Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all minds are constantly joining together in groups. . . . There are associations of a thousand . . . kinds: some religious, some moral, some grave, some trivial, some quite general, and others quite particular, some huge and others tiny. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to erect churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the ends of the earth. This is how they create hospitals, prisons, and schools. . . . Wherever there is a new undertaking, at the head of which you would expect to see in France the government and in England some great lord, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

Catholic charities, then, belong to a varied and energetic civil society in America—a sphere that the nation’s founders meant to remain distinct from the realms of government, industry, and purely private life.

Two points are vital here. First, the American proposition presumes that large areas of our common life as a nation exist where government has no special competence and no business intruding. Second, self-government means exactly that: self-government. The solutions to problems in American society are mainly the duty of individuals working together in associations. Government involvement is never the first, and usually not the preferred, course of action. The genius of the American system is that government has found ways to work fruitfully with mediating institutions like the Church to solve problems and deliver key social services.

To put it another way, American civic institutions have always been nonsectarian, but they have never been hostile to religion. Although the Constitution forbids the establishment of a state-sponsored religion, historically, no constitutional problem has been seen in directing public monies to religious charities that serve legitimate public-policy objectives—so long as these religious groups do not use public funds to proselytize.

We should note, however, another difference between American and European experiences. America has never had a European-style church tax or allowed direct public funding of religious organizations. In practice, the American formula—government and religious charities supporting each other in working toward common goals—should not be seen as state assistance to religious charities. It has been, instead, state cooperation with independent charities to advance the public good.

In addition to offering grants and service contracts to Church charities, the government’s main form of cooperation is exempting Church ministries from paying taxes on their properties, assets, or income. But we should remember that the Church’s tax-exempt status is a form of public respect for religious freedom and the importance of religious institutions—combined with a pragmatic realism about the government’s own limited effectiveness. The power to tax is the power to control and even to destroy, as Daniel Webster once observed. And the American government has never—at least, until very recently—tried to wield it as a club in working with the Church.

So, in broad strokes, this is the system that America’s founders set in place. Two hundred years later, we have a robust civil society marked by a wide range of philanthropic and charitable activities. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons, Buddhists, Muslims, and more all play a role in this network of social development and assistance.

In my own state of Colorado, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Denver is one of the largest providers of social services. This holds true at the national level, as well. Catholic Charities U.S.A. ranks among the largest private nongovernmental charitable networks in the country. Its affiliated organizations serve nearly 8 million people each year.

Catholic charities typically have low overhead costs and dedicated staffs, many of whom are volunteers. Because of their Christian commitment and volunteer profile, they make good use of monies received from government sources. They can devote a high percentage of these funds to direct services and program costs.

So why would any government want to undermine a successful, long-standing system of Church–state cooperation with intrusive regulations and abusive demands on Catholic consciences? If Catholic charities left the nation’s social-welfare network, the system would clearly suffer. Even if the government assumed all social services itself, it would take years to replace Church charities with government-run programs. Yet government interference—in effect, a kind of extortion—is a growing pattern. The leverage used against the Church is financial. Today, public functionaries and lawmakers often pressure Church-related agencies by threatening to cut funding for their programs or to revoke their historic exemption from paying taxes.

Consider two recent cases. The first comes from direct pastoral experience. Recently, the Colorado state assembly proposed a bill that would have forced every charitable group receiving state money to comply with a set of “antidiscrimination” laws. That may sound harmless. It may even seem reasonable. But in practice the law would have stripped the Church of any control over the people she hires. Because the proposed law banned “discrimination” on the basis of religion, the Church could easily have been forced to hire non-Catholics or people who publicly reject Catholic teaching—even for key leadership positions.

The implications for Catholics were obvious. The right to define our mission as a Church and to select the people who can best transmit Catholic beliefs and values is at the heart of our religious freedom. No Catholic ministry can ensure its identity if its leaders and staffers cannot be required to be Catholic. Colorado Catholics argued this case forcefully in the state legislature, and the bill was tabled. It never came to a vote. But the issue is by no means dead. And this bad legislation reflected a trend we now see elsewhere. Public officials increasingly push social agendas hostile to religious faith, even at the cost of denying rights historically guaranteed to religious groups.

