But it seems it may have been conversion-lite. On homosexuality, Blair has shown evident opposition to consistent Catholic teaching. He described the difference between the Pope’s position, and Blair’s own, as a “huge generational difference”. Blair evidently thinks that as time goes by, teachings will change, and old thinking will fade, to be replaced by new stuff. Blair has all the key phrases for this: “rethinking is good”, “evolve over time”, “evolving attitudes becomes part of the discipline”, etc, etc. The thought that the Church may have the right position, a solid position, which can built on (and sometimes in unexpected ways) seems not to have crossed his mind. Or, it has never been made to cross his mind by those responsible for teaching him. And the Church has noticed this.

And so, like so many, he believes in the Church of Shangri La; a nice comfortable parish run by a gently wizened old priest where happiness abounds, isolated from hardship, and where the soft winds of the changes of time bring only the breath of delights.

The issue causing such thought is, of course, the honorary degree given to Obama by Notre Dame. That honorary degree is in law, which is exactly the area which he should not be honored in. Perhaps a case might be made for a honorary degree in humane letters (Obama did write a popular book). But not in law. To honor the President in law is, paradoxically, to dishonor him, by highlighting what he should not be doing. (Father Jenkins — the president of Notre Dame — recent letter avoids such reasoning.

We are also called to honor the bishops. So when they called for Catholics to avoid giving such honors, their request has not been honored. So the secular President has overtly been honored, but not our spiritual fathers. But both must be honored.

A memo dated January 17, 2003 also described techniques “used” against Khatani between November 23, 2002 and January 16, 2003, including stripping, forced grooming, invasion of space by a female interrogator, treating Khatani like an animal, using a military working dog, and forcing him to pray to an idol shrine.

The forced grooming was the shaving of Khatani’s beard, which has religious significance in Islam. And what on earth was the “idol shrine”? As for the “invasion of space by a female”, later passages gives more details:

Nor did the inquiry review an allegation that, on April 17, 2003, a female GTMO interrogator sat on a detainee’s lap “making sexual affiliated movements with he chest and pelvis while again speaking sexually oriented sentences.”

The second incident involved a female military interrogator who wiped what she tols the detainee was mentrual blood on a detainee’s face and forehead.

The memo stated that Slahi would be denied the opportunity to pray and described techniques to exploit “religious taboos,” such as using a female interrogator in “close physical contact.” The memo also stated that interrogators would play music to “stress [Slahi] because he believes music is forbidden” and that light in Slahi’s interrogation booth would be filtered with “red plastic to produce a stressful environment.” Khatani had also been denied prayer and a female interrogator touch him during his interrogation to increase his stress level.”

Horrifying.

This time it deals with the difference between something being directly intended, and something being indirectly intended. (Of course, many of the commenters don’t realize that this is the issue, and use the word “intend” in ways that seem reasonable to them, but that were never … er … intended by the Church.)

As Pope Paul VI taught, and was repeated by John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor:

it is never lawful … to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order

The careful language immediately tips us off that there is some significant difference between something directly intended and something indirectly intended. What is the difference?

As one of many places to go, we can use Google Books, and dip back into a 19th Catholic text on moral philosophy. After explaining what direct intention means — it is that intention which is the motivation for an act, the thing wished for, the thing desired, the thing wanted, the goal that drives our actions —the author describes what indirect intention is:

But there may be other effects which the agent foresees or can foresee so related to the act, that, though he does not intend them, yet he consents to their taking place, inasmuch as he wills the act which, to his knowledge, is the cause or at least the occasion of these effects. Thus, in ordering a city to be bombarded, a general brings about, however reluctantly, the death of many non-combatants. Such an effect, he is said to permit, or to will indirectly.

As Veritatis Splendor indicates, the absolute prohibition on taking innocent life applies when taking the innocent life is the direct intention.

If you desire to kill an innocent, wish for it, plan for it, are made happy by the thought of one of these deaths, and fail to avoid such a death when there is no cost to avoiding it, then taking the innocent life is your direct intention.

But if you do everything possible to avoid such a death, are dismayed and dejected at the thought of such a death, look for every opportunity of achieving your other goals without causing such a death, and rethink whether your direct goals are even worth such a death, then taking an innocent life is an indirect intention.

This distinction between direct and indirect intention has, in various ways, been in the Church’s mind for a long time (it goes back to Aquinas, and even as far back as 1 Maccabees 6:43-46).

To muddle together direct intention and indirect intention leads only to incorrect conclusions — and quite horrible conclusions.

I cordially greet all of you who took part in the International Congress: "Life-Sustaining Treatments and Vegetative State: Scientific Advances and Ethical Dilemmas".

I quote this because it sets the scene for what caused the Pope's statement to come about — the treatment of those in a PVS.

