1) Intolerance in the name of “tolerance” must be named for what it is and publicly condemned. To deny religiously-informed moral argument a place in the public square is intolerant and anti-democratic. To identify the truths of biblical morality with bigotry and intolerance is a distortion of moral truth and an intolerant, uncivil act, which must be named as such. To imagine that any state…has the authority to redefine marriage, a human institution that [is prior to] the state ontologically as well as historically, is to open the door to what John Paul II called … “thinly disguised totalitarianism” – and this, too, must be said, publicly. This will require (western) Christians … to overcome what (sometimes) seems to be a deeply-engrained and internalized sense of marginalization within contemporary society.

2) We must speak openly … about the empirically demonstrable and deplorable effects of the sexual revolution on individuals and society, while calling our contemporaries to a new appreciation of the dignity and nobility of human love. In John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, believers and unbelievers alike have a more compelling account of our human embodiedness as male and female, and the reciprocity and fruitfulness “built into” that embodiedness and differentiation, than theories of human sexuality that reduce sexual differentiation to a question of plumbing and human love to another sport. … Young people, deeply wounded by a culture of promiscuity that tells them simultaneously that they must be sexually active and that sex could kill them, are yearning for the truth about love, as the remarkable impact of the Theology of the Body on … university campuses and in marriage-preparation programs demonstrates. This weapon in the conversion of culture (must) be fully … deployed: and if that requires making the public claim that the Catholic Church understands human sexuality better than the prophets of sexual liberation, then so be it.

3) The reduction of Christian history to the Crusades, the European wars of religion, Galileo’s trial, and the Inquisition must be publicly challenged, for these “black legends” … put obstacles in the way of the conversion of culture. … Contemporary scholarship has deepened our understanding of the Crusades as a legitimate, if often mismanaged and brutal, response to Islamic aggression, even as it has demonstrated that such horrors as the Thirty Years War were far more about politics than about the fine points of the theology of justification. As for the Inquisition, the Church has repented, publicly, of this and other unsavory alliances with state power; when will the (western) Left apologize for communism, which killed more men and women in a slow week than the Inquisition did in centuries? As for science, absent Christianity and its convictions about a world imprinted with the divine reason … it almost certainly would not have developed as it did in Europe (or anywhere else). I raise these matters of historical record, not to score debating points, but to suggest that part of the challenge we face today is to recognize … that the West is suffering from a false story about itself, and about the relationship of biblical religion to its formation and its history.

4) The Catholic Church, while enriching its interior life through a deepened encounter with the sources of its faith in the Bible, the Fathers, and the sacraments (ressourcement), and while developing ever more winsome ways to make the Church’s proposal to a post-Christian Europe (aggiornamento), must also join forces with men and women of conscience who may not be believers, in order to challenge publicly the (encroaching) dictatorship of relativism of which Cardinal Ratzinger warned (in April 2005). The Church’s engagement with … culture and politics, in other words, must be less diffident, less defensive, and more assertive – not in the sense of aggression, but of truth-telling “in and out of season” (2 Tim 4:2).

The relentless grittiness of Lent begins at the beginning, with the imposition of ashes (preferably in abundance) and the reminder that we are the dust to which we shall return. Then we come to the First Sunday of Lent, when, each year, one of the Synoptic evangelists, Mark, Matthew, or Luke, focuses our attention on the temptation of Jesus — a gritty business that begins in a gritty place, the Judean wilderness. Mark, as is his wont, keeps the narrative spare; all we are told is that Satan tempted Jesus in the desert, amidst “wild beasts” and angels. Matthew, the evangelical portraitist, fills out the story by rendering the temptations in their most familiar sequence: the temptation to indulge the flesh, by turning stones into bread; the temptation to test divine providence and divine favor, by Jesus throwing himself from the pinnacle of the Temple; the temptation to worldly power, achieved through the worship of a false deity.

