Enemy Of The State

     The years have made one fact utterly clear: The State hates Christianity – especially the Catholic variety – above all other things. Christianity is the State’s foremost opponent.

     I needn’t recount the reasons for my Gentle Readers. Any system of belief that holds that there is a higher authority than the political would draw the State’s enmity. Christianity doubles down by putting that Authority beyond the State’s reach. And to celebrate human freedom as well! The nerve!

     So wherever you find the State, you will find it scheming to do damage to Christianity. The Soviets tried their damnedest to eliminate it completely. I’m sure you know how the Red Chinese treat Christians. And let’s not discuss the North Koreans; it’s too nice a day.

     But what of our free and “tolerant” Republic?

BREAKING: In a nationwide ruling against a Trump Administration religious conscience rule, a federal district Court today ruled against the Little Sisters of the Poor. The Court sided with Pennsylvania and New Jersey in their years-long effort to force the Little Sisters of the…

— BECKET (@becketfund) August 13, 2025

     Please read the whole thread.

     The game here “should” be “obvious.” The absolute sanctity of human life, including that of the unborn child, is fundamental to Christian belief. The Catholic Church is the foremost defender of the right to life in the whole world. If the State can force the Church to yield on that point, it will have made a fatal breakthrough. Think about it: If one crucial tenet of the faith can be compromised for Church-State amity, why would the others be immune? Pretty soon, Church teaching would be hollowed out completely.

     The governments of the United States of America would have succeeded where the Communists and totalitarians failed. Quite a feather for the gradualists’ cap, eh?

     Of course the Little Sisters of the Poor will appeal. They might win at the Circuit Court level, but it’s even money that the case will go all the way to the top. It’s a case to be watched closely. Defenders of human life should take note – and provide what support they can.

     I wonder if the Institute for Justice could be persuaded to get involved?

Now The Fun Begins

     As had been predicted, yesterday President Trump announced his nomination of Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court seat vacated by the recent death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And – as has been predicted – leftists’ heads are exploding from coast to coast.

     Of course, we must expect leftists’ heads to explode when they don’t get their way. That’s become par for the course in these United States. As the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg was regarded as a secure vote to preserve such anti-Constitutional atrocities as the Affordable Care Act and Roe v. Wade, the prospect of having Ginsburg’s replacement be a firm Constitutionalist was a heavy blow.

     They probably expected President Trump to nominate a judicial conservative. But a Catholic! And just look at her family: she really means it! That’s nothing less than the roof falling in on them. That would put six professed Catholics on the Court. Catholics are the last people in America it’s okay to discriminate against! How can you take that away from us? This nomination must be defeated!

     However, while anti-Catholic bigotry is alive and well in these United States, it still speaks in whispers. Arguments against the Barrett nomination, therefore, must be couched in terms compatible with the non-discrimination pose the Left strives to maintain. (Shut up with your nonsense about discrimination against white men. That’s not racism; that’s justice.)

     The Democrats’ standard-bearers are of course horrified that the last particle of Obama’s “legacy” is threatened by the Barrett nomination:

     Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, declared a vote for Barrett as "a vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act and eliminate protections for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions."

     "By nominating Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, President Trump has once again put Americans’ healthcare in the crosshairs," he said, adding he would "strongly" oppose her nomination.

     He also accused Trump and McConnell of "shamelessly rushing to fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat less than 40 days before a presidential election."

     "Justice Ginsburg’s dying wish was that she not be replaced until a new president is installed. Republicans are poised to not only ignore her wishes, but to replace her with someone who could tear down everything that she built," he said. "This reprehensible power grab is a cynical attack on the legitimacy of the Court."

     And also:

     Remarkable, this unwillingness to allow that the Affordable Care Act, which the Court has chipped away several times, just might be unConstitutional in its entirety, an exercise of a power never granted to Congress. But that’s the Left for you. Though it grants no stature to the victories of the Right, which it will assault a outrance, the Left insists that its victories, no matter how they were achieved, must be regarded as “irreversible.”

     We also have the spectacle of this New York Times column by Elizabeth Breunig:

     Roman Catholicism does not readily distinguish between public and private moral obligations. In the thought of John Locke, one of liberalism’s earliest architects, willingness to make that distinction was critical to participation in a tolerant society. “Basically,” the political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote in a 1999 essay, “Locke drew up a strong civic map with religion within one sphere and government in another. A person could be a citizen of each so long as that citizen never attempted to merge and blend the two.” Locke notably excluded Catholics from the religions meriting toleration because he suspected they could not be trusted to leave their faith in the appropriate sphere....

