I know the man who said that, though not well. I wish he had said something I could agree with, like “God is too big for any one religion” (not a problem unless you think religion is for boxing God in rather than for listening to what He says).

Still, I find myself drawn to the “big world, small god” comment. Its author and I graduated within a year of each other from the same Catholic high school in Hawaii where Brother Stanich was a master of Socratic dialog, and Brother Maloney taught Latin while suffering excuses like “Bruddah! I cannot translate da kine! I got scoliosis!”

With that in common, I’m in no position to tell Facebook Guy that my karma ran over his dogma. But it’s hard to keep from asking whether he lingered too long in the cul-de-sac shared by professional throat-clearers who make a living from the premise that all religions are more or less equal. However he came by that “big planet, small god” point of view, it must be challenged, and there’s no better place to start than with astronomy: Earth is not big when compared to other worlds. Many things about Earth are special, but by galactic standards, our planet checks in with average mass at best. On a beach patrolled by giants like Jupiter and Saturn, Earth would get sand kicked in its face. If this world really were bigger than any one god, then Mr. Facebook Philosopher would only have transposed the question about whether God could make a rock heavier than He could lift into a new key, and there’s no harmonic convergence or sense there, either.

Beyond the problem of asserting nonsense on stilts, “small gods” are pretenders to the throne, because what is small could conceivably be bigger, and capital-g God (the Father) has no growing to do.

Yet logic only goes so far. While Elijah recognized the voice of God in a tiny whispering sound (1 Kings 19:12), the same God spoke in a basso profundo from a cloud at the Transfiguration (Mk 9:7). As David and Goliath could attest, questions of degree are often more important than questions of size.

In contexts like this, philosophy and theology dance with each other, and not in the forced or cringe-making way that attracts condescending observers like crows to shiny objects. Think of the tango in “Scent of a Woman,” or the ballet that shorebirds do with waves. With no unrealized potential to grow into – even in Mary’s womb before He was born, Jesus was fully rather than “potentially” human –  God cannot be inert. On the contrary, wrote John the Evangelist, God is love, and the essence of love is the act of self-giving. Love would have to be that way, wouldn’t it, springing as it does from the template laid down by a triune God? Some beach glass, then: who God is and what God does are inseparable, and neither part of that leaves any room for improvement.

Disciples of John the Baptist glimpsed God’s perfect unity when they came (in Mt 11:2-5) to ask Jesus if He was the “expected one.” Jesus did not answer their question with another question, or touch a finger to his nose as though affirming their guess in a game of charades. Instead, He said, “Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the good news preached to them.”

What John’s disciples got from Jesus, in other words, was the unabridged version of “By their fruits, you shall know them.” Jesus had already taught His own disciples to pray that the Father’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” He had worked miracles, explained forgiveness, turned fishermen into “fishers of men,” and encouraged them to learn trust from the lilies of the field.

All of that backs my claim that small gods end up in fantasy novels. Large gods inspire multi-volume love stories. And when the glee club at the U.S. Naval Academy breaks into a stirring rendition of “Eternal father, strong to save,” it’s not Poseidon or Neptune who receives the prayer offered by their harmonizing voices.

Where would the assertion about “small gods” that got to me have come from? It bobs like a marker buoy over the crab trap of confusion, and my guess is that the man who dropped it into the wide water suffers from misplaced tolerance. David Mills recently described a related pitfall while explaining how “spiritual” sounds better to some audiences than “religious” does, and why that is a mistake:

“The man wasting away from pancreatic cancer will get no help nor comfort from the ‘spiritual,’ which will seem a lot less friendly and comforting when he feels pain morphine won’t suppress,” wrote Mills. “He has no one to beg for help, no one to ask for comfort, no one to be with him, no one to meet when he crosses from this world to the next. He wants what religion promises. And he is right to do so.”

There is more going on in that paragraph than I can unpack while gliding over the wave tops of Christian thought, so let me close by noting that musicians often write about the same search for security (see, for example, King David’s work in Psalm 23). Nowadays, the search colors everything from “Stand by Me” to “Landslide,” but it’s strongest in gospel music. Here, for example, is part of the lyric from a Patty Griffin song: “Calling the sheep in for the evening / There’s a voice, calls above the howling wind / It says “Come rest beside my little fire; we’ll ride out the storm that’s coming in.”

That invitation is something an old priest might also have sung, though he wouldn’t sound so much like an angel playing guitar.  But as the Capuchin friar I’m thinking of told an anguished writer, “True belief is a decision. It’s also a gift. Accept the gift, and you will make the decision.”

For a column published April 17, Noonan used her coffee-klatch writing style to revisit an essay from 2002 in which she had criticized church leaders up to and including then-pope John Paul II for being out of touch or stupidly careerist (as the cardinals shepherding Catholics in Washington, D.C. and Boston at the time proved to be). Using her eight-year-old column as a launch pad, Noonan suggested that the Vatican needs new blood. Of the men there, she wrote, “they are defensive and they are angry, and they will not turn the church around on their own.”

Well. With respect to the abuse scandals that people are talking about, Pope Benedict has already accepted the resignations of several bishops and pledged to muck out the stables. The pope’s recent meeting with victims of clerical sexual abuse in Malta proved yet again that his instincts, at least, are pastoral rather than defensive. Whatever anger he has seems focused on those priests who betrayed their vows to the detriment of everyone around them. Noonan wrote nothing specifically about the current pope, which is a shame: she ought to remember that the “Panzerkardinal” and “Rottweiler” nicknames that Joseph Ratzinger once wore with more grace than they deserved were given to him by opponents within the church who feared his intelligence and his willingness to emulate You-Know-Who in throwing miscreants out of the temple whenever necessary.

Few things are more frustrating than watching a columnist joust with a straw man. Noonan wants grumpy pastors to step aside for joyful ones, but is there anyone out there who really thinks that angry old priests will turn the church around on their own?

When she’s not pulling straw out of her hair because her own rhetoric knocked her over, Noonan knows as well as anyone else that change in the church has theological implications, which is why devout Catholics usually look to the Holy Spirit for that, rather than to the next crop of pastoral appointments from local bishops. Moreover, tried-and-true prescriptions like “Reform your lives and believe in the gospel” apply to Christians of all ages; the gospel has perennial currency that faded slogans like “Question Authority” do not.