I feel the duty to reaffirm strongly that the intrinsic value and personal dignity of every human being do not change, no matter what the concrete circumstances of his or her life. A man, even if seriously ill or disabled in the exercise of his highest functions, is and always will be a man, and he will never become a "vegetable" or an "animal".

I.e. those in a PVS have just as much human dignity and intrinsic value as any one-day old child, or any Pope, or any blogger.

The sick person in a vegetative state, awaiting recovery or a natural end, still has the right to basic health care (nutrition, hydration, cleanliness, warmth, etc.), and to the prevention of complications related to his confinement to bed. He also has the right to appropriate rehabilitative care and to be monitored for clinical signs of eventual recovery.

That is the primary teaching contained in the Pope's statement as it applies to those in a PVS. It is exceptionally clear.

Then, two secondary statements are made, so as to clear up some confusions in this area. For some have said, in effect: "Surely the provision of food and water to those unable to do it for themselves is a medical act, and should be considered as one of the possible medical acts that may or may not be given to those in a PVS?" And the Pope says:

I should like particularly to underline how the administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act.

Which settles that. And note that this secondary statement applies to more than just those in a PVS.

And then some have, in effect, said: "Surely the provision of food and water is sometimes an extraordinary act, not normal care, and thus not always morally obligatory." And the Pope clarifies the issues here, saying:

Its use, furthermore, should be considered, in principle, ordinary and proportionate, and as such morally obligatory, insofar as and until it is seen to have attained its proper finality …

Which says that the provision of food and water (provided that the purposes of food and water are actually being achieved) is always ordinary care, and thus morally obligatory. And this applies to more than just those in a PVS.

… which in the present case consists in providing nourishment to the patient and alleviation of his suffering.

And to give an example as it relates directly to those in a PVS, the Pope indicates the purposes ("finality") of food and water as being to provide nourishment (so as to maintain life and health) and to prevent suffering (which the removal of food and water would cause). So long as the food and water is achieving some of its purpose, it is ordinary and morally obligatory care.

The Pope's statement on this can be read here, and it is worth looking at how the blog posting manages to make such a clear statement somehow less clear:

Pope John Paul II weighed in on this issue in May 2004. In a short allocution, he argued that…

The Pope was teaching, not arguing.

But this statement should be interpreted not as some new innovation…

But it doesn't really matter if it was an innovation — it isn't something at odds with previous teaching, and it provided great clarity in a potentially confusing area.

One implication of the pope's statement is that the case for withdrawing tubes from patients in persistent vegetative states may be less clear than for other cases…

On reading the Pope's statement, the exact opposite is the case: for patients in a persistent vegetative state, it is perfectly clear that removal of nutrition/hydration is not permissible.

Note also the two conditions listed by the pope: providing nourishment, and alleviation of suffering. It could be argued that Terry Schiavo was not suffering.

I cannot for the life of me see that the Pope was intending to state that both conditions had to be fulfilled for food and water to be allowable. Food and water are provided so as to keep the body alive, and to prevent suffering due to lack of food and water. Both are needs. (And if Schiavo were not suffering, this would be even less reason to remove food and water.)

As I noted, the area suffers from a grave lack of clarity.

As described by the blogger, surely so. But not if the Pope's statement is read as teaching.

Or could it [nutrition and hydration] have been seen as extraordinary treatment, given that she was suffering from severe brain damage and was not cognizant of her surroundings?

Anyone reading the whole of the Pope's teaching statement could not realistically be left in doubt about the answer to that question.

Take abortion and torture, two instrinsically evil acts. If one chooses torture instead of abortion on the grounds that it is the "lesser evil", then one is engaging in the kind of proportionalism condemned by John Paul in Veritatis Splendour.

Firstly, one can never choose to perform any evil, under any circumstances. So, one can never perform abortion, and one can never perform torture. Choosing one over the other still leaves an evil act being performed: whichever act is chosen, it is still evil, and no appeal to proportionalism is needed to see this.

When MM refers to "the lesser evil", this is the principle that a lesser evil can sometimes be tolerated, provided it occurs as the unintended and indirect consequence of directly choosing a greater good (or avoiding a greater evil). It may be that MM is only intending to cover that case. But what is that case?

A classic example: an out-of-control train is traveling down a track which will shortly fork into two directions. The driver can choose to go left, with the result that one innocent person will be killed. Or the driver can go to the right, with the result that ten innocent people will be killed. Moral theology allows that the driver can deliberately choose to go to the left.

This is sometimes called "choosing the lesser evil" (one person dies rather than ten), but this can be a very misleading terminology. It is much clearer to call it "choosing the greatest possible good". By going to the left, the driver is choosing to save ten innocent people — and saving people is a good thing to do. The driver's choice in going left is good. The choice does imply that one innocent person will die, but this is unintended, indirect, and the chosen good is proportionately larger than the foreseen evil.

