grammatical principle that I still try to uphold -- against ending a sentence with a preposition -- let me repeat the offense: One way of putting our predicament is this: The challenge and the quintessential human task is to discover -- existentially at least, and cognitively as far as possible -- what human existence is all about. It remains, after all, an open question. We are, par excellence, the only unfinished creatures. But that does not mean that we are free to fashion ourselves according to our whims. Our existence would then simply been absurd, which is to say incapable of being assessed. A "well-lived life" would be an unintelligible phrase, purely subjective. There must be a pattern, a form, a purpose, and logic, in a "word," a Logos.

More that merely a synonym for the English "word," the Logos of John's Gospel means the reason, the pattern, the (Trinitarian) reality toward which creatures made in the image and likeness of God are inherently ordained. Everyone whose life has any moral or conceptual or existential coherence has a logos at work in the background of his or her existence, that is to say: an operational notion, however vaguely conceptualized, of the meaning and purpose of human existence.

The question is: how true is the logos on which one's life is based? A Christian, like everyone else, ought to routine ask: What are humans for? In other words: what is the true pattern, the true nature of human existence? To what are we called by the fact that we are made in the image and likeness of (the Trinitarian) God? The answer is Christ, simply: Christ: the Logos in the flesh, that is to say, the Reason (for human life) embodied in human form.

It would be technically true to say that "what we Christians believe is that Christ is the answer," but, in the squishy world of multicultural diffidence, that way of expressing it inevitably relativizes it. Imagine a person getting up at an international meeting of scientists and saying: "what we Western scientists believe is that the earth is spherical." There are people who don't believe that, but those who do believe it are right and those who don't are wrong. When is the last time you heard a Muslim say: "What we Muslims believe is that there is no God but Allah and Mohammad is is prophet"? Don't hold your breath waiting to hear it. Our Islamic brothers and sisters may be religiously mistaken (they are), but at least they believe what they claim to believe.

To make the truth claim unabashedly will seem, again in the present atmosphere, to be an act of pride. In fact it is an act of humility, inasmuch as the one who makes such a statement is precisely not stating his or her personal opinion. One is simply assenting to the truth that has been mediated by centuries of credible Christian witnesses ("Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe") and, provisionally at least, corroborated by one's own experience of prayer and the sacraments.

Accounting for one's creedal affirmation surely requires the summoning of apologetic, theological, and (especially in the case of Christianity) anthropological corroboration, but none of these things will avail if the original affirmation is too diffident, too equivocating, too relativized to be taken seriously.

To say, as Christians always have, that Christ is "Lord," is to say that He is the true Logos, the unsurpassable pattern of self-sacrificing love to which all humans are called by God. To say that Christ is the "Lord of history," is to say that history is the drama of Christ's gentle appeal to his mortal brothers and sisters to come their senses and claim their ontological inheritance by participating, here and now, in the joy of Trinitarian self-donation.

The Sole Sufferer

In his discussion of "Rhenish-Flemish Mysticism," Hans Urs von Balthasar refers to a passage in the writings of Heinrich Suso:

In a great prayer Suso praises God in "the pains of all wounds, the groans of all the sick, the sighing of all who mourn, the tears of all who weep, the insults borne by all the oppressed;" this is possible because God the Son is "the sole Sufferer": thus all who suffer should form a circle around him, thirstily drinking from him who is the "overflowing wellspring of grace." [Theo-Drama, Vol. V, p. 456.]

A few pages earlier, von Balthasar quoted another of the Rhineland mystics, the 14th century Johannes Tauler, who wrote: "we do not follow God by experiencing a sense of well-being but by taking up our Cross."

Liz had a seizure tonight. She recovered, but we welcome your prayers and are grateful for them.

The Future of Europe

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Bernard Lewis made it clear:

Islam could soon be the dominant force in a Europe which, in the name of political correctness, has abdicated the battle for cultural and religious control, Prof. Bernard Lewis, the world-renowned Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar, said on Sunday.

The Muslims "seem to be about to take over Europe," Lewis said at a special briefing with the editorial staff of The Jerusalem Post. Asked what this meant for the continent's Jews, he responded, "The outlook for the Jewish communities of Europe is dim." Soon, he warned, the only pertinent question regarding Europe's future would be, "Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?" The growing sway of Islam in Europe was of particular concern given the rising support within the Islamic world for extremist and terrorist movements, said Lewis.

Has anything so enormous, so precious, and so irreplaceable ever been more wantonly forsaken and betrayed by its own privileged beneficiaries than has the Christian underpinnings of Western civilization in our time? It takes ones breath away. If only we would realize what we have done or allowed to be done to the cultures in which our children and grandchildren will be obliged to live. No salvaging effort will bear fruit that does not start with contrition.