Here’s a second case. In Boston, the local archdiocese ran one of the nation’s oldest, most respected adoption agencies. Nonetheless, the Church was forced to shut down her adoption ministry. Why? Because the state demanded that the Church begin placing orphans for adoption with homosexual couples—a demand that violates Catholic moral beliefs that children have the right to grow up in a stable family with a married mother and father. Boston’s archbishop, Seán Cardinal O’Malley, sought a conscience clause to exempt the Church from the requirement. State lawmakers refused. The result was the end of more than a century of excellent child-adoption services to the general public.

This case embodied the “grave inconsistency” that Benedict XVI writes about in his encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. A small social subgroup—for example, active homosexuals and supporters of homosexual-related issues—demands that the government defend their right to a controversial lifestyle, a right that is “alleged, . . . arbitrary, and nonessential in nature,” as Benedict puts it. To meet this demand and promote this ambiguous right, public officials attack the “elementary and basic rights” of defenseless children without parents.

When we look closely at Church–state conflicts in America, we see that they now often center on a group of behaviors—homosexual activity, contraception, abortion, and the like—that the state in recent years has redefined as essential and nonnegotiable rights. Critics rarely dispute the Church’s work fighting injustice, helping community development, or serving persons in need. But that’s no longer enough. Now they demand that the Church must submit her identity and mission to the state’s promotion of these newly alleged rights—despite the constant Catholic teaching that these behaviors are personal moral tragedies that can lead to deep social injustices.

As a result, the original links between freedom and truth, and between individual rights and moral duties, are disappearing in the United States. In the name of advancing the rights of the individual, other basic rights—the rights of religious believers, communities, and institutions—and key truths about the human person, are denied.

In squeezing the Church and other mediating institutions out of the public square, government naturally assumes more power over the nation’s economic and social life. Civil society becomes subordinated to the state. And the state then increasingly sees itself as the primary shared identity of its citizens. But this is utterly alien to—and in fact, an exact contradiction of—what America’s founders intended.

America’s original vision conforms closely with subsidiarity, a core principle of Catholic social teaching. Through mediating institutions like the Church, America has always sought to meet people’s needs at a local and even personal level, thereby keeping the state properly limited. As civil authorities intrude on the daily work of mediating institutions, they also substitute themselves for the role of the Church and other similar groups. These tendencies are reinforced by a strong secularist spirit among America’s knowledge classes. In education, scientific circles, and the mass media, religion is often seen as a backward social force, a source of division and violence. The language of pluralism and diversity is misused to advance the antidemocratic goal of marginalizing believers and religious communities from the national conversation.

Today’s distaste for religion among America’s leadership classes has created disarray in our civic philosophy. The American proposition, while nonsectarian in nature, has always been marked by a belief in God’s sovereignty over human affairs and the importance of religion in personal and public life. The secularization of America’s political and intellectual life has weakened these tenets that shaped our common identity. Without God, without the natural-law and the natural-rights tradition, we no longer have any broadly shared moral consensus in which to ground our politics, and from which to draw a common purpose.

American political thought has dwindled to what Christopher Wolfe has called “antiperfectionist liberalism” and what Michael Sandel has identified as the liberalism of a “procedural republic.” In reality, what these political philosophers describe bears a strong resemblance to Benedict’s “dictatorship of relativism.” This relativism shows itself in the claim that—out of respect for pluralism and the diversity of its citizenry—the state should never act as if any one way of life is any better than the next. The government, under this theory, exists not to promote “the good life” of its citizens but only to create a framework of individual rights and legal procedures that will enable each person to pursue his or her own version of the good life.

But we should notice two unhappy things about this public philosophy. First, it allows no room for mediating structures or civil society. In this universe, only individuals and the government finally exist. Families, religious institutions, and voluntary associations are either irrelevant or possible threats to individual rights. This explains, in part, why the Church and other mediating groups so often find themselves attacked by the government for allegedly discriminating against the private rights of individuals.

