The Associated Press calls it “passive defiance.”  I call it active nonviolence.  However one prefers to name it, it is a perfect illustration of the power of nonviolent resistance.  As the AP reports, “After weeks of sometimes violent confrontation with police, protesters in Turkey have found what could be a more potent form of resistance: standing still.”

And furthermore:

Gunduz’s act, amplified by social media, had a remarkably swift effect on the protests.

Erdogan appeared to be seizing the initiative after large weekend rallies in which he ordered Taksim Square to be cleared. The government has capitalized on sporadic scenes of violence amid the generally peaceful protest movement.

Gunduz’s act of non-violence could be harder to deal with, as it could pressure the government to arrest or disperse people who are doing nothing more than standing still.

This is exactly why nonviolence is powerful, in a way that violence can never be: it takes away any excuse to demonize, let alone retaliate.  Not giving Prime Minister Erdogan anything to retaliate for may well be the surest way, in the words of Solomon and Saint Paul, to “heap burning coals upon his head.”

About two and a half years ago, I was working at a job that I didn’t enjoy and was rather bad at. I did my best, but I learned that if you need someone to stay on top of the material needs of a busy office, I’m definitely not your guy.

My boss at the time was a great guy, and was almost heroically patient with me, but it was clear that the position was not for me. The only thing keeping me there was the very soft post-Great-Recession labor market and a sense of economic caution I probably got from my mother, who grew up in the last economic calamity to afflict the United States, the Great Depression.

As I settled into bed one night, I had a Moment of Clarity: I suddenly remembered that I had pretty decent savings, and that I’d always wanted to take an extended road trip. Suddenly, I knew what I needed to do.

The next day, I gave notice to my boss (he hid his relief pretty well). I spent the next two weeks in a frenzy of practical preparation — I got my car thoroughly serviced, paid a few months’ rent in advance and packed. On Oct. 8, 2010, I hit the road.

In the next few weeks, I hit more than 40 states and put almost 11,000 miles on my little car. As a result of my adventures I can say without exaggeration that we live in a rather stunning country.

I have seen some other parts of the world, but on this trip I got some sense of why the Chinese word for America means “The Beautiful Country.” Nowhere else have I encountered the scenic riches that America offers in astonishing variety and abundance.

Going through the Montana wilderness made me appreciate what made Woody Guthrie sing:

I’ve roamed and rambled and I’ve followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me

On my trip, I gained a new appreciation not just for the beauty of America’s land, but the brimming decency and generosity of her people. I met people along the way of almost every station and circumstance of life, and almost without exception the people of every region were kind, generous and happy to share their homes and lives with me.

The part of my trip I most looked forward to was the Deep South, to which I had never been.

My pre-visit image of the South was of a place that put a sort of courtly gloss on Faulknerian spiritual ruin. But while there is evidence all over the South of the sadder parts of their history,  I found myself unexpectedly and utterly charmed.

I stayed for a few days with a friend in Greenville, South Carolina, and was struck by the far slower pace of life there – in a literal sense. People there talk slow, drive slow, and generally take their time with things. Buying something at the store is not just the brisk exchange of money and goods it usually is in places like New York and San Francisco, but also a chance to pause to catch up – there were pauses in the transaction where various parties asked about the well-being of various family members and so on. In the Bay Area, you’d have people behind them tapping their feet and rolling their eyes; there, though, this was just part of the expected ritual of courtesy and sociability.

I remember going to a barber shop in Savannah, Georgia, to get my hair cut (I recalled how “Easy Rider” ended, and was taking no chances). It was a Saturday morning, and I sat among men in white, short-sleeved dress shirts talking about the things men talk about when they are out of earshot of their wives — hunting, baseball, politics and so on. There was a certain refined courtesy and gentility — an almost reflexive charm — these men had with one another that seems to be distinctive to the South.

On my way through Atlanta, I stopped at the Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Social Change, and my visit felt like the culmination of a pilgrimage. I have admired Dr. King since high school, and seeing the nearby church where he preached was overwhelming.

The words of one of his speeches came to me, and for a brief moment I caught a glimpse of the great promise of America, and a path to reach it.  Despite the real and deep divisions that beset us, we can, in fact, be reconciled with one another, if we but will it. My trip through America gave me a new appreciation of the depth of his words:

Love is a weapon that cuts without wounding, and ennobles the one who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

And I believe that it is this kind of love that can take us through this period of transition and we can come to that brighter day. This is what we’ve tried to do. In the midst of our struggle we haven’t always succeeded, but somehow in some of the dark moments we have been able to stand up before our violent oppressors and say:

We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. And so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Burn our homes and threaten our children and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Yes, send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hours and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half dead, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.

- From Memoir from Antproof Case by Mark Helprin

I don’t really have much to add to this except to record my own sense of horror and shame:  how could a CATHOLIC school, and a CATHOLIC diocese do this?  Is there some aspect of the story I am missing or not understanding?  How can they possibly justify doing this?

I posted some of these links on my FaceBook page, and one of my FB friends cryptically responded with a variation of “The only thing required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”  Well, I don’t want evil to triumph,  but honestly I have no idea what to do.  Pray, of course, but I want to act in a more temporal fashion.  I suppose I could write to the Bishop, Robert Brom, but I have limited faith in the power of such letters.

What are your thoughts on this affair?  What can or should be done?

UPDATE  (6/18/2013):  It is being reported in the media that she is being offered a job at an unidentified private school in the Los Angeles letter.  It is also being reported that parents at Holy Trinity had a demonstration in support of her firing.  More can be found here.

