LAW NATURALLY

In ‘The New York Times’ Charles Morris reviews a just-published book by the just-deceased Richard John Neuhaus; the book is entitled “American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile”. I have not yet read the book (it’s on my buy-now list), but Morris – himself an accomplished author on things religious and spiritual – has raised enough worthwhile points in his review that I’ll offer a few thoughts.

Neuhaus traces a mutation in American religio-political thought stretching back at least to Walt Whitman and John Dewey: whereas the pre-Civil War American self-conception was that the nation (and its political principles and structure) were the expression of a genuine gift from God to humanity and the world’s peoples, Whitman “secularized” that – America was indeed “special” and even “exceptional”, and gloriously so, but not because God had raised it up but rather just because American and Americans were so marvelously ‘special’ on their own. (And the world’s peoples, and History, it was presumed, would just have to accept that, unless they were all as dumb as dirt and as stubborn as mules.)

Dewey, a moralizing thinker rather than a poet like Whitman, limned the whole approach in the shape of ‘serious thinking’: America is an entity with goals of its own. Those goals weren’t given from on high but were rather evolved from the marvelous American thing itself. But since “all goals come with an ‘ought’”, then those goals had to be realized. (Again, the world’s peoples apparently were well-advised to get used to that; Americans were here, they were special, and everybody else better get used to it – and, by the by, give thanks for their good luck in having Americans around.)

You can see the Flattening effect here. Instead of being anchored in some Gift from Beyond, America was anchored not only in material ‘nature’, but in its own self-definitions. Yet – oy! – that self-definition carried some force of ‘ought’, of ‘law’ even, in History. Imagine America as claiming to be the solid base of all the world’s moral striving, yet itself not anchored to anything but instead sort of free-floating in its own self-definition and self-conception, however those might change as Time and History went on. Such an ‘unanchored anchor’ – if I may – might seem a kind of too-free-floating and unreliable ‘rock’ on which to base the Modern age around the world.

But the Progressive take on Dewey was that his vision was fluid, dynamic, and capable of countenancing the massive ‘creative destruction’ that would sweep away an old world like whatever-it-was that did away with the dinosaurs and usher in a bright new Age of Man (generically understood, of course). One might be justified in ejaculating a long and loud Wheeeeeeeeee!

Morris observes – rightly – that “Neuhaus’s brand of natural law comes from the Greeks, and especially Aristotle”. True enough, from the narrow approach of tracing its intellectual roots. I think it’s essential to go a bit deeper here: The Greeks and Aristotle, and they weren’t the first, applied a particularly conceptual approach to a reality that marked all humans and their societies and cultures as they evolved in the last few millennia of ‘recorded History’: all of them were trying to give expression to a universally felt awareness, i.e. that humans were in the presence of some Life that existed Beyond the particular shape of this dimension.

So when certain current philosophies or political dogmas – such as ‘deconstruction’ and ‘ideological feminism’* - dismiss such natural law thinking as merely the intellectual sleaze of ‘dead white european males’, they are failing to deal with the far more fundamental human reality: human beings have evinced over Time and History a stubborn sense that there is a Beyond and that there are even Presences within that Beyond. The ‘stubborn’ persistence of this sense suggests strongly – and hardly implausibly - that humans do indeed live out their lives in the presence of such a Beyond and its Presences. (Although I grant you that the same type of thinking that Newton used to ‘prove’ gravity cannot be applied to non-material realities such as the Beyond and the Presences themselves.)

That said, Morris is spot-on when he asserts that “most people still think … that morality is not something you just make up”. And as I implied above, it’s a mighty queasy experience to try to ‘anchor’ your entire life and the existence of the entire species on something that’s simply ‘made up’ and that can change without warning.

Along came the philosopher Richard Rorty who died at a ripe age just a couple of years ago. Rorty, a ‘liberal’ as the word is defined nowadays, tried to take the bull by the horns: Yup, folks do indeed just “make up morality” and therefore “there is no way to privilege one citizen’s first principles over any others”.

Well … it’s certainly food for thought. Though I can’t imagine how an orchestra is going to play a symphony if every member in every instrument group can simply adopt a different score to play. Of course, a Conductor can be raised up who will impose a common Score – but in a democracy that opens up a whole other, and verrrry nasty, can of worms.

But that’s pretty much where Rorty and his contemporary, John Rawls, wound up (much to the delight of the revolutionary cadres of ‘revolutionary’ thought among the ideological feminists and the deconstructors and others). You can go the Fascist route and raise up a particular Leader, or you can go the Communist route and raise up an ‘elite’ who ‘gets it’ and who uses the governmental authority to impose its will on everybody in the name of all the people (‘the masses’, as the Commies were fond of calling their donkey-saddled citizenries).

And as We may have noticed in the past forty years, the Communist approach can be draped in the appearances of Democracy, where ‘zealous and revolutionary advocates’ can demand power ‘in the name of the oppressed’; the modern ‘sensitive’ elites are doing it to eradicate ‘pain’ whereas the Commies were doing it to eradicate economic injustice by eradicating the ‘kulaks’ and the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘intelligentsia’ as a class. If there is any ‘class’ in America nowadays that has been assigned to fill in for the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘intelligentsia’, it would have to be ‘men’, and perhaps ‘religiously inclined thinkers and believers’.

