Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It starts Thursday morning when my dad and I play in the neighborhood football game for the one time all year I care about sports. When we come back, we all help out with the preparations and drag our nice “dining room” table from the crawl space, where it was put for storage when the dining room was turned into the piano room when I got a grand piano in high school. I’m always in charge of place settings, and ever since turning 21, my family gets a kick out of me being the one to uncork the wine. We eat early (~3:30) so that by the time most people are sitting down to eat turkey, we can be eating dessert. Dinner starts with grace, and then each one of us goes around and says something we’re especially thankful for that year. After dinner, we play family games until dessert. After dessert, we watch whatever Thanksgiving specials are on TV—ideally A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, but in a pinch whatever Disney Channel Thanksgiving special is on will do. We go to sleep early, because our traditions aren't over yet.
On Friday, we wake up early and go out to breakfast. We share our Christmas lists while we're eating, but try to be fast, because our goal is to be at the mall by 9 am. At the mall, we pair off—one parent and one child, switch, and then the parents and kids—and take advantage of the Black Friday sales. We have a late lunch and then go see whatever movie in theaters that we haven’t seen yet.
I felt a little guilty this Thanksgiving, and all this week, though. I missed Mass last Sunday. Sure, I had a ton of work and wasn't sleeping (thus missing the blog post, too), but it was the second time this semester I’ve missed Mass for no better reason than “I have a lot of work.” I'll admit, there's not much incentive to go to Mass here. The law school Mass here lasts just over 40 minutes, has no music, and is in a classroom. Add that to the new translation that I’m still stumbling over (aren’t we Harvard students supposed to be quick on the uptake?), and it can be hard to convince myself to go when so much else is going on. Compare it to the Masses I grew used to during undergrad at Duke Chapel, it almost just doesn’t feel even feel like Mass.
When the new priest for the Catholic Center came to campus, his first words to me and the other student music coordinator were, “people come to Mass for two things: good preaching and good music.” I fought that interpretation, because, really, Mass is all about the Eucharist—about God. Music should be at most a nice supplement. But my priest was right; it’d be great if people came to Mass and could walk away saying “I fell asleep during the sermon, and there was no music, but that’s okay, because I got the Eucharist”. Sometimes, that happens, but God didn’t make us that way. Our tradition of liturgy has grown up with music, surrounded in a beautiful Church, for a reason.
This is okay. In a society where in educated circles being “spiritual" is more fashionable than being “religious,” our politics continues to tell us that religion should be relegated to the private sphere, and acts such as the rosary are looked down on as superstition, it only makes sense we would think that only interior disposition matters—that any exterior “act” is at best superfluous. Thus we fall into the Valentinian heresy the Church Father St. Iranaeus wrote so much against which set up a dichotomy between holiness and the physical world. However, in Catholicism, we recognize that the Bible exhorts both “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24) as well as “you have been saved through faith…not from works” (Eph. 2:8). Ultimately “faith without works is dead,” (James 2:26) and what we do matters. Yes, that means the corporal works of mercy, but it also means going to Mass and engaging our physical senses there as well as our spiritual ones. It means that the Church tapping into that experience so many have called “spiritual” when looking at a beautiful piece of art or hearing a moving piece of music during liturgy is not only okay, but it’s more in tune with the way God created us: both spiritual and physical.
However, we must not forget that while aesthetic appeal adds to a Mass, it is never the focus. That has to be the Word and the Eucharist. The Eucharist is, first of all, an act of Thanksgiving; the word eucharist itself means “thanksgiving” ( CCC 1360). And, like Thanksgiving traditions, sometimes they don’t work out quite as planned. Our Friday afternoon movie, 20/20 hindsight would say that we might have been better off listening to my dad’s suggestion of Lincoln, instead of going with The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2. That doesn’t mean our Friday was ruined. Going to a movie with the family can have more value than just the movie itself. Even if football were cancelled, the turkey burned, and the producer of a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving opted to be out waiting for The Great Pumpkin instead of producing his TV special, we would still have a day of thanks. We still have so much to be thankful for, and there is beauty in that giving of thanks, not matter if the traditional acts for some reason are stripped away. Just the same way, there is beauty in the Word, no matter how poorly a lector proclaims it. There is beauty in the words of the Mass, no matter how much the priest mumbles it. When Christianity was illegal in Rome, the Eucharist was not celebrated with a brilliant pipe organ, but with whatever was available. The artistic beauty is useful, but not essential. There are so many other ways we are engaged .