Sandro Magister in his blog wrote that Pope Francis has been preaching against ecclesiastical careerism, which is most notably manifested in bishops being transferred between dioceses.  He notes that this practice was banned in the early Church, and only became common during the middle ages.  He quotes Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, who railed against this practice in a 1999 interview:

On his appointment, the bishop must be a father and a pastor for the people of God. One is always a father. Once a bishop is appointed to a particular see, he must generally and in principle stay there for ever. Let that be clear. The relationship between a bishop and a diocese is also depicted as a marriage and a marriage, according to the spirit of the Gospel, is indissoluble. The new bishop must not make other personal plans. There may well be serious reasons, very serious reasons for a decision by the authorities that the bishop go from one family, so to speak, to another. In making this decision, the authorities take numerous factors into consideration. They do not include an eventual desire by a bishop to change see.

In my own diocese our own Archbishop has reached the age of retirement.  I have been told that the Chancery gossip is entirely focused on which existing bishop is going to be transferred here.  No one is discussing who among the clergy should be ordained bishop, or even if our auxiliary bishop should be made ordinary.

One problem with this resolution is that it will have an impact on who is eligible to be elected Pope and will also have an impact on who might be called upon to fill important positions at the Vatican.  I would be interested in hearing your ideas on possible alternatives for addressing these concerns.

In Sylvan, it would be an absurdity to write to a company 2,000 miles away if you had a problem with a chair, since the person who made it would probably be personally known to you, and you would likely be no more than a few minutes’ walk from the location of its manufacture. If you wanted, you could easily arrange to watch it being made, along with practically everything else you owned — milk, butter, the shoes for your horse, the shoes you wore, and so on.

It is probably still possible to live your life that way — eating only agricultural products from local farmers, using only locally made furniture, clothing and shoes, and so forth — but it is nowhere near the typical experience. The very structure of our civilization would have been nearly unimaginable to the residents of Sylvan, and probably somewhat terrifying if they did imagine it.

The desk and the keyboard on which I’m typing this was made in China by people I’ll never meet, as was the cup holding the cocoa I’m sipping. The car I drive was made somewhere in the U.S.; my shirt in Indonesia; my jeans in the U.S. (again, I have no idea where, exactly). There is virtually no possibility of my ever meeting the people who made most of the stuff I use every day.

To be sure, there are many advantages to living in the present industrial world. I like being able to take BART to work. Altogether, getting to work and getting around in general is much easier and more pleasant an experience than it used to be — in 1800, America’s larger cities reeked of horse dung, and the bloated, putrefying remains of worked-to-death draft animals used to be a common sight in the streets of places like New York and Philadelphia.

I really, really would not want to give up modern dentistry. I like being able to eat a more-or-less fresh orange in New York City in, say, February.

But the price of the material abundance made possible by the Industrial Revolution is that we are deeply, structurally alienated from one another in our economic (and, for that matter, basic human) relations.

When I read some of the arguments put forth by spokesmen for the contemporary political right, it seems that the remedies they propose are more suited for the problems of the world inhabited by my Sylvanians in 1800 than to the challenges of the scale and complexity of American civilization in 2013. A large, powerful national government in 1800 would have been an intrusive absurdity – there was no need for it. To the extent that economic regulation was needed, it could easily be handled at the local level and relatively informally, since that was the scale of virtually any problems that arose.

New Deal-type liberals like myself think there is a critical role to be played by a large, powerful central government in the present United States — not because we think governments ought, always and everywhere, to be big, but because Big Government is the only potential counter-balance to the power of Big Business. And big business, in the present world, has enormous power and influence. ExxonMobil made more in after-tax profits last year than many U.S. state governments took in in total revenue.

Now, some readers might be surprised to hear me say this, but I don’t think there is anything innately wrong with business in general, nor even with big business, per se. My father retired from Chevron after 33 years, and worked with many fine people, including people who became old family friends. I worked for a major imaging company for several years and have fond memories of my co-workers and supervisors from my time there.

The benefits of industrialization — primarily a great variety and abundance of stuff — are great, too. But the costs need to be addressed.

For all the complaints about how environmental regulations cost U.S. companies efficiency, I appreciate the fact that as a result of their existence I can be reasonably certain that wherever I go in the United States, I will not be poisoned by toxic waste as I go about my day. I also like the fact that my food has been inspected, and that the facilities in which it is produced are subject to all kinds of regulations regarding sanitation and the humane treatment of animals.

I like the fact that gold mining companies can no longer blithely contaminate rivers, bays and ultimately the ocean with mercury like they used to. I like the fact that our coal mines kill fewer workers in a year than were killed in them each month before safety regulations were imposed. I like the fact that, thanks to child labor laws, 9-year-olds no longer have their arms torn off working in mills. I like the fact that unions can no longer be crushed by company-hired thugs for the simple act of banding together and asking for fair treatment and wages.

The world of Sylvan was in many ways better than the world in which we live out our lives today — but that pastoral, courtly world is well and truly gone. New citizens, and new circumstances, require new laws.

Those operating within the Catholic moral tradition accept that a victim of sexual violence, in seeking to prevent pregnancy following assault, acts in self-defense. However, in the administering of an emergency contraceptive measure, possibility exists that a second victim may be affected.

When one who has been victimized by sexual violence is tested for pregnancy (within appropriate proximity to the assault experienced), and when the result of that test is positive, the pregnancy cannot owe existence to the sexual assault experienced. The administering of an emergency contraceptive measure then becomes unnecessary and the particular concern of she who had feared forcible impregnation is alleviated.