“Political dialogue is shot through with shared notions of right and wrong.” Yes. The great gamble of a revolution is in trying to shortcut the ‘sharing’ and simply substitute a ‘new’ Grand Notion for the old ‘shared’ notion. The faster that can be done, the better a chance the revolution has; conversely, the longer it takes, the greater the risk that folks might take it upon themselves to kick the tires of the revolution. Lenin and Stalin saw that, so did Hitler – and so did Mussolini, but Italians are just too anchored in actuality to go gaga over ‘new ideas’, let alone a new ‘Grand Idea’.

But just how do the notions come to be ‘shared’? It’s one thing to insist that they’re ‘shared’ because humans simply assembled them and can change them. It's another thing to assert that they’re shared because the Beyond covers everybody and the ‘notions’ reflect, however imperfectly, the hidden centripetal reality of the Beyond’s influence in this dimension.

Again, the same science that discovered gravity can’t be made to work in this type of ‘physics’ (which is why they’ve called it ‘metaphysics’ for quite some time). But then, the fact that cargo cult islanders couldn’t pick up radio-waves with coconut shells doesn’t mean that radio waves didn’t or don’t exist. We’re all cargo cult islanders when it comes to the ‘radio waves’ of the Beyond – although standing on the shoulders of Aristotle and the medieval theologians actually gives Us a better shot than a lot of folks might nowadays care to think.

Rorty, as Morris notes, asserted that since – as he assumed – there is no ‘There there’ out in the Beyond, then the only position a smart, progressive, ‘hip’ liberal could take is that of the “liberal ironist”. The irony of the ironist position is this: everybody (at least everybody who ‘gets it’) knows that a) human beings need to feel like their lives are anchored in principles but at the same time b) there ARE NO PRINCIPLES – or at least none that anybody can be sure of, that anybody can ‘prove’ are reely reely anchored in the nature of a reality set up and presided over by the Beyond.**

So the liberal, progressive, ‘elite’ trick will be to pretend that your principles are solidly enough anchored to give your life and your morality some meaning while ‘really’ knowing deep deep down that there are no such solid principles (and that consequently your life is like a blob of gelatin floating on a stormy, trackless ocean of meaninglessness). And for the donkey-minded masses, they can go on actually believing in a Beyond – after all, religion is the “opiate of the masses” as a great revolutionary thinker once assured the world.

And of course, by getting rid of your opposition – popes, priests, anybody who stands up for the Beyond or at least tries to – then you are free to make sure that it is your Notion that is ‘shared’ by the masses. Not a terribly original scheme, but it’s worked before in this world – at least for a while.

In a by-the-by that stuns with its revelation of just how witless a bonafide, card-carrying cutting-edge ‘intellectual’ can be, Morris relates Neuhaus’s retelling of the Princeton University bioethicist, Peter Singer. Singer has been barred from speaking at German universities since the Wall came down, because he proposed that “defective” children be destroyed “during a trial period after their births”. It was pointed out to him that that was precisely the Nazi plan for clearing the “defective” undergrowth out of the healthy forest of the German Volk (which they actually carried out until Bishop Galen of Munster raised such a hullaballoo that they had to stop it). Somehow, Singer managed to become “especially upset” that anyone would even bring all that up, since he had lost relatives in the Holocaust.

Apparently Singer the storied intellectual assumed a) that he didn’t need to really think his ideas through, b) that actual human historical experience had nothing to do with his ideas, and c) that since he was a second-tier victim of the Holocaust then nobody had the right to increase his ‘pain’ by disagreeing with his ideas. Such are the complications of too-little thinking by elite types who think that their every intellectual burp is a deep thought ready to be imposed on the waiting donkeys.

Morris, alas, still has to keep his own union card, so he finds fault with Neuhaus in the matter of Roe v. Wade (about – you know – abortion as a doable do). Morris accuses Neuhaus of charging that the country never got a chance to really debate the abortion issue after (let alone before) Roe; Morris points to a 2008 South Dakota referendum which was passed, calling for “rule-based access to abortion”.

But “rule-based access to abortion” – the idea that there can be rules that narrowly limit abortions to actual life-threatening danger to the mother, that abortions cannot be performed after fetal viability - are accepted by a sizable percentage of citizens. What a very large percentage does not agree with is ‘abortion’ as a ‘private’ health-and-lifestyle matter to be decided between the woman and her doctor and nobody else, the father and the State included.

I’d say that there’s no decisive support for the current position of the feminist ‘elites’ that abortion is a) nobody’s business but the individual woman’s and b) it ‘ain’t but a thang’ anyway.

But if prior maneuvering is any indicator, the revolutionary devil will have been hidden in the details, and through the skullduggerous collaboration of willing intellectuals, jurists, and legislators, the voters of the Great State of South Dakota will shortly find that they have been snookered as the advocate-cadres go to work on ‘implementation’ in the State capitol (which I should remember from 5th grade geography but don’t).

