From the Archives - A Moral Argument for Civil Defense: Advice to America’s Catholic Bishops (1983)

This article appeared exactly 35 years ago today, in the January 1, 1983, issue of Crisis Magazine, a Catholic journal of opinion (previously known as Catholicism in Crisis).

CRISIS MAGAZINE - JANUARY 1, 1983

A Moral Argument for Civil Defense: Advice to America’s Catholic Bishops

RICHARD E. SINCERE, JR.

“Justice demands that those who do not make war not have war made upon them.” This is a central teaching of the Catholic Church that is repeated emphatically in the second draft of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter on peace and war. Just war doctrine demands discrimination in battle and both the United States and the Soviet Union in part meet this moral requirement in their strategic plans, which do not target nuclear weapons against civilian populations as such. However, to meet it fully, both nations must also protect civilian populations from the effects of enemy weapons.

The bishops do not adequately address the question of civil defense in their draft letter, nor is it likely that they will do so in the final version next May. In spite of that oversight, I would like to set forth here the moral principles which compel a government to protect its people from weapons of mass destruction, principles drawn in part from the bishops’ own document.

Moral Foundations: Just War and Vatican II

Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, condemned indiscriminate warfare by saying: “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.” This moral judgment has obvious applications to gruesome examples of modern warfare: the obliteration bombings of Coventry and Tokyo, the blitz against London, the firebombings of Dresden and Hamburg, the use of chemical weapons in Afghanistan, Laos, and Kampuchea. By extension we can apply it to the extermination policies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao — even though these were not acts of war in the conventional sense.

A mistaken interpretation of the Council’s judgment maintains that any use of nuclear weapons would be “indiscriminate” and therefore damnable. Yet the evolution of modern technology made possible pinpoint attacks on purely military targets. Weapons such as the neutron bomb have been designed primarily with the principle of discrimination in mind: enhanced radiation warheads arrest the aggressive movement of tank forces without affecting innocent civilian populations nearby. Their lethal effects are short-lived and narrowly targeted.

However, intercontinental strategic weapons are still so destructive that even pinpoint bombings of missile silos can spread harmful radioactive fallout indiscriminately to civilian areas. Simple measures can be taken to protect against these effects. These must be examined in the light of moral reasoning.

Defense Against Nuclear Weapons

The American bishops write, contrary to the facts, that “the presumption exists that defense against a nuclear attack is not feasible.” They ignore extensive and presumably effective air defenses deployed by the Soviet Union, along with the available technology for ballistic missile defense (BMD) — whether in the form of antiballistic missiles (in place in the Soviet Union, abandoned by the United States), space-based laser — or conventional-BMD, or sophisticated anti-weapon weapons like particle beams. Moreover, the bishops all but overlook the possibility of passive civilian defenses — except in this passage:

“In discussing non-violent means of defense, some attention must be given to existing programs for civil defense against nuclear attack, including blast and fallout shelters and relocation plans. It is unclear in the public mind whether these are intended to offer significant protection against at least some forms of nuclear attack or are being put into place to enhance the credibility of the strategic deterrent forces by demonstrating an ability to survive attack.”

The bishops here unwittingly present two strong reasons to support civil defense: emphatically, significant protection against the effects of nuclear weapons is possible; secondarily, the ability to survive indeed increases the credibility of the deterrent strategy of the United States government. Clearly this is the most peaceful component of nuclear deterrence: it requires no weapons and possesses none of the moral ambiguity of nuclear weapons. If the bishops someday see fit to condemn the mere possession of nuclear weapons, they shall have no justification to condemn the peaceful means to protect innocent civilians against an aggressor.

The bishops recommend that an independent panel of scientists, engineers, and physicians examine the feasibility of civil defense as a means to survive a nuclear war. Yet many such studies have been done over the past thirty years. The consensus is that nuclear war is indeed survivable and, in the words of one of the latest studies, “no insuperable barrier to recovery exists.” It would indeed be horrible, but preparations for the potentially horrible can significantly mitigate its consequences. If targeting civilian populations in your enemy’s territory is morally unjustifiable, acquiescing in the unnecessary death of innocents in your own country is morally repugnant. It deserves unhesitating condemnation.

Civil Defense: A Life or Death Issue

“Questions of war and peace,” write the bishops, “have a profoundly moral dimension which responsible Christians cannot ignore. They are questions of life and death.” War is evil not in itself but because it is the cause of human suffering and death. To alleviate suffering and prevent death is ipso facto a moral good. That is why an increased American commitment to civil defense is a moral imperative. Every reason exists for the bishops to express their support for such a commitment: (1) Above all, civil defense saves lives. Estimates vary, but in the event of nuclear war some civil defense will save more lives than no civil defense. (The Swiss have a slogan: “Better civil defense without nuclear war than nuclear war without civil defense.”) (2) As I argued earlier, civil defense is an integral component of a deterrent strategy, the only component that is objectively peaceful. It is also, many experts argue, the most effective part of a deterrent strategy. Soviet military planners and their leaders in the Kremlin are cautious. If they have no guarantee of victory — that is, if the United States can demonstrate an ability to survive, recover, and challenge Soviet hegemony — they will not be as ready to risk a strategic conflict.