The human condition -- on a personal note

I've often thought, and several times said (whether on this weblog or not I cannot recall) that those of us who live with all the conveniences would do well to have to do our laundry at a laundromat at least every once in a while. Perhaps it is my blue-collar upbringing, but I feel at home in a laundromat, almost as much as I do in church. In my case, the danger of romanticizing either is not great. But for a graduate course in subjects that can be studied at the undergraduate level in laundromats, an emergency room in an urban hospital late on a Saturday night is hard to beat.

Complications related to Liz's illness and the numerous medications she is enduring because of it took us to the emergency room on Saturday night. Crowded conditions and the various procedures and diagnostic tests Liz had to undergo kept us at the hospital until 6:30 a.m. Sunday. While Liz was being diagnosed and given an emergency MRI, I sat in her wheelchair in one of the little curtained-off cubicals trying (against impossible odds) to get at least a few minutes of sleep.

The curtain of the cubical where I sat was opened, and I was able to see and hear the choppy segments of the emergency room drama. To the din of blaring televisions (a ubiquitous curse in most places in the typical hospital today), sirens, intercom staff messages, shouts of patients who were in pain, or on drugs, or drunk, or all three, I tried (largely unsuccessfully) to sleep. (Wheelchairs are not made for sleep.)

At one point, two of the patients, males in their 30s who seemed to be high on something or other, went for each other, triggering an avalanche of testosterone, as uniformed security personnel, men in street clothes and surgery scrubs emerged from every corridor. The shouting died down, and, after milling around for a few minutes, most drifted off to resume their assigned roles.

All the while, I was wondering how Liz was handling the exhaustion and the diagnostic tests, and worrying that her tumor might have gotten into her spinal column. (Mercifully, it had not.)

Back home on Sunday morning for a few short hours of sleep and then a day like most other days, quiet and revolving around Liz's needs. As I may have mentioned in an earlier post, before dinner each night Liz and I have always had a period of prayer and reflection and personal sharing. We call it "port time" because it invariably includes a glass of port or an equivalent libation. Liz isn't able to read these days, so I have lately been reading a few paragraphs each night from something of spiritual interest to us. For the last couple of weeks or so I have been reading from Romano Guardini's The Lord.

As it happened, on Sunday night, when I turned to where I had left off the night before, it was at Guardini's discussion of the Beatitudes, and more precisely the following paragraph, in which the great German theologian reflects on the Beatitudes as Christ's manifesto for a new order of existence:

To participate in this new order, man must open his heart. He must free himself from the clutches of natural existence and advance to meet the things to come. He must eradicate the old, deeply rooted claim that this world is sufficient unto itself, the essential and only reality; he must admit that earthly existence even at its best is stained and discredited in the eyes of God. Naturally such self-emancipation is particularly difficult for those for whom the world holds the most delights-for the powerful and creative, for all who have a large share in earth's greatness and beauty. These are the rich, the sated, the laughing, the praised and honored ones-hence, the woe that threatens them. On the other hand, blessings on the poor, the mournful, the hungry and persecuted, not because their condition in itself is blessed, but because it helps them to realize that more than just this world exists. Need teaches them only too well how inadequate existence is, and once taught, they turn more easily from earth to heaven for something better. [The Lord, p. 72]

Fresh from my long vigil at the emergency room, this marvelous paragraph seemed to me to capture the sum and substance of Christian faith. All the more so is this the case, inasmuch as Guardini took pains to warn against sentimentalizing Christ's transvaluation of all values. "We must guard against one thing only," he insists, "sentimentality." (Something that would survive in the emergency room for about 30 seconds.)

Nothing on earth ever, of itself, guarantees heaven. Poverty can make men greedier than wealth. ... Hunger can harden; pain can drive to despair; contempt can inwardly destroy. ... But on the whole, Jesus' "Blessed are you" is correct. He spoke from experience: it was the poor, the suffering, the despised publicans, sinners and harlots who at least attempted to believe. The powerful, the learned, the wealthy, the secure were provoked by his message, or laughed at him, or hated him, whom they considered a danger to the political existence of the nation.

The Church is humanity's emergency room, where the weak and the wounded, the reckless and the raging, the broken and the frightened are thrown together to be ministered to by others only marginally healthier or holier than those to whom they minister.

At this very moment, as I am tying these words, Liz is sitting on the sofa nearby looking intently at an image of the Mother of Sorrows which was carved by our friend Vonn Hartung and which hangs in our living-room. Mary, with her heart pierced by the sword, is the icon of the Church: the Mother of Sorrows, under whose protection we huddle together with all the other needy ones.

How blessed we are to be under her protection and in the care of Mother Church.

The Scylla and Charybdis

In a post on the Mirror of Justice weblog, Rick Garnett, who teaches at Notre Dame Law School, quoted this passage from a recent column by Chicago Cardinal George.