While some religious traditions have managed to make room for some amount of abortion – under certain circumstances – there isn’t a great deal of religious support for ‘abortion at will’ or abortion as merely a lifestyle choice just a little more significant than getting Botoxed.

To those who ‘get it’, of course, such complexity is merely ‘thinking too much’, and in the service of ‘patriarchy’ – defined as a violent programme of world-historical proportions. (Sort of like – by amazing coincidence – what Marx said Capitalism was.)

One wonders, from time to time: if ‘men’ are as violent and evil as they have been made out to be by certain groups, and if the said ‘men’ have been that way since that pre-Pharaonic age of the Great Goddes(es), then how is it that by the Year of Grace One Thousand Nine Hundred and Seventy or thereabouts, there were still alive and taking nourishment in this country sufficient numbers of ‘women’ as to constitute that tempting 51% of the population that so seduced the desperate Democrats into imagining that they could weld to their Party a huge and reliable majority of the American citizenry, all for the price of ‘merely’ allowing the demonization and denigration of ‘men’ as a class, using as weapons the full legislative, justicial, police, and media resources of the nation? ***

Or is that thinking too much?

Well, at this point of course, such questions might be seen as Politburo debates about ‘how we got to this point’ and ‘what we can do now’ in 1990.

Or not.

Maybe something might still be done to work for the common weal – or, to put it ‘quaintly’, for all the citizens.

And – who can say? – maybe there is a Beyond, and maybe ‘It’ loves all humans, and maybe We can hoist up what little canvas the ship can still bear and bring her back before the Wind.

NOTES

*As always, when I speak of ‘ideological feminism’ I am not referring to all female human beings in their thoughts and preferences, but rather to a particular cadre – the ‘base’ of ‘feminism’ – that has been pursuing, under all manner of guises, a purely political agenda in this country and elsewhere in the West for the past forty years or so. Nor, if I take issue with that ‘ideology’, am I taking a swipe at the interests or ‘pain’ of all female human beings.

**This is exactly the point about which Pope Benedict XVI spoke clearly in his recent address to the faculties of the University of Regensburg: that the Church has always taught that human reason, helped along by the Holy Spirit, can reach into and grasp (however incompletely) the reality of a cosmos presided over by an all-powerful, loving Grace (or: God).

***All this despite the fact, among others, that while 44% of gays report violence in their domestic relationship, 57% of lesbians do or that while 22% of men admit to resorting to violence against their partners, 38% of women do. And while the PC explanation of this is that many women are conditioned by patriarchy, that explanation neither limns a very impressive prospect for female agency and initiative, nor does it seem to explain how ‘men’ are the sole (and evil) core of the problem of violence in relationships. And perhaps it has something to do with testosterone; thus perhaps the lesbians proving more violence-prone than the gays. But if so, then both sexes and both the straight and gay orientations have testosterone in their systems (albeit in different amounts and with different effects).

So the national policy – if there is to be one – should be concerned with testosterone’s consequences on people, not with a ‘war’ of one gender upon another, AND with the government – on top of everything else – taking sides. The reports are discussed on p. 244 of Nathanson and Young’s “Legalizing Misandry” (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press; 2006); the entire book is worth the read, and I’ll be doing a Post when I’ve finished reflecting upon it.

Moreover, sex-assaultive adolescent males who as children were themselves abused by females, uniformly chose female victims. Which indicates a monstrous amount of female-abuse-of-male-children behind the seemingly ‘ultimate’ reality of males assaulting females sexually. (See p.257 of “Legalizing”.) So there is a universe of suppressed information buried behind the headlines. And the absence of that crucial information fuels the lethally misguided uproar against males; an uproar that the self-proclaimed “Party of Women” needs to think rather seriously about, I would say – and sooner rather than later.

THE STATE OF MILITARY CHAPLAINS

Over at ‘America’ magazine, there’s a little dust-up over chaplains in the armed services. It’s of interest more widely than might at first seem apparent. The original article that started it is here.

I have written about chaplains, mostly in regard to professionals (doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists, and – at some length – lawyers) in the military. The Post ‘Bishops Bomb’ from November 2, 2006 comes to mind.

A proposal was put forward in the magazine by a Catholic deacon that while the ministry of Catholic priests is necessary in the military, they should be civilians, in order to be more effective.

In response, a sub-bishop of the Catholic archdiocese for the military has written a piece. He is a former Navy chaplain, who after 27 years retired after holding some hefty billets and is now a sub-bishop for the archbishop who oversees Catholic ministry for all the Services.

He wishes to refute the idea that priests (and clergy generally) who are not actually military chaplains would be a good idea. The concept of non-military chaplains would not work very well, he says.

I won’t repeat here all the arguments about professionals in the military and chaplains specifically. The November 2006 Post is the first of several that deals with that in the period from late 2006 through the Watada trial of mid-2007 and again around the time that military psychologists were discovered to be involved in the ‘BISKIT’ torture teams (with, rather relevantly, the connivance of their ‘parent’ organization, the American Psychological Association).

