The culprits are parents who want to have sons only and use sonograms to identify the sex of their child in the womb. The end result is millions of sex-selection abortions of unwanted girls every year.

Pro-lifers have denounced this “slaughter of Eve” in the strongest terms for some time now. It is undoubtedly the greatest campaign of deadly discrimination against women in history. Incredibly, with few exceptions, the problem of sex-selection abortion is steadily worsening in Asia and around the world!

Shockingly, The Economist’s recommended solution is more feminism: more propaganda from the same folks who brought you abortion, but this time directed toward somehow improving the public image of women and daughters. Basically, they are saying that a big PR blitz is needed to highlight the positive contributions of women to society.

Of course, any society that does not value female children or women in general, as much as men, is in serious need of a change of heart on the subject. Can anyone take seriously, however, the proposition that those who trumpet abortion as a paramount right of women are the best ones to lead us in recovering a sense of the dignity of womanhood?

The Economist points approvingly to modernization and societies which have abortion on demand but no sex-selection abortion crisis. Putting aside the fact they acknowledge that Chinese and Japanese-Americans are having recourse to sex-selection abortions, these same “progressive” societies have embraced myriad other assaults on female dignity: pornography, contraception, “sex education” which teaches the objectification of the human person, and so on.

If they are seriously proposing that the solution to the eradication of women in the developing world is a more complete embrace of the very ideology that has so obviously harmed women and men, then we must point out the absurdity of this view as many times as it takes to sink in.

Radical feminists willingly sacrifice the health and lives of mothers on the altar of abortion-on-demand. It is only one step further to stand by while unborn girls are killed for the “crime” of being female. Some “pro-choice” feminists are understandably uncomfortable with this, but they are trapped by their sinister ideology which affirms that no one can tell anyone else their “choice” to abort is wrong.

A turning point in my pro-life education regarding so-called “women’s rights” organizations came while attending a March 2007 meeting deep in the bowels of the United Nations headquarters in New York. South Korea’s government proposed that the full assembly of the UN Commission on the Status of Women adopt a resolution to condemn sex-selection abortion. The vast majority of international delegations were initially favorable to this proposal; then the feminists unleashed their fury.

The self-proclaimed “defenders of women” lobbied hard and successfully to have the European Union and others abandon preborn girls to their fate and kill the largely symbolic UN resolution. Their logic was essentially this: If we accept that some abortions must be stopped, then all abortions are in danger, and our goal is to spread, not limit, abortion.

The way to end sex-selection abortion is to convince the world of the truth about the human person. All children are created in the very image of God, and as such have profound dignity and a right to life regardless of what doctors, parents, society or the State “choose.” No PR campaign can compare with this Natural Law standard when it comes to protecting the lives of unborn girls.

The lie that these feminist hypocrites are defending women or girls must be exposed and denounced in the strongest possible ways. They are defending abortion, period. They are not part of the solution — they are part of the problem — and millions of girls’ (and boys’) lives are being snuffed out every year because of them.

After Vatican II, of course, we saw an explosion of ecumenical work within the Catholic Church. At every level — from the Pope to the lowliest layman — efforts were made to bridge the gap between Catholics and our “separated brethren.” Much of this work was forgettable and had little impact, but some ecumenical endeavors have borne much fruit. I’m thinking especially of the pro-life movement, which, though not born of a desire for ecumenism, nevertheless has advanced the cause of Christian unity greatly over the years.

Over the past few years, however, there has been a shift in ecumenical work. Instead of simply discussing what unites us, many Catholics and non-Catholics are getting down to more concrete work. We can see this in the ongoing talks between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, as well as the recent move by Pope Benedict to smooth the entrance of Anglicans into the Catholic fold.

As an overview of the history of Catholic ecumenism, I have identified four stages in the Church’s ecumenical work, which can be likened to learning to drive a car (stick with me, the analogy works, I think).