Why would Peggy Noonan –-of all people– make me reach for my trusty sword? Her writing shades toward sweetness rather than sarcasm, but it can still be muddle-headed. The problem here is twofold. First, as John Haas did an excellent job of showing just last week, Noonan did not acknowledge work that has already been done. Second, she mixed good and bad advice. “Most especially and most immediately,” Noonan wrote at full boil, Church leaders “need to elevate women.” The irony in calling for institutional housecleaning and then describing it as women’s work seems to have flown right over her head.

Beyond that, the ambiguity in her main recommendation seems dishonest. Noonan is not often coy. She could have written that “we” need to elevate women, but instead she wrote that “they” should do that. She has senior clerics in mind, but gave herself wiggle room, because she’s not keen to admit that many women already hold leadership positions in the Church. Noonan also seems uncomfortable with honest conversation about what elevating more women to leadership positions might actually mean. In other words, Noonan concealed her hand, and then overplayed it.

Recall that in 1994, her favorite pope reaffirmed the longstanding teaching that for reasons that cannot be reduced to “patriarchal privilege,” the Church has no authority to ordain women to the priesthood. Noonan remembers that. She also knows that some other Christians think differently, and so she segued from a call for “elevating” women to a less-controversial assurance that any women involved with decision-making in chancery offices would question attempts to transfer priests with a history of abuse.

I like the mama bear imagery that Noonan wants to bank on, but you can transpose that assertion into politics to see how empty it is. Mike Brown and Alberto Gonzales “failed upward,” but so did Janet Reno and Jamie Gorelick. And while there are men who must be reckoned conniving and exclusionary, the same could be said about some women.

That brings us to Nicholas Kristof. On April 18, he devoted his New York Times column to a description of the two Catholic churches that he has encountered while searching out grist for his metaphor mill. One Catholic Church is a grassroots organization that comforts people and saves lives around the world, while the other is an old boys’ club with posh digs in Vatican City.

If you’re a nun who drives a Jeep along heavily-rutted roads to visit orphans, Kristof respects you, but if you’re a bishop who “obsesses” over dogma, Kristof won’t give you the time of day — and this despite the fact that obsessing over dogma of a different kind is part of his job at the best-known bastion of secular materialist journalism.

The dualism here brooks no rebuttal. Priests who want to build condom factories in the Vatican to “save lives” rank in his estimation with raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, but anyone who thinks “sheepdogs” still have roles to play in what some of us call the “economy of salvation” must be part of the problem.

Kristof claims to admire “a Church that Mary could love,” and he’s pretty sure that the one we have now makes her cry. Even if he’s right, you’d think he’d have more respect for Jewish mothers, especially that one. Yet Kristof treats the mother of Jesus like a hothouse flower. He can’t find the “steel magnolia” in the Infancy narratives, or the Wedding at Cana, or the scene at the foot of the cross where Jesus died. Fresh from auditing one of those Dan Brown classes in How to Make Church History Sound Like a Conspiracy, Kristof ignores Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to cite Gnostic texts (!) and mutter about the allegedly willful mistranslation of the New Testament letter from Paul to the Romans, which of course downplayed the one-and-only mention of a female “apostle” named Junia.

What fresh hell have we here? Saint Paul thanks a woman named Junia in Romans 16:7, alright, but over at Touchstone magazine, where they take their exegesis seriously, I learned from a book review by John Hunwicke that her “apostleship” isn’t the open-and-shut case that Kristof thinks it is. Junia is “well-known among the apostles” in the same way that a later writer might say that “William the Conqueror is well-known among historians.” Moreover, the on-again, off-again controversy over her gender likely owes more to Martin Luther than to any first-team defenders of those Scary Dudes in Rome: “It is probably due to [Luther] that some north European Protestant translations went for ‘Junias’ (masculine), while versions in Spain and Italy, where the dead repressive hand of Romish tyranny had more influence, stayed with ‘Junia’ (feminine),” Hunwicke explains mischeviously. No one seems to have been discomfited by Junia’s gender in Christianity’s first 16 centuries. Egad! It’s another brick in the wall, and another reason to be skeptical of the Nick Kristof theory that early Christian transition from “house churches” to public spaces was bad news for women.

What Noonan and Kristof do not seem to grasp is that church-fixing is something like barn-building. Neither task requires aiming slingshots at old men or appealing to The Feminine Mystique. Mary had the right perspective way back when, at that wedding party where the wine ran out and she looked from her son to the catering staff before telling them to “Do whatever He tells you.”

Could anyone familiar with the people involved think the Old Gray Lady of American journalism would pass up a chance to encumber a target who rejects conventional wisdom about abortion, gay marriage, and the ordination of women?

Nothing else perfumes the air of a newsroom like a whiff of self-righteousness, or intoxicates certain reporters faster than evidence of mismanagement and hypocrisy at the Vatican.

When it comes to brand management at the New York Times, the snark of Maureen Dowd, the delusion of David Brooks, the bitterness of Paul Krugman, and the name-dropping of Thomas Friedman are well known, but recent developments mark perhaps the first time that that quartet of vices has purchased vacation property: Snark, delusion, bitterness, and shallowness — the Four Horsemen of the Obamalypse — now gallop freely between different sections of the publication.

Senior religion correspondent Laurie Goodstein unwittingly exposed this pattern in her March 24 story about the case of a priest in Wisconsin who sexually abused as many as 200 deaf boys. Together with a clutch of similar stories about the abhorrent behavior of some priests in Ireland and Germany, the Goodstein report on Fr. Lawrence C. Murphy was meant to shed light on a culture of buck-passing that allegedly infected even Pope Benedict XVI.

Ms. Goodstein has written that she strives to give views other than her own a fair shake. I believe her. Beyond that, I appreciate reporters who are game enough to spar verbally with comedian Stephen Colbert, as Goodstein did when divisions within the Anglican Communion were making news. But in trying to undercut the moral witness of the pope by suggesting that as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger he was too forgiving of the monstrous Fr. Murphy, Goodstein committed errors of fact, interpretation, context, and journalistic procedure that together make nonsense of any claim to objectivity on the part of the New York Times.

Here (for the benefit of Maureen Dowd and others who have forgotten Journalism 101) are some of the ways that Goodstein and her editors botched the “Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys” story. Anyone following the hyperlinks will see that I’ve paraphrased published comments from priests, laypeople, and journalists not working for the New York Times.

Issue One: Chronology. If you want to charge a man with trying to cover up a scandal, the questions that demand answers are “What did he know and when did he know it?” But Fr. Murphy disgraced his priesthood long before Pope Benedict was in any position to notice, as even the New York Daily News observed. When Fr. Murphy’s conduct eventually came to the attention of the Vatican, then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s office approved a request for trial, and waived the statute of limitations that would otherwise have precluded trying a priest for crimes he had committed more than twenty years before.

