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The practice of excellence

Human flourishing
means seeing
what is and acting accordingly.

By Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

“A man properly nurtured in poetry will quickly spot shoddy, poorly made works and ill-grown things, and his joy and aversion will be properly placed; he’ll approve beautiful things, joyfully take them into his soul, and from their nurture grow beautiful and good; ugly ones he’ll hate and properly condemn even as a child before he can grasp the reason, and when reason comes he’ll know her and embrace her as one of his own.”
—Plato, Repub. III.401e-402a

“I guess you don’t hear Phocylides’ saying that when a man has enough to live on he should practice excellence.”
—Plato, Repub. III.407a
“Well, I suppose you agree that people are deprived of bad things voluntarily and of good things involuntarily. And isn’t it bad to be deceived of the truth, but good to encounter it? Or isn’t conjecturing the truth the same as encountering it?”
—Plato, Repub. III.413a

Near the end of the Second Book of Plato’s Republic, we find Socrates telling Adeimantus, “No one would willingly accept a lie in the most vital place about the most vital things. To have that there terrifies us more than anything.” Plato’s brother is still confused. “What where?” he says, “I still don’t understand.” Socrates explains, “You do not get the point because you think I mean something highfalutin. All I mean is that no one wants to be deceived and ignorant about reality in his soul; to have a lie there instead of the truth. Everyone would hate that” (382b).

Notice what is being said here. We might well lie to others in order to obtain what we want. Human beings do that, though all lies, like all error, are based in some truth. Otherwise it could not happen, since a lie presupposes that the truth is being spoken to a listener who presumes the truthfulness of the speaker. If everyone lied, we could not communicate. We would all have to shut up permanently. Thus in lying, we are, or at least we think we are, doing something for our benefit. We intend some good, usually what we think to be our own.

The question posed by Socrates, however, concerns not our lying to someone else but our lying to ourselves, a different nuance. Lying about what? Lying about the most important things. An objective order judges us. The assumption is that some things are of more importance than others. Life has to do with sorting them out, the important things from the unimportant ones, not that unimportant things are not also of considerable value. To deceive ourselves about what we are, of what is important, however, stands in a different category.

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Razing the bastions, yet again

Be confident, bold
and loving,
for Christ has won!

By Fr. David Meconi, S.J.

In his 1952 Razing the Bastions (Schleifung der Bastionen) Hans Urs von Balthasar challenged the Church to replace any posturing of fear with a more world-friendly embrace.1 In what proved to be a much disputed work, von Balthasar argued that the Church must leave the security of Catholic isolation and move into a more confident involvement with anti-Catholic worldviews and biases. Sensing the call to be engaged with Protestants as well as non-believers in institutions of higher learning, in the marketplace, in laboratories and in all ranges of (legitimate) research, as well as in every aspect of society and culture, the Church left the “Catholic ghetto,” making the middle of the 20th century a unique opportunity to “take every thought captive in obedience to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). This of course meant risking a sense of surety for the entry into—but hopeful conversion of—those places of modernity where the Church was then still leery to tread.

The call foreshadowed by von Balthasar was vindicated by future popes and in part realized with the Second Vatican Council’s aggiornamento (updating). Paul VI’s first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam (1964), for example, presented God the Father’s love for sinful man as the fundamental dialogue (a term that appears eighty-one times in the English edition) in which God makes himself accessible and therefore vulnerable in the sending of his Son. Willing to enter into the “messiness” of human life, God thus invites all to a dialogue of mutual understanding and charity. God longs to bring all things into himself through his Church and, stripping himself of all glory, draws near to wherever the imperfect find themselves. Toward the end of this encyclical, Pope Paul VI called on all Catholics to continue this mission by being as catechetically learned and articulate as possible, by assuming the good will of those whom they aim to evangelize, and by being sensitive to the needs and histories of others. Above all, charity must mark this exchange, and here the Holy Father warned:

It would indeed be a disgrace if our dialogue were marked by arrogance, the use of bared words or offensive bitterness. What gives it its authority is the fact that it affirms the truth, shares with others the gifts of charity, is itself an example of virtue, avoids peremptory language, makes no demands. It is peaceful, has no use for extreme methods, is patient under contradiction and inclines towards generosity.2

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Physician-assisted suicide: Can the culture of life and love prevail?

With faith and hope in Jesus and a firm resolve,
it is not inevitable
that PAS and euthanasia proponents will win the day.