Stage 1: No privileges

Before a child reaches the proper age, he is not allowed to drive a car. What parents would allow their 10-year-old behind the wheel? This is appropriate, since the child does not have either the physical or mental preparation needed to properly handle the car.

After the Reformation, this was the status of Catholic ecumenism. The Church was engaged in a battle for its very soul, and was not prepared to engage in ecumenical dialogue (nor were most non-Catholics interested in the discussion either). Thus, up until the late 19th century, Church leaders wisely banned Catholics from engaging in ecumenical work.

Stage 2: Learner’s permit

At some point a child is ready to learn to drive. But a wise parent doesn’t just throw him behind the wheel and say, “let ‘er rip!” First a potential driver is given a permit which gives him the right to drive, but with severe limitations, and usually only with the presence of an experienced driver in the car.

After Leo XIII, we can see that the Church entered the “learner’s permit” era of ecumenical relations. In this stage, some ecumenical dialogue was permitted, but under very strict conditions. In these first instances of contact between Catholics and non-Catholics, Catholic leaders were prudently assessing the situation and determining what exactly ecumenism would entail. But no one was ready yet to dive into full dialogue.

Stage 3: Getting the license

Eventually a child receives his license and he is now allowed to drive. What do most kids do in response? They drive just to drive. They don’t care where they are going. They don’t have a destination. They just want to drive. And this is not all bad: one only gets better at driving by actually driving. This is how one learns — from both his positive experiences and his mistakes. But obviously someone should not stay in this stage forever.

Vatican II was like the granting of a driver’s license to the Church for ecumenism. Now almost all conditions were lifted, and everyone started engaging in ecumenism for ecumenism’s sake. There often seemed to be little direction in the dialogue, but everyone enjoyed the ride. Like the new driver, this was useful in many ways: we could truly talk to one another and learn where we were united, and where we were divided. But one cannot stay in this era forever. You won’t get anywhere.

Stage 4: Directed towards a destination

After the enthusiasm for being behind the wheel wears off, the driver begins to see the importance of the destination over just driving. The typical person sees driving as the means to an end: to get to a specific location.

Pope Benedict, I believe, has instituted this phase in Catholic Ecumenism with his recent outreach to the Anglicans. No longer are we just to engage in ecumenism for ecumenism’s sake, but instead we are to engage in it with an eye to our destination: full communion as one Church. How exactly we get there is anyone’s guess (and only the Holy Spirit really knows), but it is impossible to get anywhere if you don’t know where you are going. Pope Benedict has advanced the ecumenical movement significantly by giving a clear indication of what the Catholic Church perceives is the eventual goal of ecumenism.

Let us pray for all involved in ecumenical efforts that one day soon we might arrive at our proper destination, in which all followers of Christ are in communion with one another in one visible Church.

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 University of Notre Dame dates back to the end of 1842, when French-born Rev. Edward Sorin, C.S.C., and seven companions, all members of the recently established Congregation of Holy Cross, took possession of 524 snow-covered acres that the Bishop of Vincennes had given them in the Indiana mission fields. Father Sorin named his fledgling school, in his native tongue, “L’Université de Notre Dame du Lac” (The University of Our Lady of the Lake).

Fast forward about 50 years to the summer of 1913, when Notre Dame football players Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais could be found practicing the forward pass on an Ohio beach. If Rockne and his teammate had not honed the forward pass as an offensive weapon to advance the ball down the field, Notre Dame today might be as well known nationally as, say, Xavier University in Chicago. That fall, their newly acquired offensive weapon won them victories and sports, and this tiny all-male Catholic college in South Bend, Indiana, went on to become a football power regularly beating the giants of college football, winning national championships, and churning out Heisman trophy winners and All Americans.