The Pontifical Academy of Life presents pregnancy as existing in the formation of a zygote rather than only after a blastocyst has implanted in the uterine wall of its carrier and thus a difficulty arises when the evidence does not substantiate a pregnancy. The existence of a zygote prior to its implantation in the uterine wall of its carrier cannot be discerned, and so failing to substantiate a pregnancy does not necessarily mean that no pregnancy exists. Administering a measure which has the capacity to impede implantation could have an effect abortifacient in nature.

As a result, what the ERD describes as “appropriate testing” includes, but is not limited to, testing for pregnancy. A victim of sexual violence, before being administered an emergency contraceptive measure, might be given a serum progesterone test as well as a test for the presence of luteinizing hormone. Levels of progesterone rise at the time of ovulation and continue for six to ten days, while a dramatic increase in luteinizing hormone occurs immediately prior to ovulation. If, in a victim of sexual violence, the increase of progesterone and luteinizing hormone is not discerned then the purpose of administering certain measures would be to inhibit an ovulation not yet supposed to have begun. Such tests remove the predicament of the physician who otherwise would have administered what can be abortifacient without knowing first whether, in a victim of sexual violence, a zygote exists.

Kevin O’Rourke, in A Primer for Health Care Ethics: Essays for a Pluralistic Society, writes that if Ovral, for example, is “given with the intention of inhibiting ovulation and preventing conception, its use is acceptable — provided it is given at a time in the woman’s cycle when it could prevent ovulation or impede the motility of the sperm and thus prevent fertilization”.

Questions arise surrounding the level of effectiveness particular emergency contraceptive measures have in actually preventing ovulation. This lies beyond my competence, but my sense is that studies surrounding the effectiveness of measures aimed at preventing ovulation vary. Kahlenborn, Stanford and Larimore (2002), in assessing the effect of administering emergency contraception, conclude that the evidence supports the contention that use of emergency contraception does not always inhibit ovulation and that it may even impede the zygote travelling toward the uterine wall. In contrast, Novikova et al. (2007), found evidence to support their own hypothesis that the particular measure being studied had a major contraceptive effect prior to ovulation and no effect after the formation of a zygote.

Those concerned by such measures seek certitude that administering particular measures will not have the effect of preventing the implantation of a blastocyst in the uterine wall of its carrier. Where that certitude does not exist, the argument is made that administering such measures is not acceptable.

I find this position to lack persuasive power. When Ovral is administered to a sexually abstinent young woman to treat her acne, opposing her use because an abortifacient effect exists introduces a red herring that, I believe, parallels criticism of measures administered to victims of sexual violence. After all, if the purpose of administering Ovral to a victim of sexual violence is to inhibit ovulation, then to the extent that it succeeds in doing so, a context does not exist wherein an effect such as an abortifacient one might manifest. Persons seeking to eliminate any possibility that there be two victims instead of one, I recognize, will find no satisfaction in the evaluation that “to the extent that [Ovral] succeeds in [preventing ovulation], a context does not exist wherein an effect such as an abortifacient one might manifest” (emphasis added).

What one strives for, however, in drawing moral judgments is certitude of a different sort; the distinction Peter Cataldo makes, in his rebuttal to critics of “Argument in Favor of the Use of Levonorgestrel in Cases of Sexual Assault”, is between a mathematic sort of certitude and a moral sort. Returning to the situation of the sexually abstinent young woman prescribed Ovral for her skin, mathematically a physician cannot rule out the prescription being used for an effect not intended when first prescribed. Perhaps the young woman will, while in possession of the prescription, become sexually active. Her sexual activity, combined with the medication she has been prescribed, will result in a contraceptive effect and, possibly, a more specifically abortifacient one. That this exists as a possibility would not be grounds to refuse administering Ovral for the physician has prescribed with the moral certitude that the measure will be used in the way he or she intended. With emergency contraceptive measures more recent than Ovral in mind, Cataldo argues that even if there is a remote chance of an abortifacient effect, one may draw a judgment in moral certainty and administer the measure.

Concluding, because appropriate testing includes, but is not limited to, testing for pregnancy, if testing can show that ovulation has not begun, measures which seek to inhibit ovulation in one who has experienced assault are “contraceptive” rather than abortifacient and, as I understand, would then fall within the domain of one acceptably acting in self-defense.

I welcome your interaction.

-James Nicholas

Pope Francis’ May 22 homily, in which he touched on the redemption of atheists, is still generating buzz.  This is due at least as much to a number of virally spreading misquotations as it is to what the Holy Father actually said.  Now, lest I suffer the fate of other well-meaning explicators (explained below), let me make one thing clear from the outset: nothing I say here is in any way intended to repudiate or explain away the redemption, or even the salvation, of those outside the visible Church.  In fact, I agree not only with what Pope Francis said but also with much of what has been extrapolated from it.  What I do wish to correct is the misconstrued narrative that has been growing around the pope’s message, In Which Pope Francis Says Something Revolutionary Which Is Promptly Walked Back by Vatican Reactionaries.  I’ll unpack the flaws in this narrative in a bit, but first, to clarify the breadth of Catholic orthodoxy on the questions it has raised, a little crash course in soteriology is in order.

A lot could be said about the various views of salvation held among Christians (a more thorough taxonomy is spelled out here [p. 6-7]), but for my present purposes I simply want to give a brief explanation of two extremes and a broad middle.  On one end, exclusivism says that only those who explicitly confess Christ (and, in the case of an ecclesiocentric model, who explicitly belong to the Church) can be saved.  On the other, relativism (along with some closely-related forms of universalism) says that the Christ-event is, at best, merely one of many ways to salvation.  Contrary to both of these, inclusivism says that all grace is through Christ, though not only through explicit profession of Christianity; in other words, that people outside of the Christian faith may in fact be saved by Christ – a view that, in Catholic theology, has been most famously articulated in Karl Rahner’s idea of the “anonymous Christian.”

