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Show highlights - Rod Dreher, Author - Feb 2
Show highlights - Rod Dreher, Author - Feb 2
3 comments:
Is there anything that some people can't resist reducing to a label, and thereby trivialize. This is the stuff of the adolescent television culture that is inflicted upon us. For a week or so, even here, it was "Augustinian Thomists", - far better named Balthasarian Thomists or simply Catholics if we're thinking of David Schindler who has, in fact, made attempts to explore in a Balthasarian context with Fr. Norris Clarke aspects of the Thomistic notion of esse - or "Whig Thomists" who can be more appropriately and simply be called "Catholicans" if labels are so absolutely essential it seems to me. But oy with the reductionism! Can't we be spared things not being taken on their face and being forced into categories for the convenience of people who would prefer not having to make an effort with themselves? One tires of this type of treatment. I petition for relief.
John Lowell
Mr Lowell,
Funny quote on labels, since you are the one that keeps repeating the canard that a Holy Priest, namely Father Neuhaus is a 'cafeterica Catholic'. For the sake of the 5-6 people who visit this blog, here is Mr. Lowell's article(assuming you are the same Mr. Lowell who as of a few months ago never heard of Mr Hand at TCR News)
http://tcrnews2.com/Neuhaus2006.html
The Cafeteria Catholicism of Richard John Neuhaus
Mr. Bush, Stem Cell Research, and the Iraq War
By John Lowell
"But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom - and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside." …. John F. Kennedy
Daily for about a week in advance, James Dobson in his Focus On The Family radio broadcasts bellowed-out undying assurances that no compromise would be trucked, no deviation tolerated of President Bush as the night of Bush’s long awaited embryonic stem-cell research announcement arrived in August of 2001. The Pope had personally counseled Bush against any federal funding of such research as had others beside Dobson on the Evangelical Right but there were nevertheless rumors of an impending "sell-out" to the liberals in the Congress. Taking to the air that evening, Bush surprised many by announcing a compromise that contemplated federal funding for research on sixty already existing stem-cell lines, but that resisted a deeper commitment on the argument that to involve more than these sixty would require the destruction of innocent human life, something he abhorred. And so it would have. The President appeared to have treaded the needle politically. His solemn promise of resistance notwithstanding, Dobson gushed his approval on Larry King live, as did Charles Colson, Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, Pat Robertson, and National Right To Life independently later. But some were unconvinced. Bishop Fiorenza, then head of the USCCB, ominously termed the Bush decision "morally unacceptable" as did Vatican Radio. Ken Connor of FRC and Wendy Wright of Concerned Women denounced it. The pro-life movement was clearly divided and a newly emergent "ecumenism of social morality" seemed threatened. But an important Catholic voice had yet to speak: Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.
Pilgrim's Progress
A minister and a convert to Catholicism from Lutheranism in 1990, Neuhaus was ordained a priest of the Church in the Archdiocese of New York in 1991. His bona fides as an author and as a conservative commentator on matters of faith and culture as editor of First Things: The Journal Of Religion, Culture And Public Life preceded him. Offering a vehicle for the intelligent expression of opposition to the depredations of liberalism within the various Protestant denominations and to the then newly-in-retreat "progressivists" within American Catholicism, Neuhaus’ journal grew in importance and influence throughout the 1990s. In 1994, First Things became a kind of table d’hote for Evangelicals And Catholics Together, an extra-Church dabble at the achievement of a kind of "moral ecumenism" between religious conservatives of diverse confessions and the joint undertaking of Neuhaus and former Nixon advisor turned evangelist, Charles Colson. Despite its ostensible purpose of uncovering common theological ground between Evangelicals and Catholics, there was an always perceptible political undercurrent accompanying the personal connections of the project’s Poobahs. Indeed, that E&CT serve as an incubator for the political perspective of the Religious Right was the conscious hope of many. And it wasn’t long before that hope was realized.