Luke’s account of the temptations, however, drives the story even deeper into the gritty soil of history by inverting the sequences of the second and third temptations: the last and gravest temptation takes place in Jerusalem, the holy city to which Luke’s entire Gospel is oriented. Here, in Jerusalem, Jesus faces the temptation to refuse the destiny the Father has appointed for him — to be the world’s savior by stripping himself of himself on the cross. Here, truly, we are at history’s hinge-point, its crossroads. What will Jesus do? Gianfranco Ravasi puts it neatly in his commentary on Luke’s temptation narrative: Jesus, “respecting the sovereign freedom of the plan of salvation to which he has been devoted, pronounces his definitive ‘Yes’ to the Father and abandons himself completely to his destiny.” Not as an abstract matter, but here, in this place and at this time: here, in Jerusalem, amidst the history with which Luke began his Christmas narrative, with its references to the time when Augustus was emperor and “Quirinius was governor of Syria” (Luke 2:2).

One of the greatest artistic evocations of the grittiness of Lent is Peter Bruegel the Elder’s 1564 painting, The Procession to Calvary, which I first saw in 2006 at the Museum of Art History in Vienna. It’s a large work, 5-and-a-half-feet by 4-feet, featuring hundreds of small figures, with the equally small figure of Christ carrying the cross in the center of the painting. Bruegel included certain familiar motifs in rendering the scene: the holy women and St. John are in the right foreground, comforting Mary; the vast majority of those involved, concerned about quotidian things, are clueless about the drama unfolding before their eyes. What is utterly striking about The Procession to Calvary, however, is that we are in Europe, not Judea: Christ is carrying the cross through a typical Flemish landscape, complete with horses, carts, oxen and a windmill. Christ is carrying the cross through history—right through the grittiness of everyday life.

Peter Bruegel the Elder would, I expect, want us to understand that the “procession to Calvary” is taking place in our midst, too. He would be right to do so. Lent is a privileged time for recovering the sight and the commitment that let us see and enter the passion play going on around us.

Ralph McInerny was arguably the most distinguished scholar ever to work at Notre Dame. His scholarly publications outstrip those of other Notre Dame philosophers by orders of magnitude—and that’s before we get to his popular fiction, his magazine work, and his encouraging of generations of younger Catholic academics. Yet a university that does not hesitate to boast of its accomplishments as measured by the U.S. News and World Report ratings seemed curiously reticent about celebrating the life and accomplishments of Ralph McInerny. The university Web site posted a nicely written obituary three days after his death, but there was little sense in the university’s official recognition of its loss that a gigantic figure had left the scene.

One cannot help suspect that this has something to do with the fact that Ralph thought Notre Dame had gone off the rails in its dogged and relentlessly self-promoting attempts to measure itself against what it likes to term “peer schools,” such as Dartmouth and Yale. What Ralph understood, and what the man who brought him to Notre Dame, the legendary Father Theodore Hesburgh, has never seemed to understand, is that that’s the wrong plumb-line by which to measure a Catholic university’s accomplishment. Or indeed any university’s accomplishment, given the intellectual chaos, political correctness, decadence, and madcap trendiness that has afflicted those “peer schools” since the late Sixties.

Ralph McInerny knew, and could demonstrate with acute philosophical rigor, that there are truths built into the world and into us: truths we can know by exercising the arts of reason; truths that, known, lay certain moral obligations on us, personally and in our civic lives. With the rarest of exceptions, they don’t know that, and in fact they deny that, at the “peer schools” to which Notre Dame is addicted to comparing itself.  And therein lay the tragedy of Notre Dame and Catholic institutions of higher education of a similar cast of mind, as Ralph saw it: they had sold their intellectual and moral birthright—the true excellence that comes from an immersion in the Great Tradition of western higher learning—for a mess of pottage.

I’ve long thought that all of this had something to do with the misreading of a 1955 essay by Father John Tracy Ellis, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life,” which justifiably criticized the shabby condition of too much of Catholic higher education in the United States in those days. Father Hesburgh and others influenced by one reading of Ellis’s critique decided that the thing to do was for Notre Dame to become Harvard, so to speak. Ralph McInerny thought that this didn’t make much sense at a time when those “peer schools” were awash in pragmatism and utilitarianism. Rather, he believed (and I think this was the more accurate reading of Ellis) that Notre Dame and other premier Catholic universities should play to strength, emphasizing a demanding liberal arts education while bringing the best of the mid-20th century Catholic philosophical, theological and literary renaissance to bear in the U.S. Doing that, Catholic universities would model a form of higher learning that was truth-centered, character-building, and life-inspiring.

