Now he is a horrifying idea...

...what if the Catholic Church was right on contraception?

//Here's the thing, though: the Catholic Church is the world's biggest and oldest organization. It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor. It's given us some of the world's greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually has a good reason. Everyone has a right to disagree, but it's not that they're a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages.

So, what's going on?

The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That's it. But it's pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it's probably never been as salient as today.

Today's injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI called Humanae Vitae.  He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:

General lowering of moral standards
A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
Government coercion in reproductive matters.
Does that sound familiar? 

It's Science!


Here's the reason that whenever someone says "I was raised a Catholic, so I know what it teaches," what follows will be the weirdest farago of nonsense you will ever hear.

According to the research blog of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate:

//In comparison to the Pew study, D'Antonio et al. find that half of self-identified adult Catholics (50%) are unaware that the Catholic Church teaches the following about the bread and wine used for Communion: "the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Jesus Christ." However, 63% of adult Catholics, regardless of what they think the Church teaches, believe that "at the Consecration during a Catholic Mass, the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Jesus Christ."

As shown below, this creates four groups. The largest are "knowledgeable believers," representing 46% of adult Catholics, who are aware of the Church's teachings about the Real Presence and say they believe these to be true. Additionally, there is another 17% who believe in the Real Presence but who are unaware that this represents a Church teaching. These are the "unknowing believers." 

The second largest group is the "unknowing unbelievers" who do not believe in the Real Presence (i.e., they believe the bread and wine are only symbols) and do not know that this represents a teaching of the Church. There is something hopeful about this group, which represents a third of adult Catholics (33%). Even though they currently do not believe the Church's teaching, they may come to believe it if they knew and understood it better. Knowledge and belief of this may even bring more of them to a Catholic parish on Sundays.

What is rare, representing only 4% of adult Catholics, is someone who knows about the Church's teachings regarding the Real Presence and who states they do not believe this teaching to be true. These are the "knowledgeable doubters" (...note that this study uses the same methods of CARA Catholic Polls, e.g., anonymity, self-administered response without an interviewer, which limit social desirability bias).

And a handy graph to prove the point!

Losing Natural Law.

James Kalb writes:

The result is that natural-law moral reasoning loses its basis in how reason and reality are publicly understood, and comes to seem an imposition of arbitrary demands that are at odds with perfectly valid (because peacefully achievable) human desires. To make matters worse, as moral standards come to conform themselves to what is now understood as reason, and to the tendency of a bureaucratic, commercial, and technocratic society to view everything from the standpoint of obvious immediate utility, natural-law moral reasoning comes to appear actively evil. After all, it tries to bring human life within natural patterns that are traditionally recognized, and that means stereotyping and discrimination, which are now considered the worst sins imaginable.
That’s why Barack Obama got a rainbow-colored halo on the cover of Time Magazine when he came out in favor of “gay marriage.” Indeed, the requirement under international law that governments suppress attitudes and practices stemming from belief in sexual complementarity suggests that extirpating natural-law considerations is now considered, by our most authoritative institutions, a basic responsibility of government.
Under such circumstances, intelligent discussion of the public good, and of the complex and multi-leveled patterns and goals that shape human life, becomes impossible. So what do Catholics do when confronted with social authorities that insist, as a matter of fundamental principle, on replacement of human nature and the good by will and technology as the highest standard, and demand the imposition of their vision on the whole of life everywhere?
It’s a difficult question, especially when the state and other centralized forms of social organization are as pervasive as they are today. What we obviously can’t do, though, is support the realization of the progressive vision. The egalitarian, bureaucratic, and centrally-administered conception of social justice on which it is based is something we can’t cooperate with. When we support it, as the case of Obamacare illustrates, we are strengthening what will crush us. We might as well support the construction of a universal caliphate.
Instead, we must insistently, in season and out, in every possible setting, assert, argue for, and act on our own contrary understanding of human life. When there is a fundamental misconception the answer is not to join in the projects of the people who suffer from the misconception. It is to do whatever is needed to correct it. Today the Catholic view is simply not a presence in public life, and at best is misunderstood as an eccentric variation on some other view. Our most important political task is to change that.