     Roman Catholic schools have warred bitterly over their exemption from anti-discrimination employment statutes, scoring a win in a case argued before the Supreme Court as recently as this summer. Catholic hospitals have found themselves embroiled in court battles for refusing to perform or even discuss abortions, regardless of state or federal law. And, perhaps most famously, the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns that operates nursing homes for low-income seniors, fought the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate all the way to the Supreme Court, and won.

     In each case, Catholic institutions have asked for exemptions to various laws, citing the First Amendment.

     Whether consciously or otherwise, Breunig has produced an anti-Constitutional argument. One of the most important purposes of the Constitution's constraint-by-specification of the powers of the federal government was to keep it out of the way of private convictions, as far as possible. Under an unconstrained government, there cannot be freedom of religion – unless, that is, “freedom of religion” is defined to occur solely within the confines of the skull. Inasmuch as the earliest European settlers came to North America in pursuit of freedom to practice their faiths, the irony is enormous.

     John Hinderaker pierces to the heart of the matter:

     The Democrats object to Amy Barrett because she is not a left-winger dedicated to perpetuating the Court as a liberal super-legislature, which is the only sort of justice they want. That is why they object to her, but they hate her because she is a Christian. The extent of anti-Christian bigotry on the left is astonishing, given that until recent years the U.S. was widely described as a Christian country. No longer.

     There will be a great tumult as the Senate undertakes Barrett’s confirmation hearings. It won’t be pleasant to watch...but fortunately, it won’t be necessary. We already know where the Senate Democrats stand. Government-controlled health care and unrestricted, unregulated abortion at any point during gestation are the hills they’re prepared to die on. Let’s hope the Republican caucus gives them a fine funeral, concluded with a fanfare of trumpets.

Strange Associations

     Well, perhaps this one isn’t so strange, after all.

     For some time I’ve been straining to get the Rosary back into my prayer life. Given the obvious need to pray for the nation in this time, I’ve managed to do so, at least tentatively. But just this morning, the evil little dwarf that manages the “Goose Fran when he least expects it” function of my hindbrain decided that right in the middle of Joyful Mysteries was the perfect time to start me laughing hysterically. In service to that mission, he tossed this recollection up at me:

     She'd been strangled with a rosary--not a run-of-the-mill rosary like you might get at a Catholic bookstore where Hail Marys are two for a quarter and indulgences are included on the back flap of the May issue of "Nuns and Roses" magazine, but a fancy heirloom rosary with pearls, rubies, and a solid gold cross, a rosary with attitude, the kind of rosary that said, "Get your Jehovah's Witness butt off my front porch."

     From the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Contest, of course. Where else?

Congregations: A Sunday Rumination

     The following is taken from Meditations Before Mass by the late Father Romano Guardini:

     When we say that Holy Mass is celebrated “in church,” we are including something more, the congregation. “Congregation,” not merely people. Churchgoers arriving, sitting, or kneeling in pews are not necessarily a congregation; they can be simply a roomful of more or less pious individuals. Congregation is formed only when those individuals are present not only corporally but also spiritually, when they have contacted one another in prayer and step together into the spiritual “space” around them; strictly speaking, when they have first widened and heightened that space by prayer. Then true congregation comes into being, which, along with the building that is its architectural expression, forms the vital church in which the sacred act is accomplished. All this takes place only in stillness; out of stillness grows the real sanctuary. It is important to understand this. Church buildings may be lost or destroyed; then everything depends on whether or not the faithful are capable of forming congregations that erect indestructible “churches” wherever they happen to find themselves, no matter how poor or dreary their quarters. We must learn and practice the art of constructing spiritual cathedrals.

     Father Guardini died in 1968. I don’t know exactly when his book was published; I would guess that it was during the era of the Tridentine or Latin Mass rather than the Novus Ordo Mass that has replaced it. Whatever the case, his statement above resonates with important truths, both explicit and implicit.

     Before my return to the Church I had very specific convictions about proper conduct when at Mass attendance, whether during the ritual or before it begins. To be brief, I believed it to be important that one attempt, in silence, to prepare oneself to receive the Body of Christ at the climax of the rite. These days silence is the last thing anyone should expect from a gathering of American Catholic churchgoers. There’s a considerable amount of conversation, not to say commotion, among the attendees before the opening “Please rise” and the entrance of the celebrant. I strive not to let it distract me, but with limited success.