The former two positions, at least in their most extreme forms, have been repudiated by the Catholic magisterium (with the likes of Leonard Feeney and Jacques Dupuis representing boundary markers on either end). The latter is my own view, and at least by implication it seems that it is likely Pope Francis’ view as well.  But that’s not really what he was talking about in his now-famous homily, or at least not in the way it’s been popularly reported.  The Huffington Post, for instance, proclaimed, “Pope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good Are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics,” which is technically true but reflects a few significant misunderstandings, namely 1) that the redemption and/or salvation of non-Christians is an unprecedented idea in the Catholic Church, 2) that redemption is necessarily interchangeable with eschatological salvation, and 3) that either one depends on “doing good.”

Here is what he said about atheists and doing good in context, courtesy of Vatican Radio:

The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can. He must. Not can: must! Because he has this commandment within him. Instead, this ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God. That we can kill in the name of God. And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.

Commenting on that day’s Gospel reading in which Jesus rebukes his disciples for stopping someone from driving out demons because he was not one of them, Pope Francis was critiquing the idea that non-Christians are incapable of doing good.  He was not saying that atheists can be redeemed if they do good, but rather that atheists can do good because they are redeemed.

On one level, this is an even broader affirmation than the news reports imagine.  And if they find it shocking to hear the pope say that redemption is for all, they would be even more shocked to realize that this was already a teaching of the Catholic Church (as Mark Shea has pointed out).  So yes, atheists who do good are redeemed – and so are atheists who do evil.  This does not automatically mean that all will accept that redemption, but neither does this in turn mean that all professed non-believers will ultimately reject it.

Of course, we can’t necessarily expect the secular press to grasp the rather subtle distinctions in theological concepts such as salvation and redemption, but there is a bigger problem with how the pope’s homily was reported, perhaps fed by popular preferences for sensationalism over substance and soundbites over fuller context.  One recent editorial, heavy on snark and light on factual accuracy, misidentifies Fr. Thomas Rosica, CEO of Canada’s Salt and Light Media, as a Vatican spokesman and then misquotes him as saying, contra Pope Francis, that “atheists are still going to hell.”  Having once met Fr. Rosica and having seen several of his interviews, I was immediately suspicious: for one thing, I knew he wasn’t a Vatican spokesman, and for another, he did not strike me as the type to make that sort of hard-line statement.  I looked up what he actually said on Salt and Light’s website and found not a “correction” of the pope’s homily but a response to questions he had received about it, vastly more nuanced than the impression given by the aforementioned article.  The only direct quote attributed to Fr. Rosica (“People who know about the Catholic church ‘cannot be saved’ if they ‘refuse to enter her or remain in her,’ he said.”) was actually taken from his lengthy citation of the Compendium of the Catechism, which, in context, clearly does not indicate a “tall order of eternal hellfire for the rest of us.”  The full paragraph reads as follows:

171. What is the meaning of the affirmation “Outside the Church there is no salvation”?

This means that all salvation comes from Christ, the Head, through the Church which is his body. Hence they cannot be saved who, knowing the Church as founded by Christ and necessary for salvation, would refuse to enter her or remain in her. At the same time, thanks to Christ and to his Church, those who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ and his Church but sincerely seek God and, moved by grace, try to do his will as it is known through the dictates of conscience can attain eternal salvation.

Fr. Rosica essentially goes on to affirm the doctrinal soundness of inclusivism as opposed to either exclusivism or relativism, elaborating on Pope Francis’ homily and setting it within the context of Catholic tradition.  In a final echo of the pope’s message, he says, “As Christians, we believe that God is always reaching out to humanity in love.  This means that every man or woman, whatever their situation, can be saved.  Even non-Christians can respond to this saving action of the Spirit.”

That doesn’t sound like much of a walk-back.  And yet the Huffington Post ran with the mischaracterization of Fr. Rosica’s note as a Vatican statement trying “to do damage control for Francis’ remarks.”  To their credit, they did correct the misattributed catechism quote and provide a bit more of a context for what Fr. Rosica did say, but they still erroneously state that he was speaking on behalf of the Vatican and cherry-pick a comment on the homiletic context of Francis’ remarks in a way that makes it sound like an attempt to downplay his authority in general.  Abigail Frymann at the Tablet caught the original mistake, although even she seems to suggest at one point that Fr. Rosica was somehow siding against Pope Francis.  But Frymann, at least, is informed enough to see through the patently false headline, “Vatican corrects infallible pope: atheists will still burn in hell.”  A contextualized reading shows that the statement in question was not made by the Vatican, was not meant as a correction, had nothing to do with papal infallibility, and did not claim that atheists are automatically damned.  So, in effect, the only true word in that headline is “pope.”

The invocation of infallibility in this situation only demonstrates the need for a more understandable articulation of papal authority.  The idea that the pope could singlehandedly and spontaneously cause a dramatic upheaval in church doctrine with a statement he makes in a homily or any off-the-cuff remark, and that other ecclesial authorities would therefore be hypocritical to disagree with anything the pope says, represents a sense of “creeping infallibility” as blatantly as any ultramontanist could.

Unfortunately, the misperceptions are out there and readily available to anyone seeking reasons to believe in the faulty narrative they present.  The least we can do is not to perpetuate them further.  The best we can do is to demonstrate a counter-narrative of our Church’s truest self-expression by living into our Holy Father’s example of “the ‘culture of encounter’ that is the foundation of peace,” whatever that might look like for each of us in practice.