So families have their traditions around Thanksgiving, and the Church has her traditions around her act of thanks. And just as every member of the family has their favorite traditions, different members of the Church will like different traditions differently. Though, in the long run, it will probably be best, sometimes God asks us to forego our favorite part and remember the point: God. And so this Sunday, I plan on going to classroom Mass again, and to truly be in communion with God—not my favorite song on the organ.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Sunday, November 11, 2012
God of This City
I’ll admit I’m a little bit upset about the election. No, unlike many of the Bishops, I’m not in mourning about Obama’s reelection. In case you missed last week’s post, I’m perfectly fine with that outcome.
No. I’m talking about the sentiments I saw on election day and the days following. One facebook post summed up the election as between a “ warmongering, religious homophobe” and an “economically ignorant demagogue. ” Or as I mentioned in last week’s post, Stanley Hauerwas’ called it a “Roman Circus.” I won’t even get into this.
It’s become quite popular nowadays to be a political cynic, whether among the religious who feel their faith not being represented as they understand it, the well-educated who feel the political sound bites and slogans we often hear miss the true complexity of the issues we face, or your average citizen complaining of political hypocrisy.
There’s certainly a lot of hypocrisy in our political system. Take Mike Bowers. Bowers was born in 1942 in Commerce—a small town in rural Georgia, that in 1940 had a population of not quite 3,300. The son of a truck driver, he went on to graduate from West Point in 1963, and served in the air force until 1970, when he attended the University of Georgia Law School. He was elected attorney general of Georgia from 1981-1997, and made a record for himself fighting government corruption.
Sounds like a pretty cool guy, right?
Unfortunately for his legacy in the history books, Bowers is best known as the defendant in two cases: Bowers v. Hardwick, and Shahar v. Bowers. In the first case in 1986, Bowers convinced the Supreme Court to uphold a Georgia anti-sodomy law, and in the second, Bowers convinced the Eleventh Circuit uphold his 1991 rescinding of an employment offer to Robin Shahar, upon his finding that she had recently married another women in a Reformation Jewish marriage ceremony. At first glance, one could argue that Bowers was just doing his job of enforcing statutes the elected legislature had passed. In Shahar, he argued that he was justified firing her because “inaction on my part would constitute tacit approval of this purported marriage and jeopardize the proper functioning of this office,” that she would be unable to enforce the state’s anti-sodomy laws, and he had doubts about the quality of Shahar’s judgment “in general” as seen in her choice to get seek employment in the state attorney's office while getting married to a women, despite the controversy in Georgia following Bowers. However, the lawyers arguing for Shahar knew that Bowers had been having a longtime affair with a member of his staff—as against Georgia’s anti-adultery law (O.C.G.A. §16-6-19). The man who was arguing that a lesbian couldn’t enforce Georgia’s morality statutes on account of her violation of them was himself actively violating them!
So, yes, frustration with our politics is quite valid. At the same time, we, the voters, often make matters worse. We caricaturize the candidates, dehumanize them to be an issue, rather than people in and of themselves. But Romney is not some impersonal robot incapable of feelings and out to oppress 47% of America. Obama is not some demon antichrist with plans to invade the US with UN troops. They have their own thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, (and, yes, even tears). They are public figures, and so subject their political views to public criticism, as Obama has pointed out. However, in holding ourselves proudly aloof and criticizing a system while not working to change it, we make ourselves no better than those we criticize.
Christianity is a religion of hope, not cynicism. We believe in the best, not worst, of what it is to be human. The beauty of democracy is that if you don’t like something, you can work to change it. If no one represents you to your satisfaction, you can run for office yourself. I admit, you’ll probably have an uphill battle—what with our two party system and all. However, there is no beatitude, “blessed are the cynics.” Jesus didn’t forget to finish the “love your neighbor as yourself” with “…except for that political bozo on the TV.”
Ultimately, there is a lesson in the frustration of politics. A friend of mine posted on facebook perhaps my favorite election-day post: "No matter who wins the election today, they won't be perfect. And that's okay; the position of savior has already been taken."
We are not perfect, and our politics is not perfect. Heaven knows, if it were then we’d have some serious question to ask regarding the Catholic teachings of human fallenness and original sin. However, the Catholic response is not cynicism—not holding ourselves aloof in some fortress of self-righteousness. When St. Paul writes to the Romans, “There is no one righteous, not even one,” he doesn’t counsel cynicism. He counsels hope, and faith in God.