I’ll just go with the thoughts prompted by the points that the good bishop raises.
Bishop Estabrook begins by reciting his own career record in the Navy. What caught my eye was his comment that he has “taught” courses on conscientious objection, privileged communication, and confidentiality at the Navy’s school for chaplains in Newport, R.I. I’m sure he did. But military ‘schools’ at the level he’s talking about aren’t exactly university post-grad courses on bosky campuses, in oak-paneled libraries or class-rooms, reading and discoursing upon ancient hefty tomes.

Bets are that they are held in an old barracks or today’s equivalent of a Quonset hut. The course probably doesn’t last longer than a few months. The classes probably involve a great deal of Power-Point and photocopies of assorted regulations. There are probably few essay questions on the ‘test’. Nor would spelling be a priority.

The ‘school’ would be open to chaplains of all faiths, and some form of it would be mandatory for all as an introductory course. Given the vast differences in formal schooling, let alone aptitude, among the ministerial schools of the many faiths recognized by the military, it would be a Lowest Common Denominator course, and the bar, as above implied, would have to be set rather low, especially, I imagine, in the past decade and more of the Fundamentalist Ascendancy.

The bishop follows his creds with a story, or an anecdote: Marine General James Mattis “claimed that his most trusted resource was his chaplain”. There are two possibilities here: the General’s comments were made in some sort of after-dinner speech or address to a chaplains’ gathering and he was being polite and upbeat, the military equivalent of Rotarian rubber-chicken boilerplate. Or, in the alternative, a significant reason that our forces have not been doing so well on the Eastern Front is that the General commanding seems to be spending way too much time with his staff chaplain rather than the officers entrusted with advising him as to matters military and implementing his operational plans.

In this particular story, the General – as the bishop tells it – had ordered his troops to “demonstrate a show of force in full battle gear”, when suddenly a chaplain, a priest named Bill, suggested that instead the troops sort of meet-and-greet folks and pass out bottles of water. And the General, after considering the advice “bizarre” yet goes ahead and so orders it.

The idea of not trying to shock-and-awe people whose country you are occupying, but rather to try to engage them as human beings, is a militarily sound one. That it had occurred to nobody including the General is, at this point alas, a credible possibility. That the single chaplain alone, on the basis of the wisdom of his advice and strength of his character, stared down the whole command structure like Luther in front of the Diet and comes up with an idea that has escaped the consideration of an entire senior command staff is an implication suitable only for a movie script (perhaps one is in the works). That the General could report that “it worked” and that there were smiles, embraces, and friendly relations all around is certainly possible, but it is most surely a script according to the stylings of Oprah.

The bishop does “doubt that a civilian cleric would have enjoyed such influence; security wouldn’t have allowed him into the war zone”. Two rather big points.

In order to enjoy that sort of influence in a tight-knit, hierarchical organization with its own very special ways of doing everything, a clergyman ‘right off the street’ isn’t going to gain much entrée. He isn’t ‘one of us’, as the officers would say. Of course, a clergyman who had some working familiarity and experience in dealing with military folk, and especially with senior staff officers and senior commanders, would be able to circumvent the potholes of operational malapropism.

But that brings Us to the second point: ‘security’ won’t allow that civilian clergyman to be there. You don’t get to ‘be’ in important places in the military unless it knows it can ‘trust’ you. And to unpack that word ‘trust’ in this context is an exercise well worth the time and effort. The military, especially at these exalted levels, has to ‘know’ you; and that only comes from ‘being around’. But also from having a ‘place’, keeping to your ‘place’, and knowing your ‘place’. Having a uniform and a rank as well as a job description is very valuable. But also expensive.

You don’t get ‘security’ clearance until the military knows it can control you, alas. And thereby the rub. You are a commissioned officer in the US military. You can be court-martialed, and can certainly lose a career, unless you stay within some very clear and distinct lines. Father Bill may have had a very good day (although probably not as simply and easily marvelous as the story would imply), but Father X assigned to the guard battalion at Abu Ghraib, or Father Y assigned to minister to the guard force at Guantanamo, probably had few of them, if indeed they even bothered to try.

Which also raises the point: did the good bishop, who by his own report was what appears to be the highest-ranking priest in the naval chaplaincy for a while, have any such good days there in the precincts of the Pentagon? Did he have bad ones and not tell anybody? Very possibly so – he would have lost his security clearance, perhaps been court-martialed, and all the rest. Chaplains are – must be – ‘team players’; there is precious little room for prophecy even in its best and most authentic sense; Jeremiah would have wound up in Fort Leavenworth’s walls quicker than you can say “Integrity and Christian Witness and speaking-truth-to-power”. You go along to get-along; there’s a price for that.

On the other hand, if they were not ‘team players’, or even if they simply weren’t on the team, then a clergyman would have a hard time getting ‘access’ at all. He might be able to come aboard a Stateside ship or base to do a service and perhaps counsel individual troubled souls, but he wouldn’t be going overseas on missions, especially to a war zone, and especially to a war zone where ‘stuff happens’ and continues ‘to happen’. For that you have to be ‘embedded’ in so thorough a way that it makes the modern media look fiercely independent.

The bishop would like it to be thought of as just another form of “missionary work” – you go to a foreign land, you learn the culture, you sort of ‘go in their door to bring them out your own’. But like so many other cuddly or at least familiar historical analogies that have been thrown at Us over the past years, this one doesn’t quite fit.