Issue Two: Sourcing. Would you write an investigative report that relied on documents provided by a morally compromised bishop whom you had already written sympathetically about, and lawyers with a financial interest in squeezing reparations out of the institution you’re looking at? Would you also miss a chance to interview the judge who presided over the trial relevant to your story? If you answered “no” to both questions, you’re a step ahead of the New York Times.

Issue Three: Interpretation. Here’s a pop quiz: 1. Metaphorically speaking, is it more appropriate to think of the church as a hospital for sinners or a hotel for saints? 2. Has Pope Benedict, with an eye on sexual abuse cases worldwide, warned bluntly and repeatedly against “filth” in the church? 3. Do Cardinals supervise the daily activities of most priests?

The questions are not hard. Reporters like John Allen, and comedians like Stephen Colbert, would answer them correctly without even stopping to think. But neither Allen nor Colbert works for the New York Times, and one could be forgiven for supposing that the people who do cash checks from the Times seem to think that Easter is mainly an excuse to wear pastels and eat chocolate bunnies.

Issue Four: Context. You wouldn’t know from reading the Times that Pope Benedict has influential enemies within the church, or that he has been out front in fighting the scourge of predatory priests. For context there, it’s hard to beat the observations of Lutheran theologian John Stephenson, who writes (among other perceptive things) that “Neither apostates within Holy Christendom nor naked unbelievers outside her borders will ever forgive Ratzinger for the grave breach of secularist, pluralist etiquette involved in the first volume of his Jesus of Nazareth. It goes without saying (and around the Holy Week of each year the several forms of mainstream media say it loudly, often, and emphatically) that Jesus was an ordinary man, a wacko apocalyptist, or a failed political revolutionary. Stones must fly and clubs be brandished against a learned man fully familiar with all the ‘Jesus of history’ literature from Reimarus to the present, who winsomely draws on believing scholarship of all confessions to offer a calm and cogent argument that the real, actual Jesus is the one who meets us in the Gospel record.”

Dr. Stephenson does not mean to suggest that papal handling of moral issues has been above reproach, and I would not say that, either. But neither will I pretend to objectivity that I do not have: Pope Benedict writes accessibly. He brought back the red shoes, unshackled the Latin Mass, and annoys professional dissidents just by getting up in the morning. He doesn’t think “children” and “church” are opposing terms. What’s not to like? Beyond that, I once dabbled in journalism, and learned from my mistakes. Taking occasional shots at big media goes with the territory. In this case, the New York Times deserves a few licks. It’s a matter of “Here I stand; I can do no other.” And if Laurie Goodstein has to Google the origins of that phrase, religion reporting at the paper of record has fallen on hard times indeed.

{This article previously appeared in the American Spectator online and is used by permission of the author.]

Having been advised that female CEOs run only three percent of the Fortune 500 companies, and that women earn 78 cents for every dollar that men earn in comparable jobs (about which more later), the president wants some two dozen department heads to help remedy those deficiencies in the name of "fulfill[ing] the promise of democracy for all our people."

Before signing the Council creation document, President Obama described the new panel as having "a mission that dates back to our founding," and quoted former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to the effect that "responsibility for the advancement of women is not the job of any one agency; it’s the job of all of them."

Some people love the initiative. Others question its usefulness, suggesting that ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Despite the grandiose rhetoric with which the president welcomed his latest creation into the fold, the new council is lower in the political pecking order than a blue-ribbon presidential commission staffed with marquee names like former HP CEO Carly Fiorina or current Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy would have been. If the Balrog of Bad Intentions comes calling, the council may not be strong enough to shout "You shall not pass!" without sounding like a hobbit holding a Russian dictionary and a badly-translated "reset" button.

The East Room was jammed for the signing ceremony. Interestingly, the guest list released by the White House revealed that professional advocates for abortion comprised the largest single group of attendees after politicians.

Pretty words about fairness for all could not obscure the fact that the president pitched most of his remarks to the pro-choice wing of "grievance feminism." As a result, representatives from influential contrarian groups like Feminists for Life, Concerned Women for America, and the Independent Women’s Forum were nowhere to be found.

Outside the field of dreams where "Clueless Joe" Biden roams the baselines looking for a fly ball with which to try out his new glove, all of Washington now knows that only a fairy godmother and a pair of talking mice will get pro-life feminists to official functions of the Obama administration. William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal described the new environment as condescending to "any American woman deemed insufficiently progressive on the received wisdom." Although the White House council is supposed to improve the lot of all women, EMILY’s List thumped Susan B. Anthony’s.

If you’re unfamiliar with those lobbying groups, the contrast in their names deserves scrutiny: Pro-life feminists find inspiration in the example of a real woman, while people who fundraise in the name of abortion rights identify themselves with a cynical acronym ("Early Money Is Like Yeast").

For President Obama, anti-abortion arguments are abstractions to which lip service must be paid for the sake of maintaining bipartisan appearances. Not surprisingly, the president and his inner circle treat pro-life views either as rebukes to be laughed off by underlings or as tools by which annoying conservatives keep trying to thwart political appointments and plans for universal health care.

Think back to Animal Farm and assume for the sake of argument that some women are more equal than others. George Orwell’s unvarnished distillation of what happens when socialist theory meets socialist practice explains why pro-life women are rightly regarded as threats to the increasingly tattered myth that pro-abortion politicians actually advance the pro-life cause.

Having already moved to rescind a rule that allowed health care workers to opt out of abortion counseling if it violated their beliefs, and knowing that a lawyer with a history of defending pornographers would be confirmed to the number two post in the Justice Department, President Obama had no desire to draw renewed attention to questions about how those decisions or unprincipled leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services might impact the lives of American women and girls.

Fortunately, the president keeps his flunkies numbered for just such an occasion, and one or more of them had briefed the senior teleprompter on the "78 cents for women to every dollar earned by men" statistic.

That particular ratio has become a teddy bear for people whose definition of "comparable jobs" sometimes stretches enough to mix pilots with Pilates instructors. Other researchers do honest work, but fail to account for the impact of things like maternity leave and sex segregation by occupation. "Due diligence" in this administration does not necessarily involve looking into different points of view, else someone might also have noticed that while a pay gap between men and women does exist, several studies have pegged it at considerably less than 22 cents on the dollar.