As Chris Tomlin explains his song, “God of This City,” the Christian band Bluetree was in Pattaya, Thailand—a city known for its sex industry and child prostitution. A bar (more descriptively, a brothel) called “The Climax Club” was desperately looking for a band, to play and asked Bluetree, so long as they would bring their sizable crowd of missionaries with them. In the middle of the set, surrounded by the poles for dancers and looking out over the missionaries--heavily involved with their Cokes, Aaron Boyd, the lead singer for Bluetree, was struck with the notion that God was still present. God was the “God of this city, the King of these peoples.” As he described it, in the middle of the set, he started chanting—started singing—those words. This “minor, downbeat loop,” eventually opened up into the lyrics “the greater things have yet to come, and greater things are still to be done yet in this city.” After all, even a city “vitiated by sin” is a city over which God still is God—still the “light in this darkness…the hope to the hopeless…the peace to the restless.”
Remember Bowers, the Attorney General of Georgia who fired a women for a sexual crime while he was committing one of his own? In May 1997, he resigned his position as attorney general to run for governor. Just a week after a final decision by the Eleventh Circuit in his favor in Shahar, Bowers admitted to his affair. He lost in the 1998 primary. Bowers was overturned in 2003 by Lawrence v. Texas, which stated “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, [and] is not correct today.”
Our political world is far from perfect, but it has a tendency to work itself out in the long run. But those imperfections are important; they remind us we shouldn’t seek our savior in a politician. At the end of the day, we are responsible for our own holiness—there is no miracle politician or law that we must have or cannot do with out. It reminds us that, ultimately, the greatest things are yet to come.
We already have our savior; let’s focus on getting to know Him better, and not on expecting politics to create a new one.
No. I’m talking about the sentiments I saw on election day and the days following. One facebook post summed up the election as between a “ warmongering, religious homophobe” and an “economically ignorant demagogue. ” Or as I mentioned in last week’s post, Stanley Hauerwas’ called it a “Roman Circus.” I won’t even get into this.
It’s become quite popular nowadays to be a political cynic, whether among the religious who feel their faith not being represented as they understand it, the well-educated who feel the political sound bites and slogans we often hear miss the true complexity of the issues we face, or your average citizen complaining of political hypocrisy.
There’s certainly a lot of hypocrisy in our political system. Take Mike Bowers. Bowers was born in 1942 in Commerce—a small town in rural Georgia, that in 1940 had a population of not quite 3,300. The son of a truck driver, he went on to graduate from West Point in 1963, and served in the air force until 1970, when he attended the University of Georgia Law School. He was elected attorney general of Georgia from 1981-1997, and made a record for himself fighting government corruption.
Sounds like a pretty cool guy, right?
Unfortunately for his legacy in the history books, Bowers is best known as the defendant in two cases: Bowers v. Hardwick, and Shahar v. Bowers. In the first case in 1986, Bowers convinced the Supreme Court to uphold a Georgia anti-sodomy law, and in the second, Bowers convinced the Eleventh Circuit uphold his 1991 rescinding of an employment offer to Robin Shahar, upon his finding that she had recently married another women in a Reformation Jewish marriage ceremony. At first glance, one could argue that Bowers was just doing his job of enforcing statutes the elected legislature had passed. In Shahar, he argued that he was justified firing her because “inaction on my part would constitute tacit approval of this purported marriage and jeopardize the proper functioning of this office,” that she would be unable to enforce the state’s anti-sodomy laws, and he had doubts about the quality of Shahar’s judgment “in general” as seen in her choice to get seek employment in the state attorney's office while getting married to a women, despite the controversy in Georgia following Bowers. However, the lawyers arguing for Shahar knew that Bowers had been having a longtime affair with a member of his staff—as against Georgia’s anti-adultery law (O.C.G.A. §16-6-19). The man who was arguing that a lesbian couldn’t enforce Georgia’s morality statutes on account of her violation of them was himself actively violating them!
So, yes, frustration with our politics is quite valid. At the same time, we, the voters, often make matters worse. We caricaturize the candidates, dehumanize them to be an issue, rather than people in and of themselves. But Romney is not some impersonal robot incapable of feelings and out to oppress 47% of America. Obama is not some demon antichrist with plans to invade the US with UN troops. They have their own thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, (and, yes, even tears). They are public figures, and so subject their political views to public criticism, as Obama has pointed out. However, in holding ourselves proudly aloof and criticizing a system while not working to change it, we make ourselves no better than those we criticize.
Christianity is a religion of hope, not cynicism. We believe in the best, not worst, of what it is to be human. The beauty of democracy is that if you don’t like something, you can work to change it. If no one represents you to your satisfaction, you can run for office yourself. I admit, you’ll probably have an uphill battle—what with our two party system and all. However, there is no beatitude, “blessed are the cynics.” Jesus didn’t forget to finish the “love your neighbor as yourself” with “…except for that political bozo on the TV.”
