"The strong too often dominate the weak, and too many of those with wealth and with power find all manner of justification for their own privilege." —US President Barack Obama, May 17, 2009

"When the Church addresses her social teaching to issues of the common good… her aim, which is our aim as patriotic Catholics, is simply to help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just (Deus caritas est , no. 28)." —Archbishop Raymond Burke, May 8, 2009

"Understand — I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it… the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature. Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words." —US President Barack Obama , May 17, 2009

"As Catholics, we can never cease to work for the correction of gravely unjust laws. Law is a fundamental expression of our culture and implicitly teaches citizens what is morally acceptable." —Archbishop Raymond Burke, May 8, 2009

Two different interpretations of justice, two different visions of law, and two different understandings of reason were on display for the nation and the world to see this past week in America.

One was presented by an American Catholic prelate from Wisconsin: Archbishop Raymond Burke , formerly bishop of La Crosse, Wisconsin, then of St. Louis, Missouri, and now Prefect of the Apostolic Signature in Rome, the highest judicial authority (the equivalent of a Supreme Court) of the Roman Catholic Church.

The other was presented by US President Barack Obama , formerly a community organizer, professor of law, and state representative from Illinois.

Burke’s remarks were made on May 8 in Washington D.C. before a crowd of about 2,000 people, mostly Catholics, at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.

Obama’s remarks were made on May 17 at the University of Notre Dame ("Our Lady" in French, in honor of the Virgin Mary), in front of tens of thousands.

The crux of the issue, the place where the visions of the two men conflict and cannot be reconciled, is simple to understand. It is the question of human life — the life of the unborn baby — and whether that human life has a claim to be protected by law.

Burke’s position is that all human life has a right to be protected.

In essence, Burke is a defender of the right of every human being to live, and not be murdered by others for no cause. In this sense, he is "pro-life."

For Burke, reason (natural law) teaches that all just human societies should provide a benevolent protection for human life through laws.

A society that does not do so, a society which allows a class or group of human beings to be killed without any legal sanction, introduces, in Burke’s view, a profound injustice into its legal system, with consequences that ripple out in unpredictable ways, undermining the respect for justice throughout the society.

Burke further believes that reason (natural law) teaches that it is the purpose of all law to strive for justice.

Thus, reason urges us — reason, not the Christian or any other religious faith — to make laws that protect innocent human life, and repeal laws that sanction injustice.

If we are to be true servants of reason (servants of the Logos at the origin of all things), Burke argues, then we must acknowledge that taking the life of an innocent human being is always and everywhere unjust, that is, evil, and can never be described as just, that is, good.

Obama presented a different vision.

He argued — or seemed to argue — that justice is something relative, that there are different views about what is just, and that the highest principle of human social order, therefore, is not to find justice itself, and protect it with just laws, but to honor and respect the moral judgments of others, even if those judgments are unjust.

In this vision, wrong has rights.

It has rights because the goal is to reconcile competing visions of an uncertain moral law, not to arrive at justice itself.

This is Obama’s principle of "common ground," where wrong and right are equally at home.

Here is the salient passage where Obama sets forth his viewpoint:

"When we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do — that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground," Obama said. "That’s when we begin to say, ‘Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions. So let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women.”

In these words, Obama does grant considerable space to the "pro-life" position — and for this, he was applauded by many, even in Rome.

Indeed, he is proposing, in this passage, just actions.

Still, in these words, Obama avoids granting any validity to the pro-life contention: that it is unjust to kill an innocent human being.

Is it, or is it not, just to kill a baby in his mother’s womb?

From the president, no answer.

Burke says it is not just.

For Burke, the highest principle is justice: if an action is unjust, it cannot be justified by any human law.

Obama seems to be saying, "maybe it is, maybe it isn’t."

For Obama, the highest principle seems to be social peace: if an action is unjust, it can still be permitted for the sake of the general peace of society.

Burke finds the measure of human action in a principle: justice; Obama, seemingly, in a different principle: utility, the useful.

And out of this difference, it would seem, two different types of human society inevitably unfold and develop, one based on justice, on what is good and right, the other on utility, on what is useful at the moment, without regard to transcendent considerations of the good or the just — our present society.

And the consequences are grave in all areas of human life, including family life, including the justice or injustice of the society’s financial system and the organization of its economy — areas where the upcoming social encyclical of the Pope will clarify how justice must also be the goal of economic systems and laws.

First Reactions

The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano , gave a rather superficial and unsatisfying report on Obama’s address this morning. (Burke’s talk a week earlier was almost universally ignored worldwide.)