It's in this sense that one can choose a lesser evil over a greater one — provided the lesser evil is unintended, indirect, and occurs through some kind of force (in the same way that the train was out-of-control).

MM goes on:

But if the act of voting itself is not intrinsically evil, and you do not share in the intent to either abort babies or torture people, then proportional considerations can come into play.

Before looking at what proportionate reasons there might be, it is well to consider that fact that the support for abortion can potentially include three intrinsic evils:

1. it encourages abortions to actually be carried out;
2. it fails to put into place the protection of the innocent from murder;
3. it proclaims that an evil is a good.

MM then says:

a legitimate prudential judgment could well be to support the pro-abortion candidate on the grounds that he or she would not affect any increase in abortion

While that would take into account reason (1) given above, it does nothing to avoid the evils of (2) and (3).

To begin with: what is prudence? As is usual, if Aquinas has something to say on the matter, it will be particularly helpful. He says that prudence is "right reason as applied to action". Prudence is a practical matter, an application of good reasoning as to which actions should be undertaken in particular circumstances. Prudence does not consider the goals of our actions, but rather the means by which we will achieve those goals.

In general, prudence may involve the use of ordinary pragmatic reasoning. If the weather forecast is for heavy rain, it may be prudent to have an umbrella handy. That is prudence as applied to a pragmatic problem. But also — depending on the issue — moral reasoning may be involved. That is because prudence is right reasoning, and correct reasoning must always be based on the right morals. Thus it is never prudent to consider immoral means to achieve any goal.

In general, the use of prudence may involve combining both pragmatic and moral reasoning. If the forecast is for rain, it is not prudent to steal an umbrella, since protecting the body at the expense of harming the soul is never prudent. Right reasoning would see that though the body is protected for a short time against the rain, this is insufficient reason to harm the eternal soul.

Does the Church make prudential judgments? Certainly. Very many. Some examples:

• in the exercise of canon law, both pragmatic and moral reasoning is involved. At a marriage tribunal, where the validity of a marriage is being determined, the Church is using right reasoning  both in defending a marriage bond if it exists (moral reasoning), while also investigating the pragmatic circumstances of the marriage (for which, perhaps a psychologist or a doctor is consulted, not for their moral opinion but for their pragmatic opinion).
• even more commonly, prudential judgments are made in sacramental confessions. The priest may listen to the pragmatic circumstances surrounding a potential sin, and then make a ruling as to whether it is a sin or not.

So, with this full sense of prudential (involving both pragmatic and moral reasoning), the Church certainly makes prudential judgments, and Catholics can be required to assent to those rulings.

It is sometimes claimed that though the Church has the ability to require Catholics to assent to moral rulings, it has not authority to require them to assent to pragmatic rulings. While there is a sense in which this is true, there is a sense in which it is false. Hence some disentangling is needed.

It is true that the Church has some areas on which her opinion is not authoritative. For example, deciding on the chances of rain tomorrow is left to a meteorologist, not the Pope, since it is a purely pragmatic issue. In contrast, what kinds of killing are wrong is a moral matter, over which the Church has authority to make moral rulings.

But (as we have seen in the bullet list above), the Church may make use of pragmatic reasoning prior to making a moral ruling. That kind of combined reasoning is not purely pragmatic, and can come under the authority of the Church.

The #2267 death penalty controversy

A timely example: controversy has recently arisen over a particular prudential judgment that can be found in the Catechism (#2267):

Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm – without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."

 There is an argument there, of the form:

1. Do not apply the death penalty unless it is necessary for the safety of society;
2. It is very rare for the condition in (1) to be true;
3. Therefore, the application of the death penalty will be very rare.

 Objection is sometimes made that though (1) is a moral ruling, since (2) is a pragmatic judgment, the conclusion offered in (3) cannot amount to something that requires the assent of Catholics, since it relies on a pragmatic judgment. This is not correct. As we have seen in the bulleted list towards the beginning of this post, the Church is (and always has been) capable of making rulings based partly on a pragmatic assessment of particular circumstances. The kind of argument given in #2267 of the Catechism is of the same type, and (given its clear authority expressed by placing it both in an encyclical and the Catechism), requires assent — in the same way that rulings made in confession, and marriage-tribunal rulings require assent.

Fact and law and the Jansenists

A related kind of challenge to Church teaching, as described in the prior section, has been seen before in Church history. In summary: In the 17th century a Jansenist had written down in a book some teachings. The Pope read the book, and presented a list of condemned propositions he found in the book. To evade condemnation of the book, the Jansenists replied by claiming that while all the Pope's moral condemnations were of course completely correct, the condemned propositions were not actually to be found in the book, and furthermore (since the Jansenists really, really did not want the book to be condemned) that reading and understanding a book was only a pragmatic matter, and thus was not something that the Pope had authority to rule on.