Ultimately, there is a lesson in the frustration of politics. A friend of mine posted on facebook perhaps my favorite election-day post: "No matter who wins the election today, they won't be perfect. And that's okay; the position of savior has already been taken."
We are not perfect, and our politics is not perfect. Heaven knows, if it were then we’d have some serious question to ask regarding the Catholic teachings of human fallenness and original sin. However, the Catholic response is not cynicism—not holding ourselves aloof in some fortress of self-righteousness. When St. Paul writes to the Romans, “There is no one righteous, not even one,” he doesn’t counsel cynicism. He counsels hope, and faith in God.
As Chris Tomlin explains his song, “God of This City,” the Christian band Bluetree was in Pattaya, Thailand—a city known for its sex industry and child prostitution. A bar (more descriptively, a brothel) called “The Climax Club” was desperately looking for a band, to play and asked Bluetree, so long as they would bring their sizable crowd of missionaries with them. In the middle of the set, surrounded by the poles for dancers and looking out over the missionaries--heavily involved with their Cokes, Aaron Boyd, the lead singer for Bluetree, was struck with the notion that God was still present. God was the “God of this city, the King of these peoples.” As he described it, in the middle of the set, he started chanting—started singing—those words. This “minor, downbeat loop,” eventually opened up into the lyrics “the greater things have yet to come, and greater things are still to be done yet in this city.” After all, even a city “vitiated by sin” is a city over which God still is God—still the “light in this darkness…the hope to the hopeless…the peace to the restless.”
Remember Bowers, the Attorney General of Georgia who fired a women for a sexual crime while he was committing one of his own? In May 1997, he resigned his position as attorney general to run for governor. Just a week after a final decision by the Eleventh Circuit in his favor in Shahar, Bowers admitted to his affair. He lost in the 1998 primary. Bowers was overturned in 2003 by Lawrence v. Texas, which stated “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, [and] is not correct today.”
Our political world is far from perfect, but it has a tendency to work itself out in the long run. But those imperfections are important; they remind us we shouldn’t seek our savior in a politician. At the end of the day, we are responsible for our own holiness—there is no miracle politician or law that we must have or cannot do with out. It reminds us that, ultimately, the greatest things are yet to come.
We already have our savior; let’s focus on getting to know Him better, and not on expecting politics to create a new one.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
A Catholic Vote for Obama
As the election
is imminent, I’ve heard a lot of diverging talk among Catholics about who they
support. After all, the Catholic Bishops' guide on faithful voting seems to come down in support of Obama on
some issues and Romney for others. So
what’s a Catholic supposed to do?
Well, first of all, vote. Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas has a video going around encouraging Christians not to take the election too seriously. After all, he says that elections are where “51.1% get to tell 49.9% how to live.” There’s a mentality that if I can’t find a candidate who agrees with me on 100% of the factors of public policy, I should take my ball (or vote) and go home. If everyone followed that rule, then the moment I get a politician to meet my own standards, I disenfranchise everyone who doesn’t agree with me. That’s simply uncharitable and selfish. If you can’t bring yourself to vote for one of the major candidates, then find a third party candidate, or even write in someone who matches. If that doesn’t work, run for office yourself next time. But don’t take the easy way out and refuse to participate.
That said, I hope to convince you in this blog post that a third party vote is unnecessary, and that the faithful Catholic choice is Obama. In the following, I assume standard Catholic moral teachings. I only consider their application to public policy in the context of abortion, same-sex marriage, the poor, foreign relations, and the Supreme Court. As all of these issues are, of course, debates, I invite respectful and thoughtful comments and discussion in the comments.
There are two glaring issues I want to address upfront: abortion and same-sex marriage. Romney, like the Catholic Bishops, is pro-life, and he appeals to the quiet of conscience” in “people of both political parties” to bolster support for his position. As the candidate who claims to stand for religious freedom, we have to trust this “conscience” is not really an appeal to any individual religion. After all, the Church teaches that legislation based on values—coercing morality—may only occur from natural law; anything else violates religious freedom. Natural law is that which "present in the heart of each man and established by reason" (CCC 1956). This means anything we as Catholics know from the Bible or from divinely-inspired Papal declarations are simply not valid. Thus we can legislate against murder, but not against missing Mass on Holy Days of Obligation.