. . . There are many good people whose path to holiness is shaped by religious individualism and private interpretation of what God has revealed. They are, however, called Protestants. When an informed and committed group of Catholics, such as the Archdiocesan Pastoral Council, comes up with an agenda for discussion that is, historically, Protestant, an important point is being made. Catholics assimilated to American culture, which is historically Protestant, are now living with great tension between how their culture shapes them and what their Catholic faith tells them to hold.

. . . The Second Vatican Council wasn’t called to turn Catholics into Protestants. It was called to ask God to bring all Christ’s followers into unity of faith so that the world would believe who Christ is and live with him in his Body, the Church. . . .

. . . What seems clear to me is that God is calling us to be authentically Catholic in our faith and also, perhaps paradoxically, Protestant in our culture. We live where we are, not in some ideal world where everything works smoothly. Those who withdraw into sectarian enclaves, even in the name of orthodoxy but without respect for or obedience to the mediators called bishops, are simply repeating the Protestant Reformation with Catholic tags. The one thing necessary is to live with discerning hearts and minds. We need to keep asking ourselves what is influencing our ways of thought, our decisions, our feelings and affections. A life of constant discernment is not always easy, but it’s joyful because it means living with the Holy Spirit, whose presence brings truth and consolation and unity. . . .

Professor Garnett then adds this:

This is interesting, and not just for its possible relevance to "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" projects (about which I am very enthusiastic). Cardinal George seems to be warning about both (a) a tendency to retreat, perhaps smugly, into self-styled "orthodox" enclaves, and (b) the confusion of "renewal" with individualism.

I, too, am very enthusiastic about "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," and clarifications like the one that Cardinal George made in his column are a most welcome contribution to it, as is the attention Professor Garnett has called to it and his succinct summary of it.

What much of the world sees ...

In the introduction to his The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, Dinesh d'Souza criticizes the ideological Left for providing the non-Western world with all the most venomous anti-Western rhetorical flourishes. One glaring and unmistakable example is this:

In his October 30, 2004 videotaped message, apparently timed to precede the presidential election, Bin Laden drew liberally from themes in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 to condemn the Bush administration. Bin Laden denounced Bush for election-rigging in Florida, for going to war to enrich oil companies and defense contracts like Halliburton, for curtailing civil liberties under the Patriot Act, and for reading stories to school-children while the World Trade Center burned. Apart from the rhetorical flourishes of “Praise be to Allah,” Bin Laden sounds exactly like Michael Moore.

The other contribution D'Souza claims that the Left has made to the jihadist cause is that it has contributed to a moral degradation that the jihadists have exploited. I have only read the online introductory chapter of D'Souza's book, but others argue that he has overstated his case, seeming to suggest that the jihadists are in some way justified by the West's moral decline and that those who feel an obligation to defend the West should see traditional Muslims as better allies than their libertine Liberal compatriots. If this is so, I would agree that this is carrying the argument too far. What D'Souza gets right, as far as I'm concerned, is that what the rest of the world sees when it looks at contemporary Western (American) culture is something a good deal less edifying than Jeffersonian democracy, motherhood, and apple pie. It's the sexual hysteria into which what I called in the earlier post the Alfred Kinsey libertine Left has led the culture.

We should not dismiss the Islamic or traditional critique so easily. In fact, as our own domestic and cultural debate shows, we know that many of the concerns raised by the radical Muslims are widely-shared in our own society. Indeed, many conservative and religious Americans agree with the Islamic fundamentalists that American culture has become increasingly vulgar, trivial and disgusting. I am not merely referring to the reality shows where contestants eat maggots or the talk shows where guests reveal the humiliating details of their sex lives. I am also referring to “high culture,” to liberal culture that offers itself as refined and sophisticated.

Here, for example, is a brief excerpt from Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” a play that won rave reviews and Hollywood accolades and is now routinely performed (according to its own publicity materials) in “more than 20 countries, including China and Turkey.” In the book version of the play — now sold in translation in Pakistan, India, and Egypt — Ensler offers what she terms “Vagina Occurrences”: “Glenn Close gets 2,500 people to stand up and chant the word cunt…There is now a Cunt Workshop at Wesleyan University…Roseanne performs ‘What Does Your Vagina Smell Like?” in her underwear for two thousand people…Alanis Morisette and Audra McDonald sing the cunt piece.” And so on. If all of this makes many Americans uncomfortable and embarrassed — which may be part of Ensler’s objective — one can only imagine how it is received in traditional cultures where the public recitation of such themes and language is considered a grotesque violation of manners and morals. Nor is Ensler an extreme example. If the garbage heap of American excess leaves many Americans feeling dirty and defiled at home, what gives America the right to dump it on the rest of the world?