There is indeed some of that going on at Our Lady’s University today, thanks to students, younger faculty, and some reform-minded members of the Congregation of the Holy Cross.  Those true reformers lost a happy warrior for their noble cause with the death of Ralph McInerny. Perhaps someday the university’s board and administration will understand that.

Those complexities just became, well, more complex, thanks to some distinctive features of contemporary Russian history and one long-standing feature of Russian culture. The latter is the close relationship between the Russian Orthodox patriarchate of Moscow and the Kremlin, which has endured through czars, commissars, and now presidents and prime ministers; the former involves the strange post-Cold War situation of Russia.

To say that Russia has never comes to grips with the legacy of 74 years of communism is to understate the problem. Lenin’s mummy—the ghastly relic of one of the 20th century’s greatest mass murderers—remains on display for the veneration of the obtuse and the confused in Red Square. Parades celebrating the birthday of Stalin, whose homicidal record topped Lenin’s, are not uncommon. Documentary film-makers who dare to tell the truth about communism’s depredations are burned in effigy. History is re-written in order to mask, even deny, the horrors of the GULAG system (which, as Anne Applebaum demonstrated in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, was not an accidental feature of Stalinism but an essential component of Stalinist “economics”).

Vladimir Putin, the true center of power in Russia despite having been compelled to trade the presidency for the office of prime minister, has made it clear that he is not satisfied with a Russia shrunk to the country’s size at the time of Peter the Great. Yet neither Putin nor his successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, seems much interested in dealing with Russia’s colossal demographic and public health problems, which include a rapidly shriveling native population (thanks to catastrophically low birth rates and declining life expectancy, both exacerbated by environmental degradation and rampant alcoholism). Meanwhile, Russia’s “market” economy resembles a Mafia operation rather more than the “free economy” of which John Paul II wrote in Centesimus Annus.

The flashpoints in Putin’s efforts to reconstitute the old Soviet “near abroad” as de facto or de iure parts of a Greater Russia are clear: the Caucasus, central Asia, and Ukraine. Ukraine is the strategic key to all the rest; without Ukraine, Russia cannot be a superpower. One of the chief repositories of Ukrainian national consciousness is the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Byzantine in its liturgical life and polity but in full communion with Rome. Declared illegal under communism (in a brutal 1946 maneuver aided and abetted by the Russian Orthodox Church), the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine was the world’s largest underground religious community for four and a half decades. Its flourishing after communism, and its dedication to building a Ukraine that models the free and virtuous society proposed by Catholic social doctrine, is one of the most heartening stories unfolding in the former Soviet Union.

Vatican diplomats and ecumenists have had their difficulties with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic cause—in part because of Ukrainian passions and indiscretions, but also because of a tendency to bend over backwards towards the Russian Orthodox patriarchate of Moscow for ecumenical reasons. But now comes the diplomatic rub. There is little reason to think that the patriarchate of Moscow will be anything but a willing, indeed enthusiastic, partner in any effort by the Russian state to reconstitute Greater Russia. If, at some point, Putin & Co. try to ingest a large chunk of eastern Ukraine, the Holy See’s diplomats are going to face an enormous challenge, with grave implications for internal Catholic unity, ecumenism and international relations.

All of us who loved and esteemed Rob Susil have been pierced by that sword in recent weeks. He and my daughter, Gwyneth, had fought gallantly against his sarcoma since it was diagnosed in March 2008, with the able assistance of the entire Hopkins medical family, of which Rob, as a specialist in radiation oncology completing his Hopkins residency, was a valuable and beloved member. There are, however, things that even the best medicine cannot do, at even the greatest medical centers in the world. So those who loved Rob and shared his deep Catholic faith prayed for a miracle, and were joined in that prayer by people all over the world. The miracle did not come; we know, however, that those prayers opened channels of grace and healing of which we are unaware, but for which we are grateful.

When Rob and Gwyneth first started seeing each other seriously, and after we were introduced, my wife said, “So, what do you think of Rob?” “Think?” I replied. “Smart, handsome, funny, 110 percent Catholic, loves Gwyneth, and likely to have an income. He’s straight out of son-in-law Central Casting.” He was so much more, though.