If you say something to piss off the tribal chief, something like say ‘Do unto others’, you could wind up in a world of hurt. It was for this reason that some of the most enterprising missionaries either found themselves reduced to merely being ‘models’ of a good Christian life and ix-naying the Christian preaching, or preaching ‘love’ to a culture that is based on ‘war’ and getting whacked.

Among Catholics, the Jesuits – if memory serves – back in the day when they were at the top of their game, got themselves into a big snit with the lesser Orders in foreign lands: the lesser Orders wanted to simply put it out there loud and clear – be Catholic, do this and don’t do that, or burn in hell; the Jesuits wanted to finesse things, especially with feudal hierarchies such as the Japanese shogunate and the daimyos. To the point where being ‘Catholic’ was quietly reduced to a much lower priority than ‘being patient’ and ‘keeping access’.

The Jesuit thinking was that it was counterproductive to force the Chinese and the Japanese to forego ‘ancestor worship’ and listen to services in the Latin, get them all annoyed, and then be unable to ‘really really’ have an impact on the long-term, ‘strategic’ (it might be termed today) changing of the culture. It’s not really varsity-level play, they figured, to alienate the entire ‘elite’ of a complex society simply over the basis of culture-bound particulars, when there was the possibility of ‘major change’ that might be, with a little indulgence and loosening up of ‘principles’, achieved. That was about the size of it.

The lesser Orders were more ‘realistic’, perhaps. Sumus quod sumus, as Garrison Keillor’s denizens of mythical Lake Wobegone might say; we are what we are. That being the case, let’s just show’em what to do, let those who truly wish Christianity (Catholic Christianity) come forward, and the rest can take their own sweet time or be damned or both. We do what we can; we don’t debase ourselves in the fatuous hope of achieving ‘bigger things’ that are, in all but fairy-tales, pretty much impossible; and thoroughly ‘Christianizing’ an entire complex, hierarchical civilization that had been in business for millennia … would fall into the realm of ‘not today’, without a doubt.

And it doesn’t take too long before insignificant particulars migrate from ‘telling the beads’ to Charity and Justice and such things. And Truth, as all knoweth full well, goes out the frakking door when diplomacy is ‘on the table’.

It's curious that the Jesuits might look down their noses at the military chaplaincy's considered soft-sell of principles in order to retain 'access' and for the abstract but strategic 'greater good', when that Order, even in its heyday now long past, did precisely that in its work on the foreign missions. And, more recently, I recall reading somewhere that Jesuits were the major players in helping Teddy Kennedy 'see' that one could be a good Catholic and be pro-abortion back there in the 1970s. The Jesuits and the military chaplainry are - wheeee! - 'sisters under the skin'. It's sobering to realize just what can be politely locked away if you're doing it in so good a cause as 'the greater glory of God'. The fate of Cardinal Wolsey and the more recent Richard John Neuhaus (deliciously, a nemesis of the Order for being too unprincipled) should have made that clear.

‘Christianizing’ the military, even the US military, falls into that latter category a whole lot more than any of Us might care to imagine. More and more of the younger troops, especially in these troubled economic times, have been raised in not-overly-churched situations. And the senior officers are now doubly ensnared. In the first place, military business is a tough and lethal business when you get right down to exercising lethal force. It’s not easy to follow the Golden Rule just in the nature of things.

But in the second place, although the military is bound to take its orders from the civilian Executive Branch (and in some ways from a Gongress that has pretty much abdicated any real responsibility), that Executive, in this day and age, has become somewhat aggressive. Nor is it only a ‘Bush’ problem or a Republican problem: an invasion ‘of the Left’, for ‘humanitarian’ purposes or to ‘save the children’ or ‘help women’ is going to wind up doing as lethal a job of shooting as an invasion for ‘imperialistic’ purposes. (Although I suppose a good case can be made that ‘humanitarian’ invasion is simply a ‘humanitarian’ imperialism, as opposed to the ‘nationalist-economic’ imperialism of the Right. In either case, and especially if both cases are in play, then I wouldn’t expect things to get too much better in a new Administration.) We are becoming a Reich, simultaneously ‘humanitarian’ and ‘nationalist’, simultaneously’ humane’ and invasive, simultaneously ‘sensitive’ and ‘patriotic’ as those words are currently bandied about.

That being the case, chaplains are now in the unenviable position of being – as it were – Reichspriests, and the good bishop himself a Reichsbishop. Ach.

The bishop then goes on to relate how, in the matter of protesting partial-birth abortion legislation, he was advised by Navy lawyers (the JAGs) that chaplains could not protest in uniform, since they were commissioned officers (as if they would be immune from consequences if they protested in slacks and Hawaiian shirts). But, he reports, he told them that “once they put on their vestments they represented the church [sic], and all the faithful had a constitutional right to hear what other Catholics were being told”. As if it would not be ‘noted’ what they preached, and such ‘word’ would wind up in the ‘invisible file’, that vast miasmic layer of opinion, truth, half-truth, factoid and ‘scuttlebutt’ that hangs over any Service, influencing who gets promoted and who doesn’t. A ‘prophetic’ military ministry would be a very brief one indeed.