     Another phenomenon one can observe in many a Catholic parish is the ubiquity of cliques. The clique isn’t just a high-school occurrence. It can develop wherever people gather for any purpose. Even at Mass, people cluster into enduring cliques that stoutly resist penetration by new arrivals. The pervasiveness of this behavior once caused a visiting friend to ask me if my parish had assigned seating. Ponder that.

     Compare these observations to the insights of Father Guardini.

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     Christian worship takes many forms. The form dearest to me, the Mass, commemorates the Last Supper, at which Christ instituted the sacrament we call the Eucharist. Inasmuch as the Eucharist is His Body in the form of bread and wine – that’s what we mean by the Transubstantiation – you would think that serious Catholics would show it both inward and outward respect. Sadly, this is less often the case than it should be.

     A fair number of persons, once they’ve received a Host, march directly out of the church. They don’t kneel and commune with the Son of God, Whose flesh they have just consumed. They don’t even return to their pews for the conclusion of the ceremony. No, it’s get out of the nave, get clear of the doors, and above all get out of the parking lot before the mad rush begins. And check the cell phone for incoming texts, of course.

     I can’t see that as worshipful, especially given the gravity of the gift we receive.

     I wrote some time ago about the Christian inversion of the “food chain” that dominates temporal life. I regard its thesis as supremely important. Anyone who hopes to grasp the stunning power of Christ’s Sacrifice of Himself for our sakes could do worse than to meditate on it for a minute or two. The “gods” before God were consumers who demanded to be fed. Some of them demanded human flesh. God demonstrated His singularity by feeding us. The Old Testament tales of manna from heaven were the first manifestations of His nourishing nature; the willing sacrifice of His Son was the climax.

     This isn’t just a matter for silence and solemn prayer. It should inspire awe that eclipses any purely human experience. Why doesn’t it?

     I’ll grant that some people are armored against religious awe. They think themselves “too smart” for such things. Faith, you see, is not for hard-headed realists who can see the world as the tough and merciless son of a bitch it really is. It’s for those of us who “need an imaginary friend” to buttress us against the fear of death. But then, you’d never find their sort inside a church building.

     What about the rest of us? We who believe in the Transubstantiation? We who strive – nominally at least – to meet Jesus’s standards for salvation as He expressed them in His time on Earth? Oughtn’t we to be a tad more respectful than the attendees at an open air picnic or a sporting event? Oughtn’t we to strive to be congregants in Father Guardini’s sense, silent, still, and spiritually unified with those around us?

     It seems worth the effort to me, but it also seems that mine is a minority view.

     I shan’t belabor the point. It will stand on its own.

     May God bless and keep you all.

A Prick To The Conscience

     There aren’t many things I expect a priest to do for his flock. (There are a few things I expect him not to do, and woe betide his parishioners if he does any of them.) But in recent years one of my expectations has been confounded. For example, I hardly expect a priest to show significant courage in the face of the previously expressed displeasure of the Church’s higher-ups.

     Father Ed Kealey, who has retired from active ministry on account of age and infirmity, was first to impress me with his courage. Some years ago, he upbraided a large gathering of clergy, many of whom were his hierarchical superiors, for their prissy, almost dismissive attitude toward the clerical sexual-abuse scandals the whole world knows about. I was greatly impressed, especially as I knew that Father Ed was already disdained by the power structure of the Diocese of Rockville Center for his involvement in Voice of the Faithful, a lay Catholic organization many priests and bishops regard as an irritation and a threat to their perquisites.

     This morning I heard statements that have forced me to revise my prior opinion of a priest of whom I’ve spoken harshly in the past. Before I name him, I shall tell you why my assessment of him has improved.

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     The Catholic Church has suffered several attacks and disruptions over the centuries. Some of those disruptions have come from within the clergy. The profligacy, dissolution, and libidinousness of the Renaissance popes, in particular, came near to destroying the Church entirely. Indeed, it was their conduct that made possible the Protestant Schism and all that followed from it.