At first glance, the matter is simple. If life begins at conception, then there is no wiggle-room. Just as we as Catholics believe that killing criminals under the death penalty is immoral, to kill the most innocent among us is that much more abhorrent. Unfortunately, that part about “life beginning at conception” is pretty difficult to establish. When does life begin? Can we, through pure reason, define life as beginning when sperm cell meets egg cell? Science can tell us details about various processes that fetus undergoes at various phases of pregnancy, but the scientist does not define words and cannot tell us when we can start applying the term “life.” Religion itself is confused on the topic. Even within Christianity, there are diverging opinions. Even Scripture seems not at peace with itself. At one point, it states “You knit me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13), and while that would make it seem that at least some time in the womb might be considered sacred, if we apply that same standard to Jeremiah 1:5, which states “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” then perhaps that we’re alive even before conception. In Genesis 38 God even imposes the death penalty on Onan for “[wasting] his seed on the ground.” So does this mean every sperm and egg cell is living, and Congress should pass laws that consider, in the words of Elle Woods, “any masturbatory emissions, where the sperm is clearly not seeking an egg . . . reckless abandonment"?  
Ultimately, finding a definition of life confuses science and religion alike, yet in Massachusetts, Romney supported a Constitutional amendment defining life as beginning at conception. Surely there are better ways to amend a Constitution than by making it some sort of dictionary. We have the Oxford English Dictionary for that (which, incidentally, does not mention the word “conception” in its definitions of life). Even if God has instructed the Bishops and the Pope as to how the dictionary should be written, the definition is, in this case, clearly not “present in the heart of every man,” and as such, not a valid item to legislate.
If you continued listening to the video I linked above about Romney’s support for a pro-life amendment, Romney also mentioned he fought for an amendment that would have defined marriage as between one man and one women. The Church explicitly states that homosexual relations are against natural law (CCC 2357), and in an address to the U.S. Bishops in March, Pope Benedict XVI said “Defending the institution of marriage as a social reality is ultimately a question of justice.”
However, I would like to point to Professor Paul Griffiths’ claim in his response to Professor Douglas Farrow’s thirteen theses on marriage in First Things, in which he claims that in our “pagan late-capitalist democracy ordered to idolatry of the market,” an obligation to provide political support to the traditional notion of marriage “is certainly not apparent to all ordinarily rational people.” As such, it is not natural law, and cannot fall under a proper legislative priority. (For the opposite side, see a considered defense of limiting government recognition to traditional marriage here)
As a final note on legislating morality through natural law, I would like to point out the danger in over-applying natural law. In Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, he includes under natural law the proposition that "each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life” (Humanae Vitae 11).Yet, according to a 2011 study, only 2% of sexually active Catholic women use Natural Family Planning. I trust those who fight for legislating the other sexual teachings of the Church will put just as much energy and verve into legislation supporting the illegalization of all forms of birth control, no matter their personal view on the issue. It would be unfaithful to do otherwise, seeing as they stem from the same line of natural law reasoning.
The Catholic Church teaches a preferential option for the poor, and in his recent Encyclical Benedict XVI explicitly recognized the importance of care for the poor in an institutional/political context (Caritas in Veritate 7). I have alluded in previous posts how important this element of caring for “the last, the littlest, the least” must be for the Catholic. In a brief letter to Paul Ryan, Georgetown theologians reminded us of the U.S. Bishops’ letters protesting the 2011 House budget as one that, “decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few.” Obama, on the other hand, expanded basic health care to an unprecedented number, in line with the Pope’s explicit callfor universal health care and the U.S. Bishops’ similar call dating back to 1919 Like Thomas Friedman in his recent New York Times Op-Ed, I reject a political ideology that recognizes a right to life up that is inviolable right up to the point one is born.
The question we have to ask, as in the two cases above, is if there is a moral obligation for the Catholic to help the poor, can we use the government to further it. There is a fundamental distinction between the individual moral issues mentioned above, and care for the poor. My friend marrying her same-sex partner of years in no way affects my parents’ marriage. However, my choice to write this while munching on a cookie at Panera rather than donating that $2 to the homeless person I walked by on the way here does in fact measurably hurt the poor. The government has a responsibility to work for the good of its members. As we accept human rights, we see that humans have a minimum level that society cannot infringe on without violating their fundamental dignity. If other institutions in society cannot, on its own, provide that level of dignity, then the government must step in to do so.