Columnist Ilana Mercer was not at the ceremony, but asked the kind of economically-informed question that rarely percolates up through discussions of pay equity: If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, wouldn’t men have long-since priced themselves out of the job market? The fact that men haven’t done that might mean that different abilities and experiences are at work, Mercer guessed, "rather than a conspiracy to suppress women."

Mercer’s glass slipper of a response to equity issues will not fit anyone in the Obama administration, but it still attracts more positive attention than Christina Hoff Summers’ argument that boys rather than girls need help, thanks to a culture that derides men as oafs, and an educational system that considers masculinity the root of intolerance.

Governor Sarah Palin, abortion survivor Gianna Jessen , and radio host Laura Ingraham all have a better shot at honorary membership on the White House Council for Women and Girls than Ilana Mercer and Christina Hoff Summers do. Yet while the Obama administration has little time for women like these, the rest of us are not similarly hobbled, and that is reason enough to be grateful.

This essay originally appeared in American Spectator Online ( www.spectator.org ) and is reprinted here by permission.

Al Pacino and Sophia nose along on leashes while Walter trots nearby. Often we are shadowed by a black cat that follows from a distance like a scout escorting a wagon train.

On walks with the family pets, I find it easy to remember how one person can bless another without even knowing it.

Jennifer Fulwiler is one of the people who have blessed me unawares. In blogging about her journey from atheism to the Catholic faith, Jennifer has strewn my own path with presents in the same way that crushed glass mixed with asphalt makes a moonlit road look paved with glitter. Moreover, thanks to her straightforward style, Jennifer never forces her readers to become Riders of the Purple Page.

The essay “Special Yet Small” describes her first attempts to come to grips with the night sky. It was written as a look back on her own thought to a time when she had accepted the possibility of God as Creator, but not yet as Father. The question of scale was a sticking point. What Jennifer wanted to know, she writes, is “if mankind has such a huge role to play in all of creation, then what’s up with all these other stars and planets?”

In other words, in a playground the size of the universe, why would God bother with us? Why do we live on what Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards call “The Privileged Planet“?

Biologists and astronomers point out that our whole solar system seems uniquely structured to protect Earth and help people learn about the nature of the cosmos. One visitor to Jennifer’s blog raised the stakes even higher by remarking that in order for us to exist, the whole universe has to be the size that it is, because “If it were smaller it would blow apart before having time to create the second-generation stars that we need to be the sun for us, [and] if it were bigger it would have collapsed into a black hole before becoming big enough for us.” As intriguing as such observations are, they go no further than science itself can.

How then to account for the Incarnation, for a God whom Jesus told us to pray to as “Daddy,” or for the life and mission of Christ as summarized in scripture verses like John 3:16?

That Jesus would do what he did for us is an immensely humbling thought. What I have slowly come to realize is that even the people close to Jesus are worthy of admiration.

Start with the small stuff: I can’t keep my retriever from lunging after a tennis ball, much less tame a wolf the way Saint Francis did, befriend a lion (per Saint Jerome), or cajole a bear into carrying a backpack as Saint Corbinian is reputed to have done, in an exploit that would have been forgotten outside Bavaria had it not found its way onto the papal coat of arms.

Remember Pope Benedict’s visit to America? The pundit Spengler was so impressed by what Benedict said then that he borrowed a scriptural image to describe the papal message as “I’ve got a mustard seed and I’m not afraid to use it.” Confidence like that can only be found where little people embrace, and are embraced by, big truths.

It was Benedict, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who first schooled me on the cosmic implications of the liturgical calendar kept by the Church. Without him, I’d have missed the significance of celebrating the birthday of John the Baptist as the days begin to shorten, and the birthday of Jesus six months later, as the days begin to lengthen. Benedict explained John’s “He must increase, but I must decrease” in a way that tied Jesus and John to us and to what the ancients called the “music of the spheres.” In so doing, he taught me to hear reverberations I had never heard before.

That is rarefied air, however, and on dog walks I think more about blog posts than about books. Interestingly, what Jennifer asked about our place in the scheme of things has the same tone of puzzled awe that Elizabeth had when greeting Mary (in Luke 1:43) with the exclamation “Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”

People are not the only recipients of providential care. The sun rises on the evil and the good; the rain falls on the just and on the unjust, and every dog has his day. Re-frame Jennifer’s question, and it is still possible to ask why so many lilies of the field outshine even King Solomon in all his glory.

The answer has to do with God’s out-sized generosity. What we often regard as extravagance is better understood as love.

Consider the insights of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, who like other songwriters can sometimes be sublime theologians. When I hear “So much love to make up, everywhere you turn, love we have wasted on the way; so much water moving underneath the bridge, let the water come and carry us away,” I can’t help but think in terms of what sounds like joyful abandonment to baptismal imagery. There is no such thing as wasted love, only wasted opportunity. But surrender of the kind implied in that song is the kind of thing that can only be offered after you walk through a dark night.

We are perhaps closer to answering Jennifer’s question, although it boggles the mind to think that the creator of the universe also delights in being the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not to mention the God of Cathleen, Leslie, Chuck, Suzanne, and countless other people.

Trying to understand why God loves us as He does, I went back to scripture via the pope, and found this: “The true God is, of his own nature, being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being-with (Holy Spirit),” Benedict wrote in Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions. Moreover, “Man is in the image of God precisely because the being for, from, and with constitute the basic anthropological shape.”

That insight is yet another blessing, and another reason to continue walking pets past the orange halos of street lights through deepening gradations of blue while Ursa Major patrols the night sky, a big bear as enduring as the faithful dog that followed Tobias and the archangel Raphael in the Book of Tobit.

Dr. James Dobson of “Focus on the Family” thinks Bill’s huggy-bear visual has been displaced by Barack’s thuggy-bear soundbite. Dobson grabbed recent headlines by blasting a speech that Obama made two years ago. Although the evangelical leader was late with a critique, he came prepared. This was not an instance of stumbling upon a transcript of the senator’s remarks while strolling with a shotgun over one shoulder like Elmer Fudd in wabbit season; this was personal. Dobson was in the speech. Obama had identified him with one kind of Christianity and the Rev. Al Sharpton with another, while mocking the futility of teaching either kind of Christianity in a pluralist society, even one that had hypothetically expelled non-Christians.

Mesmerized by his own wit, Obama apparently forgot that neither Dobson nor Sharpton pastor a congregation, and neither leads a school of theological thought. The analogy yoking the two men together in a parody of yin and yang was based solely on name recognition. Consequently, it proved as durable as a Shoji screen at a professional rodeo. Worse, Obama welded the facile comparison to a “spiritual but not religious” thesis bedeviled by what Dobson calls a “fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.” Dobson described the result as an appeal to “lowest common denominator” morality foreign to any people the Founders thought they were building a new country for.