Nuclear war would no doubt be the most tragic disaster ever to befall mankind. There is no need to make it any worse by ignoring its consequences. There are, of course, some problems with civil defense as it exists today: crisis relocation is far from perfect, shelters are not invulnerable, panic and confusion may still occur. Yet to refuse to plan for these contingencies is as sinful as launching a nuclear weapon in the first place.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that “it is the concrete individual who lends meaning to the human race. We do not think that a human being is valuable because he is a member of the race; it is rather the opposite: the human race is valuable because it is composed of human beings.” The responsibility of the nation is to preserve and protect as many human beings as possible. To neglect that responsibility reveals a moral turpitude worse than the Nazi Holocaust, worse than the Stalinist purges, indeed worse than any conceivable use of nuclear weapons. To commit ourselves to civil defense is to reaffirm a choice God made available to us several thousand years ago: “I set before you life or death, a blessing or curse. Choose life then, so that you and your descendants may live in the love of Yahweh your god, obeying his voice, clinging to him; for in this your life consists …” (Deuteronomy 11:26)


Richard E. Sincere, Jr., is research assistant for church and society at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a member of the visiting faculty of the Georgetown University School for Summer and Continuing Education, and president of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the American Civil Defense Association.

Guest Post: Why Easter is called Easter

by Brent Landau, University of Texas at Austin

This Sunday, April 16, Christians will be celebrating Easter, the day on which the resurrection of Jesus is said to have taken place. The date of celebration changes from year to year.

The reason for this variation is that Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. So, in 2018, Easter will be celebrated on April 1, and on April 21 in 2019.

I am a religious studies scholar specializing in early Christianity, and my research shows that this dating of Easter goes back to the complicated origins of this holiday and how it has evolved over the centuries.

Easter is quite similar to other major holidays like Christmas and Halloween, which have evolved over the last 200 years or so. In all of these holidays, Christian and non-Christian (pagan) elements have continued to blend together.

Easter as a rite of spring

Most major holidays have some connection to the changing of seasons. This is especially obvious in the case of Christmas. The New Testament gives no information about what time of year Jesus was born. Many scholars believe, however, that the main reason Jesus’ birth came to be celebrated on December 25 is because that was the date of the winter solstice according to the Roman calendar.

What is the origin of Easter eggs?
Katie Morrow, CC BY-NC-ND

Since the days following the winter solstice gradually become longer and less dark, it was ideal symbolism for the birth of “the light of the world” as stated in the New Testament’s Gospel of John.

Similar was the case with Easter, which falls in close proximity to another key point in the solar year: the vernal equinox (around March 20), when there are equal periods of light and darkness. For those in northern latitudes, the coming of spring is often met with excitement, as it means an end to the cold days of winter.

Spring also means the coming back to life of plants and trees that have been dormant for winter, as well as the birth of new life in the animal world. Given the symbolism of new life and rebirth, it was only natural to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus at this time of the year.

The naming of the celebration as “Easter” seems to go back to the name of a pre-Christian goddess in England, Eostre, who was celebrated at beginning of spring. The only reference to this goddess comes from the writings of the Venerable Bede, a British monk who lived in the late seventh and early eighth century. As religious studies scholar Bruce Forbes summarizes:

“Bede wrote that the month in which English Christians were celebrating the resurrection of Jesus had been called Eosturmonath in Old English, referring to a goddess named Eostre. And even though Christians had begun affirming the Christian meaning of the celebration, they continued to use the name of the goddess to designate the season.”

Bede was so influential for later Christians that the name stuck, and hence Easter remains the name by which the English, Germans and Americans refer to the festival of Jesus’ resurrection.

The connection with Jewish Passover

It is important to point out that while the name “Easter” is used in the English-speaking world, many more cultures refer to it by terms best translated as “Passover” (for instance, “Pascha” in Greek) – a reference, indeed, to the Jewish festival of Passover.

In the Hebrew Bible, Passover is a festival that commemorates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, as narrated in the Book of Exodus. It was and continues to be the most important Jewish seasonal festival, celebrated on the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

At the time of Jesus, Passover had special significance, as the Jewish people were again under the dominance of foreign powers (namely, the Romans). Jewish pilgrims streamed into Jerusalem every year in the hope that God’s chosen people (as they believed themselves to be) would soon be liberated once more.

On one Passover, Jesus traveled to Jerusalem with his disciples to celebrate the festival. He entered Jerusalem in a triumphal procession and created a disturbance in the Jerusalem Temple. It seems that both of these actions attracted the attention of the Romans, and that as a result Jesus was executed around the year A.D. 30.

Some of Jesus’ followers, however, believed that they saw him alive after his death, experiences that gave birth to the Christian religion. As Jesus died during the Passover festival and his followers believed he was resurrected from the dead three days later, it was logical to commemorate these events in close proximity.

Resurrection.
Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P., CC BY-NC-ND

Some early Christians chose to celebrate the resurrection of Christ on the same date as the Jewish Passover, which fell around day 14 of the month of Nisan, in March or April. These Christians were known as Quartodecimans (the name means “Fourteeners”).

By choosing this date, they put the focus on when Jesus died and also emphasized continuity with the Judaism out of which Christianity emerged. Some others instead preferred to hold the festival on a Sunday, since that was when Jesus’ tomb was believed to have been found.

In A.D. 325, the Emperor Constantine, who favored Christianity, convened a meeting of Christian leaders to resolve important disputes at the Council of Nicaea. The most fateful of its decisions was about the status of Christ, whom the council recognized as “fully human and fully divine.” This council also resolved that Easter should be fixed on a Sunday, not on day 14 of Nisan. As a result, Easter is now celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox.

The Easter bunny and Easter eggs

In early America, the Easter festival was far more popular among Catholics than Protestants. For instance, the New England Puritans regarded both Easter and Christmas as too tainted by non-Christian influences to be appropriate to celebrate. Such festivals also tended to be opportunities for heavy drinking and merrymaking.

The fortunes of both holidays changed in the 19th century, when they became occasions to be spent with one’s family. This was done partly out of a desire to make the celebration of these holidays less rowdy.