A society in which private interests provide all care for the poor is simply not possible. According to this America article, The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate found that if every Catholic increased their charitable giving five-fold, the Church could only pay for half of this single government program, even if it focused all its resources (reserving only its own administrative costs) to it. If Church, as the largest private charity in the world, could not maintain the burden of a single government program that ensures the right to life, with five times its current resources, I find it doubtful other private institutions would be able to, as well. It is the job of the government to overcome the collective action failure of the bystander effect or diffusion of responsibility discussed in Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point or here. It would be difficult to argue that the government may provide for physical defense, stage two in Maslow’shierarchy of needs, yet somehow people are on their own for stage one: basic physiological needs.
Additionally, there is a fundamental fairness concern. Romney, in supporting stripping government loans and grants from higher education, has suggested to students that they should borrow money from parents. Unfortunately, not all parents have enough money to pay for ever increasing tuition. Romney paying for the Medical School of his deceased Bain partner’s daughter is an inspiring story of his personal charity. Sadly, most of those who need the most help paying for college do not have fathers who are partners of Bain Capital and friends with millionaires who can forgive a $400,000 debt as a Christmas present. Pretending we can care for the poor in this way merely increases the stratification of wealth as the people who know the wealthy get more privileges, and those who don’t are denied them. If we believe in equality of opportunity, this is not the way to go about it.
Just a brief note on international affairs. As a member of an international Church that recognizes that people are people, no matter where they’re born, international affairs is always an important aspect for a Catholic’s vote. I’ll admit, Obama isn’t perfect on international affairs, but at least trials are finally happening at Guantanamo Bay (click here for a Jesuit reporter's impression), he banned waterboarding as torture, and recognizes the immigration issue as something that must be resolved. I won’t go much more into depth, because beyond those issues mentioned, I think the third debate showed us on most other substantive international issues, Obama and Romney are pretty close.
As Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman points out, several members of the Court are getting old. There is quite a good chance Justice Kennedy or Justice Ginsberg will leave the Court—voluntarily or involuntarily—in the next four years. We have one of the most conservative Supreme Courts in modern history. With the current Republican fascination with Constitutional Originalism, a President Romney appointee would be the diametric opposite of Ginsberg, and probably considerably more Originalist than Kennedy, just as President Bush replaced Justice O’Connor with the considerably more conservative Justice Alito.
Why is this a problem? Consider Burnham v. Superior Court of California (495 U.S. 604 (1990)). In Burnham, the Court unanimously held that someone could sue you in any jurisdiction they personally deliver the court summons–even if you’ve never been there before. While the judgment was unanimous, there was no opinion a majority of the Justices could agree as to was the reasoning. Writing for a Conservative plurality, Justice Scalia rested his justification in a pure pedigree argument. He explicitly rejects Justice Brennan and the liberal wing’s argument that the Court should consider “contemporary notions of due process,” and claims this “tag jurisdiction” was justified “because it is one of the continuing traditions of our legal system”(622-23). As anyone who has ever changed his or her mind about anything at all—merely because we’ve thought something in the past is not sufficient to say that it’s right. Yet Originalism takes this exact view. In his confirmation hearing, Scalia mentioned how the Originalist view would hold that “if lashing was fine [in 1789], lashing would be fine now.”
Fundamentally, this sense of Originalism is contrary to the Catholic experience of justice. The history of Church is the development towards a greater understanding of morality. Take slavery, which the fifth century St. Augustine understood as permissible, and of which the thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas explicitly wrote, “a slave belongs to his master.” Yet, Pope Gregory XVI penned an Encyclical in 1839 explicitly condemning the slave trade, and slavery is currently held as “against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights“ (CCC 2414). The story of the Church is the story of how morality is greater understood over time. No Catholic can support a candidate who would nominate a Justice who believes American jurisprudence is somehow exempt from a process to which even the Holy Spirit-guided Church is subject.
Well, first of all, vote. Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas has a video going around encouraging Christians not to take the election too seriously. After all, he says that elections are where “51.1% get to tell 49.9% how to live.” There’s a mentality that if I can’t find a candidate who agrees with me on 100% of the factors of public policy, I should take my ball (or vote) and go home. If everyone followed that rule, then the moment I get a politician to meet my own standards, I disenfranchise everyone who doesn’t agree with me. That’s simply uncharitable and selfish. If you can’t bring yourself to vote for one of the major candidates, then find a third party candidate, or even write in someone who matches. If that doesn’t work, run for office yourself next time. But don’t take the easy way out and refuse to participate.
That said, I hope to convince you in this blog post that a third party vote is unnecessary, and that the faithful Catholic choice is Obama. In the following, I assume standard Catholic moral teachings. I only consider their application to public policy in the context of abortion, same-sex marriage, the poor, foreign relations, and the Supreme Court. As all of these issues are, of course, debates, I invite respectful and thoughtful comments and discussion in the comments.