The editorial in US Catholic concentrates on the fact that the number of knowledgeable doubters is quite small (4%) but that a significant number of Catholics believe in the Real Presence without knowing that htis is what the Church teaches.   I suspect that this belief is grounded in Church teaching; the respondants simply no longer remember the proximate source of their belief.  (Like all belief it must ultimately be grounded in faith and the gift of the Holy Spirit.)

What I find inexplicable is that 50% of Catholics surveyed report not knowing that the Church teaches the Real Presence in the Eucharist.  I find it hard to believe that this is not the subject of homilies and catechesis on a regular basis, if only because it is A) orthodox, and B) relatively non-controversial.  Indeed, drawing on personal experience, I can only recall one instance in which I ever heard a priest say anything that could be interpreted as denying the Real Presence.  In this particular case the more charitable reading is that he was not trying to deny transubstantiation but was rather making a hash of describing Schillibeeckx’s ideas on transignification.  I am sure that some of you can report anecdotal evidence to the contrary, but for the sake of argumentation, I am going to assume that such instances are rare.

This then leaves open the question of how it can happen that one half of all Catholics do not know what the Church teaches on this question.  I want to suggest that it is a failure of pedagogy:  Catholics are routinely taught about the Real Presence, but in such a way that it has no substantive meaning and is therefore not incorporated into their understanding of the sacrament.

I see this phenomenon regularly teaching calculus.  To a mathematician, a derivative is a “rate of change”, but to many students, it is a formal algebraic manipulation that is done to certain expressions.  Thus, if I ask students what is the derivative of f(x)=x^2, the vast majority will dutifully compute that f’(x)=2x.  But if I ask them in some way to explain or interpret what this means in terms of a rate of change, a significant minority will not be able to do so.   Early in my career I assumed that such students were simply too lazy or too stupid to understand what was “really” going on.  Old age has brought, if not wisdom then a deeper understanding of how their failure to understand is also a product of pedagogy:  they do not get it in part because the way I am teaching does not lead them to incorporate this deeper understanding into their overall mental construct of the derivative.

This suggests that the solution to the problem is not simply more homilies on transubstantiation and the Real Presence:  piling on words will not yield more understanding.   Rather, I would suggest that the solution is to address what it means for us, what are the consequences for us as individuals and as a community, that Jesus is present in the Eucharist.   Pope Francis touched on this in an extemporaneous homily he preached at a parish in Rome.  Engaging in a dialogue (heaven forefend:  a dialogue sermon!) with children who recently made their first communion, he tried to convey the deeper meaning of the sacrament:

Jesus has saved us, but he also walks with us in life. Right? And how does he walk? What does he do when he walks with us in life? This is difficult. The one who gets it wins the derby. What does Jesus do when he walks with us? Speak up! First: he helps us. He guides us! Great! He walks with us, he guides us and he teaches us to go forward. And Jesus also gives us the strength to walk. Right? He sustains us! Good! In difficulties, right? And also in our homework! He sustains us, he helps us, he guides us, he sustains us. That’s it!

Jesus always goes with us. Very well. But listen, Jesus gives us strength. How does Jesus give us strength? You know this, how he gives us strength! Speak up, I can’t hear you! In Communion he gives us strength, he really helps us with strength. He comes to us. But when you say, “he gives us Communion,” does a piece of bread give you so much strength? That’s not bread? It’s bread? This is bread, but that on the altar, is it bread or not? It looks like bread! It’s not really bread. What is it? It is the Body of Jesus. Jesus comes into our hearts.

While clearly aimed at children, I think that these words would also have spoken to the adults present at mass.  Now, of course, they will have a greater impact because they heard them directly from a charismatic pope in a relatively intimate setting.  But I think the words themselves say something important.  The question then is this: how can we expand upon these ideas so that they are heard and internalized by the 50% of Catholics who do not hear, or who hear but do not understand, what the Church is now saying about the Eucharist?

McCain’s brother was (rightly) ridiculed at the time for doing something so clueless. The 9-1-1 system was set up to report emergencies, and using it to complain about a traffic problem was an abuse of the system, one that might have delayed help for someone in a life-threatening emergency.

In the aftermath of the incident, I had a recurring thought I couldn’t shake: Despite his poor judgment, I could understand what Joseph McCain was hoping to do. What he really wanted was to speak to The Guy Who Made the Decision. He wanted to hold someone accountable for making the idiotic decision to conduct traffic-clogging construction work on a busy bridge during rush hour.

This brings me to one consequence of industrial civilization — its mass production, specialization of skills and so on — that I call the Creeping Abstraction of Accountability.

Think about what life, and especially economic life, was like in a typical village in America in the time before mass industrialization. For fun, let’s name this hypothetical little town “Sylvan,” and we’ll say the year is 1800.

In Sylvan, accountability in economic relations was pervasive — inescapable, even. If you were a typical citizen of such a town, you knew who made your clothing, pots and pans, furniture, shoes, lamps, soap, window glass; you knew who built your carriage or wagon, and so on. And not just in an abstract way— you likely knew personally the makers of those things, and could thus hold them accountable if there was a problem. If the furniture-maker’s apprentice delivered a three-legged chair to your house, you could walk over to his shop with the chair, hold it up and ask (perhaps wryly), “Yea, Thomas? Wert thou just back from yon tavern when ye forgot this missing leg?” and expect poor, hungover Thomas to groan a sheepish apology, and promise to correct the situation without delay. Similarly, if your skillet handle broke, you could march off to the local tinker’s shop and demand an explanation, and you would expect to receive one on the spot.

In short, you actually could in fact speak to The Guy Who Made the Decision, and this state of affairs obtained from roughly before the American Civil War, all the way back to the dimly known beginnings of civilization when the first farmer planted the first crop.