Rob was a brilliant young scientist, who held M.D. and Ph.D. degrees—and who didn’t tell me that he had co-authored numerous scholarly articles until I saw the galley proofs of a forthcoming one when I was helping him and my daughter move into their first apartment. He had a great appetite for learning; weakened by chemotherapy and anemia, he was nevertheless maintaining his research program, and the day before his last hospitalization, I was planning to drive him to Philadelphia so he could work on an academic paper with a colleague. He was an extraordinarily committed husband and father: he and my daughter shared one of the great marriages I have been privileged to witness, packing a superabundance of love, devotion and mutual support into five and a half years, and his joy in being “Daddy” to William was itself a joy to behold. And he was a man of faith, whose faith sustained his good humor, his clear-mindedness, and his determination during an illness about which he, a consummate young professional, knew all too much. That faith was matched by Gwyneth’s; more than one friend, in the week before Rob died, described Gwyneth’s strength and dignity as that of a biblical heroine.  I am a suspect witness, of course, but I could not agree more.

When I put Gwyneth’s hand into Rob’s at the foot of the altar at St. Jane Frances de Chantal Church in Bethesda, Md., on Aug. 16, 2004, the day of their wedding, I was able to get out three brief sentences before my throat tightened up and my eyes became misty: “You two are great. Be great for each other. Let Christ be great in you.” Gwyneth and Rob were all of that, and more, as they finished medical school together, did residencies together, brought William into the world together, and felt the sword of sorrow pierce their souls together. All of that good lives on, I am certain—as I am certain that I shall pray for the divine assistance through my son-in-law’s intercession in the future.

The baseball fan in me likes to think it was Coakley’s bizarre charge that Curt (“Bloody Sock”) Schilling was a Yankees fan — a gaffe in Red Sox Nation commensurate with claiming that the late Senator Kennedy had been a George W. Bush fan. Yet there was another clumsy Coakleyism that ought to have enraged a considerable part of the Bay State electorate. Pressed by an interviewer on what Catholic physicians, nurses and other health-care workers should do when they cannot in conscience provide certain services or conduct certain procedures, Coakley replied, “You can have religious freedom but you probably shouldn’t work in the emergency room.”

A month earlier, speaking at Georgetown University, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton offered a similarly diminished view of religious freedom when she declined to use that term, substituting “freedom to worship” in a catalogue of fundamental human rights that included a striking innovation. Asserting that people must be free to “choose laws and leaders, to share and access information, to speak, criticize and debate,” the secretary of state then averred that people “must be free … to love in the way they choose.”  For those with ears to hear in Gaston Hall that day, the promotion of the so-called LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgendered) agenda had just been declared a human rights priority of the United States, in the same sentence in which the secretary of state had offered an anorexic description of religious freedom that even the Saudis could accept (so long as the worshipping was done behind closed doors in a U.S. embassy).

One has to wonder if there is a connection here.

Religious freedom is already under assault from proponents of the LGBT agenda in Europe and Canada. Rocco Buttiglione’s convictions about the immorality of homosexual acts prevented his becoming Minister of Justice of the European Union, despite a lifetime in defense of the basic human rights of all and an explicit assurance that he would scrupulously enforce the EU’s equal-protection laws. The Canadian Revenue Agency (their IRS) has recently removed the tax-exempt status of a Calgary church, in part because it spends more than 10 percent of its funds and time preaching and teaching against same-sex “marriage” (and, to compound the offense, euthanasia and abortion). Anyone who imagines that this can’t happen in the Great Republic need only consider the recent efforts by the Washington, D.C., City Council to bring the Archdiocese of Washington to heel over the marriage question.

And now we have the successor of John Quincy Adams and William H. Seward, Elihu Root and Cordell Hull, George Marshall and Dean Acheson suggesting that the defense of the LGBT agenda will, as a human rights issue, be considered on a par with such basic human rights as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and religious freedom-and that no small part of the substance of religious freedom may have to be sacrificed, if necessary, to advance that agenda.