Stumblings
The first evidence of Fr. Neuhaus’ take on the Bush stem-cell decision came in the October 2001 edition of First Things. In While We’re At It, Neuhaus asserted:
"As this goes to press, President Bush has announced his decision on stem cell research, possibly the most important of his presidency. There will, of course, be more on that in these pages. For the moment, I believe it is a morally defensible decision (italics mine), although the critics are right to note that the distinction between using human embryos and using stem cells derived from human embryos after the "the life or death decision has been made" is not as bright a line as Bush’s explanation suggested. In addition, he failed to say that what will not be done with the federal funding should not be done at all. On the other hand, his address to the nation was without doubt the most lucid and straightforward presidential statement on the beginnings of human life and our moral responsibility for such lives since the fateful turn of Roe v. Wade in 1973."
Oddly, what is upsetting to Neuhaus here is not that for the first time in history the money of American taxpayers would be used to desecrate the remains of humans murdered solely for the purpose of medical experimentation and essentially to be made its instruments, rather his concern is with Bush’s failure to make clear that embryonic stem cell research carried out on cell lines beyond these first exceptions is unacceptable. The experimentation that Bush chose to fund is "morally defensible" in the view of Neuhaus!
Admittedly, shortly after Bush made his decision, Republican enthusiast, Paul Weyrich, made public the rather curious argument of certain "Catholic ethicists" that because the embryos approved for federally funded experimentation were already dead there could be no possible immorality in their being so used. Without presenting the argument in detail, the logic moved along these lines, essentially: No person, no one to injure. There was another component as well, that moral complicity by the Bush Administration in the deaths of the embryos could not be established either formally or materially. Now it is very possible that Neuhaus had been made familiar with these arguments at the time they became current. Their adequacy will be considered later. What can’t be explained is his ignorance of pertinent paragraphs of the Instruction, Donum Vitae, disseminated by the Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith in 1987. One such paragraph states:
"The corpses of human embryos and fetuses, whether they have been deliberately aborted or not, must be respected just as the remains of other human beings. In particular, they cannot be subjected to mutilation or to autopsies if their death has not been verified and without the consent of the parents or of the mother. Furthermore, the moral requirements must be safeguarded that there be no complicity in deliberate abortion and that the risk of scandal be avoided. Also, in the case of dead fetuses, as for the corpses of adult persons, all commercial trafficking must be considered illicit and should be prohibited."
One wonders what part of "cannot be subjected to mutilation … without the consent of the parents or of the mother" Neuhaus failed to understand. And while it cannot be proven from the history whether or not Neuhaus relied on the Weyrich argumentation set out above, had he, his Catholicism can be seen as having been reduced to a kind of hair-splitting. The whole point of the Weyrich obfuscation was to exonerate Bush from complicity in the deaths of the embryos and to establish a rationale for the profitable use of their remains. Beside it’s dealing hopelessly in abstractions and the fact that it’s tenets might themselves be considered vulnerable, one is reminded when considering its logic of the morality of the guards at Bergen-Belsen, of their extracting the gold from the teeth of the dead Jews they gassed there. In any case, the formulation of the Weyrich "ethicists" skillfully dodges contact not only with Donum Vitae but with two other very important considerations: (1) The centrality of the argument against instrumentality, and (2) the open theological question of the relation of human persons in the intermediate state to the present material reality of the world. The issue here is not limited to the questions of complicity in the deaths of these innocents and to profitable use alone, it is rather larger than that. It concerns their being made into objects. The eschatological question, while less central, cannot be seen as lacking relevance either. What can be seen here, then, is an attempt at a redefinition of the boundaries of the pro-life position, a carefully placed paradigm shift as it were. It fails and along with it fails Fr. Neuhaus’ much overplayed orthodoxy.
How is it that someone as highly regarded as Fr. Neuhaus becomes cloudy in this way? With embryonic stem-cell research we have a question so fundamental to a life respecting Catholicism that no priest should ever get it wrong. Yet Neuhaus did. Why? His further history offers a clue.