Consequently, the University became an icon of devotion for millions of   Catholics, many of them the children and grandchildren of immigrants, who made Notre Dame’s gridiron victories a symbol of their own emergence as “real” Americans able to hold their own–not only in sports but in politics, business, and entertainment. Figures as varied as Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and John F. Kennedy completely finished the work of assimilation. At the same time, the deadly Affluenza epidemic of constantly rising economic status made America and its “values” appear to be completely compatible with their Faith. (Look up the “heresy” of Americanism as condemned by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical letter to Cardinal Gibbons Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae in 1899 for more information.)  Rather than evangelizing the Protestant majority, American Catholics became another denomination that just happened to require Sunday Church attendance and could brag of a longer pedigree and more “culture” than the rest.  And the most identifiable Catholic institution on our shores to the 75 percent of Americans who are not Catholic has been the University of Notre Dame.

All of this a preamble to the incident provoking noted University of Notre Dame law professor and natural law scholar Charles Rice to write this book.  That incident was the university’s incendiary invitation to President Barack Obama to speak at its 2009 commencement and to receive an honorary law degree.

The problem? Simply that Obama’s position on virtually every moral issue in public contention, including marriage, abortion, homosexuality, and embryonic stem cell research, is at odds with the teaching authority of the Church to which Notre Dame theoretically and ostensibly adheres.  Imagine the Catholic University of Munich offering a podium, an honorary degree, and a speaking opportunity to one of its lost sons, the democratically elected Adolph Hitler, after Kristallnacht in 1938.  Unthinkable, right? But not at Notre Dame in a nation where over 40 million unborn children have lost their lives since 1973 due to a Supreme Court decision that President Obama and his administration enthusiastically uphold.

Professor Rice’s book is concise, a lawyer’s brief to convict Notre Dame and its administration of committing treason against its history and founding and to contest its continued claim to be a Catholic institution of higher learning. Rice succinctly recounts the university’s invitation to President Obama and the almost immediate outrage from dozens of bishops who felt that they, their confreres, and the Church had been insulted by the University’s open flouting of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical “The Gospel of Life” and the bishops’ statement “Catholics in Public Life.” The latter document explicitly states: “The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms, which would suggest support for their actions.”  Could any statement be clearer?

Rice next chronicles the university commencement itself — or rather, its two commencements. The official Obama commencement had the air of a political rally, with 12,000 attending, while the alternative one organized by the pro-life student group ND Response and held at the Alumni Gall Chapel, the Grotto, and the South Quad had the character of a retreat. No chanting, no marches, nor disruptions marked this gathering of about 3000.  Whether Notre Dame returns to its genuine Catholic identity or continues on its secularizing course, the wisdom of the ND Response will become more obvious with time. As Rice puts it, comparing the event to the beginning of the Irish revolution at the General Post Office in Dublin in 1916, it will be more attractive to say, “I was there on the 17^th of May praying at the Grotto.”

The heart of Rice’s book, however, is the chapter on the infamous Land O’ Lakes conference that took place in a Notre Dame-owned property in Wisconsin in July of 1967. That conference brought together 26 men, almost all priests and educators, presided over by Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, then President of Notre Dame, the same man (now well into his nineties) who ostentatiously attended the Obama commencement.  The statement issued at the conclusion of the Land O’ Lakes conference included these words: “To reform its teaching and research functions effectively, the Catholic University must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatsoever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.” In other words, in order to achieve the identity of academic institutions with an emphasis on research rather than teaching, and to qualify for federal and state money, “Catholic” universities must cease…. to be Catholic!  And so it is today, with 90 percent of these universities being Catholic in name only.

As Rice sums up, “Notre Dame made a wrong turn four decades ago.” Or as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus mordantly put it: “The essential formula of Land O’ Lakes is a perfect invitation to follow in the footsteps of the originally Protestant universities, which in the words of Prof. George Marsden have gone ‘from Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.’”