Mr. Senior Lecturer in Constitutional Law tried to blunt that critique by saying that Dobson had been “making stuff up,” which is not a smart way to take issue with a man whose web site links to a transcript of the speech you are talking about. Apart from the argument over whether Obama was really just saying that “people of faith” need to speak in a “universal language” that promotes “open and vigorous debate,” the speech and its aftermath are also notable for other reasons. As George Neumayr pointedly observed, Obama mistakenly assumes that secularism is synonymous with reason, while religion is what happens when “mere opinion” ponders Big Questions like “is that all there is?” Both propositions are ahistorical, and both have been refuted many times over.

Perhaps Obama heard that it is impossible to reason your way to faith, and bounced from that truism to the conclusion that faith must therefore be unreasonable. He would not have been the first to make that mistake. Had he wrestled more thoughtfully with the original premise, he might have come to realize that true belief is both a decision and a gift: “Accept the gift and you will make the decision,” as Fr. Benedict Groeschel has been reminding other Christians for years.

Obama did scold those liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as “inherently irrational or intolerant.” Faith can be rational, he conceded, presumably because the burden of proof there is a little lower than it is for “reasonable.” He also said that democracy demands that religious concerns be translated into vocabulary less likely to annoy atheists or people of rival faiths. James Dobson took umbrage at that assertion, as we’ve seen, but Dobson did not reply as he could have: that democracy demands no such thing. If it did, states like Pennsylvania and Maryland would be reckoned un-American for having been chartered as havens for pious colonists.

How Obama could praise the biblical cadences of speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. while simultaneously holding Christians hostage to a peculiarly cranky notion of what pluralism requires is one of the wonders of this campaign season. An appeal to the natural law might have been enough to keep Dr. Dobson from fulminating against lowest common denominator morality, but we’ll never know, because Obama made no such appeal: he was too busy fishing for applause with a line about how the Sermon on the Mount is “a passage so radical that it’s doubtful our own Defense Department would survive its application.”

Shall we raise the bet made in that quip for the sake of proving a point? Obama cloaked false modesty in wry humor. Is he really “doubtful,” and does he mean that we should be, too? Not on your life. For one thing, he’s all about hope (he even hopes that Republicans won’t try to caricature him as a scary black man with a funny name, but you never know, because he’s been told that Republicans are into despair). For another thing, the senator is certain that the Sermon on the Mount would obliterate the Defense Department if more of us started living up to it. When the meek inherit the Earth, it will not be because they blackmailed the boisterous or built enough missiles to advance a threat of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Among the many things that have not occurred to Barack Obama, we may suppose that he’s forgotten that virtue is more often ascribed to individuals than to institutions. It’s also safe to say that he doesn’t think of the Defense Department as even occasionally performing the kind of rear-guard action necessary in a fallen world, so that the rest of us can go on about the business of giving peace a chance. Say it with me, brothers and sisters: Those who live by the sword also die by the sword. But somebody ought to tell Obama that when Jesus praised the faith of a Roman centurion, there is no record of our Savior having added, “and find a new career, bub.” Moreover, “prooftexting” of the kind Obama flirts with amounts to Exegesis for Dummies, not least because the devil quotes scriptures better than we can.

Perhaps the biggest irony in what Obama said is how quickly the appearance of evenhandedness wilts when you follow the senator’s own advice. On the one hand, Obama admits, “if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.” For that reason, “secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square.” But on the other hand, the man who has repeatedly said that “words matter” wants religious believers to abandon religious language in public discourse. Obama’s advice to secularist Democrats is to take believers seriously, but not on their own terms.

We can’t base policy on religion, he says, because religion ultimately rejects the kind of compromise that politics depends on. Why Obama felt the need to impart advice like that to his fellow Americans is anyone’s guess: Washington, D.C. will not soon be confused with Geneva as it was under John Calvin. But Obama was talking primarily to other progressive activists. Near the end of his speech, he asked whether somebody would please call Child Protective Services about what Abraham almost did to Isaac. The subterranean current of fear under his advice suggests that we all know you can’t be too careful with potentially unreasonable or zealous believers, so it may perhaps be best to neuter religious speech up front, strictly in the interest of promoting social cohesion. To put the matter differently: it’s a jungle out there, so we’d better make sure the lion sleeps tonight.

Fortunately, none of us need settle for the porridge that Obama was offering two years ago. We got better advice just two months ago, from a German with deep-set eyes and red shoes. When he visited America, Asia Times columnist Spengler summarized the impact of his religious faith as “I have a mustard seed and I’m not afraid to use it.”

Pope Benedict articulated what Barack Obama could not: “Perhaps America’s brand of secularism poses a particular problem: it allows for professing belief in God, and respects the public role of religion and the Churches, but at the same time it can subtly reduce religious belief to a lowest common denominator. Faith becomes a passive acceptance that certain things ‘out there’ are true, but without practical relevance for everyday life. The result is a growing separation of faith from life: living ‘as if God did not exist’. This is aggravated by an individualistic and eclectic approach to faith and religion: far from a Catholic approach to ‘thinking with the Church’, each person believes he or she has a right to pick and choose, maintaining external social bonds but without an integral, interior conversion to the law of Christ. Consequently, rather than being transformed and renewed in mind, Christians are easily tempted to conform themselves to the spirit of this age (cf. Rom 12:3).”

Let’s not give into temptation, especially when it arrives as a “fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution” hermetically sealed in a tin of progressivism with a label that fakes an inclusiveness it never had and can only tolerate on its own terms.

With apologies to Charlton Heston and a tip of the hat to the SCOTUS majority in District of Columbia v. Heller, Barack Obama and his ilk can have my religious vocabulary when they pry it from my cold dead hands.

Like Newman eventually did, I look to the Pope and the Catechism of the Catholic Church for theological guidance. Accordingly, I had promised myself that I was not going to write about Anglican troubles.

But that was before Nicholas Thomas Wright, Bishop of Durham, England and fourth-ranking Anglican prelate, volunteered an insufferably condescending defense of his colleague Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Now I feel like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

You already know that in a recent interview with the BBC, Williams mused that the British legal system ought to formally accommodate Islamic Sharia law where it can, in the interest of greater social cohesion and because Muslim influence in Britain will not wane anytime soon. There was more than a hint of the apocryphal Victorian resolve to "lie back and think of England" in this prescription.