Children on an egg hunt.
Susan Bassett, CC BY-NC-ND

But Easter and Christmas also became reshaped as domestic holidays because understandings of children were changing. Prior to the 17th century, children were rarely the center of attention. As historian Stephen Nissenbaum writes,

“…children were lumped together with other members of the lower orders in general, especially servants and apprentices – who, not coincidentally, were generally young people themselves.”

From the 17th century onward, there was an increasing recognition of childhood as as time of life that should be joyous, not simply as preparatory for adulthood. This “discovery of childhood” and the doting upon children had profound effects on how Easter was celebrated.

It is at this point in the holiday’s development that Easter eggs and the Easter bunny become especially important. Decorated eggs had been part of the Easter festival at least since medieval times, given the obvious symbolism of new life. A vast amount of folklore surrounds Easter eggs, and in a number of Eastern European countries, the process of decorating them is extremely elaborate. Several Eastern European legends describe eggs turning red (a favorite color for Easter eggs) in connection with the events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Yet it was only in the 17th century that a German tradition of an “Easter hare” bringing eggs to good children came to be known. Hares and rabbits had a long association with spring seasonal rituals because of their amazing powers of fertility.

When German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th centuries, they brought this tradition with them. The wild hare also became supplanted by the more docile and domestic rabbit, in another indication of how the focus moved toward children.

As Christians celebrate the festival this spring in commemoration of Jesus’ resurrection, the familiar sights of the Easter bunny and Easter eggs serve as a reminder of the holiday’s very ancient origins outside of the Christian tradition.

Brent Landau, Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Texas at Austin

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: How did we come to celebrate Christmas?

by Bronwen Neil, Australian Catholic University

Christmas is literally “the mass for Christ”, the day on which Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus.

Pope Leo I

The western date for Jesus’ birth is quite arbitrary. It was chosen by Pope Leo I, bishop of Rome (440-461), to coincide with the Festival of the Saturnalia, when Romans worshipped Saturn, the sun god. This was the day of the solar equinox, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, which officially marked the halfway point of winter.

Leo thought it would distract his Roman congregation from sun worship by celebrating the feast of Christ’s birth on the same day. He described Jesus as the “new light”; an image of salvation, but timely in that the days began to lengthen from 25 December onwards.

The date of the feast varies within Christian denominations. Western Christians celebrate the Nativity on a fixed date, 25 December. Some Eastern Orthodox Christians celebrate it on 6 January together with Epiphany, the revelation of the infant Jesus to three wise men. The Greek and Russian Orthodox celebrate Christmas on 7 January and Epiphany on 19 January.

Where did Christmas traditions originate?

It is true to say that the western Christmas began as a Christianized pagan feast. The Christmas tree is also a pagan symbol of fertility.

In northern countries, when the nights are long and cold, the feast of Christmas traditionally gave Christian people something to look forward to: rich food (reindeer if you are in Sweden, pork and lamb if you are in Greece), lots of candles, Catholic Mass at midnight or Protestant services on Christmas morning. Fir trees were brought inside and lit with candles as a symbol of the hope that spring would return with new crops and plentiful food.

Fir trees were brought inside to symbolise the return of spring, new crops, and plentiful food. It’s also a pagan symbol of fertility.
Ievgenii Meyer/www.shutterstock.com

The early church also celebrated Christ’s Resurrection in spring, the season of new life, since it coincided with the Jewish Passover feast on 14 Nisan, a date that depended on when the first full moon occurred in March or April. Many of our Easter symbols, like the bunny and the egg, are ancient fertility symbols. No one knows how chocolate got dragged in!

It is also an interesting coincidence that the Jewish Festival of Lights, Hanukkah, falls in November or December each year, and is celebrated with the lighting of the candelabra (menorah), traditional foods, games and gifts.

Where did Santa Claus come from?

The Santa Claus myth (spoiler alert: don’t read any further if you are under 10!) came from the legend of Saint Nicholas. Nicholas was a bishop in the city of Myra (in modern Turkey), who wanted to help poor young women get husbands. He left bags of money of the doorsteps of their family homes in secret, an anonymous gift to the poor to be used as a dowry.

A 1950s Coca-Cola advertisement

For this he became known as the patron saint of virgins and children. Over time, his generosity was remembered by people giving gifts to children in secret on the feast of St Nicholas, celebrated on December 6 (in western Christian countries) and 19 December (in the eastern churches). His name in English became Clause, after the Dutch Sinterklaas. Dutch children and others in western Europe leave food out in a shoe or a clog for Nicholas’ horse on the eve of 6 December, and receive presents on the day of the feast.

Our modern image of Santa Claus as a rotund gentleman of a certain age dressed in a red-and-white suit and matching hat comes from an incredibly successful marketing campaign by Coca-Cola in the 1930s. Since then, suburban Santas always dress in the image created by the Coke brand.

But this image comes from an earlier depiction of Father Christmas who had nothing to do with the American Santa Claus until the 1850s.

Until the Victorian era, when childhood was recognised as a separate stage of life, and the Christmas feast came to centre around children, Father Christmas, or Lord Christmas as he was also known, was the personification of a mid-winter feast of merrymaking for adults – and he brought no presents. He was useful as a symbol for Catholic-sympathising writers in the early 17th century who wanted to defend Christmas from attacks by the Puritans, radical Protestants who intended to ban the feast.

(For a Jewish perspective on the Wars of Religion, see Stephen Feldman’s book, Please Don’t Wish Me a Merry Christmas: A Critical History of the Separation of Church and State (1997).)

Tuck Postcard, Photo Oilette Series, 1919.

From the 1850s onwards, the English Father Christmas was depicted as a bearded old man wearing a long red robe trimmed with white fur and a pointed red hat, who brought gifts to good children. This image can be seen on English postcards from the early 20th century.