By Arland K. Nichols

The daunting specter of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) continues to loom in our country and throughout the world.¹ At times it appears as though the culture of death will prevail in the minds of our people and in our laws. In November of 2008, Washington state joined Oregon as one of the two states that has legalized PAS by ballot initiatives, protecting physicians who prescribe a lethal dose of drugs to a patient seeking to kill himself. With the backing of millions of dollars, the initiative was passed with nearly a 6:4 margin. Since 1991, there have been six ballot initiatives seeking to legalize PAS in five states. (Washington voters had initially voted against PAS in 1999 at a 4:6 margin.) From January 1994 through June 2009 there have been 113 legislative proposals in twenty-four states. Thankfully, for various reasons, none have passed. However, in Montana (Baxter v. Montana), a district court legislated from the bench and determined that doctors may assist in suicides and be protected from liability. In December 2009, the Montana state supreme court upheld the ruling.

Since 1997, when the “Death with Dignity Act” took effect in Oregon, 629 lethal prescriptions have been written, with 407 individuals taking their own lives. The year 2008 saw a record number of individuals committing suicide by prescription overdose. On May 22, 2009, Linda Fleming became the first to kill herself under the new law in Washington. Sadly, more will soon follow. And, in Europe (which provided the model for the Oregon law), as of April 1, 2009, four countries offer protections to those who assist in suicides: the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland. Efforts are underway in many countries to join their ranks, while thousands of Europeans have already taken their own lives. Finally, countless thousands upon thousands have been negatively influenced and convinced that PAS is a morally acceptable exercise of freedom and choice.

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Toward a Gospel witness: Confronting child abuse

The Church’s response to this
evolving crisis has been,
at the very least, disturbing.

By Daniel Cere

We live in a culture that celebrates progressive liberation from sexual taboos and constraints. The sexual transgressions of days gone by have been rapidly refashioned into the conventional sexualities of today; even more risqué sexualities like sadomasochism and polyamory are well on their way to becoming packaged and mainstreamed for popular consumption. But there are glaring exceptions to this trend, particularly when sexual relations involve abuse or exploitation. More to the point, contemporary culture now displays acutely heightened moral indignation toward one area of sexual transgression, the abuse and exploitation of children.

In Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America, historian Philip Jenkins documents a veritable “revolution” in our moral response to child sexual abuse.1 There was a time when child molesters were brushed off with dismissive smirks and tawdry jokes. However, today, moral horror, not condescending humor, marks the public response to child abuse. Furthermore, in sharp contrast to more traditional patterns of concealment and strict confidentiality, recent social developments have created a climate more disposed to the disclosure of abuse. Jenkins seems to view this growing public indignation with a certain amount of intellectual cynicism, but our heightened moral sensitivity does resonate with what we now know of the deep harm experienced by victims of abuse.

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Year for Priests: Presence and not production

In our obsession with worldly standards
of success, we forget
the message of the littleness of the Gospel.

By Fr. Alvaro Delgado

We learn from the Church’s sacred Tradition and the Scriptures the sublime role the priest plays as a steward of God’s mysteries in the vineyard of the Lord, responsible for bringing the Good News of salvation to God’s holy people. Through the grace of his ordination, the priest partakes of the riches of Jesus Christ in immeasurable and unspeakable ways, and shares those riches freely with the flock entrusted to his care.

He earns none of these holy favors, he merits nothing of what he shares. His is a sublime and supernatural task that no priest is capable of carrying out without divine help and intervention at every step of this mysterious mission. It is God—in his Holy Spirit—working in and through the priest who brings this work to fruition.

This supernatural mission is carried out not on the clouds of heaven but in the trenches of the world. So it is that the priest in the western world engages in a sort of spiritual tug-of-war, battling the temptation to measure his priestly calling by the standards of the world, not divine standards. He reels under the pressure to achieve something tangible on the world’s stage, something he can feel, see and touch. Something he can show the whole world, something the world will appreciate and applaud.

It’s a concept of worth greatly influenced by the Protestant work ethic, which to great extent measures success by the external signs of wealth, achievement and production. Under this ethic, the external manifestations of success become signs of God’s favor bestowed on the believer.

The modern priest—along with modern man—is beset with the ongoing temptation to justify himself before God and man. To justify his existence, so to speak, by what he does and what he accomplishes. To live out of fear that he is not meeting certain preconceived expectations of worldly success.

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