Again, this is not to say that the fanatics willing to kill innocent Westerners are motivated by moral scruple, but only that, in silencing their co-religionists or coercing their cooperation, the moral decadence of the West works in their favor. There is no doubt that the jihadists would be as eager to destroy a Norman Rockwell America as they would an Eve Ensler one, but the eclipse of the former by the latter has provided them with a very advantageous recruiting device among traditional Muslims who might be otherwise less easily rallied to their cause.

D'Souza continues:

The debate over popular culture points to a deeper issue. For the past quarter-century we have been having a “culture war” in this country which has, until now, been viewed as a debate with only domestic ramifications. I believe that it has momentous global consequences as well. When we debate hot-button issues like abortion, school prayer, divorce, gay marriage, and so on, we are debating two radically different views of liberty and morality. Issues like divorce and family breakdown are important in themselves, yet they are ultimately symptoms of a great moral shift that has occurred in American society, one that continues to divide and polarize this country, and one that is at the root of the anti-Americanism of traditional cultures.

In the last post, I quoted a portion of d'Souza's reference to Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation. Here is that quote in its fuller context:

The cultural shift can be described in this way. Some years ago I read Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation, which describes the virtues of the World War II generation. I asked myself whether this was truly the “greatest” generation. Was it greater than the generation of the American founding? Greater than the civil war generation? I don’t think so. The significant thing about the World War II generation was that it was the last generation. Last in what way? It was the last generation to embrace an external code of traditional morality. Indeed this generation’s great failure was that it was unable to inculcate this moral code in its children. Thus the frugal, self-disciplined, deferred-gratification generation of World War II produced the spoiled children of the 1960s — the Clinton generation.

Which is to say: my generation, we members of which still have a few years left in which to try to rectify the moral and cultural catastrophe that we actively celebrated or passively allowed to take place on our watch.

The introductory chapter of D'Souza's book can be read in its entirety here, and an interesting critique of it is here.

The (Last) Great Generation

My parents were part of what Tom Brokaw, in his book by that name, called the greatest generation. Like so many others, my father was killed in Europe's last great effort to resist a murderous and heartless tyranny. My mother never took her wedding ring off, worked as a secretary at the Catholic parish where I attended grammar school, and was a daily communicant. The greatness was disguised in the most ordinary of forms, but it stands out against the backdrop of what happened subsequently, when we were inundated by the moral and cultural tsunami that washed up in the late 1960s. Unlike a literal tsunami, the moral one left most of the physical structures in place. In that sense it was more like a neutron bomb, which is reputed to kill all living things while leaving the physical infrastructure standing.

These things were brought to mind this morning by the first reading in today's Mass, from the introduction of St. Paul's second letter to Timothy, in which he wrote to Timothy:

... I recall your sincere faith
that first lived in your grandmother Lois
and in your mother Eunice
and that I am confident lives also in you.

Here is a genealogy of faith that has been the greatest of all sources of Christian devotion and the incalculable blessings that accompany it. William Butler Yeats may have slightly overstated matters when he said that no one can write poetry except in the language in which he first spoke the familiar form of the word for mother, and the religious corollary is likewise only one of the ways Christian faith is transmitted. There are countless Christians who came to their faith in adult life without the benefit of a Christian upbringing. Nevertheless, the most natural and beautiful way to receive the gift of faith is, so to speak, at our mother's breast or on our mother's knee. I say, "so to speak," because, as a father, I am keenly aware of the father's role in the transmission of faith, a role that is especially important today when fatherlessness -- both literal and metaphorical -- is such a conspicuous cultural reality.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, however, the tsunami rolled across the heartland from both coasts. What was vaguely called patriarchy was most definitely out, something that served to obscure the fact that the great tragedy of that period was fatherlessness. On the other hand, there was a great wave of nostalgia for matriarchy. All this, of course, was taking place in the rarefied atmosphere ideological fashion. Back on earth, what was actually and conspicuously happening was the radical renunciation of both paternal and maternal responsibilities, that is to say, the responsibilities of adulthood.

In his The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, Dinesh d'Souza makes a reference to Brokaw's book that is apposite.

Some years ago I read Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation, which describes the virtues of the World War II generation. I asked myself whether this was truly the “greatest” generation. Was it greater than the generation of the American founding? Greater than the civil war generation? I don’t think so. The significant thing about the World War II generation was that it was the last generation. Last in what way? It was the last generation to embrace an external code of traditional morality. Indeed this generation’s great failure was that it was unable to inculcate this moral code in its children.

I want to return to d'Souza's argument in a subsequent post. In the meantime, I offer the comment above in the hope that it will provide others of my generation what it provided me: an occasion for the examination of conscience, on one hand, and a reminder, on the other, of the great debt I owe to those who were for me what Lois and Eunice were for Timothy.

The Conversion of St. Paul

Today is the feast of the conversion of St. Paul, an occasion to re-call the call which changes one's life. It is an appropriate occasion for sharing something I have just received from a young Australian friend of mine who has responded to such a call and who has just been accepted to the seminary.