Is there hope for the lapsed Catholic university? Rice offers no easy optimism, but he does give a prescription for relief, if the university is willing to take it. “The President, Fellows, and Trustees who perpetrated the honoring of Obama have forfeited their right to continue in positions of responsibility at Notre Dame… if Notre Dame is to survive it must repudiate the mistake it made at Land O’ Lakes. That would require a full acceptance of Ex Corde Ecclesiae which guarantees appropriate autonomy and academic freedom but insists on ‘adherence to the teaching authority of the Church in matters of Faith and Morals.’” Rice also insists that Notre Dame accept as necessary in practice what Pope John Paul II taught: “it is the honor and responsibility of a Catholic University to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of Truth.”

Will this happen?  Unlikely, but one can hope and pray for this outcome. There are some instances of much smaller Catholic colleges gradually returning to faithfulness to the Magisterium and the truth — Franciscan University of Steubenville and Providence College come to mind.

For the time being Notre Dame will remain “A public university in a Catholic Neighborhood,” as  chair of the Notre Dame Philosophy Department Alfred Freddoso put it in his excellent Introduction  to Rice’s book.  Perhaps it will take some years before the Congregation of Catholic Education in Rome makes an effort to define more clearly what a Catholic university is and what sanctions should be set when a nominally Catholic university goes astray.  And perhaps the much younger new bishop of South Bend and Fort Wayne will provide more “acta” and fewer “verba.”

After all, there is no more valuable brand name in religion than that of “Catholic.” Millions have suffered or chosen death rather than deny it. Meanwhile, take a good look at the 21 real Catholic Colleges that can be found on the web site of the Cardinal Newman Society. They provide the real thing — Catholic liberal arts education grounded in Faith and the unashamed search for Truth. Okay, so they don’t have Division One football teams, but then, the Notre Dame football program has fallen on hard times. Perhaps Our Lady is looking for a new Catholic university football team to sponsor. Ave Maria University, anybody?  Rockne himself, a Catholic convert, would surely approve.

[First published in St. Austin Review ( StAR), March 2010]

“That’s right!   That’s right!” he responded to our ‘Please Don’t Pass the Healthcare Bill’ sign.  “I think they’re spitting on us!”

It was Monday, March 15, 2010.  The day Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, Virginia called the people of his diocese to pray and fast for an end to the healthcare bill which haunts all people of good faith with the specter of having to pay for abortion.

We live in close proximity to the Nation’s Capital and feel a burden to physically represent the Americans who would like to march on Washington, but can’t.

So, after being fortified with the Holy Eucharist, we packed up the children and headed an hour east to Capitol Hill.

A chill wind and brooding sky reflected the mood.  Somber.  Threatening.

Along the way, we discussed the ramifications of our taxes being used to fund abortion.  Was it material participation?  Was there room for civil disobedience?  Which is more important, obeying God’s law or man’s?  Is there a difference between the rhetorical answer and the practical implications? Homeschool civics class.

There was consensus — the Bishop is a cool dude.  A shepherd, who sees a danger and uses his means to protect his flock.  A line of defense for the unborn.

“Lord, you know we need a parking pla…” I didn’t have to finish.  There was one at the head of the Mall, near the Museum of Art.  We plunked in four dollars worth of quarters for a two-hour stay and set off.

Our plan was to show our sign to as much traffic as possible, since the area around the Capitol building is filled with Senate and House of Representative office buildings, not to mention the Supreme Court.  We turned south.

“Hope you never lose your job!” said a jogger, not a minute after we set out.

“What does that mean, Mama?”

“It means he wants the healthcare bill to pass so people without jobs can go to the doctor.”

“Is that good?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t we want it?”

“We want to help people who need help, honey, it’s just that this bill says we have to pay people to kill babies, too.”

“That’s bad.”

Our five-year-old, a natural evangelist, took up our sign and held it high above his head.  Several people stopped to take his picture.

In front of the Supreme Court, a family passed by, the boy quizzing his dad about the sign.

“What’s healthcare, Dad?”

“The biggest screw-up this country’s ever seen.”

People honked and waved.  Staffers called down from the steps of one of the House Office Buildings.  Tourists thanked us.  A woman climbing into a cab said, “We agree!”