Coming as it did from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Williams' preemptive capitulation and nonchalant attitude toward taking a sledgehammer to one of the pillars of western civilization was viewed with dismay in many circles. The editor in chief of this magazine even dubbed Williams "Islam's most recent celebrity convert."

RET, as Bob Tyrrell is known around these parts, had company. Satirist David "Iowahawk" Burge lampooned Williams with a brilliant update of The Canterbury Tales. On the other side of the Atlantic, Craig Brown rewrote "the cat sat on the mat" in over-processed prose that sounded like it had come from the Archbishop himself. Meanwhile in Missouri, Christopher Johnson tracked events with the same bemused diligence he applies to all things Anglican, pausing to note that the celebrated N.T. Wright had defended his colleague in perhaps the worst possible fashion.

As one who characterized what the Bush administration did in response to the attacks of 9/11 as "astonishingly immature," and as a champion of what some Protestants call the "new perspective on Paul," Wright has long been controversial. The man knows what the back of a podium looks like, and can usually dream up something sonorous and theological before his first cup of coffee. But what he had to say in defense of Rowan Williams was spectacularly ill-considered.

In an essay posted February 13, Wright said Williams was talking to lawyers, focused on civil rather than criminal matters, and had distanced himself from those aspects of Sharia law that non-Muslims frequently find abominable. If the rest of you were not so twitchy about Islam, he implied, you might understand that the relationship of individual conscience to society is an important question.

By way of concluding comment, and in spite of that fact that Williams had two days before allowed for the possibility that his remarks caused may have caused "distress or misunderstanding," Wright huffed, "We should be grateful that we have an Archbishop capable of such work, not demand that his every word be instantly comprehensible by the casual uninformed onlooker."

The aforementioned Mr. Johnson rejected that defense "Wright quick," so to speak, observing that "the idea that Britain or anybody else can cherry-pick which aspects of Islamic law will be accommodated and which will not is the apotheosis of the term 'pipe dream.'"

IT'S SAFE TO SAY that British triumphalism of the kind that once set a poem to music with the idea that a singer "would not cease from mental fight or let my sword sleep in my hand till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land" is long gone and little missed, but one does not lightly substitute Mecca for Jerusalem.

Wright's tone was more irksome than his surprising failure to grasp the idea that Sharia law grows like kudzu wherever it gains a foothold, precisely because Islam does not make the Christian and Enlightenment distinction between church and state. Moreover, the under-remarked aspect of Wright's "you people just don't understand" defense is that it's lifted from the same playbook that some Episcopalian and Anglican leaders have used to criticize conservative African bishops who think homosexual conduct is sinful even if a bishop in New Hampshire says differently.

Wright does not explain how people who allegedly misunderstand the Archbishop of Canterbury can nevertheless grasp the overtly theological language in the Book of Common Prayer. Similarly, too many of the voices raised against Nigerian prelate Peter Akinola and his allies stop just short of suggesting that conservative African theologians would agree with progressive churchmen if only they had a little more seasoning and a lot more practice at reading between the scriptural lines.

Snootiness is not unique to the Anglican Communion, of course. At least one Catholic bishop objects to a more accurate translation of liturgical prayers on the grounds that accuracy might be "pastorally challenging" and "hard for ordinary churchgoers to understand." But there are more reasons to call balderdash on the benighted idea that an interview aimed at barristers ought not also be bandied about by barkeeps, ballerinas, and perhaps even bosun's mates on banana boats.

Had Rowan Williams been as technical as Tom Wright claims he was being, he would not have shared his thoughts so willingly with a non-specialist at the BBC. Had the people arguing with the archbishop been as immune to nuance as Wright seems to believe they are, Williams' cautious advocacy of Sharia law would not have been parodied as quickly and skillfully as it was.

Even the left-leaning Guardian, hardly a bastion of lawyers or theologians, correctly paraphrased his assertion that laws are not just instruments of control, but also public affirmations of "the affiliations that people owe to one another."

In short, we must look to none other than legendary lisper Daffy Duck for a deft description of the defense offered by the Doctor of Divinity in Durham, because it's "dethpicable."

Heroes All

Nicole doesn't know my name, but she knows my car and my weakness for caramel. Not knowing what to call me has never kept the friendly smile off her face or the lilt out of her voice. On those occasions when I ask for a foofoo drink or say “surprise me,” she never has to ask whether I want whipped cream, and when she wishes any customer a good day, the twinkle in her eyes proves that she means it.

That a barista who has never called me Patrick knows my preference for “Black Forest Latte” is enough. Moreover, realizing that is what has helped bring me to amicable terms with the idea of saluting little-known and even anonymous saints.

I used to wonder what the point was of remembering heroic virtue untethered to particular persons. I now see that observing feasts like that of “Isaac Jogues and the North American Martyrs” is no slight to the seven other missionaries to Native Americans killed in the seventeenth century along with the “Apostle of the Mohawks.” We know the names of all eight, but Jogues typically gets top billing, and that's OK.

To Protestant eyes, the Catholic calendar must sometimes seem chock-a-block with remembrance that borders on idolatry. There are about ten thousand named saints and “beati” (think non-commissioned officers) in the Catholic canon, but no definitive head count exists.

Some of the people in the catalog of saints strike me as odd, too. As my friend Carl says, it's probably inevitable that “heroic virtue” would look odd to those of us who can't yet claim it, in spite of the fact that all Christians are called to be saints.

In Precise Order

On this score as on so many others, it helps to be fortified by “Vitamin B-16,” because Benedict XVI provides useful guidance: “The great feasts that structure the year of faith are feasts of Christ and precisely as such are ordered toward the one God who revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush and chose Israel as the confessor of faith in his uniqueness,” wrote Joseph Ratzinger in The Spirit of the Liturgybefore being chosen to succeed St. Peter.

Meditating on time and space in the liturgy, Ratzinger then addressed the symbolism through Christian history of the cosmos itself:

In addition to the sun, which is the image of Christ, there is the moon, which has no light of its own but shines with a brightness that comes from the sun. This is a sign to us that we men are in constant need of a “little” light, whose hidden light helps us to know and love the light of the Creator, God one and triune.

“That is why the feasts of the saints from earliest times have formed part of the Christian year,” he continues.

We have already encountered Mary, whose person is so closely interwoven with the mystery of Christ that the development of the Christmas cycle inevitably introduced a Marian note into the Church's year. The Marian dimension of the christological feasts was made visible. Then, in addition, come the commemorations of the apostles and martyrs and, finally, the memorials of the saints of every century.