     One of the more significant changes the Church instituted in response to unacceptable behavior among its clerics was to forbid the ordination of married men, and to forbid ordained priests to marry. I could go into the particular dynamics that made married clerics a blight upon the Church in medieval Europe, but that’s a large subject that deserves its own essay. Suffice it to say that clerical benefices were being handed down from priests to their sons in a fashion that was outrage of the Old World. The clerical abuse called simony was closely associated with it. The only way to put a stop to it at that time was to put an end to the fathering of sons by priests. That required the rule of clerical celibacy, which was made formal and official by Pope Gregory VII in 1074 A.D.

     Today, of course, we have the scandals involving the sexual abuse of minors by clerics, a thing so monstrous that for some time many Catholics could not credit it. Only after a series of confessions – usually compelled by the emergence of unambiguous evidence – by pedophile priests did it become indisputable that something was rotten within the Church. Changes had to be made...but of what sort?

     The question is still being debated among the high bishops and cardinals. Pope Francis is said to be deeply involved in those discussions. That doesn’t speak well of the likely outcome. During his years in Argentina Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio protected a number of priests from facing accusations that, at the very least, deserved to be addressed by a court of law.

     Peripheral to this but deserving of mention this morning is the pope’s decree, following upon similar decrees by his predecessors, that Church will not consider the approval of priestly marriage. Neither will he permit consideration of the ordination of women. Most Catholic clergy will concede that those measures, if adopted, would help to reduce the frequency of clerical sex abuses, both by improving the fund of applicants for the priesthood and by reducing the number of opportunities for abuse to occur. However, with the pope firmly against them, it’s become professionally hazardous for a priest to suggest that they be considered. Priests have been disciplined, sometimes severely, for daring to suggest them to their congregations.

     What measures, then, are under discussion? The rumblings from the Vatican aren’t encouraging. What results from the conferences might amount to nothing more than cosmetics.

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     Before I go any deeper into this matter, I must make certain declarations about my personal convictions that many Catholics will find shocking.

     First, the pope is not infallible as that notion is commonly understood. Yes, the Church teaches that the Supreme Pontiff is infallible on matters of faith or morals, but this is impossible to accept given the egregious sinfulness and excesses of so many popes throughout history. Indeed, at least one pope, Benedict IX, has been credibly accused of practicing witchcraft. Some apologists for the infallibility doctrine have tried to finesse this, claiming that being infallible is not the same as being impeccable — i.e., without sin — and that sinfulness does not therefore imply that the pope could promulgate false doctrines. That defense, to put it mildly, isn’t terribly convincing.

     For papal infallibility to be reasonable, it should be interpreted in a different fashion, to wit: if the faithful follow the pope’s teachings on faith and morals, then they are spiritually indemnified even if those teachings are absolutely wrong. Any other approach would attribute to a mortal man a characteristic that mortal men have never exhibited.

     Second, clerical celibacy and the denial of ordination to women are merely Churchly personnel policies. Nothing in the Gospels mandates either. For any cleric of any altitude to claim otherwise isn’t just wrong; it’s deceitful. Most of the Apostles were married men. For a thousand years priests were permitted to marry, though only a celibate priest could ascend to the rank of bishop. Feel free to search the Gospels and the records of the early Church.

     Third, clergy have no authority over lay Catholics in any sense. We are the Church; they are the servants of the Church. Christ established that relation when He proclaimed that He had come “not to be served, but to serve,” and instructed His disciples that “the first shall be last, and the last first.” A priest’s special status as one who can validly administer the seven sacraments implies no other power. His responsibilities are to promulgate the teachings of Christ and to administer the sacraments as appropriate.

     If this be heresy, make the most of it. I stand by it nonetheless.

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     This morning, the celebrant at Mass delivered an impassioned statement about the sex-abuse scandals. The high points were as follows:

• The Church hierarchy has been corrupted by the pursuit of power and status.
• Better that the hierarchy collapse and the entire edifice be bankrupted than that the evils be allowed to continue.
• Every possible method of redress must be considered, including clerical marriage and the ordination of women.

     These are massively courageous declarations coming from a man in a Roman collar. Other priests have been severely disciplined for such statements. The priest who uttered them was one I’ve criticized for customizing the Mass to his tastes, for mixing his politics into his preaching, and for his routine practice of self-promotion: Father Francis X. Pizzarelli of the Society of St. Louis de Montfort.

     Father Francis, you’re a better man than I knew. Know that you have my sincerest apologies. May God bless and keep you, and make His face to shine upon you.

Scenes We’d Like To See Dept.