“Call your congressman!” I suggested.

“We did.  We’ve written, we’ve called, we’ve done it all.”

Another jogger, this time at the Northeast corner near Union Station, called, “Oh, come on.  Let your parents hold the sign.”

“What does that mean, Mama?”

“It means he doesn’t think you’re old enough to have an opinion.”

The child scoffed.

Twice, we walked the long block around the building, and when we finally took refuge from the wind and drizzle in the van, it was with a sense that the overwhelming majority of people agreed.

They don’t want the healthcare bill in its present state to pass.

You’ve probably written, called, emailed, and forwarded.  The only thing left to do now is follow Bishop Loverde’s lead.

Some things only come out by prayer and fasting.

Despite the overwhelming attention that I received as a result, this was never about me, nor Mr. Hannity. It was and is about the basic honesty of Catholics with regard to their own Faith and the responsibility of priests (every last one of us!) to teach, uphold, and defend that Faith until our dying breath! Fidelity to the teachings of the Church is nothing less than fidelity to Christ. We are not free as Catholics to just pick and choose what parts of Christ’s teaching we want to adhere to and which ones we want to ignore, cast aside, or – as in the case of Mr. Hannity – to mock and dismiss as outdated and impractical. We are free to leave the Church, though, if we disagree with its teachings. That would be the honest thing to do. What is intolerable to faithful Catholics is the disingenuousness of those who enjoy all the privileges of being Catholic, but who feel no obligation to embrace the responsibilities of our Faith. This was what the Hannity interview highlighted, and it is an endemic problem in our Church.

Generations of martyrs made a much greater sacrifice for their beliefs than those who are inconvenienced by the prohibition on contraception. As the English martyr, St. John Noughton, stood at the gallows with the rope around his neck, he said, “I am bound in conscience and am ready and willing to suffer every kind of torture rather than deny a doctrine of the Church.” Wow! That is Catholic fidelity and integrity to the limit.

Perhaps better known is the story of his fellow martyr, St. Thomas More, who died essentially because the pope wouldn’t issue an annulment to the murderous Henry VIII. The issue of who exactly would control the Church in England was based on Henry’s adamant rejection of the Church’s – that is, Christ’s – teaching on marriage. Less than five hundred years later, Henry’s Anglican church is in utter disarray on all the issues of marriage and human sexuality precisely because of the original dishonesty upon which it was founded. Such chaos is the inevitable result of any church’s betrayal of Christ’s teaching.

This same rejection of centuries-old, well-articulated, infallible teaching is what we are faced with in modern America. We have to admit that the failure of millions of Catholics to uphold and live according to the truths of our Faith has led us down the heinous path of rampant promiscuity and institutionalized child-killing. “You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world,” said the Lord and added, rhetorically, “but what if salt goes flat?” That’s a good question! If Catholics alone would have been strictly faithful to our own doctrine in the last half century, we would have preserved our society from the degraded culture of promiscuity and death that we lament today. Alas, Catholics who preserve themselves from childbearing rather than preserve the moral integrity of our society have betrayed Christ in His deepest agony since the Garden. Because we let the pagans break down the walls of faith and morality, all families in our country, our own included, are rendered vulnerable to the pernicious culture of death. We did it to ourselves.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of that Hannity interview was the way in which Fr. Jonathan Morris, Fox News priest advisor, defended Mr. Hannity in his dissent against a Catholic priest who was actually defending the orthodox teaching of the Church. The priestly sell-out on contraception and church discipline is a painful corollary to Hannity’s lay dissent. The shameful silence of the clergy on the issue of Catholic morality in the era when it has been most needed is an insufferable failure of those responsible for being its guardians. We will be for generations digging ourselves out of this clerical mess, and although the tides are indeed turning toward greater orthodoxy in the clergy, the damage has been done, and priests bear the lion’s share of the blame for the degradation of the moral fabric of our world.