Christmas in the modern era

A lot of the significance of the original feast is lost when we in the southern hemisphere celebrate it in the middle of summer. A family barbecue at the beach cannot really capture the atmosphere of a cold and dark mid-winter.

This seems to be the main reason for the emergence of the alternative “Christmas in July”. Today we give presents to adults as well as kids on the eve or day of 25 December, and usually not anonymously. It would be interesting to see what would change if none of our gifts had name tags attached – Secret Santa at the office is based on the same concept.

Our gifts are also reminiscent of the tributes that the three Magi – who symbolise, according to tradition, the non-Jewish peoples – gave to the infant Jesus.

Incidentally, according to two of the four Gospels, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but given the lack of corroborating evidence for a census there that year, it is now thought that Jesus was more likely born in Galilee, where he grew up. Bethlehem was significant for the Gospel writers as being the birthplace of King David 1,000 years earlier, and a royal city for the Jews.

The Magi gave Jesus gold, frankincense and myrrh, when they understood that the baby they were looking at was both human and the son of God. That mystery at least remains intact.



Bronwen Neil, Associate professor, Australian Catholic University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

From the Archives: Former U.S. ambassador to Vatican talks diplomacy at Virginia book festival

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on March 19, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Former U.S. ambassador to Vatican talks diplomacy at Virginia book festival

Ambassador Francis Rooney came to Charlottesville on March 19 to speak about his recent book, The Global Vatican: An Inside Look at the Catholic Church, World Politics, and the Extraordinary Relationship between the United States and the Holy See. The occasion was a panel on “The United States in the World” at the twentieth annual Virginia Festival of the Book.

Rooney, who was President George W. Bush's envoy to the Holy See, participated in the discussion along with University of Virginia political scientist James Ceaser, University of Mary Washington professor Stephen Farnsworth, and Stanford University historian Robert Rakove. The panel was moderated by Sorensen Institute executive director Bob Gibson.

After the panel ended, Ambassador Rooney spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his book and about the Vatican's politics and diplomacy.

Pope and Congress
First, he commented on the invitation issued by Speaker of the House John Boehner, asking Pope Francis to address a joint meeting of Congress in 2015.

“Speaker Boehner,” he said, “is a devout Catholic and values the role the Holy See plays in the world.”

The idea of inviting the Pope to the U.S. Capitol “reflects the importance of Holy See diplomacy and the importance of the relationship with the United States,” Rooney noted. “It's never happened before” but it also “offers an interesting opportunity.”

Rooney said he would be surprised if Pope Francis accepts the invitation but the gesture itself demonstrates “the importance of Holy See diplomacy” to U.S. policymakers.

He added that there is a convergence of interests and values between Washington and the Vatican.

For instance, he said, the “principles of Holy See diplomacy apply to all persons.” These include “fundamental respect for human dignity, nurture of freedoms, especially religious freedom, and [seeking] to promote the natural rights of man.”

Human intelligence
Rooney also pointed out how the Vatican also is the locus of a worldwide human intelligence network, something that may be unparalleled elsewhere. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he recalled, said the Catholic Church has “one of the greatest information gathering networks in the world.”

“One of the unique aspects of the Holy See is their global network of priests, nuns, NGOs. We get so much information from them,” he said, adding that there are “millions of vignettes of Holy See information surprising the United States in its, in what they've been able to find out.”

He gave the example of when Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, then the Vatican Secretary of State, visited President George H.W. Bush in the Oval Office.

When the meeting took place, Rooney said, Casaroli had just been told by some nuns “about a bridge being blown up in Lebanon.” This was pertinent because the United States and the Holy See had been working together to unify Lebanese Christians. Bush and Casaroli looked at a map together, with the cardinal pointing out where the missing bridge had been located.

The president was unaware of this information, so he called the CIA, which also had not learned about it. “How do they know that?,” the CIA asked.

'Holy See in action'
In writing his book, Rooney said, he “tried to minimize the memoir part. People's interests in ambassadorial memoirs are fairly circumscribed and, I think, justly so.”

Instead of focusing on himself, he “tried to put in the things that show the Holy See in action,” especially instances of “the Holy See and the United States working together.”

While doing research for his book, he learned “about the incredible ability of the Holy See to do good in the world diplomatically and how important this charge is,” as well as how much the United States and the Vatican have in common in terms of their foreign policy aims.

In addition, he said, prior to his experience as a diplomat and as a writer examining diplomacy, “I didn't fully appreciate the First Amendment, I didn't fully appreciate our unique concept of citizenship in the United States, until I saw how other countries work, especially European ones.”

Vatican II
Rooney also commented about how the articulation of ecumenism by the Second Vatican Council affected the Holy See's diplomacy, both positively and negatively.

Vatican II, he said, “brought it into the modern world. It would be pretty hard” for Vatican diplomats “to be taken seriously nowadays without Dignitatis Humanae and Nostra Aetate,” two key documents of the council.

“On the other hand,” he continued, there have been “three existential threats to Holy See diplomacy: one was Napoleon, one was the unification of Italy, and the third one was Vatican II – because a lot of priests wanted to turn inward and get out of the diplomatic business.”

They wanted to “have nuncios focus on recruiting bishops and appointing bishops” rather than on diplomacy, but Pope Paul VI, a graduate of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, (the Vatican's school for training diplomats) said that the Church has “an important role to play in the world.” Pope Paul, he asserted, “saved the diplomatic mission, if you will, of the Holy See.”

Ukraine and Russia
Finally, Rooney answered a question about the current dispute between largely-Catholic Ukraine and mostly-Orthodox Russia.

The situation there, he said, does not stem from religious differences but rather from geopolitics.

“It's Obama's weakness and the fact that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, in some ways, even had President Bush's number – but he for sure has Obama's number.”

