Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness. Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.

That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord. To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best. Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

- George Washington

The other day I encountered a libertarian who was honestly puzzled as to why so many people oppose open borders. Unrestricted immigration was such an obviously good thing to him that he could not conceive how anyone could rationally oppose it. It's economically beneficial to the immigrants, it's economically beneficial to their new country - what could possibly be wrong with it? His arguments make sense... if you believe man is a purely economic animal who has no strong attachments to any particular culture, or any particular place, or any religion, or his own family.

I could never be a libertarian myself. They're too Marxist.

It doesn't matter how much money you spend; you're not going to have equal outcomes between unequal students.

A lot of people I know get absolutely hysterical when someone like Buchanan points out what everyone knows to be true, i.e. that not all children are intellectually capable of high school work, let alone college work. Ask any child who the smart kid and who the dumb kid is in their class, and he won't hesitate for a bit. In a technocratic liberal order, one's worth as a human being is in large part determined by one's productivity. How often did your parents tell you that you had to go to college to be "a productive member of society?" The implicit assumption there is that if you don't go to college, then you won't be a productive member of society. And if you aren't productive, you're less than human. You're a leech. A bum. Housewives, the elderly, the homeless, the insane, the unemployed, those who can only work in the most menial tasks - they aren't "productive," so therefore they are less than human. Housewives are an embarrassment to the sisterhood, the elderly, homeless, and insane need to be shunted off into homes or institutions, the unemployed will often tell you they feel utterly ashamed, and people who only work in the most menial tasks, well they're even worse because they could clearly do better if they only willed to do so.

But what if you're just not smart enough to go to college? This possibility is simply unacceptable to the enforcers of public opinion (no one finds it controversial that some people can't be professional athletes no matter how hard they try.) Everyone is perfectly and equally capable of university-level work. They have to be capable of it, they just have to be. Because if they're not - if we're not perfectly, completely equal in every way - then that means we're not infinitely malleable. That means we face external constraints on our self-creation through our own reason and will that can't be made to go away.

There are two choices we can make here. The first is to return to the truth that we all possess inherent dignity as human beings. Stop pushing people into work they are not intellectually capable of performing, and help them to succeed at the levels that are attainable for them. There are more important things in life than how much we earn or what kind of job we happen to have, like the salvation of our souls.

Or we can continue with our current policy of ignoring mountains of evidence (hatefacts), putting every child on the college track, and blaming their inevitable failures on everything and everyone except the education establishment that pushes them along regardless of how they're performing.

"Diversity" is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought. True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at curing cancer and containing pollution. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: "Cancer is a strength!" "Pollution is our greatest asset!"

Here, Ignatius Press interviews Jim Kalb, author of the book you need to read right now, The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command.

Ignatius Insight: You spend quite a bit of time, understandably, in the book defining liberalism and variations thereof. For the sake of clarity, what is a relatively concise definition of the liberalism you critique? What are its core principles and beliefs?

James Kalb: By liberalism I mean the view that equal freedom is the highest political, social, and moral principle. The big goal is to be able to do and get what we want, as much and as equally as possible.

That view comes from the view that transcendent standards don't exist--or what amounts to the same thing, that they aren't publicly knowable. That leaves desire as the standard for action, along with logic and knowledge of how to get what we want.

Desires are all equally desires, so they all equally deserve satisfaction. Nothing is exempt from the system, so everything becomes a resource to be used for our purposes. The end result is an overall project of reconstructing social life to make it a rational system for maximum equal preference satisfaction.

That's what liberalism is now, and everything else has to give way to it. For example, traditional ties like family and inherited culture aren't egalitarian or hedonistic or technologically rational. They have their own concerns. So they have to be done away with or turned into private hobbies that people can take or leave as they like. Anything else would violate freedom and equality.

Ignatius Insight: You argue that liberalism "began as an attempt to moderate the influence of religion in politics, [but] ends by establishing itself as a religion." How is liberalism a religion? What are some examples of its religious nature? What significant challenges do these pose to serious, practicing Catholics?

James Kalb: People in authority treat liberalism as true, ultimate, and socially necessary. So far as they're concerned, it gives the final standards that everyone has to defer to because they're demanded by the order of the community and also by the fundamental way the world is. That's what it means to say it's the established religion.

Like other religions it helps maintain its place through saints, martyrs, rituals, and holidays. A candlelit vigil for Matthew Shepard is an example. There's also education. All education is religious education, so education today is shot through with liberal indoctrination. Liberalism even has blasphemy laws, in the form of the laws against politically incorrect comments on Islam, homosexuality, and other topics that you find in Europe and Canada.