The report focused on the positive: that Obama had indicated he would work to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, to facilitate adoption, and to support women who want to carry their babies to term. The Osservatore also duly noted that Obama had also spoken of drafting a "conscience clause" for medical personnel who are morally opposed to participating in abortions. (Is this a matter for rejoicing? That the government will agree not to force pro-life doctors, whether Catholics, Orthodox Jews, evangelical Protestants, or others of good will, to perform abortions they regard as abominable contraventions of their personal and professional principles? What kind of government would compel such participation?)

"The search for a common ground: This seems to be the path chosen by the president of the United States, Barack Obama, in facing the delicate question of abortion," the Osservatore said, adding that Obama had set aside the "strident tone" of the 2008 political campaign on the abortion issue.

The Osservatore acknowledged the controversy caused by the president’s appearance at what it called "the most prestigious Catholic university in the United States."

"Yesterday, too, as could have been predicted, there were protests. But from the podium set up in the basketball arena, the president invited Americans of every faith and ideological conviction to ‘work in common effort’ to reduce the number of abortions," the paper said.

Missing from this report is any discussion of the deeper issues involved, issues set forth by Burke in his May 8 address.

American Reactions

In America, the press coverage of Obama’s remarks was generally laudatory — sometimes fawningly so.

Perhaps the supreme example of this came in an opinion piece penned by E. J. Dionne, who covered Vatican affairs for the New York Times for several years in the 1980s, before becoming a leading political commentator in America.

Here is how Dionne opened his piece, published in the Washington Post [yesterday] morning: "Facing down protesters who didn’t want him at Notre Dame, President Obama fought back not with harsh words but with the most devastating weapons in his political arsenal: a call for ‘open hearts,’ ‘open minds,’ ‘fair-minded words’ and a search for ‘common ground.’"

Clearly, Dionne is presenting Obama as the voice of reason, and the pro-life protesters — who did not feel it fitting that a pro-abortion president should receive an honorary degree and speak at length at a university dedicated to Our Lady — as unreasonable.

And Dionne is correct when he sums up the "conventional wisdom" on the result of Obama’s speech: "By facing their arguments (the arguments of the pro-life protesters) head-on and by demonstrating his attentiveness to Catholic concerns, Obama strengthened moderate and liberal forces inside the Church itself. He also struck a forceful blow against those who would keep the nation mired in culture-war politics without end. Obama’s opponents on the Catholic right placed a large bet on his Notre Dame visit. And they lost."

Yes, that is the generally accepted wisdom: that Obama was reasonable, that the protesters were unreasonable; that the "culture wars" in America (over abortion, embryonic stem cell use, homosexual marriage, etc.) have been a muddy swamp in which the nation has been mired, but that Obama, with his "sweet reason" will guide the nation to higher ground ("common ground"); that Catholic pro-life activists are politically on "the right" as if a conviction about the injustice of killing unborn babies is a political and not a moral position.

The issue is not Obama’s calm demeanor, nor is it his laudable efforts to do things which, objectively speaking, are good or in the direction of the good ("make adoption more available"; "provide care and support for women who do carry their children to term").

The issue is basic, fundamental: does the infant in the womb have human rights, including the right not to be killed?

Obama, clearly, does not believe any child in the womb has this right.

The Larger Picture

The Catholic tradition, the Jewish tradition, the Muslim tradition, the entire ethical tradition of mankind, the natural law tradition, all unanimously have held that the unborn child should be protected, cherished, nourished, cared for, loved.

This is the common conviction of all mankind at all times, except, it would appear, our own.

This ethic is a true "seamless garment" — protect the unborn child (no intentional abortion), protect the newborn infant (no infanticide), protect the child (no abuse of children), protect the young (educate them and nourish them and confer on them all the hopes for a better future), protect the middle-aged (so that they can care for their parents and their children, by ensuring good work at decent pay), and protect the old — honor the old (no euthanasia).

This is an ethic of life.

And it is not right-wing or left-wing. It is radical, rooted in what all of us know to be true and just and right. And a society that goes against what all of us know to be true and just and right cannot thrive and flourish.

And the beginning of the ethic, the starting point of the seamless garment, is in the womb, that place of all places which ought to be sacred, and secure, and respected, and not doused with drugs, probed by pincers, cut open, poisoned, scraped, or otherwise disrupted and invaded.

This is true respect for the woman — true feminism.

This is true respect for the human person — true humanism.

And if it took the smooth but ultimately unjust — ultimately unreasonable — words of Obama at Our Lady’s university, Notre Dame, to make this crystal clear, then so be it.

The pro-life movement has not lost.

Sometime, generations hence, our descendants will look back in puzzlement and shame at what we have done, and justified, with specious arguments.

Obama could reflect more deeply, and become a true unifier — uniting with the wise and holy men of previous and coming generations, and not with the utilitarians of the present — if he would embrace the ethic of life.