The bishop then relates – in best ‘ecumenical’ form – that in the 1970s the senior chaplain at the Naval Academy, future Cardinal John O’Connor – threatened to “pull out all the chaplains” if the orders for a black Baptist chaplain’s assignment to the Academy were revoked. And they weren’t. Of course, O’Connor was shrewd enough to be surfing a national wave that the Navy brass of the era were sufficiently fuddy-duddy to be opposing; it helps a lot to be standing up to ‘power’ when the national government is on your side and your immediate bosses were such blockheads as to take up a position on the low ground.

But in all these cases, the military chaplains – and the ecclesiastical superiors who oversee them – are at best able to make a small difference here or there. No chaplain – Catholic or otherwise – was able to prevent the abomination of preventive war that was Iraq; no chaplain – Catholic or otherwise – was able to stop Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. Indeed, during the Fundamentalist Ascendancy, it can only be prudently presumed that the psychologists on the torture-teams and the JAGs (with some few very honorable exceptions) who went along with the torture were joined by a chaplainry far too given over to ‘the powers that be that are of God’ and of a militarism and outright jingoism that lubricated the skids along which the entire abomination has rolled these many years.

It’s anybody’s guess how much ‘truth’ has been suppressed in favor of maintaining ‘access’; a strategy that has utterly undone the American media and ‘the press’ (and ultimately did not serve the ‘Jesuit’ approach in 16th-century China and Japan).

One wonders what happened back in the days when Constantine suddenly made the Empire ‘Christian’ overnight. Did the legions do ‘their thing’ more charitably? Was it a kinder and gentler Empire?

One also recalls that in World War 1, famously, French and German bishops were both busily blessing their troops, as were Orthodox clergy to the vast, already-doomed Russian formations. Individual acts of true priestly integrity and ministry may have been – doubtless were – performed on all sides. But the war came, and went on, and ground out millions of soldiers’ lives before the nations finally called a halt. At its conclusion, no high-ranking prelate emerged as having played a great role in stopping it.

It seems an interesting coincidence to me that just as the Vatican report on homosexuality in American seminaries is (finally) being released, there is this small but steady trickle of articles about Catholic military chaplains and that special archdiocese – hitherto so reticent – that oversees the military ministry. The prelate who conducted that investigation – or review – of American seminaries was the same fellow who up until recently was the archbishop of that military archdiocese. He conducted his review, submitted his report some years ago; it was promptly sat upon, and he was promptly given a promotion to head the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Rome then appointed an American with lots of ‘Roman’ experience to run the military archdiocese. Wheels within wheels, and We shall see what We shall see.

But the good bishop – this Estabrook – is too clever by half, from the text of the article.

FIRST THING

The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus is dead.

He found his niche during the Reagan era, taking a conservative Catholic position on numerous public issues, but building alliances with the rising Evangelical – read Fundamentalist – Ascendancy. They made common cultural cause. There was a lot going on in the culture that their respective approaches could agree upon.

But he also itched to play a wider role. He set up his offices in Washington; imperial capitals in their butter-bright glow seem to exert a gravitational pull on religious types who seek to ‘make a difference’. And make their mark.

And this being Reagan’s Washington, his theological conservatism – no bad thing in itself at all – tinged into neoconservatism. He wanted to make a larger difference than ‘mere’ theological’ and ‘religious’ commentary could provide. He started going down the political road.

As his Fundamentalist associates entered upon their Ascendancy, he was drawn up with them ; the pols were pleased to have a Catholic to provide – as it were – benefit of clergy to their less-rigorously theological, slightly less burnished bible-thumpers. Chuck Colson, felon of the Watergate scam, had found religion in prison and came out to set up a thriving national business in ‘Christian’ prison-ministry; he and Neuhaus formed a mutually rewarding alliance.

It was not always difficult. The Pope for much of that time was John Paul II, whom Neuhaus took upon himself to call John Paul the Great, in a queasily self-aggrandizing assumption of authority. That Pope was open to ‘dialogue’ with other faiths, and in that space Neuhaus navigated skillfully, building up a substantial cultural and political ministry while remaining well within the bounds approved by the hierarchy – indeed, by Rome itself. It was a masterful job.

He could preach – fluently and knowledgeably – valid Catholic doctrine while remaining in the best political graces. This was not a position the American Church was used to, and he provided a simulacrum of the old Catholic social authority, harking back to the days when Church authorities could ‘pick up the phone’. Since the late Sixties most authoritative public Catholic social comment had been oppositional in its stance for the poor, against abortion, and against war, especially the nuclear brinkmanship of Reagan’s first Administration. The full spectrum of Catholic concern earned it no lasting friends among the Democrats (pro-abortion, anti-male) or the Republicans (pro-war, anti-poor). Neuhaus’s success was a gleaming respite from the constant, wearing struggle against all tides.