It also has some special features. Liberalism is a stealth religion. It becomes established and authoritative by claiming that it is not a religion but only the setting other religions need to cooperate peacefully.

The claim doesn't make much sense, since religion has to do with ultimate issues. The religion of a society is simply the ultimate authoritative way the society grasps reality. As such it can't be subordinate to anything else.

Anything written by Nietzsche, Sartre, or Foucault. Not because they lack literary or philosophical merit, but because I'm going to throttle the next punk kid who tells me morality is an illusion, he can be whatever he wants to be, and nothing means anything.

Trautman's Fishperson's Last Stand.

The arguments against the new translation of the Roman Missal boil down to, "Catholics are too dumb to understand them." That's an unusual thing to say considering we are also told that many lay Catholics are more well educated than their pastors so priests shouldn't presume to lord it over them like they did in the bad old days before 1965.

To give you an idea of how bad the current translation of the MR is, take this example from the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer #1):

accípiens et hunc præclárum cálicem in sanctas ac venerábiles manus suas

The literal translation according to my personal 1962 missal reads:

taking also this excellent Chalice into His holy and venerable hands

The translation currently used in every American parish:

He took the cup

Should we really be addressing the Triune God in such dumbed down banalities? Even if you want to use modern English, should we be changing the meaning of the prayers like we are here? Overly casual prayers lead to similarly dumbed down music, art, architecture, and a more lax attitude in general - Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi.

From the Second Sunday of Advent:

Placáre, quaésumus, Dómine, humilitátis nostræ précibus et hóstiis: et ubi nulla súppetunt suffrágia meritórum, tuis nobis succúrre præsídiis. Per Dóminum nostrum…

The literal translation:

Be appeased, we beseech Thee, O Lord, by the prayers and sacrifices of our humility: and where we lack pleading merits of our own, do Thou, by Thine aid, assist us. Through our Lord…

The current translation:

Lord, we are nothing without you. As you sustain us with your mercy, receive our prayers and offerings. We ask this through Christ our Lord.

ARRRGGGHHHH.

Italian mayors respond to Strasbourg ruling by hanging more crucifixes in schools

Rome, Italy, Nov 12, 2009 / 01:49 pm (CNA).- A number of Italian officials have responded to the ruling by the European Human Rights Court that ordered schools in Italy to remove crucifixes from the classrooms by taking unprecedented measures to preserve the Christian symbol.

If I were an Italian mayor, I would have done that, and I would have sent a two word email to the court: "Molon Labe."

Flawless victory. My personal favorite from the Boston Globe:

GUN GOES ON RAMPAGE IN TEXAS

Experts say shootings could have easily been prevented if guns did not exist; others argue bullets must share blame

Gun facts: scary, loud, shoot people

A Kennedy got schooled by his bishop (how sweet it feels to type those words) and Andrew Sullivan is upset.

Note the first sentence: "Here is a classic document from Benedict's church." In other words, Sullivan is telling us we don't need to take it seriously because it comes from the wrong tribe, led by a "weak and reactionary" pope, as Sullivan once described Benedict. The Church has always and everywhere taught that abortion is a grave moral evil, but Sullivan and Patrick Kennedy both seem surprised that 1) the Church still teaches it, and 2) expects its flock to comply. Liberal Catholics attempt to dodge their binding moral obligation to support the outlawing of abortion by asserting that Church and State are separate, and that it would be unjust to "impose" a Catholic moral teaching on a population which includes millions of non-Catholics.

Well, consider this: is "Thou shalt not kill" solely a Catholic moral teaching? No; that murdering innocent people is wrong and must be outlawed is a conclusion one can reach through the use of right reason alone. Sullivan himself has honorably argued against torture through the use of right reason and the natural moral law. So too we can argue against abortion that way in the public sphere. Many non-Catholics have told me that natural law is just a bunch of mystical hooey that we use to smuggle in our religious beliefs. It is true that the natural law is ultimately rooted in the eternal law of God. But I think that places the non-Catholics into a more difficult position than it does me. Take same-sex marriage for example. After their loss in Maine, its supporters argued that people possess certain rights that cannot be infringed upon by the positive law. This is true, but from whence do those rights come if natural law is hooey, God doesn't exist, and human nature is a figment of our imaginations?