     Recently a nominee to the federal bench, Brian C. Buescher, was interrogated by a couple of Democrat senators thus:

     In written questions sent to Buescher by committee members Dec. 5, Sen. Hirono stated that “the Knights of Columbus has taken a number of extreme positions. For example, it was reportedly one of the top contributors to California’s Proposition 8 campaign to ban same-sex marriage.”

     Hirono then asked Buescher if he would quit the group if he was confirmed “to avoid any appearance of bias.”

     “The Knights of Columbus does not have the authority to take personal political positions on behalf of all of its approximately two million members,” Buescher responded.

     “If confirmed, I will apply all provisions of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges regarding recusal and disqualification,” he said.

     And also thus:

     In her questions to the nominee, Sen. [Kamala] Harris described the Knights as “an all-male society” and asked if Buescher was aware that the Knights of Columbus “opposed a woman’s right to choose” and were against “marriage equality” when he joined.

     Responding to the senator’s questions, Buescher confirmed that he has been a member of the Knights since he was 18 years old, noting that his membership “has involved participation in charitable and community events in local Catholic parishes.”

     “I do not recall if I was aware whether the Knights of Columbus had taken a position on the abortion issue when I joined at the age of 18,” he wrote in response.

     Harris raised a statement from Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson, who said that abortion constituted “the killing of the innocent on a massive scale” and asked Buescher if he agreed with Anderson.

     Buescher said he was not responsible for drafting statements or policies made by the Knights and that, as a federal judge, he would consider himself bound by judicial precedent regarding abortion.

     Brian Buescher, who might be a superb jurist, has nevertheless disappointed me greatly. He’s a Knight of Columbus and a Catholic – surprise, surprise – which means the above waffling responses ought never to have occurred. Here’s how those questions should have been met:

     Hirono: In 2014, you ran for the Republican nomination for Nebraska Attorney General. In the course of that campaign, you made a number of statements demonstrating your opposition to women’s reproductive rights. In an interview with the Nebraska Family Alliance, for instance, you said that “unfortunately, under Roe v. Wade, it is not possible to ban abortion right now.” During the same interview, you called yourself “an avidly pro-life person” and said that you would “not compromise on that issue,” noting it was “simply [your] moral fabric.”...Do you believe that Roe v. Wade was correctly decided?

     Buescher: No.

     Harris: Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men. In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as “a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.” Mr. Anderson went on to say that “abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale.” Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?

     Buescher: Yes.

     Harris: Do you agree with Mr. Anderson that abortion is “the killing of the innocent on a massive scale”?

     Buescher: Yes.

     Period. Full stop. END OF SENTENCE. Other answers are unworthy of a Catholic, to say nothing of a Knight of Columbus in good standing.

     The questions, as posed – and I copied them verbatim from the written-questions document – are about Buescher’s personal convictions, not about what he would do on the federal bench. Apparently he’s too avid for the judgeship for which he’s been nominated to be fearlessly candid about his Catholicism.

Abortion and the heterosexual nature of marriage are two of the five “non-negotiables” decreed by the Vatican:

     1. Abortion

     The Church teaches that, regarding a law permitting abortions, it is "never licit to obey it, or to take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or to vote for it" (EV 73). Abortion is the intentional and direct killing of an innocent human being, and therefore it is a form of homicide. The unborn child is always an innocent party, and no law may permit the taking of his life. Even when a child is conceived through rape or incest, the fault is not the child's, who should not suffer death for others' sins....

     5. Homosexual "Marriage"

     True marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Legal recognition of any other union as "marriage" undermines true marriage, and legal recognition of homosexual unions actually does homosexual persons a disfavor by encouraging them to persist in what is an objectively immoral arrangement. "When legislation in favor of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time ina legislative assembly, the Catholic lawmaker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favor of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral"

     Waffling as Buescher did on two “non-negotiable” positions of the Church is tantamount to saying “Well, yeah, I’m a Catholic, but I don’t put a lot of stock in the crazy parts.”

     We have a president who’s fearless and candid about his convictions. Is it too much to ask for judicial nominees who, however bound by Supreme Court precedents they may be, are fearless and candid about theirs? Among other things, imagine the looks on the faces of such Democrat terror-mongers when they get exactly the responses they thought they wanted. Imagine them having to defend their religious biases in light of the Constitution’s “no religious test” clause, or their enthusiasm about the slaughter of unborn children to a nation that’s still 74% Christian. I, at least, would be delighted.

     Happy Boxing Day.