Stumblings More
That Fr. Neuhaus has had a hand in the development of Bush Administration foreign policy is quite widely known. Bush, himself, has acknowledged both a closeness and a debt to Neuhaus in this connection and he has done so publically. What astonishes most about the kind of advice Bush has received from Neuhaus, however, is how questionably Catholic it is. One might even be tempted to believe judging from the results that it was Bush doing the advising and Neuhaus the listening, not the converse. Certainly the tragedy that is Iraq today would seem to be one consequence to emerge from their consultations.
For years prior to the on-set of hostilities in Iraq in 2003, First Things had functioned as a kind of springboard for protagonists of pre-emptive war theory. With war days away and even as an impressive array of curial figures were making known their utter rejection of this concept and Papal Nuncio, Pio Laghi, to Bush his belief that war with Iraq would be both unjust and illegal, Neuhaus could tell Zenit:
"Whether that cause can be vindicated without resort to military force and whether it would be wiser to wait and see what Iraq might do over a period of months or years, are matters of prudential judgment beyond the competence of religious authority."
Could anything be more obvious from this statement than that the Holy Father was being told to mind his own business? No mention, mind you, of the priority of the moral as the Church might see it, just a finger in the eye grounded in the perspective of an almost pre-conciliar, extrinsicist pure naturalism. But when things do reach the moral dimension there’s always the matter of the Holy Father’s difficiencies, his being something of a pantywaist. According to Neuhaus:
"Religious leaders should bring more to the public discussion than their fears. Nervous hand-wringing is not a moral argument."
Neuhaus, by way of contrast, of course, simply overwhelms with moral argumentation:
"War, if it be just, is not an option chosen but a duty imposed. In the present circumstance, military action against Iraq by a coalition of the willing is in response to Iraq’s aggression; first against Kuwait, then in defiance of the terms of surrender demanding its disarmament, then in support of, if not direct participation in, acts of terrorism. This is joined to its brutal aggression against its own citizens, and its possession of weapons of mass destruction which it can use or permit others to use. To wait until the worst happens is to wait too long, and leaders guilty of such negligence would rightly be held morally accountable. "
Banging Head Against the Facts
Today, given the facts of the case as they have emerged on the ground, Neuhaus’ assertions seem almost the antithesis of morality, very nearly a curious irrationalism. Somewhat less breathlessly, the then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, could explained to Zenit in 2003:
"There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond combat groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it still licit to admit the very existence of a just war."
Whatever claims to a valid basis in Catholic thought Neuhaus once may have imagined for his Just War views, they vaporize in the presence of Ratzinger’s remarks above. Neuhaus cannot possibly hope for long to hold up the superiority of his vision of the war in the teeth of such opposition. He would do well (especially by now) to retract it and soon.
Once a respected pillar of Catholic orthodoxy, Neuhaus is today more suitably viewed as a renegade. His anthropology lost in a sordid revisionism born of the requirements of his political and personal loyalties, and his warmongering officially disowned, Neuhaus risks decay into a kind of pathetic irrelevance. It’s not that First Things will disappear or that Neuhaus’ voice will be stilled. Rather it is that he will be forced onto the margins and seen as tangential to the present direction of the Church. There is a cost in achieving the kind of prominence so assiduously cultivated by a man of Neuhaus’ sensibilities. And Neuhaus is now paying it.
Mr Lowell, you should follow your own advice, and not the addage of 'do as I say, not as I do". To question the Catholicity of Fr Neuhaus and act as the arbiter of Catholicism, as The Hand does every day, is both arrogant, and prideful........and we all now what happens to the proud.
Listen to your mother, Mr. Lowell...don't critize a priest.
Matt
I think we've been over this ground before, haven't we Matt?
In any case thanks for the publicity.
John Lowell
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