As it is, Obama — like the University of Notre Dame itself — sounds an uncertain trumpet, and is destined, barring a change, to leave a legacy of injustice defended.

Reason and sanity and good sense and love of life will return once again, and human life will be embraced and cherished as a mysterious, priceless treasure, and the civilization which will spring from that cherishing will outshine our present one as the sun outshines the most distant stars.

With the disclosure of confidential memoranda discussing the permissible limits of aggressive interrogation of terrorist suspects, the Obama administration has thrust the issue of torture back into the public domain.

In response, former Vice President Dick Cheney proposed that subsequent government documents be released which, he claims, will reveal the fruits or benefits of these techniques which he deems to have been successful as a matter of homeland security.

As I understand Mr. Cheney, he seems to be arguing that even if the subject practices were something like torture, and they prevented a serious terrorist attack on the United States, this would be justification for having used them. While I have no particular objection to releasing this additional material, I do not find this line of moral reasoning compelling at all.

The former Vice President is arguing, essentially, that the ends justify the means.

Others have taken up this argument with gusto from the opposite perspective. This past week National Public Radio ran a story on interrogation techniques that worked and those that did not. It compared Army interrogation techniques to the CIA’s harsher approach and found the former to be more effective. I have no idea who has the better of this argument as a factual matter. But, again, this line of reasoning begs the fundamental moral question as to the licit or illicit nature of “enhanced interrogation”. I certainly hope that the morally benign approach is more effective, but it really is irrelevant to the question of the moral status of torture per se.

I have long resisted the idea that American officials would san ction torture for any reason. As a youngster I perceived that it was always the Gestapo or the KGB who did such things. I also recall the debate in France over torture during the Algerian War which tore that country apart and, at least to some degree, contributed to its withdrawal from Algeria.

That “the ends never justify the means” is one of those foundational principles drilled into any person who has had a morally serious education, evidently an increasingly rare thing in the United States these days. Certainly circumstances can lead to a sympathetic or indulgent attitude to any given situation or person utilizing intrinsically evil practices; but that is a long way from justification, approval or the setting of basic government policy.

The toughest case for me was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My father was stationed in Europe, waiting to ship out to the Pacific when those bombings occurred. Many defend these actions to this day on the grounds that the avoidance of blood lost in trying to invade Japan was well worth the cost.

Again, while sympathizing with the agony of the decision facing President Truman, I never could reconcile myself to the mass destruction of civilian, noncombatant populations, no matter how militarized Japanese society may have been at the time. I simply could not reconcile such actions with any version of the Just War Theory dating back to St. Augustine. It was simply beyond the Pale.

Reviewing the list of interrogation tactics and governing practices sanctioned by the US Justice Department back in 2002, waterboarding is the practice which clearly qualifies as torture for me and most people.

For several years now I had harbored an abhorrence of waterboarding, having heard from Viet Nam veterans of its use during that war. More recently, Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece in Vanity Fair in which he tells of his submission to the practice to gain an existential insight into the practice. Hitchens is adamant in maintaining that waterboarding does not simulate drowning. It is drowning. I think he has that right.

Considering slapping, “walling”, sleep deprivation and other tactics, tough practices all, I could not say for sure, that such techniques amounted to torture in an objective sense of the term — until I read how these techniques, as well as waterboarding, were used multiple times over a prolonged period of time. The practices relied on the fear and uncertainty of the subject on the receiving end of an extended barrage of such practices. They fell short, say, of branding or electrocution or other horrendous things that human beings have done to each other. Still, I would be extremely upset if an American soldier was subjected to similar treatment at the hands of the enemy. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Waterboarding seemed to me to comport with what most human beings perceive or understand to be “torture”. Reasonable people will disagree on many of the other techniques, depending on their severity and intensity of application; but waterboarding is the real thing.

Without getting into the legal complexity of how we as a country define torture, most citizens presume it to be not a mere municipal matter but one of moral substance.

Which brings us back to ends and means. Saving a city from a large-scale terrorist attack is a good thing. However, does it justify serious, inherently immoral or intrinsically evil means to achieve that end? Cheney and others who support him on this issue seem to think so without saying so. They fail to make explicit their view that the ends justify the means given their focus on showing the benefit, or lack of benefit, of “enhanced interrogation” in terms of successfully avoiding an attack.

I, for one, would have preferred hearing the former Vice President engage the question of what is, or is not, “torture” rather than whether or not it serves a utilitarian function. Assuming that the ends can redeem an immoral means is dangerous, a slippery moral slope which can cause otherwise sane people to justify the most horrendous practices. Why stop with torturing the subject at hand? What if you could lay hands on a terrorist’s wife and children? Would it be all right to subject them to abuse, mistreatment, torture or even death to bring pressure to bear on a recalcitrant suspect? Where, as they say, does it all end?