Religious freedom, rightly understood, cannot be reduced to freedom of worship. Religious freedom includes the right to preach and evangelize, to make religiously informed moral arguments in the public square and to conduct the affairs of one’s religious community without undue interference from the state. If religious freedom only involves the freedom to worship, then, as noted above, there is “religious freedom” in Saudi Arabia, where Bibles and evangelism are forbidden but expatriate Filipino laborers can attend Mass in the U.S. embassy compound in Riyadh.

In its glory years, the State Department’s human rights bureau was a stalwart friend of those brave men and women in communist countries who were asserting, in addition to their right to worship, their rights as believers to be fully participant in society. That noble legacy should cause the present guardians of U.S. human rights policy to think very carefully about the path they seem to be taking in this field.

I can’t remember whether I blurted “What?” loud enough to be noticed by my faithful companions at daily Mass-many of whom wear hearing aids-but I know I certainly didn’t answer with the prescribed “Lord, hear our prayer.”

The best option? Oh, so the decision whether to carry a child to term is a pragmatic calculation, and we’re to pray that those concerned get the calculation, er, right?  How did this morally degrading nonsense get written? How did it get past an editor with any theological grain of sense?

It happened because the parish I was attending, like many others, uses canned general intercessions for weekday Masses, bought from a “liturgical aids” service: the daily intercessions come with a tacky binder in a tear-‘em-out-after-you-use-‘em format, they fit neatly inside the ambo-so why not? Well, Dec. 28 illustrated why not: because more often than we’d like to admit, these intercessions are thoughtlessly written, reflecting the ambient cultural smog rather than the truth of Catholic faith. Moreover, they’re typically organized to suggest that the world of politics is, somehow, the real world: after a brief intercessory nod to the pope, the bishops, or both, we’re immediately invited to pray for sundry social and political causes, never identified as such but wrapped in the gauziness of Feel Good Prayer.

And what gets omitted is often as instructive, and depressing, as what gets addressed. How often last year did you hear a general intercession petition for Christian unity? For the relief of persecuted Christians?  For the conversion of non-believers? For victory in the war against terrorism? (Eight years and four months after 9/11, I’m still waiting for that one.) But I’ll bet you heard a dozen or more exhorting you to environmental responsibility.

In parishes that take their liturgy seriously, the canned intercessions usually disappear on Sunday, to be replaced by intercessions composed locally by responsible parties, sometimes with the aid of thoughtful resources like Magnificat. The solution to the weekday problem, I suggest, is to regularize and routinize the petitions at daily Mass, making them serenely formulaic and thus immune from the temptation to political or cultural homiletics.

Here’s one possible scheme for such a “reduction:”

For the holy Church of God throughout the world, let us pray to the Lord.
For Benedict, Bishop of Rome, and the bishops in communion with him, let us pray to the Lord.
For this local Church of [name of diocese], for [name of bishop], its chief shepherd, and for the priests and deacons of [name of diocese], let us pray to the Lord.
For this parish of [patron of other name], its pastors and its people, let us pray to the Lord.
For an abundance of vocations to the priesthood and the consecrated life, let us pray to the Lord.
For the unity of all Christians, for the relief of those suffering persecution for their Christian faith, and for the conversion of their persecutors, let us pray to the Lord.
For the civil authorities, that we may be governed in justice and truth, let us pray to the Lord.
For those who are sick, and for all those with special needs, let us pray to the Lord.
For our beloved dead, let us pray to the Lord.

That, I suggest, covers the most important bases. Such a scheme also locates the local parish within the broader Christian community of the diocese, and locates the diocese within the ambit of the universal Church: facts about which Catholics in America often need reminding. And such a formulaic schema avoids politics while making clear that we should pray regularly that the politicos recognize both the responsibilities and limits of their power.

Try it. It is, if you’ll permit me, the best option.

The first statement was unmistakably clear the day the Shrine opened to the public. Its interior was unfinished, save for one colossal icon — the great apse mosaic of Christ come in judgment, which rivets the eye from the moment the pilgrim enters the nave. That image of a stern, majestic Christ was an appropriate “fit” for a Romanesque-Byzantine structure; but it was also a challenge to the saccharine Jesus being peddled by preachers of the “power of positive thinking” in 1959. This Christ makes you think, all right — about the serious business of life, about rendering an account of one’s stewardship one day, about the awe-inspiring majesty of Jesus Christ, king of the universe.