Abortion
There are two glaring issues I want to address upfront: abortion and same-sex marriage. Romney, like the Catholic Bishops, is pro-life, and he appeals to the quiet of conscience” in “people of both political parties” to bolster support for his position. As the candidate who claims to stand for religious freedom, we have to trust this “conscience” is not really an appeal to any individual religion. After all, the Church teaches that legislation based on values—coercing morality—may only occur from natural law; anything else violates religious freedom. Natural law is that which "present in the heart of each man and established by reason" (CCC 1956). This means anything we as Catholics know from the Bible or from divinely-inspired Papal declarations are simply not valid. Thus we can legislate against murder, but not against missing Mass on Holy Days of Obligation.
At first glance, the matter is simple. If life begins at conception, then there is no wiggle-room. Just as we as Catholics believe that killing criminals under the death penalty is immoral, to kill the most innocent among us is that much more abhorrent. Unfortunately, that part about “life beginning at conception” is pretty difficult to establish. When does life begin? Can we, through pure reason, define life as beginning when sperm cell meets egg cell? Science can tell us details about various processes that fetus undergoes at various phases of pregnancy, but the scientist does not define words and cannot tell us when we can start applying the term “life.” Religion itself is confused on the topic. Even within Christianity, there are diverging opinions. Even Scripture seems not at peace with itself. At one point, it states “You knit me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13), and while that would make it seem that at least some time in the womb might be considered sacred, if we apply that same standard to Jeremiah 1:5, which states “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” then perhaps that we’re alive even before conception. In Genesis 38 God even imposes the death penalty on Onan for “[wasting] his seed on the ground.” So does this mean every sperm and egg cell is living, and Congress should pass laws that consider, in the words of Elle Woods, “any masturbatory emissions, where the sperm is clearly not seeking an egg . . . reckless abandonment"?  
Ultimately, finding a definition of life confuses science and religion alike, yet in Massachusetts, Romney supported a Constitutional amendment defining life as beginning at conception. Surely there are better ways to amend a Constitution than by making it some sort of dictionary. We have the Oxford English Dictionary for that (which, incidentally, does not mention the word “conception” in its definitions of life). Even if God has instructed the Bishops and the Pope as to how the dictionary should be written, the definition is, in this case, clearly not “present in the heart of every man,” and as such, not a valid item to legislate.
Same-sex marriage
If you continued listening to the video I linked above about Romney’s support for a pro-life amendment, Romney also mentioned he fought for an amendment that would have defined marriage as between one man and one women. The Church explicitly states that homosexual relations are against natural law (CCC 2357), and in an address to the U.S. Bishops in March, Pope Benedict XVI said “Defending the institution of marriage as a social reality is ultimately a question of justice.”
However, I would like to point to Professor Paul Griffiths’ claim in his response to Professor Douglas Farrow’s thirteen theses on marriage in First Things, in which he claims that in our “pagan late-capitalist democracy ordered to idolatry of the market,” an obligation to provide political support to the traditional notion of marriage “is certainly not apparent to all ordinarily rational people.” As such, it is not natural law, and cannot fall under a proper legislative priority. (For the opposite side, see a considered defense of limiting government recognition to traditional marriage here)
As a final note on legislating morality through natural law, I would like to point out the danger in over-applying natural law. In Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, he includes under natural law the proposition that "each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life” (Humanae Vitae 11).Yet, according to a 2011 study, only 2% of sexually active Catholic women use Natural Family Planning. I trust those who fight for legislating the other sexual teachings of the Church will put just as much energy and verve into legislation supporting the illegalization of all forms of birth control, no matter their personal view on the issue. It would be unfaithful to do otherwise, seeing as they stem from the same line of natural law reasoning.
The poor
The Catholic Church teaches a preferential option for the poor, and in his recent Encyclical Benedict XVI explicitly recognized the importance of care for the poor in an institutional/political context (Caritas in Veritate 7). I have alluded in previous posts how important this element of caring for “the last, the littlest, the least” must be for the Catholic. In a brief letter to Paul Ryan, Georgetown theologians reminded us of the U.S. Bishops’ letters protesting the 2011 House budget as one that, “decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few.” Obama, on the other hand, expanded basic health care to an unprecedented number, in line with the Pope’s explicit callfor universal health care and the U.S. Bishops’ similar call dating back to 1919 Like Thomas Friedman in his recent New York Times Op-Ed, I reject a political ideology that recognizes a right to life up that is inviolable right up to the point one is born.