President Obama, he said, “has brought [Putin] to a point where he feels he can take actions which are against international law” without fear of serious reprisal.

The complete audio version of this interview will soon be available on Bearing Drift radio, "The Score."

SUGGESTED LINKS

‘Big Roads’ author Earl Swift brings interstate story to Charlottesville
Porn king Larry Flynt defends free speech in Charlottesville
Veteran journalist Evan Thomas draws contrast between Obama and Eisenhower
Current politics has Nixons but no Eisenhowers, says biographer Jeffrey Frank
NEH chairman Jim Leach talks about ‘civility’ in Charlottesville

Original URL:  http://www.examiner.com/article/former-u-s-ambassador-to-vatican-talks-diplomacy-at-virginia-book-festival

The Pope's Medieval Economics - Still and Again

With a brief respite for Thanksgiving, social media and the blogosphere have been astir with conversations about Pope Francis' new apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium ("Joy of the Gospels"), which, despite being a lengthy disputation on the Trinity and other aspects of Catholic theological dogma, has had its few passages on economics singled out for praise and criticism.

I have earlier written about how the top ranks of the Catholic hierarchy are stuck in the Middle Ages when it comes to economic thinking, including Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

The core problem in the current Pope's thinking is found in this passage from Evangelii Gaudium (slightly truncated):

"In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts..."

This has been "confirmed by the facts" so many times I am confounded by the Pope's ignorance of free-market economics, whose theoretical principles were first propounded by the Spanish Scholastics of the early Renaissance.

This Pope, like his predecessors, adheres to a medieval mode of thinking about economics in which wealth distribution is a zero-sum game: Some people are rich because other people are poor. It completely ignores how wealth can be created (making a bigger pie, not just cutting up smaller and smaller pieces to share) through human ingenuity facilitated by the rule of law, respect for property rights, and freedom of thought and information.

The rise of capitalism -- or, as I prefer to call it, free enterprise -- has historically been the most effective driver of wealth creation and lifting people out of poverty. In the past 30 years alone, a billion people who were once living in dire poverty are now middle-class and even rich (by any standard) just in China and India, where liberalized economic policies have freed them from lives that were, by all accounts, nasty, brutish, and short (if not solitary, given those countries' large populations).

As Matt Welch, writing in Reason, put it in a slightly different way:

More people have escaped poverty the past 25 years than were alive on the planet in 1800. Their "means of escape" was largely the introduction of at least some "laws of competition" in endeavors that had long been the exclusive domain of authoritarian, monopolistic governments.

To be fair, the Pope comes from Argentina, where cronyism and mercantilism have long been presented (falsely) as free enterprise. In that context, it would be easy to assume that capitalism creates poverty rather than eliminates it. The affluence and abundance of the modern world were never envisioned by the Bible, which incorrectly prophesies that "the poor will be with us always."

As we have seen in the unprecedented progress of the past 200 years, there is no inevitability to poverty.

Waiting for the Rapture? May 21 Is Just Days Away

The unusually wet and rainy May weather has a lot of us feeling chilly this week.

A good number of our fellow humans are, at the same time, feeling a bit chiliastic, because they have accepted the prediction of radio preacher Harold Camping that the Rapture will begin this Saturday, May 21, with the world itself coming to an end five months later.

Camper is the owner of a network of religious radio stations called Family Radio, based in Oakland, California. As Stephen Cox noted in Liberty magazine in December 2010 (PDF; pp. 19ff), the network has some 100 stations in the United States and an unknown number of other stations elsewhere. He also points out that Camper predicted the world would end in 1994, but turned out to be wrong.

Not that Camper is alone. He's just the latest in a long line of false soothsayers whose predictions prove groundless. (I won't misuse the word "prophet" to describe Harold Camper. In a theological sense, prophecy has nothing to do with predicting future events. It's much more about speaking truth to power, as Nathan did with King David.) In fact, beginning with the Millerites in the 19th century, predicting the end-times has become something of an American religious tradition.

This sort of fascination with the end-times is, in fact, a fairly recent phenomenon. While the early Christians seemed to accept the idea of an imminent return of Jesus Christ, that belief dissipated rather quickly.

E. Ann Matter, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an essay called "Exegesis of the Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages" (found in The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium, edited by Michael Frassetto):

The last book of Christian Scripture, with its vivid imagery and sweeping promises of the triumph of the faithful over the persecutions of Antichrist, has always captured the imagination of Christians. Some contemporary groups fully expect to see the Last Days soon, and they offer exacting interpretations of the clues hidden in the last book of the New Testament for how this could happen. Sometimes these interpretations take the form of fiction [citing Tim LaHaye's and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind series]. This is a long tradition. In fact, the Apocalypse was among the first biblical texts to be systematically explicated in Latin, even as it was one of the last to be accepted into the canon of the New Testament and given a liturgical role.

That early exegesis was, however, soon rejected by most orthodox Christians, and the Revelation of John took on a more allegorical function, beginning with interpretation of the book by St. Jerome (translator of the Bible into Latin). As Matter notes, "it would seem that at least from the earliest stage, the book appealed especially to those whose theology deviated from the orthodox consensus" [p. 29].

Several pages later, after reviewing the literature from the third century through the ninth and tenth, Matter goes on to point out:

All the Apocalypse commentaries from the Carolingian world thus show the continuing assumption of the text as an allegory of the Church, and a continuing process of filtering specific interpretations from earlier commentaries to support that assumption. There is little in these texts that shares the radical assumption of the imminent end evident in the Apocalypse which was such a subject of fascination to the earliest Christians and now again attracts a following. Instead, early medieval exegesis presents the Apocalypse as a book about the integrity and purity of the Church on earth [p. 36].