Some found it shocking, in 1959; others find it startling today. The icon’s most important theological statement, however, is not so much a warning as a reminder: all true devotion to Mary points us to her Son, as Our Lady herself did in her last words in the Gospels-”Do whatever he tells you…” And by pointing us to her Son, who is both Son of God and Son of Mary, Our Lady points us, through the Incarnation, into the second great mystery of Christian faith: the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. The royal road to the great truths of Christianity begins with Mary’s “yes” to Gabriel’s unexpected visit.

The Shrine makes its second important Marian theological statement in a more recent addition to its decoration: the great sculpture of the “universal call to holiness” which, spanning the length of the basilica’s back wall, depicts a rich panorama of modes of Christian life and sanctity. The universal call to holiness was one of the great themes of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: no matter what their station in life or their state of life in the Church, all the baptized are called to be saints-for becoming a saint is the fulfillment of our human and Christian destiny. Looking at the cosmic Christ in judgment, we are reminded of the source of sanctity in the Church; looking at holiness exemplified in the Body of Christ as we leave the basilica, we’re reminded of the extraordinary range of God’s redeeming and sanctifying grace as it enlivens disciples.

And the Marian angle here? Mary is the first disciple, because her fiat, her “yes” to the divine plan, sets the pattern of all Christian discipleship. As John Paul II, borrowing from Hans Us von Balthasar, said in 1987, there are many “profiles” of the Christian life in the New Testament:  the Petrine profile sets the pattern for the Church of authority and jurisdiction, as the Pauline profile does for the Church of proclamation and evangelization and the Johannine profile does for the Church of contemplation. The Marian profile, however, is most basic: for everything else in the Church — authority, proclamation, contemplation — exists to serve the deepening of discipleship and the call to holiness that comes from conversion to Christ.  And the primordial profile of the Christian disciple’s life is set by two paradigmatic expressions of Mary’s discipleship: the articulated fiat of the Annunciation, and the silent fiat at the foot of the cross.

The Shrine is the largest Catholic structure in the western hemisphere. More importantly, though, it provides one of the Americas’ richest experiences of Catholicism, aesthetically, liturgically and musically — a catechism in stone, mosaic, and glass, and a noble act of homage to the patroness of the United States.

As biblical scholar Gianfranco Ravasi puts it in a commentary on that text (1 Thes 3:12-4:2), the “coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ and all his saints” preoccupied the early Christian community in Thessalonika,” where “the tension was continuous and almost palpable.” Paul’s new Thessalonian Christians were, evidently, in something of an eschatological rush: they anxiously “waited for the reappearance of Christ in the splendor of his divinity” in order to straighten things out-”to repair the confusions, traumas and brokenness of our history.” It’s hard, these days, not to sympathize.

2009 has been a beast of a year: the deaths of what seems a squadron of teachers, friends and irreplaceable leaders (Avery Dulles, Richard John Neuhaus, Francis Canavan, William Smith, Thomas Dillon, Ernest Lefever, Karen Novak, Irving Kristol, to name the most publicly prominent); a season of lethal global fanaticisms  unchecked by courage or effective statecraft; a low year in Washington, with a White House scrambling to find its feet and a Congress that would make a carnival barker blush; a public square dominated by sound-bites and mendaciousness; further deteriorations in the culture, including bizarre cults of personality; a divided Church, many of whose prominent public personalities seem little better catechized than toddlers; unemployed friends, life-threatening illnesses-and the Yankees won the World Series. Come, Lord Jesus, indeed. Soon. Please.

Through the lens of Archbishop Ravasi’s commentary, we get a glimpse of what St. Paul might have said, confronted by Thessalonians with a similar catalogue of woes and looking for a quick answer (and perhaps a little payback) in the Second Coming. Paul gently but firmly reminded “those believers who had become obsessed with impatience (for) ‘new heavens and a new earth’” of what they ought to have learned already: that “the new history of the world has already begun” in the Resurrection, such that we ought to be growing now into an unshakeable hope and an ever-deeper love. Remember that, the apostle suggested, and whenever it pleases God to send his Christ back in glory, we’ll be found ready, “unblamable in holiness.”

