Why are Prisoners in Prison?

On December 14, Pope Leo XIV celebrated Mass for the “Jubilee of Prisoners.” His homily is replete with “hope.” Sometimes it almost suggests the Parousia is about to arrive, immanently. Leo says we must build a “society established on new criteria, and ultimately on charity…” The sermon appeals to all sorts of “reforms” — prison reform, sentencing reform, reform with “justice and charity.” The only “reform” that seems obscure is the moral reform of the criminal who committed an evil act (let’s call it that) which is why he’s in jail. (A link to the homily is here.)

Perhaps I am dense, but I have trouble finding the answer to a basic question: Why are prisoners in prison?

Yes, we want people to reform. In one place the Pope talks about “justice and charity” and, assuming these virtues are not opposed, there’s a reason in justice that these people are locked up. And prison ought not to be just about the personal reform of the criminal; it ought also to be a statement to the criminal and to society that the kinds of actions that criminals commit are deplorable, will not be tolerated, and must be paid for. That is not “vengeance.”

As the Pope was waxing on a new earth, fifteen Jews were being gunned down on an Australian beach. Two students were shot at Brown University. German police say they foiled plans for a mass car attack on people in a Bavarian Christmas market. Rob Reiner’s son apparently killed him and his wife. So, sorry, even Catholics are not going to be moved by papal appeals for “forms of amnesty or pardon meant to help individuals regain confidence in themselves and in society.” Nor should they. Our least social problem is criminals lacking confidence.

Orthodox Making Converts: What Lessons to Learn?

Ruth Graham, the New York Times’s religion reporter, published a piece November 19 (here) probing why it seems Orthodox churches in the United States are getting converts. Such a phenomenon doesn’t fit the standard caricature of Eastern Christianity in the United States, largely regarded as an “old country religion” of Greek and Eastern European immigrants — holdovers in ethnic enclaves but not the stuff of religious growth in America.

But Eastern Christianity seems to be growing, and not just from converts like My Big Fat Greek Wedding’s Ian Miller, the practically atheist mainstream WASP who was baptized into Orthodoxy to get married to an Orthodox girl. Graham sees a deeper level of conviction, “especially among conservative young men. They are drawn to what they describe as a more demanding, even difficult, practice of Christianity. Echoing some of the rhetoric of the so-called manosphere, new waves of young converts say Orthodoxy offers them hard truths and affirms their masculinity.”

Male Christian (so-called) nationalists are being spawned not in fundamentalist or evangelical churches or even FBI-supervised traditional Latin Mass communities but behind some iconostasis somewhere? Yes, I believe it. I’ve long been tempted to write a book on “Eastern Christians in Virginia,” not just because the research would be conveniently accessible to where I now live but because people don’t associate Virginia with Eastern Christians. But they’re here and they’re growing. As far as I can see, many first came in the 1970s, as successful kids of traditionally Orthodox ethnicities got jobs in Washington and kept their faith. But, as Graham shows, it’s not just that. It’s also conversions.

Yes, Orthodoxy seems to appeal to some younger people, particularly younger men, because of its discipline. I’m not going to probe how deeply appropriated that discipline may be morally, but it exists, it provides a communal identity, and it strikes a visceral chord that things worth doing — like discipleship — demand a price. And, at least on the dread “gender binary,” the Orthodox (except for some of those hanging around the Fordham Orthodoxy project) seem clear about there being noninterchangeable men and women, and nothing else.

There’s a reason why Fr. Richard Neuhaus renamed the traditional old American Protestant “mainline” — Baptists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians — the “old line.” Their earlier influence got sidelined because they accommodated the Zeitgeist. Catholics now see a resurgence of their leaders relitigating the 1970s, trying to resurrect secularizing accommodationist approaches to “theology” that were bad ideas a half century ago, that we thought were buried in the John Paul II-Benedict XVI pontificates, but which have resurfaced in the guise of “pastoral accompaniment” and “discerning the Spirit.” Imitating Anglicanism should not be a model Catholics find appealing. There’s clearly something to an Orthodoxy that does not bend its public faith and morals (even if it does bend a lot of its pastoral “ekonomia”) to the modern winds and whose liturgies are not woke pep talks. Catholics might want to take closer note. Uncertain trumpets don’t mass volunteers.