The question we have to ask, as in the two cases above, is if there is a moral obligation for the Catholic to help the poor, can we use the government to further it. There is a fundamental distinction between the individual moral issues mentioned above, and care for the poor. My friend marrying her same-sex partner of years in no way affects my parents’ marriage. However, my choice to write this while munching on a cookie at Panera rather than donating that $2 to the homeless person I walked by on the way here does in fact measurably hurt the poor. The government has a responsibility to work for the good of its members. As we accept human rights, we see that humans have a minimum level that society cannot infringe on without violating their fundamental dignity. If other institutions in society cannot, on its own, provide that level of dignity, then the government must step in to do so.
A society in which private interests provide all care for the poor is simply not possible. According to this America article, The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate found that if every Catholic increased their charitable giving five-fold, the Church could only pay for half of this single government program, even if it focused all its resources (reserving only its own administrative costs) to it. If Church, as the largest private charity in the world, could not maintain the burden of a single government program that ensures the right to life, with five times its current resources, I find it doubtful other private institutions would be able to, as well. It is the job of the government to overcome the collective action failure of the bystander effect or diffusion of responsibility discussed in Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point or here. It would be difficult to argue that the government may provide for physical defense, stage two in Maslow’shierarchy of needs, yet somehow people are on their own for stage one: basic physiological needs.
Additionally, there is a fundamental fairness concern. Romney, in supporting stripping government loans and grants from higher education, has suggested to students that they should borrow money from parents. Unfortunately, not all parents have enough money to pay for ever increasing tuition. Romney paying for the Medical School of his deceased Bain partner’s daughter is an inspiring story of his personal charity. Sadly, most of those who need the most help paying for college do not have fathers who are partners of Bain Capital and friends with millionaires who can forgive a $400,000 debt as a Christmas present. Pretending we can care for the poor in this way merely increases the stratification of wealth as the people who know the wealthy get more privileges, and those who don’t are denied them. If we believe in equality of opportunity, this is not the way to go about it.
International Affairs
Just a brief note on international affairs. As a member of an international Church that recognizes that people are people, no matter where they’re born, international affairs is always an important aspect for a Catholic’s vote. I’ll admit, Obama isn’t perfect on international affairs, but at least trials are finally happening at Guantanamo Bay (click here for a Jesuit reporter's impression), he banned waterboarding as torture, and recognizes the immigration issue as something that must be resolved. I won’t go much more into depth, because beyond those issues mentioned, I think the third debate showed us on most other substantive international issues, Obama and Romney are pretty close.
Supreme Court
As Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman points out, several members of the Court are getting old. There is quite a good chance Justice Kennedy or Justice Ginsberg will leave the Court—voluntarily or involuntarily—in the next four years. We have one of the most conservative Supreme Courts in modern history. With the current Republican fascination with Constitutional Originalism, a President Romney appointee would be the diametric opposite of Ginsberg, and probably considerably more Originalist than Kennedy, just as President Bush replaced Justice O’Connor with the considerably more conservative Justice Alito.
Why is this a problem? Consider Burnham v. Superior Court of California (495 U.S. 604 (1990)). In Burnham, the Court unanimously held that someone could sue you in any jurisdiction they personally deliver the court summons–even if you’ve never been there before. While the judgment was unanimous, there was no opinion a majority of the Justices could agree as to was the reasoning. Writing for a Conservative plurality, Justice Scalia rested his justification in a pure pedigree argument. He explicitly rejects Justice Brennan and the liberal wing’s argument that the Court should consider “contemporary notions of due process,” and claims this “tag jurisdiction” was justified “because it is one of the continuing traditions of our legal system”(622-23). As anyone who has ever changed his or her mind about anything at all—merely because we’ve thought something in the past is not sufficient to say that it’s right. Yet Originalism takes this exact view. In his confirmation hearing, Scalia mentioned how the Originalist view would hold that “if lashing was fine [in 1789], lashing would be fine now.”
Fundamentally, this sense of Originalism is contrary to the Catholic experience of justice. The history of Church is the development towards a greater understanding of morality. Take slavery, which the fifth century St. Augustine understood as permissible, and of which the thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas explicitly wrote, “a slave belongs to his master.” Yet, Pope Gregory XVI penned an Encyclical in 1839 explicitly condemning the slave trade, and slavery is currently held as “against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights“ (CCC 2414). The story of the Church is the story of how morality is greater understood over time. No Catholic can support a candidate who would nominate a Justice who believes American jurisprudence is somehow exempt from a process to which even the Holy Spirit-guided Church is subject.
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