Which is, I suppose, an elegant, Pauline way of saying, “Stop whining.” Edginess and anxiety for the future are understandable; but they’re also inappropriate for men and women who should already be living the promised renovation of the universe, in the communion of the Church with its Lord. The Second Coming, after all, is not intended to be an instant fix for all the things we find difficult to make right; the Second Coming is intended to manifest the cosmic glory of God.

That bracing Pauline reminder of the “not yet” that is, or ought to be, present to us here and now is especially appropriate during this Advent/Christmas season-a time to re-center our lives on the truth of the Incarnation and to re-discover the courage to be Catholic, for 2010 promises to be at least as challenging as the year quickly fading into history. Marriage will remain under attack throughout the country, with those defending the classic understanding of marriage being branded as bigots. All over the world, the inalienable right to life will be assaulted in the name of autonomy and compassion. A madman who imagines himself capable of hastening the advent of the messianic age, as he (mis)understands it, may try to incinerate the Holy Land with nuclear fire. Religious freedom in Canada, Europe, and the United States will be under severe pressure from the champions of the dictatorship of relativism.

Facing that, we may well say, and mean, “Come, Lord Jesus.” But as we pray daily for the Kingdom’s coming in the words the Lord left us, let Christmas remind us that he has already come, which ought to make all the difference-the Bethlehem difference.

The defense of the inalienable right-to-life is not the only moral principle involved in the health-care debate, however.  There are several other such principles and social justice concerns at stake. Here are some of the most important:

• The principle of solidarity teaches us to cherish a sense of responsibility across generations.  How is that principle honored in a reform of health care that dramatically reduces the funding of Medicare for senior citizens, as bills in Congress now do?

• The principle of cross-generational solidarity also raises grave questions about the real costs of the plans that have emerged from the House and the Senate—real costs, as distinguished from the numbers being pulled out of hats on Capitol Hill. One experienced Catholic public-policy analyst estimates that the bill brought before the Senate will increase total federal spending by about $4.9 trillion (that’s $4.9 million million) over the next 20 years. There is no way to pay for this, even with spending reductions and tax increases. Does saddling our grandchildren with an Everest of debt satisfy the demands of cross-generational solidarity?

• The principle of subsidiarity teaches us to be wary of concentrating too much power in the national government.  Yet the House bill that (barely) passed in November puts the federal government squarely on the hook for controlling health care costs because it requires Americans to buy government-approved insurance. Voters will rightly turn to their representatives and insist that the government make that insurance affordable. Thus the sea change: the U.S. government will become responsible for containing all health-care costs, which will inevitably involve both rationing and a decline in the quality of care.
Moreover, does anyone seriously propose that a federal government incapable of producing and distributing flu vaccine efficiently is capable of managing a national health-care system well?  Subsidiarity teaches us to be deeply skeptical about affirmative answers to that question.  Common sense suggests that any government, given such power, will never give it up. If we make a mess of this now, we’re stuck; ask the British and the Canadians.

• The principle of the common good teaches us to avoid public policy that destroys jobs; that moral imperative becomes even more urgent under current circumstances. The taxes that proposed health-care reforms will impose on all but the smallest employers who don’t offer health insurance, and the tax surcharge that will be laid on higher income persons who own small businesses, are both likely to discourage hiring and force layoffs. That’s bad public policy at any level of unemployment. It’s unconscionable when the unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent.

• The politicization of medical decisions—which will inevitably follow the kind of health- care reform now being proposed—will put new pressures on the right-to-life principle, as well as on the principles of the common good, subsidiarity and solidarity. Decisions that should be made by patients and doctors will be made by regulators as governmental intrusion trumps moral and medical judgment. How this builds a free and virtuous society, as Catholic social doctrine bids us do, is not clear.

For all its virtues, today’s American medical system does not afford access to needed care for some, so it fails the tests set by Catholic social doctrine. We can meet those tests and fix the system’s gravest problems by working incrementally, testing results as we go: changing the liability laws that distort insurance costs, reforming the insurance industry to mandate portability and coverage of pre-existing conditions, lifting the ban on interstate competition in health insurance, and covering the uninsured by tax credits and small business reforms. That would be health-care reform that satisfies Catholic principles across-the-board.