There is hardly an inhumane or immoral act which cannot be justified for some supposedly greater good: carpet bombing of cities, euthanasia, abortion, abridgement of civil liberties, lying under oath. In this sense torture is no different. You may argue about what is or is not torture, but you cannot justify the thing itself without abandoning the fundamental principles of a just and moral social order.

It took a lot of guts for President Obama to publicly reverse campaign promises at his 100 days press conference and tell the pro-abortion crowd that “I think that those who are pro-choice make a mistake when they…suggest that this is simply an issue about women’s freedom and that there’s no other considerations…The Freedom of Choice Act is not [my] highest legislative priority. I believe that women should have the right to choose. But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on. And that’s where I’m going to focus.”

It takes a big man to make such a statement about moving away from FOCA. Additionally, those who mailed in their red envelopes also deserve praise for getting him to pause and consider that the issues of abortion (and micro-abortion — directly attacking human embryos) are not just a matter for scientists (materialists), a matter where the ends justify the means. The issue is a matter of the values that define us: an issue where the culture’s values matter as much as cold techniques that use freedom as an excuse for anything.

Seemingly oblivious to it, President Obama — within the very same press conference — created the foundation from which perhaps he can reverse some of his earlier bad social decisions and reverse the hypocrisy within which he still walks. Discussing waterboarding of terrorists, President Obama said: “Waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. I don’t think that’s just my opinion; that’s the opinion of many who’ve examined the topic. And that’s why I put an end to these practices. I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do… because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are…. You start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.” The same argument against abortion could be made by replacing the word ‘waterboarding’ with ‘abortion’ and replacing ‘torture’ with ‘murder’. Watch…

“[Abortion along with human embryonic stem cell research] violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is [murder]. I don’t think that’s just my opinion; that’s the opinion of many who’ve examined the topic. And that’s why I put an end to these practices. I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do…because we could have gotten this information [or healing] in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are…. You start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.” Yes America, there is reason for hope…. There’s no reason a U.S. President can’t say these words about abortion if he can say them about torture.

Be as suspicious as you may over President Obama’s motives for backtracking on FOCA. Was he just trying to keep poorly informed Catholics within the Democratic party with false hope? [Disclosure: I’m a registered Independent.] Has the leadership read the tea leaves and realized the party is about to be punished with mass defections? Being an optimist, I send President Obama my thanks. I prefer to believe the future is not written in stone, that humans are partners with God in determining the future. The future is determined by today’s actions, above all prayer and fasting. A second wave of red envelopes would also help to remind President Obama of the values of our country; that people are greatly upset that abortion continues to “corrode the character of our country”. The second round could remind him: “In case you mistook my silence last time.”

People of hate see nothing wrong with direct attacks upon innocent human life or direct attacks upon the importance of traditional marriage. “Many who’ve examined the topic” for thousands of years are in agreement… abortion is the taking of innocent human life and produces a culture of death that corrodes everything. Additionally, the reason so many pseudo-feminists (“pro-choicers”) think only of abortion, in Obama’s own words, “simply [as] an issue about women’s freedom and that there’s no other considerations” is because the Marxists taught them to think that way. They know human relationships only in terms of power struggles (hate). Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s collaborator, believed the Marxist/atheistic revolution could only work and take hold with the abolition of the family. He taught that the revolution had to start with the abolition of the family (cf. Schooyans) because marriage was just another form of the assertion of power. Thus, women were “forced” into pregnancy and so needed greater freedom from marriage. The U.N. continues these false ideals under the guise of feminism (cf. Schooyans) as the rest of the world suffers homosexualist attacks on true diversity (male and female) from their State supreme courts.

The problem with most Marxists (really just materialists who deny God and authentic human values) is that they can’t believe in love. Everything is about power politics. They believe only in what their eyes can see and have little value for past wisdom. Everything is about change and revolution. They treat others as only means to an end or have been used by others so much they just won’t believe in love anymore. They’re a lot like secularists. Neither can live fully human lives because neither lives in love. They are simply diminished persons — living like animals, slaves to passions. To be human is to live in love, suffering for others, living for others. Humans are made to be God’s image and likeness and God is love. We can’t say we are fully human, fully in God’s image, if we withhold love from the unborn humans who await our love. Instead we become like animals when we choose to kill the innocent or when we seduce them into bestial behavior. As Marxists and Secularists fail to realize their own humanity, they fail to realize it in others, hence abortion thrives.

It is nice to see Obama indicate that he may be moving away from ideals that were ultimately inspired by Marxists. Let’s increase our prayers for him. And let’s keep those red envelopes going.