Second, despite its claimed neutrality, this philosophy is not at all “value free.” As Wolfe notes, in practice, “this new libertarianism constitutes strong government support for one particular way of life, one that is secularized and skeptical, hostile to revealed religions and to traditional morality.”

The issues here are complex, but the simple point is that the troubles of the Church and her charitable efforts in the United States today are not merely political in a partisan sense. They are symptoms of a larger breakdown of public reasoning and discourse—and of leaders who have forgotten the moral vision of our nation’s founding thinkers.

In Colorado, and in many other Catholic communities around the country, the Christian mission of social service to the poor will continue, with or without government support. But not at the cost of our Catholic identity. We will always work with people of good will to ease the needs of the wider public. At the same time, it would make no sense to subject who we are as disciples of Jesus Christ, and what we believe as Catholics, to terms that would undermine the very purpose of our service.

The mission of Catholic Charities and all Catholic social ministries is not humanitarian but religious—to proclaim by our words and deeds the love that God has shown to the world in Jesus Christ. The spiritual and corporal works of mercy are not an option for the Church. They are a duty. Nor are they a generic act of kindness. They are a form of distinctly Catholic witness.

Today, more urgently than ever, those of us who are Catholic need to recover a gospel hunger to help the homeless, the disabled, and the immigrant. We need to deepen the professional skills in our charitable services; we need to offer our gifts to the world—and we need to be committed Catholics first. We need to love and serve the poor; we need to thirst for social justice—and we need to remember that the poorest of the poor is the unborn child who cries out for our protection. There can be no social justice while the weakest and most innocent among us are legally killed.

We need to rededicate ourselves to the work of Christian charity and the Catholic soul of our insti­tutions. Charity is a duty for the whole believing community. But it is also an obligation and privilege for every individual member of the Church, flowing from our personal encounter with the mercy of Jesus Christ.

Government cannot love. It has no soul and no heart. The greatest danger of the modern secularist state is this: In the name of humanity, under the banner of serving human needs and easing human suffering, it ultimately, ironically—and too often tragically— lacks humanity. As Benedict foresees in his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est:

The state which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a state that regulates and controls everything, but a state that, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces: She is alive with the love enkindled by the Spirit of Christ. This love does not simply offer people material help, but refreshment and care for their souls, something that often is even more necessary than material support.

In the face of modern critics who would crowd out the Church’s ministry of love, American Catholics must reclaim the vision Benedict speaks of here. We need to insist on the guarantees promised by the founders at the beginning of the American proposition: autonomy and noninterference from civil authorities.

But a more important task also remains. Catholics must come to a new zeal for that proposition, a new faithfulness to their own Catholic identity as they live their citizenship, and a new dedication to renewing the great public philosophy implicit in America’s founding documents.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M Cap., is the archbishop of Denver. This article is condensed and adapted from his contribution to Where are the Helpers? (University of Notre Dame Press), a forthcoming book on the foundations of Christian charity edited by Paul Josef Cardinal Cordes, president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum. It is used with the cardinal’s permission.

Fishing for Disinformation

That word denounce is chosen not entirely at random. On August 4, the White House set up an email box to receive “tips” about those who opposed health-care reform. “There is a lot of disinformation about health-insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end-of-life care,” the official governmental website announced. “These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health-insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”

The quick negative reaction may have been caused by those phrasings about how the government wants to “keep track” of “casual conversation,” with its echoes of “Report Your Neighbors When They Commit Crimes Against the State.” By August 17, the White House had shut down the electronic tip box, citing worries about how the data would be used—which is, really, the second problem with the whole idea. The first is that it didn’t occur to anyone in the president’s office that this was a bad thing to do. Yes, the government gathering information about your conversations is a dangerous precedent, and data like that hungers to be acted on. But even worse is encouraging Americans to report their neighbors’ conversations to the government. We just aren’t like that, and here is something that genuinely does go to “the heart of who we are as a people.”