Last year, I interviewed Charlottesville writer Kristin Swenson about her widely-reviewed book, Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time.

She explained what the book is about in just a few words:

The book is for general readers. It does not take a particular religious perspective. It’s also not dismissive of persons of faith but provides background information about the Bible: what is the Bible, where does it come from, [and] what’s in it, so that folks can make sense of the way the Bible shows up in contemporary culture.

In Bible Babel, Swenson takes a couple of pages to discuss end-times theology and how different branches of Christianity -- not to mention Judaism -- hold very different views on the Rapture and the Second Coming. Let me quote her at length:

The idea that Jesus will return and take the faithful up into heaven at some dramatic moment in the world's last days has captured the imagination of thousands of fundamentalist, evangelical, and nondenominational Christians. "Rapture," the term used to describe this event, is not actually in the Bible. Bible-based Jews, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and many other Christian denominations do not accept the premise, yet Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's creative depiction of the rapture in the Left Behind series has clearly struck a chord. Tens of millions of these books have sold since the first was released in 1995, and several have become popular movies.

Ironically, it's the faithful who are described by the term "left behind," in the rapture proponents' central biblical text -- 1 Thess 4:16-17. Paul wrote that passage to assure people that their loved ones who had died before Jesus' return would not be overlooked. Those who were dead, Paul wrote, will rise first, and then the living (the ones who were left behind) will join them, "caught up in the clouds ... to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever." The Greek word arpazo, translated "caught up," is raptus in Latin -- the basis for the English "rapture." Of course, what LaHaye and others mean by the people "left behind" is those who are not caught up at all.

Although the rapture as it's popularly understood has little biblical support, the idea that Jesus will return is prominently represented. Sometimes called the Parousia (reflecting its Greek root in "presence, coming"), the expectation of Jesus' returning to earth to initiate a new age permeates the New Testament, and it is a central feature of Christian doctrine and theology today. Even though the Bible strongly maintains that people cannot predict exactly when Jesus will return, people try anyway. Hal Lindsey wrote The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), fairly certain that his was the end-time (specifically, the 1980s). Not everyone who believes in a coming rapture agrees about its chronological relationship to other end-time events, but they share the certainty that it will happen. Then, as a popular bumper sticker warns, "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned" -- to which unbelieving humorists respond with the bumper sticker, "Come the rapture, can I have your car?" In a curious twist, the Rapture Ready Index recommends that you "fasten your seatbelts" when the number measuring end-time-like world events indicates the speady approach of the rapture [pp. 215-16].

Stephen Cox concludes his December 2010 Liberty article [PDF; p. 22]:

What will happen next?

One thing is certain: the Rapture will not take place on May 21. Nor will the total destruction of the physical universe occur on the following October 21. But what will happen to Family Radio?

Will the Depart Out movement collapse, like the Millerites? Will the Campingites try to reinterpret their message, as they did after the disappointment of 1994? Will they succeed? Or will there be a palace revolution?

I believe that the last is likeliest. People who have invested their careers in an organization are reluctant to part from it, no matter what happens, and in this instance there has been good reason for dissenters to stay and bide their time. Camping is the sole source of the sect’s peculiar theology, and he is 89 years old. (Not that he is senile — he isn’t. His method of argument is the same that it was 25 years ago, when I first found him on the dial.) It is difficult to imagine that Family Radio’s internal proletariat hasn’t made plans for what happens after his death — or even before it, when May 21 fails to justify his teachings. I look for a battle at Family Radio; and with luck, the battle will be public.

In any case, we are unlikely to see a more informative experiment in what happens when prophecy — definite, ceaselessly emphasized, widely disseminated prophecy — unmistakably and climactically fails. Every student of American civilizationshould plan to tune in to Family Radio on May 21 — not with the possibility of being caught up to heaven, but with the certainty of being caught up in a fascinating event.

In an update ("The End Is Nigh") published on the Liberty web site on May 3 (the magazine converted to web-only earlier this year), Cox makes a suggestion that could make this coming weekend highly entertaining:

Harold Camping is not a politician or a professor of environmentalism, whose prophecies can never be proven wrong because they’re ridiculously non-specific. No, he has said exactly what he means by the end of the world, and he has said exactly when the end of the world will happen. You can check it. I hope you do. Go to Family Radio’s website, find out where its nearest radio station is, and tune in during the evening of May 20 (US time), when, Camping believes, Judgment Day will begin in the Fiji Islands. Then listen through the next few days, as Family Radio responds to the disconfirmation of its prophecies. Or does not respond — until it figures out how to do so (and that should be interesting also).

As for myself, after 16 years of Catholic education (and thus holding a fundamental rejection of newfangled fundamentalism), I think the best way to spend May 21 will be to party like it's 1999 -- perhaps listening to Blondie's classic recording, "Rapture."

Then, we can listen to Harold Camping's explanation for his mistaken calculations.  I have a hint for him:  he forgot to count leap-year days in his meticulous enumeration of the number of days from the Crucifixion to May 21, 2011.


Readers of this blog post may also like:  As the Millennium Turns (Revisited) from December 31, 2004.

Be sure to visit my CafePress store for gifts and novelty items!
Read my blog on Kindle!
Follow my tweets on Twitter! 

See my articles on Examiner.com!

 

'Et Homo Factus Est'

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Today I traveled from Charlottesville to the D.C. area to celebrate Christmas with friends and friends of friends.

At the annual Christmas Eve get-together at the home of Warren Coats and Ito Briones in Bethesda, I was surprised to see my old friend, Rob Teir, and his husband, Johnny Smith, who live in Texas but came all the way to Maryland just for Warren and Ito's party. (At least that's what Rob told me; there may be more to the story than that.) Rob has recently opened up a law practice in Houston, which he seems to be enjoying very much.