Now, let’s return to the year 2013 in a typical American community.

I called my bank a couple months back because my checking account was inexplicably overdrawn. I use their bill payment service, and I had specified that the “pay date” of my rent payment should be the first of the month, yet they had deducted the payment on the 23rd of the previous month, overdrafting my account. When I called, a customer service representative said that the payment can come out that early so that the check has time to reach the payee. I apologized for misunderstanding, thanked her for the information, and hung up.

When I changed the pay date to the 7th of the next month to account for this new information, my landlord charged me a late fee because the rent check arrived on the 15th. I called the bank, and they said that it had been mailed on the 7th. When I said I was confused by this, given the information I received on my previous call, the rep explained that sometimes the money comes out on the pay date, and sometimes it comes out when the check arrives at the bank after being deposited by the payee, and they could not tell me in advance which of those two possibilities would happen each month. When I pointed out that this makes planning rather difficult, the rep told me that this was just how their (third-party) payment processor worked.

So even the bank I was speaking to could not tell me when the payment would be deducted. But worse than that, I wasn’t really speaking to “The Bank” at all — I was speaking to a rep wearing a headset in a call center in Arizona or Iowa or wherever, and she had virtually no power to change the way the bank did business (the first rep I spoke to did refund the overdraft fee, which was nice). The way the bank’s payment processor does payments was probably designed in a series of meetings involving a shifting bunch of personnel from their legal, marketing and accounting departments, and the policy’s ultimate purpose could undoubtedly be summarized as: “Make as much money as possible for the company, in a way that is unlikely to get us successfully sued.”

Thus, our current world is a mirror image of Sylvan: In our world, accountability in economic relations is abstracted, nearly to the point of meaninglessness. Who made the shirt you’re wearing? What were the wages and working conditions for the people who made it? What about the chair you’re sitting in? Or computer on which you may be reading this post? Or the cell phone in your pocket? If you have concerns about those things, to whom do you turn for accountability?

There is no immediate, human accountability for many problems that arise from the production of most of the stuff we use every day. This is the Creeping Abstraction of Accountability.

This has had profound implications not just for economics, but for how we discuss politics. More in part two.

Forgiveness is not a proposal that can be immediately understood or easily accepted; in many ways it is a paradoxical message. Forgiveness in fact always involves an apparent short-term loss for a real long-term gain. Violence is the exact opposite; opting as it does for an apparent short‑term gain, it involves a real and permanent loss. Forgiveness may seem like weakness, but it demands great spiritual strength and moral courage, both in granting it and in accepting it. It may seem in some way to diminish us, but in fact it leads us to a fuller and richer humanity, more radiant with the splendor of the Creator.

— John Paul II, Message for World Peace Day, 2002.

Michael Sean does an excellent exposing how this approach is totally at odds with the last 120 years of Catholic Social Teaching. I would like to add to this by pointing out that the economics of this argument – the argument based on the superiority of the US economic system over its European counterpart – are fundamentally flawed and not borne out by the facts. Indeed, I would argue that countries that attempt to model their economies on the basis on Catholic Social Teaching tend to do better.

Europe and Catholic Social Teaching

Let me start with the European social model and how it relates to Catholic Social Teaching. Of course, there is no single European social model. Ireland and the UK lean in the Anglo-Saxon direction, and in many important dimensions are closer to the US than to their peers in Europe. Scandinavia puts a high emphasis on solidarity and cohesion, and veers in a more statist dimension. The system in southern Europe is incoherent and suffers from major governance problems – quite frankly, it doesn’t work so well. But I believe that the philosophy that still underpins the mainstream continental social model – especially in countries like Germany – remains heavily influenced by Catholic Social Teaching.

This model, as developed by Christian Democrats in the postwar period, is known as the social market model. It combines the competitive free market with strong bonds and solidarity and fraternity, twined with appropriate degrees of subsidiarity. It also believes that stability is the glue that makes the social market work effectively.

On solidarity, the model adopts the idea from Catholic Social Teaching that there are certain rights that stem from the innate dignity of very person: rights such as life, bodily integrity, food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, necessary social services; and also the right to be looked after in old age, disability, or unemployment (Pacem in Terris). These rights typically cannot be guaranteed by the free market. And on the specific issue of medical care, the issue where the US lags the most, the Church has taught that health care expenses should be “cheap or even free of charge” (Laborem Exercens)

Clearly, the state has a key role to play here. This goes all the way back to Leo XIII, who argued that the state should protect the poor and the wage earner, and not favor the interests of the rich (Rerum Novarum). But it is also imbued with subsidiarity, as social programs in continental Europe are often administered by subsidiary associations including unions and Church groups. The state directs, but responsibility for administering the system is shared.

Subsidiarity is also supported by a strong tradition of social partnership, whereby key economic decisions – on issues like wages, employments, and benefits – reflect consultations between government, unions, and employer organizations. In other words, the European model recognizes the legitimacy of mediating institutions that stand between the individual and the state. You don’t see too much of this in the US.

Stability is also important. This goes back to a foundational principle of Catholic Social Teaching that while the free market is compatible with the common good, it cannot be left to its own devices. As Pius XI put it, “the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces… from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching” (Quadragesimo Anno). Paul VI condemned “profit as the chief spur to economic progress, free competition as the guiding norm of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right.” (Populorum Progressio) And John Paul II argued that the market should be “appropriately controlled by the forces of society and by the State, so as to guarantee that the basic needs of the whole of society are satisfied” (Centesimus Annus)

This means we need proper regulation in economic life. This is especially important in the financial sector, which tends to be the major source of dysfunction and instability in our modern economic system. This was a lesson that was forgotten in too many places, although continental Europe never embraced unfettered financial markets to the same extent as the Anglo-Saxon countries.