Sullivan attempts equivocation here:

On health insurance, there is far more public emphasis on preventing anyone who wants to get an insurance policy from the new government-run exchanges from getting an abortion (even if she pays for it herself) than on the core principle of health care as a human right (in Catholic doctrine).

This is lame. It is perfectly true that the Church teaches health care is a human right. But nowhere has it ever, or will it ever, bind us to support a particular proposal for securing that right. Whether the current health care plan being debated in Congress is a good thing or a bad thing depends on many specifics; frankly, I'm not sure if it's even possible for one person to know them all. The Church gives us certain moral principles with which to think about those specifics, and it's quite possible for good Catholics to disagree about the conclusions we derive from those principles and the specifics. No good Catholic, on the other hand, can reject the moral principle of the wrongness of abortion. The US bishops, to their everlasting credit, stood firm on this principle and got that change in the bill. Now we'll see if the Democrats' commitment to the sacrament of abortion trumps their desire for everyone to have health insurance.

Sullivan is one of those Catholics who tend only to obey the Church when its teachings coincide with their own beliefs and lifestyles. He vehemently rejects the Church's teachings in sexual morality, but still remains in the Church. It's difficult to see why. If the Church is wrong about its teachings on sexual morality (and the people who believe so desperately hope that an announcement of their wrongness would include retroactive expiation for all of their failings in that area) then there is no reason not to conclude that it could be wrong in other areas as well. I'm not Catholic solely because I find its teachings congenial; I am Catholic because Catholicism is true, even the hard bits that challenge me to change the way I live. When the Church publicly rebukes someone who is publicly dissenting from Church teaching in word or deed, the right answer is not to angrily rant about all of those Republican shills in the hierarchy. The right answer is to repent, confess, do penance, and amend your life.

Andy Warhol's Art of Sloth

When I look at certain recent pieces of art, I can never shake the feeling that the artist is trying to put one over on us. "I wonder how many rich suckers I can get to bid on my cereal bowl from this morning which still has sugary residue from my Cinnamon Toast Crunch?"

Army Chief of Staff Concerned for Muslim Troops
November 8, 2009

General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said on Sunday that he was concerned that speculation about the religious beliefs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian and wounding dozens of others in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, could "cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers."

"I've asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that," General Casey said in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union. "It would be a shame--as great a tragedy as this was--it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well."

General Casey, who was appeared on three Sunday news programs, used almost the same language during an interview on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," an indication of the Army's effort to ward off bias against the more than 3,000 Muslims in its ranks.

"A diverse Army gives us strength," General Casey, who visited Fort Hood Friday, said on "This Week."

If a few soldiers have to be sacrificed to the idol of diversity once in a while... well, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. And General, this was not a tragedy. This was an evil act committed by a specific individual. It is morally obscene for you to compare "diversity becoming a casualty" to mass murder.

EDIT: If this were fiction it would be the blackest comedy (and denounced as "racist," I'm sure):

As a senior-year psychiatric resident at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan was supposed to make a presentation on a medical topic of his choosing as a culminating exercise of the residency program.

Instead, in late June 2007, he stood before his supervisors and about 25 other mental health staff members and lectured on Islam, suicide bombers and threats the military could encounter from Muslims conflicted about fighting in the Muslim countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a copy of the presentation obtained by The Washington Post.

"It's getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims," he said in the presentation.

"It was really strange," said one staff member who attended the presentation and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the investigation of Hasan. "The senior doctors looked really upset" at the end. These medical presentations occurred each Wednesday afternoon, and other students had lectured on new medications and treatment of specific mental illnesses.

...Under the "Conclusions" page, Hasan wrote that "Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please God, even by force, is condoned by the Islam," and that "Muslim Soldiers should not serve in any capacity that renders them at risk to hurting/killing believers unjustly -- will vary!"

We are not a serious country.

Father Z published an excerpt from the email I sent him the other day. It's a pity I don't have better news to report.

Here is the text of an outstanding talk by Jim Kalb on liberalism (evil pdf format.) The whole thing is worth quoting but here are some good excerpts:

( Read more... )

...What that situation shows is that liberals view liberalism as part of rationality. It’s not just a collection of institutions and policies to be evaluated this way or that. It defines and orders the world in a very basic way. Questioning it is like questioning the law of non-contradiction.