One might say that the saints are, so to speak, new Christian constellations, in which the richness of God's goodness is reflected. Their light, coming from God, enables us to know better the interior richness of God's great light, which we cannot comprehend in the refulgence of its glory.

To find sacramental elements among what agnostics like Carl Sagan famously called billions and billions of stars is no stretch for a pope of Benedict's intellectual gifts, especially when the Catholic calendar itself is packed with clues for astronomers of a theological bent.

Cosmic Significance

I had not realized how much thought went into the liturgical calendar, and how cosmic in a Grateful Dead and Wayne's World sense it actually was, until I read this in a chapter about “Sacred Time”:

The fact that the dates of the Lord's conception and birth originally had a cosmic significance means that Christians can take on the challenge of the sun cult and incorporate it positively into the theology of the Christmas feast…. Again and again, the Fathers take up the verse about the sun that we have already quoted from Psalm 19 ["God has pitched there a tent for the sun; it comes forth like a bridegroom from his chamber, and like an athlete joyfully runs its course"]. For the early Church, this became the real Christmas psalm: the sun, that is, Christ, is like a bridegroom coming forth from his chamber. An echo of the Marian mystery was also heard in this psalm, which was interpreted as a prophecy of the Christ. Between the two dates of March 25 and December 25 comes the feast of the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist, on June 24, at the time of the summer solstice. The link between the dates can now be seen as a liturgical and cosmic expression of the Baptist's words: “He [Christ] must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:30). The birthday of St. John the Baptist takes place on the date when the days begin to shorten, just as the birthday of Christ takes place when they begin again to lengthen.

In other words, if, like me, you thought that the “Light of the World” title for Christ was an impressive but largely decorative accolade introduced by a young Church that never ran out of good things to say about Jesus, you're wrong (or only partly right, in that the title is ancient). Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) goes to the calendar and says, in effect: “Looky here, pilgrim — the Church fathers weren't kidding. You've heard about Saint Francis and the wolf of Gubbio, and about Saint Jerome and the lion. You know that even an old socialist like Arlo Guthrie releases his music on a label called ‘Rising Son Records.’ So raise your sights a little bit. ‘Be not afraid,’ in the favorite phrase of my esteemed predecessor. Cosmos and history together speak of Christ. And if the analogy helps, think of saints as stars in the Christian cosmos, whether you know their biographies or not.”

Not that our German shepherd is given to expressions like “looky here,” but I don't think he'd find serious fault with my paraphrase of his thoughts about liturgy and time; the insights seemed worth recording.

Patrick O'Hannigan is a technical writer and self-described “paragraph farmer” in California. His commentary has appeared in New Oxford Review, The American Spectator Online and New Times (San Luis Obispo), among other places.

The “I Got You, Babe” Fallacy

Murphy-O’Connor’s book is a biography, and reading it got me thinking about how misunderstood Paul has been. Because I sometimes think in musical terms, it then occurred to me that some Pauline myths can be summarized in song titles.

Although his purpose was to convey a sense of Paul’s life and mission rather than to defend Christian faith or otherwise engage in apologetics, Murphy-O’Connor gently puts the lie to at least three such fallacies.

Some of the people who denounce “patriarchy” in the Church think Paul condescended to women, because of his famous words to the Ephesians about how wives should be obedient to their husbands. The same people usually forget that Paul does not leave husbands off the hook, and that he praises Eurodia and Synctyche, two women of the church at Philippi, for having “striven side-by-side with me in the Gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life” (Phil 4:2-3).

Murphy-O’Connor observes that the verb Paul used to describe the activity of those women “has given us ‘athlete’ and ‘athletic.’” Contrary to his reputation among disgruntled feminists, Paul took it for granted that, as Christians, women were fully equal to men.

The “My Way” Fallacy

Heard the one about how Jesus preached a gentle Gospel that Paul inadvertently warped with his own hang-ups? Maybe not. Other writers have already put that myth to rest, so it’s not getting what disc jockeys would call “heavy rotation” anymore. But this book does debunk the arguably more popular misconception that Paul was closer in spirit to John Calvin than to Simon Peter.

A Protestant friend advanced this “Paul as a proto-Protestant” argument while talking with me recently. He interprets Romans 5:1 (“Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”) as vindicating the “faith alone” view famously championed by sixteenth-century Reformers. My friend also takes Paul’s mid- and late-life disdain for works performed according to Mosaic Law as a blanket condemnation of all works, which of course is not the Catholic view.

In reply to such reasoning, the Church points to verses like Philippians 2:12. The Church also warns that the “proof-texting” approach to scripture usually robs passages of necessary context.

As Peter noted in a letter of his own, Paul’s preaching sometimes confused people (2 Pt 3:13-15). The Thessalonians, for example, reasoned that because belief in Jesus made their salvation certain, they could sin with impunity. Paul was forced to correct that misunderstanding in a follow-up letter that he made a point of assuring his audience was not forged (2 Thes 3:17).

Murphy-O’Connor uses one of the controversies that dogged Paul’s ministry to paint a vivid picture of how he was vexed by his tendency to focus on one point at a time without considering its implications:

“In the circumcision debate, Paul’s one concern was to avoid circumcising his Gentile converts,” he writes. To that end, he preached faith, rather than adherence to Mosaic Law, which famously includes prescriptions that govern the preparation of meals and the interaction between Jews and Gentiles. This permitted Paul’s rivals “to draw the simple and obvious conclusion that social contacts, and particularly table fellowship, between Jewish and Gentile believers were irrelevant.”

The Eucharist we celebrate today would be different had Paul’s critics been right, but as Murphy-O’Connor points out, downplaying the importance of table fellowship as a consequence of placing stress on faith alone was not at all what Paul meant to convey. The Judaizing controversy (symbolized by arguments over circumcision and table fellowship) persisted and finally involved even Peter, who came to visit the church in Antioch about which Paul had given such good reports (Gal 2:1-14). But by then it was too late for Paul to explain that what he really meant to emphasize was the remarkably Catholic idea of “faith working through love,” per Galatians 5:6 and the Letter of James.

The “Dueling Banjos” Fallacy

As the “My Way” paragraphs were meant to imply, you’re more likely to find an automatic teller machine in Middle Earth than to successfully defend the proposition that Paul’s argument with Peter (mentioned above) undercuts the Catholic understanding of papal infallibility. What frustrated Paul was not the Gospel that he and Peter both preached, but Peter’s decision to side with the practice of the struggling Jewish church in Jerusalem rather than the practice of the thriving Gentile church in Antioch.