As the years go on, and especially during this Lenten season, I hope that the Hannity interview will be a clarion call to Catholics urging them on to greater fidelity to Christ. And, no, Mr. Hannity did not respond to my request to meet after the interview, nor has he revisited the issue in any way since that time. I still pray for him and hope for his conversion. What I hope and pray for even more is a total return to fidelity of all Catholics to the Truth on the critical issues of life, marriage and family, and the sacrificial commitment that alone will bring America out of its moral decay.

“You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the LORD” — Leviticus 19:32 ESV.

In Christopher Buckley’s 2007 novel Boomsday, a charismatic 20-something with a generational ax to grind and an ambitious politician pair up to campaign for government-sanctioned suicide of the “resource hogging” Baby Boomer generation.  The en masse retirement of Boomers threatens to sabotage the financial future of America’s working-age citizens.  Cast in the same take-no-prisoners, satirical vein as his novel-turned-blockbuster hit Thank You For Smoking, Boomsday addresses the very real, very imminent financial and demographic crisis facing America.

Writing for Real Clear Politics in 2007, columnist Robert Samuelson explained why Boomsday strikes such a chord with Boomers and Millennials alike:

Buckley’s comic tale revolves around two truths usually buried in our dreary budget debates.  First, a generational backlash is inevitable.  It may not come as attacks on sunbathing retirees, but the idea that younger workers will meekly bear the huge tax increases needed to pay all boomers’ promised benefits is delusional.  The increases are too steep, and too many boomers — fairly wealthy and healthy — will seem undeserving.

It’s certainly difficult to muster much sympathy for the retirement concerns of the Boomers with visions of “sunbathing retirees” dancing in our heads, but it’s worth considering the broader question of how society’s changing view of the elderly throughout the years has contributed to this Great Divide between generations.

There was a time, believe it or not, when the question of finding someone to support the needs of the elderly in their twilight years of life wasn’t a question at all, but a duty embraced by family and community.  Before the advent of the modern welfare state (and the corresponding shift from an extended family to a nuclear family model as the social norm), it was understood that aging relatives would be cared for by family, often with the support of community associations like churches or civic groups.  The elderly were not viewed as “burdens” or “resource hogs,” but rather as venerated members of the family – depositories of great wisdom to whom the highest respect and honor were owed.  Thus, the extra work required to support these elderly relatives was not considered extraordinary, unjust, or unfair.

Fast forward to the modern day, and it’s clear that our social attitudes about the elderly, even our own family members, has changed dramatically.  As mentioned earlier, various social, cultural, and technological developments over the last century have contributed to the abandonment of the extended family in favor of a focus on the nuclear.  Children rarely find themselves living in the same town as their parents and siblings, and once they start their own families, ties to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins are limited by time and distance.  In an era of government entitlements, chief of which are Medicare and Social Security, there is no longer an emergent need for family to stick together in order to provide crucial material support for one another in times of need.  Most elderly people today live in their own homes, separated from their loved ones by hundreds of miles.  If Granny slips and falls in her bathtub or her kitchen, chances are it will be the friendly folks at Life Alert — not her own flesh and blood — who will come to her rescue.  One too many accidents, and Granny’s Medicare or Medicaid will pay to place her in a nursing home.

On top of the fact that our society has shifted the “burden” of eldercare from the family to the state, our culture has also changed the way we think about old age.  With each passing decade America has become more and more obsessed with youth and more and more terrified of death.  We spend billions of dollars a year on products and procedures guaranteed to roll back the clock, often at the expense of other health issues and often with the help of a credit card.  It’s no surprise, then, that we are less inclined to want to care for our aging relatives, who would otherwise remind us daily that no amount of money spent in pursuit of a youthful appearance can prevent the inevitable:  In the end, no one gets out alive.

America’s obsession with youth has another ugly consequence: an increasingly utilitarian attitude about life in general.  We have come to define the net worth of individuals solely in economic terms: What do we produce?  What can we afford to consume?  Do our assets exceed our liabilities?  Unfortunately, the costs — both financial and personal — of caring for an elderly relative don’t contribute much to the bottom line.  It’s a burden we have become unwilling to bear.