As we look back on the crisis, the results are in: Catholic Social Teaching 1, Libertarianism 0. And yet, libertarians don’t seem to have internalized this lesson, criticizing even mild attempts to tighten regulatory oversight.

Just last week, Pope Francis reiterated this constant theme in Catholic Social Teaching, condemning “ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good”.

So in sum, I believe that the mainstream European social model is far more aligned with Catholic Social Teaching that its libertarian counterparts. It adopts a free market economy, yes, but subjects economic forces to the appropriate degree of regulation, and strives to ensure that people’s basic needs are met.

Living standards

But what about criticisms of the European economic model? Do they have a point? Well, yes and no. We cannot deny that Europe faces grave economic problems today. But for the most part, they are not the problems singled out by American libertarians.

Let me start with the basics, GDP per capita, the most standard estimate of living standards. If you look at the numbers, you will see European GDP per capita is about three-quarters the level of the United States – higher in the north, lower in the south, but worse everywhere. Does this prove the superiority of the US model? Not at all. To understand why, we need to break down this GDP per capita into its constituent parts. Bear with me, this will get a bit wonkish, but this is necessary for the argument.

GDP per capita is really product of the following terms:

(GDP/population) = (GDP/ hours worked) * (hours worked/ employment) * (employment/population)

In other words, income per capita is the product of hourly productivity, average hours worked, and the employment rate. Let’s take each in turn.

First, productivity. While there is a gap between US and European productivity, this is really coming from southern European countries like Italy and Spain. If you look at core Europe like France and Germany, then productivity is essentially at US levels. So there are specific structural problems in the lagging south, but this is not an indictment of the continental social model.

Second, hours worked by the average worker. Here, Europe is far behind the US. But this is a positive, not a negative, sign! It means that Europeans deliberately forego income to spend more quality time with family and friends, especially through mandated leave (which the US does not have). It is the true legacy of the days when there were about 50 religious feast days throughout the year on which no work was done. A pro-family pre-Calvinist legacy!

Third, employment rates. Again, as with productivity, the evidence is nuanced. If you look at prime-age males, the cohort traditionally charged with earning a living wage or a family wage, employment rates are as high (or even higher) than in the US. But rates for the young, the old, and (in some countries) women are lower. This is especially an issue in southern Europe, where labor market institutions too often privilege insiders over outsiders. So yes, there are specific problems with specific groups, but there is no generalized evidence that continental European labor markets are worse than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.

Let’s dig a little deeper into unemployment. Last year, the unemployment rate in the US was 8 percent. In the EU, it was 10.5 percent. But this hides huge differences. The unemployment rate in Spain, for example, was a staggering 25 percent, while in Germany it was an enviable 5.5 percent.

Remember, Catholic Social Teaching has never accepted the legitimacy of unfettered labor markets. True, European labor markets do not go far enough to guarantee a living wage and prioritize employment over other economic aims, but they still score higher than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Labor markets work pretty well in northern Europe. In these countries, social partnership looms large and unions have a key role – and unions put a lot of weight on overall employment. This works because the level of trust is high, which is not the case in the south, making the system hard to replicate.

Government also has a role to play, by funding what are known as “active labor market policies” – options for the unemployed that include education and training programs and wage subsidies to encourage take-up of low-paying jobs. In many places, receipt of unemployment benefits is conditional on participating in these programs. Again, this is fully aligned with Catholic Social Teaching, meeting the needs of workers while avoiding any violations of dignity that come with the “social assistance state”.

It is worthwhile singling out the German labor market, because it proved remarkably successful during the crisis. Even though (as in other countries) GDP fell sharply, unemployment did not rise. Germany introduced a system called Kurzarbeit, which meant that employers, unions, and the government came to an agreement – workers would cut back their hours, firms would hold onto workers, and government would provide subsidies. This was a far more effective and humane system that filling up the unemployment rolls. And it worked.

Let’s not forget – the system of codetermination is deeply ingrained in German labor relations. Again, this comes directly from Catholic Social Teaching and means that workers have a say in managing an enterprise. This kind of system, influenced by Church teaching, has the capacity to work far better than a US-style system of free and unfettered labor markets.

Going beyond GDP

So far, I have just talked about GDP per capita. This is still the way we measure standards of living, but it is patently inadequate. Its conception is overly materialistic, and it does not come close to measuring human development or, more importantly, human flourishing.

We will never be able to apply statistics to these issues. But we can certainly do better than GDP per capita. For example, ex-French President Sarkozy set up the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission to look into broader measurement of economic, environmental, and social sustainability.

This is a promising area, but it is for the future. Right now, though, we can look at well-established indicators of human development. And here, unfortunately for libertarians, the US comes across much worse than Europe.

Let’s look at some numbers from the OECD, which includes both the US and the EU countries.

The US infant mortality rate is 6.7. The OECD average is 4.6. In Germany, it is 3.5, and in Sweden it is 2.5.

Life expectancy tells the same tale. In the US, it is 77.9 years, against an OECD average of 79.3 years. It is 80 years in Germany, and 81.4 years in Sweden.

So even though the US spends more than double the amount of the EU on healthcare per person, it achieves worse outcomes – mainly by excluding millions from adequate healthcare. Add to that a dominant gun culture that cheapens life in the US.

We can look at other indicators. The poverty rate in the US is 17.3 percent, against an OECD average of 11.1 percent. In Germany, it is 8.9 percent.