He was cautious in his comments on the clergy-sex abuse crisis that flared up in a third incarnation in 2002. He deplored undisciplined and in some cases depraved priests, while carefully recalling the canonical requirements of due-process so as to avoid damaging rushes-to-judgment. Nor did he spare the American bishops, whose response in the early phases combined the worst of both institutional secrecy and cowardice. As to the larger connections between the peculiar focus on the Catholic clergy and not his allies’ clergy, or the oddities and dissonances of various facts and figures touted as accurate he was mostly silent. Curiously, for a widely educated public intellectual who was deeply involved in the ‘culture war’, he made little mention of the origin of that phrase: the Bismarckian Kulturkampf specifically designed to attack and weaken the social and cultural authority of the Catholic Church in the new Imperial Germany so as to increase public esteem of and reliance upon the government instead.

Things started getting iffy when his neoconservative allies opted for war and the invasion of Iraq. Rome, under the now-aged and ill John Paul II, was not at all in favor of it. Neuhaus was forced to resort increasingly to hair-splitting, going into great detail as to when ‘the Pope’ spoke authoritatively to Catholics and when ‘the Pope’s’ was simply one more opinion among others in the international community. He was eventually reduced to quoting a Georgia prelate who asserted that in the matter of America going to war, the Pope was merely ‘another foreign diplomat’. Much just-war theory and commentary was published in the Neuhaus magazine, ‘First Things’. Israel’s interests were not forgotten.

Somehow, in the momentous matter of war, the pre-eminently ‘conservative’ and ‘traditional’ Neuhaus was not so inclined to listen to Rome or to his Pope (whom – once safely dead – Neuhaus touted as ‘the Great’).

As things began to go irretrievably – but worse, unspinnably – baaaad in the Middle East, Neuhaus began to return the magazine to its strongest suit: literary, philosophical, theological and religious articles that were meaty and informative, but pitched at a level any modestly-attentive reader could manage. In that role the magazine has always been tremendously valuable.

When the new Pope started to move away from ‘dialogue’, although not specifically with other Christian denominations, the other rock upon which Neuhaus had founded his religio-cultural-political enterprise began to crack.

As the Bush Administration, successor to his much-esteemed Reagan Presidency, was increasingly revealed to be deficient in concept and competence and integrity, there was little that Neuhaus could say in its defense without compromising the integrity of his entire project.
The last couple of years must have been hard for him.

In a way he reminds me of an English prelate in the time of Henry VIII. Before Henry’s troubles over divorce, he walked next to the royal tiger in ceremonial processions before all the people and sat in the counsels of the great. But when the tiger reverted to a wildness stunning in its ferocity, he was hard put to balance his loyalties to government and Church and to intellectual and moral integrity.

There is always a desire to ‘do more’, that besets anyone who wishes to bring spiritual good into the world. And in these centralized times, and especially in America, there is the abiding assumption that more organization and more ‘influence’ must automatically result in more ‘success’ in ministry. A bigger ‘footprint’, a bigger establishment, a wider network of ‘friends’ and alliances … such panoply cannot but result in bigger and wider ‘success’.

But it’s a double-edged sword. Spirit does not find so congenial a home in such a situation, enmeshed as it must be in the gravitational pull of a Material dimension that, in an imperial capital, is intensified stupendously. The Holy Spirit seems to do the most lasting work in the hearts of individuals and small communities of those similarly dedicated. In matters of the Spirit, bigger is not necessarily better. Perhaps it has to do with the simple fact that the more complex the machine, the greater the probability of breakdown – Neuhaus had assembled a complex agglomeration of alliances, wading into the politics of religion and religious groups and at the same time into the politics of keeping friendly with powerful politicians. That sort of thing never lasts long without exacting a terrible price for a person committed to Grace and the Holy Spirit.

I can’t help but imagine that its unraveling hastened his demise.

There is something in here that is relevant to Our present situation. Neuhaus, gifted and hugely educated, fell into the trap seen with exquisite clarity by Washington in his Farewell Address: you can be a Model or you can be an Agent, and you’re way better off being a Model.

Washington wanted Us to fulfill Our own potential as a nation and a people; in the process, conducting Our affairs according to the newly-constructed Constitution, all the citizens pursuing life, liberty, and happiness within the wide field that it boundaried and supported. In so doing, the United States, people and form of government, would become a model for all the other nations and peoples in the world. They in turn would adapt their own national entities as they saw fit, in their own time.

Or not. There would always be the possibility that some would not be able to, or wish to , adapt to the American model. To their great and lasting detriment and damage, Washington would have readily acknowledged. But there’s only so much you can do in life, whether in dealing with individual persons or whole peoples and their governments. That’s the way it is.

And, he saw, if you start going around trying to be an ‘agent’ of those peoples’ and governments’ change, you were going to get yourself into some very deep and deadly doo-doo indeed. If they didn’t change the way you wanted them to, or thought that they should, or if they didn’t ‘change’ fast enough, What Then?

Would you simply tuck your tail between your legs and mind your own business? Would you try to ‘influence’ them? ‘Help’ them as you saw fit to imagine they needed? Coerce them into changing? Invade them? Occupy them? Such monstrous “mischief” (you didn’t need to go-vivid in the 18th-century – educated folks could think and imagine the content of that hugely freighted “mischief” for themselves) would not only embroil America in endless and increasingly complicated and probably violent “adventures” and misadventures. No, such “mischief” would inevitably have a blow-back effect.