But bear the burden we will, whether we like it or not.  Without a robust family-centered culture to care for America’s elderly, the State will continue to expand its role in this arena.  And as the worker-to-retiree ratio continues to shrink, Uncle Sam will be forced to take more of our money to finance the rising costs of health care and other benefits for the elderly in America.  There’s no shortage of blame to go around for this situation, and as America continues to become a mass-geriatric society its doubtful that we can avoid the coming crisis that is “boomsday.”

The only remaining hope is that we as a society can learn from our mistakes, move away from our radical individualistic, self-centered mindset, and rediscover the great blessings — and great responsibilities — of true family.

Let’s pair this with another number you’ve probably heard: that humans share upwards of 90% of their genes with apes. Most of our genes are exactly the same as those found in chimpanzees and gorillas, and as we move to simpler animals we find that we still share a substantial portion of our genes with creatures like dogs, mice, starfish, and oak trees. We even have some genes that are identical to those found in the simplest form of life, single-celled bacteria.

Faced with such remarkable statistical similarities, some scientists conclude that there is no real difference between human beings and apes, bacteria, and viruses. The less scientifically stunned stand back and scratch their heads, wondering how it is that holding a Ph.D. in biology can lead a man to believe that a mindless subcellular infectious agent isn’t really all that different from the species that painted the Sistine Chapel, wrote the Divine Comedy, and flew to the moon.

The problem is reductionism, the idea that beings can be reduced to merely their parts. This idea holds that the sum of the parts is all that a thing is. On the other hand, the common sense perception that viruses and people are clearly different things, however much they may share genes, is a recognition of the fact that the form of a thing matters just as much as does the matter that makes it up.

The key point when evaluating humanity is not whether it was made immediately from dirt (as a literalist reading of Genesis would imply) or whether it was made from dirt in the form of organisms passing through various stages of descent (as in the case of evolution.) In either case, the key distinction is the same: this particular dirt, this particular body, has been given an immortal soul. As such it is irreducible to mere description of its physical components.

Catholic thought has long been guided by Thomism, a Catholic development of the Greek philosophy of Aristotle. This system of philosophical thought was developed by Saint Thomas Aquinas and his followers, and has generally been endorsed by the Church as the best synthesis of revelation and the truths to which the human mind can come by reason. As difficult as it may be at times to read Thomas’ or Aristotle’s writings, their system of thought is based ultimately on common sense, and does not rely on counterintuitive premises.

Thomism, therefore, accepts completely the common sense intuition that viruses and people are clearly very different things, no matter what similarity they may have in their genetic material. Aristotle distinguished between the matter that makes up a thing and the form into which a thing is made. Wood may be made into a table, a chair, or a wall, and though they are made of the same material, wooden tables, chairs, and walls are different things. Similarly, the same genes and organic molecules may make up viruses, bacteria, monkeys, and men, yet they are all very different things. The Church affirms that of these four, only man possesses a form with an immortal, immaterial soul ordered towards God and eternal life.

The constant reporting of material similarities between the human body and simpler forms of life is often used to intimidate believers with the claim that man is no more than an animal. A return to the more sober thought found in Aristotle and Aquinas can help us to see the error of this charge. When we investigate only matter, we have to face the fact that the human body shares 100% of its elements with a pile of manure, 90% of its genes with a monkey, and 8% of those genes with a lowly virus. The human body may have inherited the genetic material of a long evolutionary history. Yet such a claim should bother the Christian no more than the Bible’s claim that the body is made of dirt. Our exceptional nature is not found in the listing of the basic components of our structure, but rather in the supernatural form God has given us, ordered beyond this world to the Creator of all matter Himself.

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.