In God We Trust

And yet, the fact that the wrongness of this tip box didn’t occur to the White House suggests something more about the Obama presidency—something that bears on both the president’s Day for the Religious and the general healthcare debate. Yes, there are easy ironies that can be pointed out in all this, mostly of the outrageous-if-Republicans-do-it-but-allowable-if-Democrats-do-it kind. But those ironies have their root, their origin, in a primal feeling present in this White House—the profound sense that we are trustworthy and they are not.

In other words, it is not hypocrisy, in their minds, to admit that they would have taken to the streets if Bush’s government tried some of the things that Obama’s government is doing. When they set up a government program to encourage people to report the fishy in their midst, they mean to use it merely to combat disinformation—for they know they can be trusted not to use the gathered material for the purposes to which the previous administration would have wanted to use it. And when they quote the Bible, they are simply using a language their audiences will recognize—for they know they can be trusted not to build the theocracy at which they think their opponents aimed.

As far as religious rhetoric goes, one wishes they had shown the same willingness to trust their government during the Bush administration, and the Clinton administration, and the first Bush administration, and the Reagan, and the Carter, and back and back and back. It’s probably too much to ask, say, the Rev. Barry Lynn to understand that Christian rhetoric is woven so completely into the English language that to ban it would leave us with nothing but threadbare conversation. And it’s surely too much to ask him to understand that religious conviction is draped so fully over the American experience that to eradicate it would leave us with nothing but a naked public square, to use a very First Things phrase: a national forum that is stark, brutal, and alien.

Phrases like “bearing false witness” are what we know and how we speak. I confess I was a little creeped out by the request that the rabbis use their sermons to “tell the stories of healthcare dilemmas to illustrate what is a stake.” Not just the content but the structure of sermons is now being scripted from the White House, like some kind of homiletics class: “Use a story to connect with the people in the pews; reach them where they live.” But if Barack Obama wants to speak in religious words to Americans precisely as a religious people, who would say him nay?

God’s Partners

The trouble is the particular version of religious language he speaks. Tevi Troy, who was deputy secretary of health and human services in the Bush administration, swiped at the president for using part of the Rosh Hashanah service—“On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die”—as the segue to the comment about how “we are God’s partners in matters of life and death.”

Bad enough, Troy remarked, is the fact that the Jewish New Year doesn’t come till September 18, which makes the president’s greeting, “ shanah tovah [happy new year] to all of you” something like “wishing people Merry Christmas on Thanksgiving.” (Several participants commented on the oddity of having “Deutschland Uber Alles” playing while the rabbis waited on hold, but the company hosting the call was probably providing generic “Classical Background Music” and didn’t recognize that something called, say, Haydn’s Kaiserquartett has had other uses.)

David Saperstein, another rabbi on the conference call, defended Obama’s remarks, writing: “The bottom line is that the president spoke in strong moral terms, referencing Jewish themes and ideas in a manner that showed deep knowledge, respect, interest, and understanding of our tradition and our values. It was a moving experience for me—and I suspect for almost every rabbi on the call.” But to do so, Saperstein had to soften considerably the point: not that we are God’s partners in matters of life and death, but merely “we are God’s partners in preserving life and delaying death.”

Perhaps we are. But only perhaps. The language of partnership with God is a tricky, dangerous one, easy to misunderstand—particularly if it is used by those whose rhetorical style is already messianic, as President Obama’s is. And, besides, he didn’t speak of preserving and delaying. He said flat out that we are “God’s partners in matters of life and death.”

The answer to which is simply no. We’re not. And when we imagine we are, we begin to think we get to decide who is to live and who is to die. We begin to think that a “panel of experts” can inscribe and seal in their book of healthcare rules how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created.

“Death panels,” Sarah Palin called such proposed groups of experts, and she was immediately and widely attacked for the phrase. Even National Review editorialized against her for the comment. But, given the state of likely panelists these days—the profession of medical ethicists evinces nearly uniform support for public-financed abortion and legalized euthanasia, for example—the phrase has some resonance. After all, on August 3, “a group of some of the most distinguished health economists in the country sent a letter to the president and Congress in support of the administration’s proposal for the establishment of an independent board of doctors and health experts to guide Medicare policy,” the White House recently reported.