I can testify to that last part. It's fascinating to observe the reactions of liberals, both online and off, whenever I say something like, "There are objective essences to things which exist independently of our will." Such a notion is literally unthinkable to them. To them, it's just so self-evidently crazy that I myself must be insane to seriously suggest it or else I'm just throwing up a smoke screen for my own bigotry. It's one of the great ironies that the most narrow-minded people today are those who like to think of themselves as open-minded and tolerant. ( Read more... )

Here is its greatest weakness:

Most basically, man is a rational animal that insists that his life
make sense. It can’t make sense without a standard of the good
that transcends desire. Getting what we want simply as such is
not what we want. It just doesn’t satisfy us.

Liberalism tries to pass itself off as neutral. Liberals say they simply want everyone to be equally free to pursue their own desires without any one system (especially religion) "imposed" on everyone. But that's the thing - people do want a standard of the Good that transcends whatever any group of individuals happens to desire at any time. St. Augustine knew this truth over 1600 years ago. And that's why in the long run we win and they lose. Liberalism as an organizing principle of public and private life is as incoherent and inhuman as communism was for economics. But the human nature which they deny exists will out. Our job, as Catholics, is to fearlessly challenge the whole rotten structure and remind God's people that what they've been yearning for all of their lives has been there waiting for them all along.

Thank you Our Lady of Victory. Thank you St. Jude. Thank you St. Rita. Thanks be to God for this great victory He has granted His people and His servant Bishop Richard Malone. Ten days ago I began a novena to St. Jude which ended yesterday. I never doubted he would come to our aid just as he did in California at this time last year. One of the devil's favorite tropes is to convince people, "Give up! The whole world is against you! What you pray for is hopeless! My triumph is inevitable!" Don't you believe it. Stand against the whole world if you have to. Standing against the world wouldn't frighten so many people if they had a stronger sense of Catholic identity. That is the project of Pope Benedict, and something I wish to make my own too. It doesn't upset me quite so much when non-Catholics sign on to a project that violates the laws of God and nature; they can hardly be expected to know better these days. But when Catholics are publicly campaigning for things like same-sex "marriage," liberalized abortion laws, etc., it's enough to make me groan in despair.

But even then I can't get completely outraged over them. Why are they out there at all? Because somewhere along the line a priest or bishop 1)failed to correct them, or 2)told them it was all right. If I'm ever a priest, I pray God I never fail in my duty, no matter how much it costs me.

Our new student president's agenda seems to include adding even more events to the seminary calendar, i.e. creating more acrimony and complaints from the students. Several of my classmates have approached me and asked if I would be willing to run for student president when I reach third year theology, which has traditionally made up the executive branch of student government. I gave them the Sherman pledge: "If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve." I don't need the extra headaches, and my program doesn't need a lot of work to implement: pray more and study more.

I asked Jeff if he has been keeping up with the reading in The Brothers Karamazov. He admitted that he had not, which means I'm the only one in the class who has. I said, "Come on man, you guys are killing me." It's a reading and discussion seminar, and many days it has turned into a one-on-one conversation between the professor and myself. Afterward Cesar told me, "No man, you're the one who's killing us!"

At the end of the student council meeting today, one of the issues brought up by the Academics Committee was, "How can we bring greater integration to our academic and spiritual formation?" Simple: do all of your reading in the Blessed Sacrament chapel. There would be much less division within the Church if theologians still did most of their work on their knees in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

In other news, five guys got ordained to the transitional deaconate this past Saturday, three of them from my diocese. Please keep them in your prayers!

This is my general approach to government:

Clerical celibacy is a discipline, not doctrine, so the Pope could theoretically change it tomorrow if he wished. What 99.99% of the people who support a married clergy don't know is that today's discipline of mandatory celibacy is much, much easier than what the Church used to do. It is true that in the first millennium married men could be ordained priests (but ordained priests could not marry.) They were not bound by a promise of celibacy, which is simply a renunciation of marriage, but they were expected to be continent (Today the promise of celibacy includes the promise of continence.) In other words, a married man who was ordained a priest was expected to remain perfectly chaste for the rest of his life - no more conjugal relations with his wife. The Council of Elvira in 306 declared that any priest who failed to abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife would be dismissed from his clerical office. Similar declarations from the early Councils abound. Clerical celibacy was an organic development from the tradition of clerical continence, and I think a considerable relaxation of the old discipline.

I know that most of the people who support a married clergy mean well (in many cases it gets lumped in with things that are not open to debate such as ordaining women.) But you know the old saying: Beware what you wish for. I would choose celibacy in any case.

What the hell is this liberal superman you're always railing against?