Back in 1996, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales issued a document, The Common Good and Catholic Social Teaching, to address political issues facing Britain at the time. Leaving aside the incoherence that characterized much of that text, a distinctly skeptical tone about market economies pervaded the document – almost to the point of being an anti-Thatcherite screed.

The 1996 document was written with a view to informing Catholics’ consciences before Britain’s 1997 General Election. Shaping Catholic consciences is, after all, part of a Catholic bishop’s job. But it was very difficult to read the 1996 text as anything other than a less-than-subtle appeal to vote for the then-opposition Labour Party.

Fast-forward to 2010. With a General Election imminent in Britain, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales have issued a new document, titled Choosing the Common Good. To the joy of many, it is a remarkably sound text. Characterized by a focus on principles, sobriety of expression, and avoidance of tedious policy-wonkery, the English and Welsh bishops have authored a document that repays careful reading.

Choosing the Common Good’s strength is that it speaks to what the Church is best qualified to discuss when it comes to social and political questions: the moral-cultural dimension. In this regard, three dominant themes pervade this concise text.

The first is the limits of politics. “Have we allowed ourselves,” the bishops write, “to be seduced by the myth that social problems are for the government to deal with?… No government can solve every problem, nor make us more generous or responsive to need.”

That’s a marked departure from much of the post-war British political consensus about government’s role that not even Margaret Thatcher could overturn.

A second theme is the centrality of truly free associations (as opposed to NGOs). “Local institutions,” the bishops state, “expressing good citizenship and neighbourliness, which are not beholden to government, form a vital part of civil society.” These networks of solidarity embody valuable social capital, the vitality of which “requires our society to rediscover the centrality of personal responsibility and the gift of service to others.”

This linkage between personal responsibility and concern for our neighbor (rather than delegating it to the state) underpins the bishops’ emphasis on trust. Trust’s significance as a force for genuine social cohesion is underscored by social and economic research. According to the bishops, the undermining of trust as a living force in much of contemporary Britain has proved costly, including in the economy.

While stressing that the causes of the financial crisis are complex, the bishops argue that a decline of trust helped facilitate the financial sector’s meltdown. It follows “that new and sweeping regulation [will not] of itself solve these deep-seated problem.” “[S]ystematic flaws in the economy,” they add, “cannot be repaired unless it is recognized that they stem from, and contribute to, equivalent flaws in our wider society.”

Yes, many irresponsible choices were made by people working in the financial industry. But, as the bishops observe, there was plenty of irresponsible behavior on the part of others – including politicians and ordinary folk – that contributed to the meltdown. Regulation in itself cannot solve this problem: indeed it can significantly worsen matters.

Then there is the theme of the indispensability of virtue for any decent society. Here the bishops really hit their stride. “In place of virtue”, they insist, “we have seen an expansion of regulation. A society that is held together just by compliance to rules is inherently fragile, open to further abuses which will be met by a further expansion of regulation.”

The bishops then detail how the classical virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance have real and practical consequences for economic and social life. That’s an important argument which many on the British left and right presently seem incapable of articulating. It also makes a welcome contrast to those – including some Catholics – who invariably reduce morality to whatever happens to be the latest fashionable lefty cause.

Naturally there will be quibbles with any document on social-political issues produced by Catholic bishops. Choosing the Common Good’s section on the environment, for example, is not especially convincing. Others will wonder about its “seamless robe” reference.

The bishops themselves, however, emphasize that their statement does “not comprise a detailed political programme.” They also stress that Catholics are free to argue among themselves about those issues that are truly prudential matters (i.e., 90 percent of political questions).

In recent years, reasoned discourse in British politics – and elsewhere – has been increasingly supplanted by “activism,” an obsession with message, a near-slavery to political correctness, and avoidance of substance. By contrast, Choosing the Common Good shows that it is possible to articulate arguments that are simultaneously clear, substantive, and grounded in a rich two-and-a-half thousand year-old ethical tradition that dwarfs 1960s progressivism and its nefarious off-spring.

For this alone, all Britons should be grateful.