The heresy of Libertarianism.

Leftist Catholic writer Michael Sean Winters pens a letter to Catholic Republicans, and promises to follow up with one to Catholic Democrats. It's always worth reading a thoughtful critique of one's position, so let's see if Winters is playing a truly prophetic role.

He writes:

The heresy of libertarianism has taken root within the Republican Party, and it has done so in the area of our culture where it is most dangerous because most pervasive: economics. I say “heresy” for two reasons. First, because libertarianism fits with the definition of heresy attributed to Lord Acton, it is a “truth run amok,” that is, it takes sound ideas about human freedom and responsibility and runs too far with them, ending up in the kind of knee-jerk, anti-government politics that could scarcely be more at odds with the classic view of government as a good found in Catholic social teaching, in the writings of Aquinas and even, with a big qualification, in Augustine. Secondly, and more dangerously, this libertarianism raises issues of theological anthropology of the first order.

I think that is a fair critique. Libertarianism is premised on a distorted anthropological view of humanity. People are selfish and invividualistic, but they are also altruistic and communitarian. An anthropology that rejects either dimension of being human will get things fundamentally wrong.

Winters expands his point with respect to income inequality:

Nowhere is the inability to grasp the social nature of man more obvious than in the reluctance of today’s Republican Party to come to terms with the fact of rising income inequality. Over at Vox Nova, Morning’s Minion has a great article about Catholic teaching on the sin of income inequality, with quotes going back to Pope Pius XI. The willingness of Republicans to trash the very idea that government has an obligation to ensure that its citizens have adequate health care and other basic human needs places them squarely at odds with a different, but equally long, catalogue of explicit papal teachings. As well, when I hear certain Catholic commentators suggest that the right to private property is inviolable, nay, even such that its violation is an intrinsic evil, I wonder if they have read the same encyclicals – or the same Summa - I have been reading since college. Above all else, Catholic Social Teaching stands for the proposition that all human activities and organizations, including the economy, must be judged in terms of their moral worth. The economy must serve man, not the other way round. And, yet, to hear some Republican Catholics talk, it is hard not to conclude that their view of the market is a superstitious, even idolatrous view, assigning to its invisible and inscrutable workings an ethical value that seems, to them, coincident with a rising GDP. The Master, of course, was clear on this: We will be judged not on the basis of our material success but on how we treat the least of these our brethren.

This is true in the last part, but what does that have to do with income inequality. Is it the case that because somebody has $100,000 today and $200,000 tomorrow that they will be less attentive to the poor? It seems that if their attention to the poor remains constant, then they will be in a position to do more good.

As noted by Theodore Dalrymple, income inequality is a phenomenon of rising standards of living, it is brute fact of mathematics:

Two considerations arise here, however. The first, as a simple thought experiment shows, is that equality in health is not necessarily desirable in itself. Suppose that the infant-mortality rate in the highest social class is three per 1,000 live births, while that in the lowest is six per 1,000 (approximately the case in Britain today). Then suppose that we could reduce the rate by one death per 1,000 births in each social class, yielding two per 1,000 in the highest class and five per 1,000 in the lowest. A cause for rejoicing, certainly—but not from the point of view of equality, for the ratio of deaths in the lowest class to deaths in the highest class would widen from 6:3 to 5:2—that is, from 2.0 to 2.5. Surely, however, only a latter-day Lenin would reject such an improvement because it increased inequality. Similarly, an increase in the infant-mortality rate of the highest social class, to six per 1,000, would represent an advance to complete equality; but again, no one but a Lenin would wish it.

Is there something unattractive about contemplating a society where the lines of the highest ten percent and the lowest ten percent are getting wider? Absolutely. Would it be nice if the lines were closer? Well, that depends on how you make that happen.

And that's the rub - in theory, using a magic wand to remove income inequality would be a good thing; in practice, it has led to injustice of Lenistic proportions.

Society must take care of the poor. It should prevent the concentration of wealth through unjust means, but if society is to improve the standard of living for the poor, it may have to tolerate an increase in income inequality, not as a goal, but as a means.