Anyone who, de facto or de jure, holds to what Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

But the liberal superman doesn't actually exist. It's a figment of your imagination. No one actually holds to what Justice Kennedy wrote. Not even Kennedy believes what he wrote to mean what you think it means.

I agree that the liberal superman doesn't exist. But Justice Kennedy and millions of other people do believe in him and want to be him. It's important to a lot of people that liberalism as I've described it not exist, but you can't make it not exist simply by pointing out that much of what liberals say lacks common sense. Of course liberalism lacks common sense; that's the point.

So where did you get your definition of liberalism?

Public and philosophical discourse in the Western world from the Enlightenment to the present.

Can you be more specific?

It's difficult with any intellectual movement to point at a specific date or person and say, "This is where it all began," but if I had to choose only one, I'd say it all began with William of Ockham and his denial of universals. A nominalist denies that human beings have anything in common beyond the predicate, "is human." If there is no shared human nature, then it follows we are not social creatures by nature, but the atomistic individuals who form Hobbes's social contract. And so on and so forth. From Descartes onward, modern philosophy's guiding principle is "Man is the measure of all things." Descartes believed in God, for example, but his arguments for the existence of God are rooted in man's thought instead of Being. That principle is easy to see in explicitly atheist writers such as Nietzsche and Sartre.

That still sounds awfully vague to me.

Well, you can read the heavy hitters of liberalism and judge for yourself. I recommend Leviathan, The Second Treatise on Government, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Critique of Pure Reason, Utilitarianism, Beyond Good and Evil, Being and Nothingness and A Theory of Justice for a start. Pay especial attention to Nietzsche - it's difficult to overstate his influence on contemporary liberalism.

I know you though, and you're not smart enough to puzzle all of that out for yourself. Assuming you're right about liberalism of course.

Very good. For a more critical look at liberalism, I recommend The Tyranny of Liberalism by James Kalb, and Liberalism is a Sin by Fr. Felix Sarda. Liberalism rejects the hierarchical model of authority, so it is sometimes called the "Protestant Principle" by some Catholic writers such as Anne Roche Muggeridge in The Desolate City. Blessed Pope Pius IX spent most of his papacy doing battle with the error of liberalism, but it would be a mistake to think he was only dealing with Italian nationalists. Pope St. Pius X also did battle with liberalism, which was then known as modernism, the "synthesis of all heresies."

Aren't you confusing political science with theology?

All political debates are ultimately theological debates. If your theology is muddled or nonexistent, then so will your politics be muddled. For example, if there is no transcendent Good that stands above subjective human desires, then there is no coherent way of resolving conflicts. Liberalism holds that 1) everyone is equal, and 2) fulfillment of desire is the sine qua non of public life. Some desires clash with others, but since we're all equal, we can't say that some desires are superior to others. So liberalism tries to silence or sweep under the rug desires that are not in accord with liberalism ("You can't impose your beliefs on others!"), all the while denying that it is doing any such thing ("I'm not 'imposing' anything, my beliefs are synonymous with basic rationality!")

Just to avoid any misunderstandings, I like Pat Buchanan.

Although I knew that this was the new policy, I'm surprised how forcefully my bishop put it. He has absolutely forbade the recruiting of any more foreign seminarians or priests, and ordered our vocations director to concentrate exclusively on finding home grown vocations. According to our diocesan newspaper, the bishop is worried that the presbyterate is so multicultural now we no longer have a distinctive character. One of my priest friends joked that the demographic profile of the presbyterate in our diocese is elderly Irishmen, middle aged Mexicans, and young Filipinos, with a smattering of Poles and Nigerians. Of the seminarians currently studying for my diocese, only a quarter of us are local.

This doesn't have to do with animus against foreigners. If local vocations aren't there, then what does that say about the health of Catholic life within that diocese? This isn't mission territory we're talking about here. Having been to Mass in many parishes in my diocese, I have a fairly good idea of why so few local guys step forward. Those of us who are local, to a man, talk about how many changes need to be made post haste. The first things I would do as a pastor, for example, are ban altar girls, fire the liturgist, and fire the DRE. No more guitars, no more drums, no more wind instruments in the choir. Ad orientem celebration of the Mass, along with whatever rearrangements need to be made within the church and renovations without. Knock the whole thing down and redesign it from scratch if necessary.

Maybe I'm missing something as a convert, but for the life of me I can't understand why so many Catholics find their own faith and religious heritage to be so offensive. The task of my generation will be to rebuild from the rubble they've left in their wake.