(I have to apologize for my strange greeting. I found it hard to believe that Rob and Johnny were there, since just last week I received a Christmas card from them, postmarked Houston. So it was a weird impulse that caused me to walk up to Rob and say, "What are you doing here?")

The food was delightful, as was the company. Warren and Ito are always perfect hosts.

After I left the party, I drove to the Cathedral of St. Thomas More in Arlington, where I arrived just in time for Midnight Mass (which started at 11:00 p.m., strangely enough, but since it ended at 12:30 a.m., I think that counts as "midnight"). An hour of lessons and carols was just ending, and the last organ piece played before Mass began was, again to my surprise, my favorite Polish carol, Dzisiaj w Betlejem. That's just something you don't hear outside of places like Milwaukee, Chicago, and Hamtramck.

I happened to have my video camera with me and captured the processional (preceded by a "Christmas Choral Introit" by Richard Proulx based on Luke 3:4 and Philippians 4:5), which was accompanied by the traditional carol, "O Come, All Ye Faithful." I also taped the recessional, which was accompanied by "Joy to the World."

Here's the video, which also includes a final blessing by Bishop Paul S. Loverde of the Diocese of Arlington:

Enjoy Christmas Day. Check back next week to see what I have up my sleeve for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

Christmas Carols: The Odd and the New

Christmas is unique among holidays in the music we associate with it.

Just think: What other holidays bring to mind so many, and so many different, songs? Outside of church services, Easter has “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” and not much else. Patriotic commemorations like Independence Day or Memorial Day might be celebrated with “The Star Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful,” but those and other anthems are not identified with a single holiday. Diehard union organizers might sing “The Internationale” on Labor Day, but even that would be a rarity.

Christmas, on the other hand, has hundreds of songs – some spiritual, some secular, some a strange blend of both – dedicated to it. We hear them on the radio (almost every media market now has at least one FM station that plays Christmas music around the clock starting around Thanksgiving and ending only on December 26), in shops, on street corners, in school pageants, from wandering carolers, and in our own homes.

Christmas songs, it seems, are among the few – besides TV theme songs – that Americans have etched in our memories with the capability of singing by heart, without written notes or lyrics. We know them so well, we think they have been around forever.

Strangely enough, some of those “ancient” songs are newer than we might imagine. Not only that, but many of them became popular despite hardheaded resistance from religious leaders – and I am not talking about opposition to “Rudolph” or “Frosty,” but to deeply spiritual, Bible- or tradition-based hymns that today are more likely to be sung at Midnight Mass than heard on the radio or at the shopping mall. From 1700 until 1782, for instance, only one Christmas hymn – “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night” – was permitted to be sung during Anglican church services; in 1782, “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing” made the acceptable song list twice as long.

The stories of these, and 98 other, familiar (and some not-so-familiar) Christmas songs are told by church historian Ian Bradley in The Daily Telegraph Book of Carols, published in 2006 as a companion to his The Daily Telegraph Book of Hymns (Continuum, 2005). Many would be surprised to learn from Bradley that hymn-singing by congregations during church services is, historically speaking, a rather recent phenomenon. What’s more, “carols” (which used to be songs accompanied by dancing for almost any season of the year, including Lent, Easter, summer, and Christmastime) were particularly looked down upon by the official church.

Bradley explains:

“Yet although it now seems almost unthinkable to celebrate (or survive) the festive season without them, carols originally had nothing to do with Christmas, nor even with Christianity. They were among the many pagan customs taken over by the medieval church which used them initially as much in the celebration of Easter as of Christmas. The subsequent development of the carol as a distinctive genre standing somewhere between the hymn, the folksong and the sacred ballad and having as its subject matter the story and significance of Jesus’ birth serves as an interesting pointer to several major currents in religious, social and cultural history of the last five hundred years. Born out of late medieval humanism, carols were suppressed by Puritan zealots after the Reformation, partially reinstated at the Restoration, sung by Dissenters and radicals to the distaste of the established churches in the eighteenth century, rediscovered and reinvented by Victorian antiquarians and romantics, and re-written in the late twentieth century to fit the demand for social realism and political correctness. As well as reflecting the mood of their times, some of our best-loved carols also contain coded comments on contemporary events, including, perhaps, the 1745 Jacobite rebellion and the revolutions across Europe in 1848.”

Rereading that paragraph from the first two pages of Bradley’s book after having read the whole thing, it becomes remarkably clear that those 205 words serve as a near-complete summation of the 420 pages of text that follow. Bradley has put in a nutshell the whole history of carol-writing and carol-singing. In subsequent chapters, however, he highlights the origins of dozens of carols, some lost in the mists of ancient history, some by composers and lyricists still living in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He offers tidbits of trivia and corrections of misconceptions that deepen our textural appreciation of much-beloved songs of the season.

In the latter category, misconceptions, for instance, the liner notes of many Christmas CDs attribute the words of “Away in a Manger” to Martin Luther. That’s historically unfounded. The first printed record of “Away in the Manger” was when verses one and two were published in Philadelphia in 1885 in the Little Children’s Book for Schools. Verse three was published seven years later in a book called Vineyard Songs. “Away in the Manger,” moreover, is sung to different tunes in Britain and in North America.

One of the favorite hymns on both sides of the Atlantic, “Adeste Fideles” (with its English-language counterpart, “O Come All Ye Faithful”) was long thought to date from the early Middle Ages. Not so, Bradley tells us:

“Until the middle of the twentieth century it was widely believed that this great Latin hymn calling the faithful to worship the newborn Christ was the work of the thirteenth-century mystic Bonaventura. However the discovery of a mid-eighteenth-century manuscript in 1946 by Maurice Frost, vicar of Deddington in Oxfordshire and a noted hymnologist, and research over the next three years by his friend Dom John Stéphan of Buckfast Abbey led both men to conclude that the author of ‘Adeste, fideles’ was John Francis Wade (1711-86).”