False Lights

Judgment may not be in vogue in some ecclesiastical circles, but it is a major theme in John’s Gospel. In John 3, it’s clear: “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” But what happens when evil pretends to be good, feigns to be the “light”?

Faith in Public Life is a liberal ecumenical, mostly Protestant, lobby. Jeanne Lewis, its CEO, recently sent out an email saying we “know darkness may feel like a dominant force … [but] let’s also remember that we are in a season of light.” And, in celebration of that “light,” she invites us to take part in webinars on “CARE” (Compassionate Authentic Reproductive Equity). Of course, that means supporting “conversations” with young people on campuses to promote abortion. Sounds pretty dark to me.

Euthanasia and Abortion: The Extremes Meet

An exchange (here) during a recent debate in the British House of Lords over legalizing assisted suicide in the UK focused on this question: What if the person requesting to be killed is a pregnant woman? How should the issue be approached? Some jurisdictions will not allow such killing, particularly if the unborn child is viable; others (the Netherlands) first require “termination” (usually by a shot of potassium chloride to the unborn child’s heart) prior to then killing the mother. Admitting the British medical establishment “is against this whole system” and so Parliament should make its will clear, the question was directed to Lord Falconer: Where do you stand? His answer: “Pregnancy should not be a bar to it.”

Back in the day, just after Roe was handed down, Congress adopted the Buckley Amendment which forbade application of federal capital punishment to a pregnant woman. The “lords” no doubt would distinguish, insisting assisted suicide is a freely chosen death. I am almost willing to revise my moral judgment and, while barring euthanasia of pregnant women, am tempted to recommend expedited protocols for euthanizing idiot politicians.

On the Topic of Culture of Death Politicians…

By the way, does anybody know what happened to the poor Catholic politician who complained to his bishop after his parish priest criticized him in a Sunday sermon for voting for euthanasia? (See here.) Is this the next case of the episcopacy letting memory of proponents of the culture of death “go into that good night?” José Kast, Chile’s President-Elect, is quoted on social media saying, “I am Catholic first, and then I am a politician.” How many American politicians, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, could or would want to say that without invoking the Bernardin seamy garment as the pH test of their Catholicity?

The “Optics of Accommodation”

…is the title of an American Spectator article questioning Pope Leo’s recent meeting with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who has since just signed euthanasia legislation. We’re told about the Church’s “prophetic” witness and “speaking truth to power,” but one might say that “the governor of Illinois visited me and all I got was a lousy T-shirt” (or, in this case, actually a beer). What is the Church’s compulsion to make nice with pro-death politicians? Pius XI could at least pretend they had to sign a concordat with Hitler for the Church’s survival, but such threats are unapparent in the Land of Lincoln. The papal “open door” doesn’t seem to advance Catholic priorities. Perhaps a closed door might.

Granted, Pritzker is not Catholic, but how about the Catholic side acting with some strategic political perspective? Illinois’s promotion of abortion-on-demand is not limited to Illinois: this blog points out how a strategically situated Illinois abortion clinic also attracts clientele from pro-life Missouri and Iowa while providing a new “growth industry” in that border town. We might want to see some “witness” against that.

We know there was pushback from the Vatican after Pope Francis was faced with a fait accompli of meeting Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. It would be nice to see more sympathy for those whose actions support, rather than undermine, Catholic teaching.