Upon hearing of my acceptance into the seminary I began telling a few of my friends at work about it. Given that I work at a science centre I was expecting a bit of flak, but most folks have been genuinely positive or at least respectful. In recent days however there have been a couple of guys--who I generally get on well with--who have been fairly hostile to the idea (it would seem that they are of the opinion that science and religion are fundamentally opposed). My first response to one of them was fairly diplomatic, though upon receiving an even more provocative e-mail from the other guy I found myself becoming quite angry, though I couldn't pin-point exactly why.

Later that day, I was calling a few old friends to tell them about my upcoming move into the seminary. One of the people I rang had once been my most serious girlfriend, though I haven't had much contact with her of late. We had a brief chat, and it turns out that she had gotten married the previous day (she left for her honeymoon the next morning). I was very happy for her, and the timing seemed an appropriate book-end of sorts to my new direction. Later on I mentally revisited our relationship a bit, and in the context of her marriage it was not long before I had figured why I was so upset with the guys at work, and I have since e-mailed them about it.

In short, the traditional metaphor of "marrying the Church" that is used to describe those entering the priesthood or religious life began to take on a personal relevance. I could see that my current position is in many ways the equivalent of having just become engaged: upon having fallen in love with something that the guys at work clearly lacked any experience of, I have begun preparing to make a life-long commitment (one that is devoted to the service of others).

In reviewing some of the derogatory statements they had made about the Church, I imagined how I might have responded if they had spoken in such a way about my wife-to-be if I had just become engaged. They mightn't like the "fiancé" I have chosen, but I love her damn it, and I was in no mood to politely explain myself to them until they were prepared to act with some basic respect and decency towards me regarding my choice of "life partner".

Anyway, this may help explain my recent sensitivity towards criticism of the Church. I know the human mess is still there, but I've fallen in love, and I thus probably have something of the protective passion that a recently-engaged man would have for his fiancé.

Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, now Brother Simeon of St. Joseph's Abbey down the road from me, writes -- in his book, Love's Sacred Order -- about St. Paul straining his Greek vocabulary "as he looks for new words and generates a wealth of semantic markers to cover the whole arena of 'love' and convey the very particular manner of relationship brought into the world by the mystery of Christ acting within us."

The Church in Paul's vision thus becomes the locus for the fullness of human life transformed by the outpouring into our hearts of divine Charity. The Church, as Lumen Gentium teaches, is truly called to be the redeemed form of the human race, the holy place and house and family where every good thing reaches its full potential by being energized by the creative and recreative power of the Holy Spirit breathed into use by Christ at Pentecost by virtue of his Resurrection. The Church is the living evidence of the ultimate development of the human family according to God's Heart, beyond blood-kinship, beyond tribe, beyond race, nation and all ideology. [57]

My friend has fallen in love, and he is on his way to the altar. I admire him enormously. Join me in prayers on his behalf. He is just what the Church -- and the world the Church exists to sanctify -- needs.

Hunting the last taboo ...

The hunt continues for the last taboo. Of course it will be the one against child-sacrifice, which has already been rehabilitated and made socially normative as a woman's choice. But meanwhile, hunting down those intolerant and oppressive sexual taboos continues. Just when you thought that there couldn't possibly be any more taboos to break. Mark Gordon reports:

Now word comes that Robert Redford’s oh-so-groovy Sundance Film Festival will screen “Zoo,” a sympathetic documentary of men who have sex with Arabian horses.

The Sundance Festival’s official reviewer of “Zoo” calls the film “visual poetry,” and declares that “the cinematic language invented for the film permits us to examine where we draw the line, how much perversity we can tolerate in others. In a broader sense, ‘Zoo’ is really about thresholds. What can we stand to know, and, more importantly, what can we stand to accept?”

Read all of Mark's reflections here.

Lest someone think that the director of this film, Robinson Devor, is either an amoral moron or a unflinching cynic, he finds a way to assure the reporter for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel that he has both moral scruples and a refined aesthetic sensibility, the former for animal rights and the latter for the marvels of nature.

"I'm not in there wrestling with the legal or animal cruelty issues," he said. Rather, he envisioned a film like his others: "I count on the natural world pulling my films through. I thought the marriage of this completely strange mind-set and the beauty of the natural world could be something interesting."

What a relief to learn that Mr. Devor has his cruelty-to-animals moral certification up to date. One might have otherwise approached his work with a degree of skepticism.

Those out to obliterate the last remnants of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition are determined. They now have reason to believe that most of their liberal enablers -- fearing association with "Victorian" prudishness or "the Christian right" -- will never wince, and those who do will take care to wince in a way that is indistinguishable from a wink.

Roe v. Wade: The Tragedy of Our Age

All those responsible for leading this young woman to this act of shamelessness have a great deal to answer for.