Here’s where the story gets even more intriguing. After it was determined that Wade wrote the song sometime in the 1750s – it first appeared in print in England in 1760 – more research led to the discovery of the song’s political overtones. Bradley continues:

“In 1990 Bennett Zon, a historian of music, gave a paper to the Catholic Family History Society in which he speculated that ‘Adeste, fideles’ might even have been written as a coded Jacobite call to arms on the eve of the 1745 rebellion. He pointed out that half-hidden Jacobite imagery, including Scottish thistles and the initials of the Stuart pretenders, often appeared in Wade’s musical transcriptions and manuscripts. Twenty years after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, Wade was still writing ‘Domine salvum fac Regem nostrum Carolum’ rather than ‘Georgium’ for English Catholic congregations to sing.”

Such speculation – and, one must admit, the case remains to be proven – is of a piece with Clare Asquith’s theory of William Shakespeare’s crypto-Catholicism in Shadowplay (PublicAffairs, 2006). Asquith makes a persuasive argument that is based on more than marginalia in a few musical manuscripts, however.

Many of us have heard the touching story about the origins of “Silent Night,” perhaps the most beloved – and certainly the most-translated – of Christmas carols. (Even as I write this, I am hearing Tony Bennett sing it on the radio.) Supposedly mice ate the cables of the church organ and the parish priest and organist huddled together to write, as quickly as possible, a song that could be accompanied by guitar at Midnight Mass.

Well, sort of.

Bradley has done some digging and found out that there’s more legend than fact in that tale, though the song is no less delightful for it.

He notes that “Stille Nacht!” (as he calls it, using the original, German title)

“almost certainly deserves the accolade of the world’s favourite carol. It has been translated into 230 languages. It is often voted No. 1 in surveys of the most popular carols in Britain although it was pipped into second place by ‘In the bleak midwinter’ in the 2005 BBC Songs of Praise poll. A Gallup poll in December 1996 found that 21 per cent of respondents named ‘Silent Night’ as their favourite carol – more than twice as many as voted for the joint runners-up, ‘Away in a manger’ and ‘O come, all ye faithful,’ which each received nine per cent.”

The legend of “Silent Night” is that it was written and performed for the first time on Christmas Eve, 1818, in the Austrian village of Oberndorf, by musician Franz Gruber and the parish priest, Joseph Mohr.

It turns out, however, that Mohr had written the lyrics, and possibly the music, too, at least two years earlier, while he was still serving at a church in Mariapfarr. “It was there,” Bradley writes, “that he wrote his six-verse carol which is striking in its frequent references to fatherhood and complete absence of references to Mary or motherhood.”

That’s right: in the original German, there is no “round yon virgin.” That line is the invention of John Freeman Young, an Episcopal bishop who gave the song a very free translation in the 1850s, and that is the most familiar translation to come down to us. (Pace Evelyn Waugh, “Episcopal bishop” is not a redundancy, it’s just an Americanism.)

Another tidbit about “Stille Nacht” – it was the subject of what we now call copyright infringement litigation. Bradley continues his story:

“’Stille nacht’ might well have sunk without a trace, alongside hundreds of other Austrian folk carols, had a manuscript copy of it not come into the hands of Josef Strasser, a glove-maker and folk-music enthusiast who had a family singing group in the best ‘Sound of Music’ tradition. The Strasser family performed the piece as a newly discovered Tyrolean folk carol. As a result of a concert they gave in Leipzig in 1832 the carol was published as one of set of four Tyrolean songs. There was no mention of either author or composer in this first printed copy and it was only after recourse to the law that Mohr and Gruber were able to prove their authorship.”

The misidentification of a new carol as old and traditional comes up in another of Bradley’s sketches, this one involving “Calypso Carol” (also known by its first line, “See Him Lying On A Bed Of Straw”), written in London in 1964 by Michael Perry, an Anglican clergyman. Bradley reports that Perry “was amused to tune into the radio one day and hear a BBC announcer describe his work as ‘that traditional folk carol from the West Indies.’”

The number of well-known and well-regarded Christmas carols written by clergymen in the 19th and 20th centuries is quite stunning. During the Victorian era, Christmas celebrations were transformed -- depending on whether one was in the low-church or high-church tradition – from an austere day of prayer and mortification and/or a day of drinking and carousing to a family- and especially child-oriented celebration. Anglican priests, in particular, stepped in to write music appropriate to this new tone. A number of familiar Christmas songs were written also by Catholic priests (or Oxford movement Anglicans who later converted to Rome) and Baptist and Unitarian ministers.

In his introduction, Bradley explains:

“Carols played an important role in the Victorian reinvention of Christmas as a largely domestic festival full of sentimentality and good cheer. A huge number of new carols were written in the mid-nineteenth century, many in a pseudo-traditional style. Even the pioneer socialist William Morris provided a pastiche medieval carol with the refrain ‘The snow in the street and the wind at the door’ … It was the Victorians, rather than Bing Crosby, who invented the concept of the White Christmas, bringing snow into the Nativity story with Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the bleak midwinter’ … and Edward Caswall’s ‘See amid the winter snow.’”

That may be the primary reason for our assumption, ahistorical as it might be, that Christmas songs are older than old, even if they were written within our lifetimes: the composers have made an effort to make them feel ancient, and the artifice works. Is it doubtful that, a century from now, listeners will think “Do You Hear What I Hear” and “The Little Drummer Boy” are relics of the late Middle Ages?

In a way, I guess, they are.