Nominalism Lives

Laura Fields complains in The New York Times (here) that MAGA thinkers draw their ideas from the strangest places: like Richard Weaver, the author of the late 1940s book Ideas Have Consequences, and who denounced William of Ockham’s nominalism as playing a large part in today’s ethical confusion. For her, it’s clear how benighted MAGA must be if it turns on a late medieval thinker. Well, yes, nominalism bears a lot of blame for modern ethical messes. If good and bad are not real but only what God’s will commands, then there is no objective good or evil in the universe. Nominalism, perpetuated by Luther, at least held things together with an omnipotent God calling the shots. When faith in God waned, the role of the divine Almighty was taken over by a less omniscient human, attaching labels of good and evil according to his will. That gives you nonsense like “your good” and “my good” rather than “the good.” So, yes, diss nominalism. And while you’re at it, I’ll also throw some tomatoes at another grossly-wrong-but-largely-celebrated philosopher, René Descartes, who devalued the body.

Pathetic Political Performances in Australia

The murder of Jews on Hanukkah in Australia was deplorable. Equally deplorable was the response. Mainstream media continued replaying standard tropes, e.g., “it was terrorism but not part of any organized plot.” Of course not. The fact that an Egyptian and several other Arabs were stopped from ramming a car through a Bavarian Christmas market was just a coincidence. No such thing as “radical Islam” being the glue holding all these “lone wolves” together. “The ideological motivation remains unclear.” How about: “We hate Jews!” Seems pretty clear to me. And, of course, the names and nationalities of the perps were long withheld. I, of course, expected to find they were Luther Osterfeld and Jesus-Maria de Bermudez. Do they really think we’re such fools?

Dumbed Down Reading and “Education”

Maybe they do, considering our reading levels. The New York Times reports the decline in reading, noting students in elementary and high school are reading ever fewer full-length books. (See here.) The story’s headline says it all: “Kids Rarely Read Books Anymore. Even in English Class.”

Not only are kids not reading full-length books but, if you read the report, you’ll find what they do read is rather limited. The standard fare is circumscribed and, but for the occasional Shakespeare play, rarely features anything pre-20^th century. For American literature, that’s arguably its first century as an independent literature (and more, if you count the Puritan and colonial eras).

This raises questions about generations raised on screens, and not just computer ones. Yes, social media forces people to express “thoughts” in a limited number of letters. But in its heyday, television acclimatized a generation into thinking a story could be told from beginning to resolution in 30 minutes, or 60, tops. In its nadir day, television doesn’t even offer stories: “reality TV” is simply aimless filming. And, almost 70 years ago, Rene Ludmann in Cinéma, foi, et morale noted that the visualization of movies suspends the imaginative function. Consider how different we envision a scene if we read the book before seeing its movie adaptation and vice versa. Have all sorts of screens attenuated both attention and imagination?

I’ll use the reading report to complain about another trend in modern pedagogy I find problematic: case studies. In the past four months, I had the occasion to teach a course at one Catholic university in the Washington area and design another for a second. I noted the tendency to use “case studies” to promote “discussion” of a subject and “independent student thinking.” Don’t get me wrong: those things are important and case studies have their place. But I remain convinced that case studies make little sense absent prior acquisition of a basic fund of knowledge in a particular field.  Without that, it seems case studies focus on the issue du jour without giving students the breadth of background — including historical background — that is essential to their being genuine “critical thinkers” and not just repeaters of the elite view of the moment. And acquiring that fund of knowledge arguably comes from one hard but neglected task: reading the books. The whole books.

A Personal Tribute

December 16 is the 94th birthday of a friend, Fr. Zygmunt Zielinski. Zielinski was longtime professor of Church History at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. His scholarship introduced me to the whole problematic of the persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland by Germans and Russians during World War II. But he was not just a muse; he was a friend. I respected him from the first time I met him. Unlike many stiffer “professors,” I met him in his apartment with a colleague and he immediately offered us beers. Zygmunt lost his father at age 8, more or less in these days of December. His dad was a postmaster in their town, and the Germans took him into the forest and shot him. His mother, who was part German, could have used that fact to benefit herself, but she insisted in front of everybody, “I am a Polish woman.” Zygmunt never shied from standing up for the truth, no matter whose sacred oxen were gored. Please say a prayer for him today.