The Pope replied by authoritatively asserting that he really did have the ability to read and understand a book, and the subsequent power, if necessary, to condemn a book specifically.

(This is not some kind of strange historical vignette. A very similar issue rose about a decade ago.)

The Church's social doctrine

Why care about #2267? Because the Church has a rather large amount of social doctrine that has been extremely poorly understood or adapted into the actions of lay Catholics (despite the fact that a Pope has ruled that the Church's social doctrine is a part of its moral theology). If #2267 is rejected as "merely pragmatic", rather than a teaching that should be assented to, there is the risk that some or all of the Church's social doctrine may be treated similarly. This would be a
disaster.

For example, he proposes two parameters to guide the process of coming up with a definition:

Parameter 1: The definition should correspond as much as possible to our pre-reflective sense of what constitutes torture.

I'm very dubious about that. Our human pre-reflective sense can be extremely muddled, and it is necessary to dissect that muddle, and drop out what is not useful (and what is dropped may be a little, or a lot).

Parameter 2: The definition should point to something that is intrinsically evil.

Whatever the Council and Pope had in mind for what was intrinsically evil, they clearly had something in mind, and not vague generalities. One part of a relevant quote from the Council and Pope is where it includes torture in a list of those things which:

violates the integrity of the human person

and that statement provides a strong clue to what it was that led to this kind of torture being an intrinsic evil.

Then Akin jumps ahead by more than a few steps, and says:

The fact that Church authorities once used torture, in keeping with the legal custom of the day in secular society, is a matter of intense shame.

As I have previously pointed out, I would like to wait to see exactly what 'torture' is defined as before trying to apply it to a previous historical situation. (Part of reducing the muddle.)

Akin proposes the following as a definition of torture:

The sin of torture consists in the disproportionate infliction of pain.

And I think that a definition like that can never help elucidate what must be an intrinsic evil. Firstly, it leaves undefined exactly what kind of proportionate comparison is proposed. And secondly, any proposed scale of pain leaves it necessarily vague as to who is to decide that counts as too much pain. Different people feel pain differently. What is too much for one is not for another. But then defining 'torture' in that way would necessarily be a subjective thing, and thus could not possibly be intrinsic. Nor, alternately,  could we leave it up to a social consensus, or a vote, as to what was to be counted as too much pain, since that would still be subjective. But the Church is condemning something as intrinsically wrong.

Akin also misses the Church's condemnation (directly adjacent to the condemnation of mental and physical torture) of attempts to coerce the spirit – which can be regarded as the spiritual form of torture. This means that the torture of an Islamic terrorist to find out about a ticking bomb (the explosion of which the terrorist regards, however mistakenly,  as a morally correct action) is an attempt to coerce the spirit, and thus also intrinsically wrong.

The swiftness to label every peep of criticism of Israel as anti-semitism is one of the weird tics of American culture. In some theoretical way, it is general acknowledged that Israel could, in some alternate universe, do something wrong. But in actual fact, a considerable number of Americans find it almost impossible to admit it, even when they do something grossly unjust, like the story this blog entry mentions. It's *astounding* how quickly you get tagged as an anti-semite, or a kook, or some other nasty thing if you suggest that Israel is just another secular nation state, capable of all the evil that any secular nation state commits. In America, even Catholics buy into the thoroughly Protestant notion that *this* particular secular nation state is somehow specially ordained by God and is not simply the product of a UN resolution. I refuse to buy that particular bit of bogus theology and view Israel's claims to statehood through the lens of natural law, not supernatural revelation. Israel has all the claims that any other secular nation state has. No less and no more.

And that has consistently been Mark's position. In summary, he holds that (filtering out the exaggerations):

• Israel is just another secular nation state;
• Israel is simply the product of a UN resolution.

And consistently I have never been able to understand how Mark can hold such positions, or where they come from.

Imagine a country where this is true:

The country is Jewish. The majority of people pay mixed or no attention to God. A minority pay great attention to God. The rulers are sometimes religious, and sometimes not. They are criticized heavily. Traditional enemies attack them regularly. They are descendants of Abraham, and the promise given to Abraham is still alive in them. Sometimes there are prophets, and sometimes not.

Is this Israel of 900BC? Or the Israel of today? Is God working in promised ways in one, but not the other? On what grounds do I decide? I think it is clear that I had better get the answer exactly right, else I risk nullifying the Old Testament, or even nullifying the New.

But somehow Mark thinks he has a precise reading on the situation, and can tell that one is really God's Israel, and the other is really not. How he has managed to figure this out I do not understand.