In two ways. First, America would create some very dedicated opponents to its policies, and it is only a short step from ‘opponent’ to ‘enemy’.

Worse, America would start deforming itself if it then responded with either massive deceit or massive violence, or both. After all, you can’t engage in such darkling ventures, especially over the long haul, and not become rather too in-touch with your own dark-side. That’s the way it is in life. (Sort of very much like devolving from the commission of the occasional sinful act to embracing a wholesale life of active sin – to put it in a theology both Reformation and Catholic).

McKinley’s embrace of imperial expansion in the service of national grandeur, national status, and the search for resources and markets started Us on a very dangerous road, for which Teddy Roosevelt’s vigorous, telegenic, ebullient ‘masculine’ exertion of the national will and strength provided a sort of up-beat cover: this was Progress!. Wilson continued the pattern, not in vulgar service of Mammon (the preacher’s son told himself) but rather in the noble defense and expansion of Liberty and Democracy.

Somehow, all that worked itself out to the CIA’s ‘covert’ and/or paramilitary activities in the 1950s: Iran in ’53, Guatemala in ’54, northern Vietnam starting in ’54, southern Vietnam starting in ’55, Tibet starting in ’56, Indonesia in ’57 and ’58, Lebanon and Iraq in ’58 … and God knows what and where else. And not simply for ‘Liberty’ and ‘Democracy’, but for reliable, ‘friendly’ governments no matter what they did to their own peoples.

From the Left, the assorted Revolutions of the Identities and Advocacies here domestically starting in the late 1960s and gathering impetus since, also felt that domestically ‘government’ should be the ‘agent’ and not simply the referee: change, in the form of this or that agenda, imposed not after deliberation but as a matter of urgency, from the top down , did vast damage (perhaps more in the long run than any good that was achieved).

But that same attitude of ‘agent’ then also spread, still from the Left, into foreign policy, as evidenced by the Clinton-era ‘humanitarian’ military coercion. We allowed Ourselves to accept the incomplete analysis of the ‘liberal interventionists’: that if you’re doing it in a ‘good’ cause then you will win.

Alas. No. A humanitarian objective can still lead to horribly anti-humanitarian results, evidenced most awesomely by Margaret Albright’s ‘realistic’ and ‘strong’ stance that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children would be “an acceptable price to pay” for the discombobulation of Our until-recently client, Saddam Hussein. As if she were paying the price, rather than those children, whom the world will never know, but whose blood cries out from the ground.

But while she may not have had to pay any price, We have: We are now lethally oblivious to the real consequences of Our actions. This will prove fatal to Our democracy and Our Republic if it isn’t corrected.

And then came Bush and the 9-11 that somehow he allowed to happen on his watch, and all that has followed.

Aligned solidly with the ‘cultural conservatives’ in the matter of the ‘culture war’, Neuhaus now found himself willy-nilly enlisted in the neoconservatives' nationalist-Rightist-imperial wars against, it is said, ‘Terror’. You might think Neuhaus with all his education would have pointed out that Terror, like Sin, is something that you can’t really stamp out, and that his own adopted Church had finally learned – after much bloodshed and infamy, all well-intentioned and philosophically ‘justified’ – that armed force will rarely achieve the Shylockian Perfection of getting what you set out to get with no further consequences or problems.

But by that time, Neuhaus’s entire network had enmeshed him – Doctor Washington to the ER stat! – in a web of ‘loyalties’: to neocons, to the romantic Southron ‘patriotism’ that winds up really being a glorification of militarism that was chaplained by his Fundamentalist friends, to the unsleeping Israeli game-plan of doing whatever that embattled ‘realm’ decided it would frakking do and making the American pols pay for the privilege of supporting it … and on and on.

Neuhaus, with his erudite and insightful and acute modeling of the deep and rich treasures of the Christian (classically, not Fundamentalistically, defined) tradition in matters spiritual, intellectual, and moral, was now inextricably entangled – like Laocoon – in the web of serpents. His project of creating an Agent in the form of a politically powerful Conservative (in the best sense) alliance of Evangelical, Christian, and Jewish had somehow (but hardly improbably) wound up with him deploying his Gifts and his Vision in the service of the Bushist Imperium and its god-addled Fundamentalist chaplainry, overrated and medal-bedecked field marshals, and calculating, ruthless corporate remora.

It is ‘tragic’ in the classical sense.

We are headed down exactly the same road that he has traveled to his end.

What to do? Start bearing Ourselves so that if indeed the world’s peoples do look to Us, as a People even more than as a government, they will see a Model worthy of emulation. All else pales beside this great, desperately needed objective. If We can People this increasingly complex, centralized, and now fiscally, militarily, and morally compromised nation, then it can still be – God willing and Inshallah (to quote a Navy military judge’s recent ejaculation) – possible to save the country, the Republic, and the Vision upon which the Republic was Founded.

Or not.

Add this to the New Year’s resolution list. Or at least – to the New Year’s ‘urgent-deliberation’ list.

And may it be that Neuhaus, who once was blind, can now see. And – if he networks as well ‘There’ as he did ‘down here’ – is now in a better position to help Us all.