Some years ago, the New York Times Bruce Bawer, whom I quoted in the last post (below), reviewed a biography of Anaïs Nin by Deirdre Bair. Discussing Nin's marriage to the American banker, Hugh (Hugo) Guiler, Bawer wrote:

Nin, who found Guiler sexually unsatisfactory, did not return his loyalty; after their 1924 removal from New York to Paris, she began a lifelong series of sexual derelictions, flirting shamelessly at Hugo’s business parties . . . coupling with her father . . . sleeping (or so she claimed) with her brother Thorvald, putting moves on her brother Joaquín’s spiritual counselor and seducing most of her psychoanalysts (including an infatuated Otto Rank...)”

In 1931 when Nin met Henry Miller, whom she adopted as lover and disciple. Bawer again:

Impregnated by either Henry or Hugo, she took medication to induce an abortion, had a still-born girl and made diary entries that reveal a chilling inhumanity. (“Here,” she said when Miller visited her in the hospital and announced his forthcoming book, “is a birth which is of greater interest to me.”

In the 1960s, everyone was avidly reading Anaïs Nin. Among the budding feminists of the time, her words were holy writ. In many ways, Nin was the mother (if the metaphor can be forgiven here) of the radical feminists that were soon to emerge, and under whose influence countless young women, like the one pictured above, were catechized and robbed of both their feminity and their dignity.

Filling the Vacuum . . .

Virgil tells Dante what it was that caused the Assyrian Queen, Semiramis, to be tormented in the region of the Inferno reserved for the lustful. Her sin, however, seems to have been more than just lust, which for Dante is the least deadly sin. Semiramis' sin seems to have been her attempt to endow her erotic recklessness with social and legal respectability.

Her vice of lust became so customary
that she made license licit in her laws
to free her from the scandal she had caused. -- Inferno V

Dante puts sodomites in another, lower place in the Inferno, but it is this tendency to make licentiousness licit that has such a strong contemporary analogue in the push to create the legislative fiction that homoerotic activity and the nuptial embrace are but two equally natural and legitimate forms of the same thing. The homosexual activists are late-comers to this moral coup d'etat. It was heterosexuals who made an art of turning sexuality into a recreational activity not to be unduly hampered by middle-class hangups, much less the sacramental dignity with which traditional Christianity endowed it. But late-coming homosexuals have mastered the art with great aplomb and obvious relish.

They are not, however, the only ones who want to replace key elements of the Western tradition with exotic moral codes more to their own liking. A surprising number of Muslims, especially in Europe, where their numbers are much greater than here, tell pollsters that they favor laws more in keeping with Islam's Sharia.

I mentioned in an earlier post the odd alliance between Jihadists and Leftists in Europe, where the political Left retains more of its Marxist roots than does the North American Left, which tends today to be a life-style libertine Left -- hyper-liberals with illiberal temperaments, content to throw off traditional moral constraints only to impose the new orthodoxy with sanctimonious contempt for those who resist. (In future posts I would like to return to this strange alliance if and when time permits.)

Herbert Marcuse's amalgamation of these two manifestations of Leftist activism still persists, of course, but the relatively greater weight of Karl Marx in Europe and Alfred Kinsey on this side of the Atlantic can still be detected. (I use Kinsey to personify the sexual revolution his reckless behavior exemplified and his unscientific writings served to exempt from moral scrutiny.) The Alfred Kinsey version of Marxism is not as likely to ally itself as readily with the Jihadists, but stranger things (not many) have happened. The multicultural world, however, is a carnival of such strangeness. There are jurisdictions in Europe today, for instance, where one is more likely to attract the attention of law enforcement agencies by calling into question the morality of homoerotic behavior than by calling Jews pigs and monkeys.

Inasmuch as Dante put Muhammad in the Inferno as a schismatic, he is surely on the Muslim short list of pernicious influences from which the young must be protected once the textbook committees can be made as solicitous of Islamic sensibilities as they have shown themselves to be of today's Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender (LGBT) pieties. (And solicitude for one is very often accompanied by solicitude for the other -- one of the genuine oddities of the multicultural mentality.)

It's conceivable that the day will come when dropping Dante from the curriculum will be among the few things on which Muslims and the LGBT activists will agree. Like the elimination of Cordelia by her sisters in King Lear, however, or the elimination of Pompey in Antony and Cleopatra, once Dante and everything he represents is set aside, the concordat between those wishing to be rid of these things will collapse into intense hostility. Foreseeing precisely this as the result of the elimination of Pompey, Antony's lieutenant, Enobarbus remarks:

Then, world, thou hast a pair of chaps, no more;
And throw between them all the food thou hast,
They'll grind the one the other.