The numbers for inequality (measured by the Gini coefficient) tell a similar story. Among the OECD countries, the US sits at the bottom of the pack, with only Turkey, Mexico, and Chile looking worse.

In the past, economists have tended to discount inequality, arguing that we should not worry about distributional issues. But recent research is actually catching up to Catholic Social Teaching, showing that excessive inequality is indeed harmful to countries. It can erode trust and social cohesion, the bedrock of economic and social progress. It makes economic growth less likely to be sustained, and it makes countries more susceptible to volatile economic and financial crises. We have hard evidence for all of this.

Just look at Latin America, one of the world’s most unequal regions. This inequitable division of wealth – plus the governance problems associated with it – goes a long way toward explaining the longstanding economic challenges of the region, including the waves of economic volatility twinned with political instability.

And looking at the OECD, is it any surprise that the countries most affected by crisis are the most unequal countries? This group includes Anglo-Saxon countries like the US, the UK, and Ireland, countries that cheerleaded a financial sector based on “casino capitalism”. It also includes crisis countries like Greece, Portugal, and Italy. Just as in Latin America, inequality comes with governance problems and a lack of trust in basic institutions. The more equal countries in the North are among the strongest and most stable. If you had studied Catholic Social Teaching instead of classical economics, this would not come as a surprise!

So what is the problem with Europe?

So far, I have talked about longer-term issues and the structural differences between European and US economic models. But what about the short term, where Europe is still mired in economic crisis?

Americans of a libertarian bent like to blame this crisis on the growth of government, especially the welfare state.

This story is far from the truth. The real story of the European crisis has little to do with its social model. It comes instead from the imbalances that arose with the introduction of the euro, when people got a bit carried away. They assumed that Greek debt, for example, now bore the same risk as German debt. So there was a huge lending boom to southern Europe, and the good times rolled. But when the crisis came, people panicked and pulled back lending. So we had a classic balance of payments problem with countries having difficulty paying their debts, both public and private. But there was a catch – as countries were tied to the euro, they could not follow the traditional route of letting the currency devalue and restoring competitiveness.

In such circumstances, options were few and painful, involving lower wages and prices relative to core Europe. But this can prove economically and socially ruinous in the short term. It can make the problem worse, creating a vicious circle of weak banks, weak growth, and weak public finances. This is the real story of the European crisis.

Let me be clear on one point – as in most other countries, high public debt was a consequence, not a cause, of the crisis. Deficits rose because of deep recession, or because governments were forced to assume the debt of collapsing banks.

The one possible exception to this point was Greece, but even here, a key problem was the refusal of the well-off to pay their taxes aided by a weak system of tax administration. It was not due to the welfare state. Look at OECD data again. Social spending in Greece is 23 percent of GDP. As a point of comparison, it is 19.4 percent of GDP in the US. On the other side, it is 26.3 percent of GDP in Germany; 28.2 percent of GDP in Sweden, and 32.1 percent of GDP in France. I find very little correlation between size of social spending and depth of economic problems. This is an ideologically-motivated red herring.

There are plenty of other data points that disprove the simplistic American narrative of Europe. Look at Ireland, which was a bastion of liberal economic policies before the crisis, embracing the American path of deregulation and low taxes. It too suffered from severe crisis, yet again because a badly regulated and poorly supervised banking sector. As the banking sector collapsed, Irish public rose by over 100 percent of GDP, a staggering addition to the public sector purse caused by bad private sector decisions. The lesson here, of course, is that we need more regulation and better supervision, and that includes across countries.

At some fundamental level, the European crisis results less from a problem with the system itself, and more from a big change to the system that was improperly managed. People got too carried away with the historic process of monetary union, and failed to look at its structural flaws.

Everyone now agrees that incomplete economic integration was at fault. Europe had a single market and a single monetary policy, but fiscal policy and financial regulation were still national responsibilities.

Let’s conduct a simple thought experiment. Imagine if Florida had been an independent country and not integrated into the federal tax and spending system. What would have happened during its housing bust? I think we know the answer, and it has nothing to do with Florida’s welfare state! The same is true with banking problems in places like Ireland that overwhelmed the ability of a single government to handle them. Integration came with too little solidarity across counties.

So Europe needs to fix the problem of incomplete integration. This is why banking union and fiscal union are high on the agenda.

One more point. The American libertarians also loathe “Keynesian” policy, which simply means countercyclical policy – looser monetary and fiscal policy in bad times, tighter monetary and fiscal policy in good times. As I mentioned at the outset, the European social model has always emphasized stability alongside solidarity, and this stability – especially in Germany – has always included a strong emphasis on low inflation and fiscal discipline.

Ironically, this has led to more skepticism of Keynesian intervention in Europe than in the US, especially in Germany. This is why Germany today is the leading voice behind the call for “austerity”, which most people believe to be misguided in current circumstances. But stability is deeply embedded in the German, and indeed the broader European, psyche. It is the Americans have that always been more interventionist on the macroeconomic front. Just compare the record of the Fed and the Bundesbank when it comes to monetary policy. This is just another example of how American libertarians do not really understand Europe.

To conclude…

Yes, there are many economic problems with Europe that need urgent attention today – problems of incomplete integration, deep-rooted structural problems in the southern countries. The economic crisis is far from over.

To get beyond these problems, I believe that Europe needs the light of Catholic Social Teaching, urgently. But so does the US, which is even further away from that light.

For the evidence teaches us that the Catholic approach to economics is not just naïve wishful thinking. It can lead to better economic outcomes than its free market alternative. Thus libertarian economics is both morally and practically flawed. It is time for Catholics across the spectrum to start pushing back against the ruinous libertarian agenda and reclaim our full heritage.