Peter — the Rock — did what he thought was most necessary, and was rebuked by the man who had studied at his feet for fifteen days after meeting the risen Christ on the road to Damascus years before. In other words, Paul was angry with Peter for making a pastoral choice that he himself would not have made.

We honor both men because in spite of their differences, they preached the same Gospel with one accord. When Paul writes about the Last Supper, for example, he makes clear that he is handing on a tradition that he also received.

Ironically, many of the people who regard Paul as a proto-Protestant prefer empty crosses to Catholic crucifixes and this in spite of the fact that Paul, who met and believed in the risen Jesus, nevertheless preached “Christ and Him crucified.”

Here, too, Murphy-O’Connor taught me a lot, by explaining that the manner in which Jesus died was important to Paul because it revealed the depth of God’s self-sacrificing love for us. “If someone on whom death had no claim had actually died, then that person must have chosen to die,” writes Murphy-O’Connor about Paul’s foundational insight.

Note how well that insight fits with Peter's own experience of Christ's love. Paul did not have the privilege of having spent three years with Jesus, but recognized divine love in Christ's willingness to endure death on a cross for us. Peter grasped the same truth by remembering how Jesus had forgiven his threefold denial by three times telling him after the Resurrection to “feed my sheep” (Jn 12:15-17). In musical terms, although Christ the conductor found them in different places playing different instruments, Peter and Paul played from the same score.

As smarter commentators have said, the relationship between the saints might be described as symphonic. About the odds of finding such insight in a public library, the same commentators are silent. But Murhpy-O'Connor's book is one to which I was called, if only because there is always more to learn about Paul's rightful place in that wonderful orchestra we call the Body of Christ.

[Editor's Note: To get your copy of Paul: His Story click here.]

© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange

Patrick O'Hannigan is a technical writer and self-described “paragraph farmer” in California. His commentary has appeared in New Oxford Review, The American Spectator Online and New Times (San Luis Obispo), among other places.

The fact that it came from a man better known for asserting that “liberalism is a mental disorder” made it all the more poignant.

So what's going on here? Mental illness hardly seems a fair thing to ascribe to a worldview that once fueled the anti-slavery, suffragette, and civil rights movements. The Magna Carta was a liberal document. Saint Thomas More was a liberal. One suspects that Savage knows all that, and you can be sure that the pope does.

What happened, then, to liberalism? How did a once-enlightened ideology become the piñata at a birthday party for conservatives who don't even speak Spanish? And what does the pope remember that many of those who work the phones for pledge drives at public television stations seem to have forgotten?

Most people locate the metamorphosis from classical to modern liberalism in the late sixties, when the ideology originally grounded in human dignity and natural law became a shadow of its former self as a result of hanging around efforts to broaden the definition of victimhood.

The success of the civil rights movement taught advocates for less reputable causes to seek shelter under the same umbrella. When continued failure to persuade a majority of their fellow citizens to vote the way they did on a host of issues made the legislative branch of government a disappointment to various activists, they learned to present their skinned knees and bruised feelings to surrogate parents in judicial robes. The courts, for their part, were happy to kiss the boo-boos and make them all better.

Eventually, judges reading what they said were the tea leaves of intent left to us by the Founding Fathers discovered such previously unknown constitutional “rights” as the right to abortion and the right to curtail the free exercise of religion if it happens in public.

We now expect as much creativity from our judges as we do from our legislators. Yet wise judges remain as rare as Latin names for household pets. Meanwhile, judicial help, however misguided, gives modern liberalism one luxury that classical liberalism never had: the freedom to spend time “wasting away in Margaritaville,” searching for lost shakers of salt, while laws created in its name attempt to remake society along more utopian lines. As a result of this arrangement, the buoys that mark the channel of ethical behavior are increasingly placed there by legal decree rather than by cultural stigma, and the few people alarmed by an increasingly cavalier judiciary are treated like harbor seals — even when, like Antonin Scalia, they're judges themselves.

Mark Levin is one of the people barking from a perch on the nearest buoy. The tell-all subtitle of his new book, Men in Black promises a look at “How the Supreme Court is Destroying America.”

With less time to spend on the same thesis, Richard Kirk explains the rise of the judiciary in an article for the “One Republic” web site:

A corollary to this shift in ethical emphasis [from cultural stigma to law] is the tendency to view the Supreme Court as a deus ex machina — an institution whose statutory authority keeps things from falling apart while putting its stamp of approval on acts that, absent such endorsement, would generate debilitating pangs of conscience.

Kirk said that in an essay about the amorality of TV lawyers, but his larger point is that legal support for the pursuit of pleasure can drown out the voice of conscience.

What I would add is that there is no better way to shout over the “still small voice” that the Prophet Elijah heard than by insisting on following your heart. Where old-school liberalism was rooted in natural law, its wastrel progeny bounces from one whim to another. When the Supreme Court decides that feelings trump thoughts and sometimes even actions, then faithful Catholic citizens have an especially tough time.

Fortunately, the season of Lent is countercultural in all the right ways. By admitting that we have sinned through our own fault, we consciously abandon the “devil made me do it” excuse that has been a favorite of victim-class thinking since Adam and Eve. By repenting before God, we acknowledge that He exists outside of how we feel about things.

Lent reminds us that there is no future in trying to drive a wedge between “reality-based” policy and “faith-based” policy, because God, the subject of faith, is also the ground of all reality.

A lay Catholic theologian named Mark Price recently showed me another way to affirm this truth. Price drew from John's story of the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, reminding his audience that the woman had been ostracized by and from her neighbors. After encountering Jesus, however, she left her jar at the well to seek out the very people whom she had been avoiding. The same thing happened to Peter, who abandoned his fishing, and to the Magi, who returned to their country by a different route.

See where this is going? Of course you do: Jesus is so real that meeting Him always forces us to change both our plans and ourselves. When the imperfect meets the perfect, one yields because the other cannot.

Modern liberalism has been slow to recognize that a faith-based life is not a fantasy-based life, but sooner or later, with or without conservative help, it will realize just that — and in so doing, recover the greatness it once had. In this as in so many other things, the classically liberal John Paul II points the way. As the pope wrote in The Rapid Development, personal encounter with Jesus “does not leave one indifferent, but stimulates imitation.”

© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange

Patrick O'Hannigan is a technical writer and self-described “paragraph farmer” in California. His commentary has appeared in LewRockwell.com, CanticaNova.com, New Oxford Review, and New Times (San Luis Obispo), among other places.