Bruce Bawer, is an American literary critic, translator, poet, living in Europe. He has written about being gay in America. His most recent book is While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. I would be surprised if Mr. Bawer and I see eye-to-eye on every issue, but I think he's surely right about this one:

Multiculturalism is deeply, perversely irrational. If you’re a multiculturalist, it’s verboten even to notice, acknowledge, and express concern about murderous hatred directed against you and yours by the officially oppressed. For a multiculturalist, any act or statement by a member of an officially oppressed group, however morally reprehensible, is to be understood either as a legitimate reaction against “our” prejudice (or our forebears’ colonialism) or as a legitimate aspect of an alien culture that we, in our pitiful narrowness, have failed to understand and respect – which is, of course, our obligation.

For a snapshot of how incoherent the world becomes when allowed to arrange itself according to the multicultural logic, there's this from the ever-quotable Mark Steyn in a December, 2004 London Daily Telegraph piece:

Last year, I was strolling down the boulevard de Maisonneuve in Montreal and saw across the street a Muslim woman, covered from head to toe in black, struggling home with her groceries past a "condom boutique" whose front window was advertising massive discounts on a, er, item of useful gay-sex paraphernalia. I wish I'd had a digital camera: there, in a single image, were the internal contradictions of the multicultural society. It seems highly improbable to me that gay hedonism and creeping sharia can co-exist for long.

The two greatest challenges to Western culture at the moment are from the Koran-quoting fanatics at the gates and the indulgent and irresponsible sexual liberationists within. It is not out of the realm of possibility that, after they beat up on Dante or the Pope for a while -- and when they no longer have George Bush around to cement their loopy alliance -- they'll grind the one the other, very likely crushing civility in Europe in the process. Since the sexual revolutionaries haven't bothered to produce the requisite numbers of offspring to maintain parity, were such a showdown to occur, the demographics would surely favor the jihadists. They would do most of the grinding.

From the ravaged world that would likely result, the Judeo-Christian moral tradition will look like what it has always been: an anthropologically sound summons to human nobility and dignity, a refuge from barbarism and tyranny, and a spur to human flourishing and freedom the likes of which the world has never seen.

Going up the Down's staircase

Apropos the earlier post about the Canadian and U. S. societies of obstetricians and gynecologists calling for more testing for Down's syndrome, Patricia E. Bauer had a piece in the January 14th edition of the Washington Post that is not to be missed.

The article that begins with this:

She was a fresh-faced young woman with a couple of adorable kids, whiling away an hour in the sandbox at the park near my home. So was I, or so I thought. New in town, I had come to the park in hopes of finding some friends for myself and my little ones.

Her eyes flicked over to where my daughter sat, shovel gripped in a tiny fist, and then traveled quickly away. The remark that followed was directed to the woman next to her, but her voice carried clearly across the playground. "Isn't it a shame," she said, an eyebrow cocked in Margaret's direction, "that everyone doesn't get amnio?"

Ends with this:

Plastic shovels no longer captivate Margaret. She's more interested in her school roommates, her part-time job, the Red Sox and, at least recently, wrestling on TV. She knows how to hold an audience and how to bring down the house with a one-liner. And, like most of my relatives, she knows how to be an absolute pill some of the time. Such is life.

That day in the sandbox, I went home and cried. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know whether the woman was right. Today, I know. She was wrong.

Leila over at Off the Record brought it to our attention, and something she said is perhaps the more important thing of all, the mystery hidden in plain view:

It’s a paradoxical truth that suffering brings joy; that our best experiences were not planned by us – we don’t really know what happiness is until we look back.

Eschatological Realism & Naive Idealism

Professor Jospeh Ratzinger:

It is above all at times of greatest crisis in human history that we find men concerned with the theology of history. The first great Christian theology of history, Augustine's De Civitate Dei contra paganos, emerged from the crisis of the Roman empire, in which the life of that age had found an orderly and apparently definitive form. Since that time, the attempt to come to terms with history theologically has never been foreign to Western theology. [Introduction to The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, v.]

Ricardo Quinones parallels Ratzinger's remark about the correlation of great crises and concern for the theology of history by paraphrasing Hamlet: “Disaster does make historians of us all.” If the disasters are ominous enough, they make theologians of those most aware of how rooted in persistent and perennial human sin these crises are.

How seriously one comes to grips with historical crises will largely depend, it seems to me, on whether or not one recognizes the fallen condition of humanity, on one hand, and our eschatological destiny, on the other. Those who fail to fully appreciate either of these things tend to find hope in ideologies of one sort or another and the utopian mirages they imagine possible, all of which shimmer like shook foil for a day or so and then are blown away by the cold winds of the disaster they made it their secret business to ignore.

The Christian alternative to such chimerical idealisms is a moral realism set against an eschatological horizon. We are fallen creatures, and our fallen condition will not be appreciably mitigated, and never eliminated, by the sundry social, cultural, moral or pedagogical programs in which we tend place our hope. But we are called (by name) to grow toward a spiritual fulfillment which we can at best only very imperfectly approximate in this life -- "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Any and every historical and cultural approximation of that "kingdom not of this world" -- however inevitably clumsy -- will be but the aggregated effect of countless personal efforts to approximate it.

Those who are making these efforts, be they ever so unnoticed and unsung, are doing more with their lives than the world in its standard worldliness could ever fathom.

Just Testing ...

In one of his early films -- which one, I forget; they're all the same -- Woody Allen plays both a Cossack soldier and a Jewish rabbi on a battlefield with explosions going off all around them. The soldier is panicking. The rabbi calmly reassures him: God is just testing us. "Why," asks the frantic soldier, "doesn't he give us a written [test]?"

It doesn't work that way.

In my post on Tuesday of this week, I said: "Evil overtakes us in small, seeming innocuous ways, each incremental development merely the logical extension of a state of affairs to which everyone has previously grown accustomed."

Here is one of the little baby steps (if you'll pardon the irony) toward the Brave New World of 21st century Eugenics -- so seemingly kinder and gentler and incremental than the old-fashioned Nazi sort, but, for that reason, far less likely to provoke a moral reaction. Reported by Lifesite:

In the same month, both the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC) are recommending that all pregnant women, not just those over 35, should be screened, including with invasive procedures such as amniocentesis, to discover whether they have a risk of bearing a child with Down’s Syndrome.

What precisely is the reason for the test? What can be done with the information the test provides? Only two things: nothing and abortion. Since the former option (nothing) is what will happen without the test, the test only exists to favor the latter option. Anyone who thinks that this is merely science is not paying attention.

While the ACOG media release does not directly mention abortion as the usual fate of the “screened” babies, a SOGC official readily admits that the Canadian recommendation was specifically intended to give women the option to abort a child with Down’s Syndrome.

“Yes, it's going to lead to more termination, but it's going to be fair to these women who are 24 who say, 'How come I have to raise an infant with Down's syndrome, whereas my cousin who was 35 didn't have to?’” Dr. Andre Lalonde, the executive vice president of the SOGC, told the National Post.

The Canadian society of obstetricians and gynaecologists recommends that all women be "given" amniocentesis, and that women over 40 should "automatically be given" amniocentesis. One wonders what the word "automatically" means here. Is there a distinction between being given amniocentesis and being automatically given amniocentesis? If so, what is it? Whatever it is, you can be sure of the direction in which the eugenic screws are turning.

A few years after this regime is in place, a parent walking down the street with a Down's syndrome child will not only be a rare sight, but it will no longer invite the sympathy and even admiration of onlookers. Rather, we will have learned to regard the bringing of Down's syndrome children into the world as an act of social irresponsibility. Eventually, social disincentives will be deemed necessary to discourage this from happening: the withdrawal of social services for those reckless enough ("heartlessness" will no doubt be the catch-phrase) to allow a Down's syndrome child to be born, and so on.

The spokesman for the Canadian medical association admitted that "it's going to lead to more termination," but, typically, there was hardly a hint as to what that word might really mean. The ACOG recommendation goes so far as to say that the discovery of Down's syndrome would result in "pregnancy loss." What, one must ask, is being unacknowledged by this acknowledgement? First there is the verb: the test "would result" in pregnancy loss. Notice the passive voice. No reference to a moral agent. And as for the noun: What is it exactly that is lost when a woman suffers a pregnancy loss?

It is just a test. Indeed, we are being tested, and it is not a written test. When a pregnant woman suffers a spontaneous abortion, we say -- saddened to have to say it -- that she lost her baby. When a mother hires an abortionist to kill the baby she is carrying and remove its little body piece by piece from her womb we say she suffered a "pregnancy loss." In societies where the popular will has political influence, tyrannies and travesties always begin with the corruption of language. It is up to the poet and the moralist to join forces, insisting on a correspondence between the words we use and the reality to which they ostensibly point.

A related matter:

I quoted Robert George in the earlier post, who warned against the "move towards treating human life like a commodity." A giant step in that direction was the first legislative priority of the 2007 Congress. The new House of Representatives leadership rushed through a bill that would allow federal funding for the creation and destruction of embryonic human life for the purpose of medical research, a slope so steep and so slippery that it constitutes a plunge into a heartless sacrificial world that will quickly become a medical status quo.

Having grown accustomed to millions of aborted babies each year, we are now ready for the next phase: cloning humans in order to cannibalize them, though self-professed sophisticates will regard the use of such scientifically correct language as proof that those who use it are members of the "religious right" or the flat earth society, enemies of progress in any case. In fact, to speak in such terms is simply to refuse to go along with the progressive anesthetizing of our moral sensibilities, without which scientific discoveries and technological innovations will produce catastrophes all out of proportion to their professed benefits.