The signers were “household names to health-policy wonks,” in the chatty boast of Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget and Obama’s point man on health-care reform. And, sure enough, the letter proclaimed the primarily economic purpose of the experts’ role in all this: “A properly structured Independent Medicare Advisory Council, with a congressional mandate and authority to do so, can reduce the rate of growth of health expenditures substantially.”

It may well have been comments such as Palin’s that caused the White House to ask for reports of fishy disinformation—and led Obama to speak of people bearing false witness. The proposed boards obviously aren’t death panels, designed by the pending legislation to ration health care by depriving the ill of services they would like. And yet, couldn’t they become that? Couldn’t they start to act that way, particularly when they’ve been told that their purpose is to save money?

The only real answer we’ve been given is the one that’s rooted in the same conviction from which blossomed the casual-conversation tip box—the belief that the people in the present administration are so uniquely trustworthy that they must be allowed to do what others should not. The finances of health care in this country are a mess and manifestly unfair; it’s hard to be opposed on principle to the idea that we need reform. But I don’t trust the potential administrators of a nationalized health care to be always benevolent. I don’t trust them to refrain from making doctors perform abortions. I don’t trust them not to use the opportunity for legalizing euthanasia. I don’t trust them to keep from using nationalized health care for social engineering.

I especially don’t trust them when they suppose that they are God’s full partners—partners in matters of life and death.
· On the front page of the Wall Street Journal, an article about thefts of hay in Texas, in which we’re told, “Searing summer temperatures and a lack of rain have turned pastures here brown and crunchy, depriving cattle of the green grass they usually live on this time of year. That has made hay, a particular kind of dried grass that is nutritious feed of livestock, a precious commodity.”

Think about that for a moment. The Wall Street Journal now thinks it has to define for its readers what hay is, in case they don’t know. Turns out to be “a particular kind of dried grass.” Often used, as it happens, to feed cows (a particular kind of large domesticated animal) on ranches (a particular kind of property on which nutritious livestock is kept).

· The dangers of email headers automatically generated by truncating the first line of the message: A publicity email I received today announced in its subject-line the news that the “Bishop of Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe Accepts The Gospel.” About time, I thought. But opening the email, I discovered that, in fact, the “Bishop of Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe Accepts The Gospel Tide’s Invitation to Speak at Fall ­Banquets.” Ah, well. The Gospel Tide is a sixty-three-year-old Mennonite ministry that produces Christian radio broadcasts. And the bishop of Christ Church in Zimbabwe will be speaking this fall at the organization’s banquets.

· In December 2007, when Belmont Abbey College discovered coverage for abortion, contraception, and sterilization tucked away in their employee health-insurance policy, they did what any Catholic college would—well, ought to—do, they had that coverage removed. As William Thierfelder, president of the College, explained, “The teaching of the Catholic Church on this moral issue is clear. The responsibility of the College as a Catholic college sponsored by the monks of Belmont Abbey to follow Church teaching is equally clear. There was no other course of action possible if we were to operate in fidelity to our mission and to our identity as a Catholic college.”

Now, after a complaint was filed by eight faculty members, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled that Belmont Abbey is discriminating against women: “By denying prescription contraception drugs, Respondent is discriminating based on gender because only females take oral prescription contraceptives. By denying coverage, men are not affected, only women.” Should the college and the faculty members who filed the complaint not be able to reach an acceptable settlement, the EEOC can file a lawsuit against the college in federal court.

In its efforts to eradicate discrimination in employment, the EEOC’s ruling tramples North Carolina law. While the state does require that health-insurance plans provide coverage for contraception, there is an exception for religious employers who may request from their insurer a health plan that excludes “coverage for prescription contraceptive drugs or devices that are contrary to the employer’s religious tenets.” In fact, before the eight faculty members at Belmont Abbey filed a complaint with the EEOC, they filed a complaint with the North Carolina Department of Insurance and the Department confirmed the college’s status as a religious institution exempt from the law.

Thierfelder has expressed confidence that the school’s “actions ultimately will be found to be in compliance with all federal and state laws and with the U.S. Constitution,” but even President Bush’s (now rescinded) conscience clause protected only hospitals and healthcare workers. We need, and we need now, a wide-ranging conscience exemption that reaches across the economic spectrum.

· Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Here in an interview is everything you could possibly want to know on the subject of Justice Ginsburg: “feminist legal agendas,” “women of means” with choices, plus “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

Q: If you were a lawyer again, what would you want to accomplish as a future feminist legal agenda?

GINSBURG: Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often.

Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?

GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [ Harris v. McRae—in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

The interview was softball. Which populations—the ones we don’t want to have too many of—might she have had in mind? If abortion proved ineffective in keeping them under control, did she have other methods in mind? What does Medicaid-paid abortions for poor women—when connected to “populations we don’t want too many of”—actually suggest to her? If “women of means” have choices poor women don’t, is it choice she wishes to extend to the poor or population reduction? All these and others went unasked. Ginsburg’s future feminist legal agenda turns out to be nothing more than the old feminist legal agenda: abortion, and abortion, and abortion.

· A story has been running in Dallas about “Baby Bella,” a baby abandoned in an apartment complex hallway moments following her birth. The mother, who had disguised her pregnancy to relatives and to her ex-boyfriend, came forward later to Child Protective Services saying, “I made a mistake.” She is facing child-endangerment charges that carry a possible two- to twenty-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine.

We cannot help but remark that had the woman demanded a late-term abortion, she wouldn’t be facing any legal troubles at all—which underscores the nutty convolutions of logic that abortion imposes on society. The only factor here that determines what happens to a pregnant woman is where and under what circumstances her baby is discarded. An abortuary is permissible; the hallway of an apartment complex is not. Of course there is a difference, but perhaps it is not the obvious one. The mother at the abortion clinic never has an opportunity to see her child alive when she realizes, “I made a mistake.” Baby Bella was placed in the care of her biological father, and we are minded to remember both him and Baby Bella’s mother in prayer.

· “We’re supposed to be the most multicultural city in the world and it doesn’t seem terribly inclusive,” Denny Alexander explained. It, as it turns out, is ten-year-old playground equipment found in two parks in the west end of Toronto. The offending objects depict the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, complete with cute pictures of animals in male-female pairings. In the most multicultural city in the world, that just won’t do. The equipment won’t be removed immediately, but the city had decided that, when it “wears out,” it won’t be replaced. “Toronto’s motto is Diversity our Strength,” wrote councilman Adam Giambrone. “City policies across the board look to reflect our multicultural city. One way of doing that is not focusing on any specific cultural or religious tradition.” You really can’t better that line about how awful it is for an inclusive city to, um, include something biblical.

· Believe it or not, sodium silicate (“liquid glass” to its friends) is in the news. The federal government gave this unassuming compound a huge boost in popularity by making it the official poison for killing fuel-inefficient cars under its now, alas, bankrupt “Cash-for-Clunkers” program. In a detailed, 136-page manual distributed to dealers, the government mandated that “clunkers” be permanently disabled by running the engine with sodium silicate instead of oil, thereby abrading the engine beyond repair.

Suppliers happily scrambled to meet the sudden demand (the Wall Street Journal reported that one distributor was working “sixteen-hour days”), and across the nation, mechanics were energized by the prospect of a novel thrill: “At dealerships across America, mechanics accustomed to fixing engines are battling for the chance to ruin them. ‘Everybody wants to go first, so I’m probably going to have to make them draw straws,’ says Jim Burton of Randy Curnow Buick Pontiac GMC in Kansas City, Kansas. As service manager, however, he might reserve that thrill for himself. ‘I can’t wait,’ he says.”

By all accounts, the prescribed method is quick, safe, and effective. At one dealership in Kansas, sodium silicate killed a 2002 Ford Windstar and a 1999 Jeep in approximately two minutes. (A 1988 Jeep held out for six minutes. “Sometimes,” observed the dealership president, “those old engines are hardest to kill.”) The simplicity, efficiency, and dispatch with which this debut federal euthanasia program was administered should help quiet fears that the federal government is incompetent to administer health care.

· Fr. Kevin Thew Forrester’s selection as bishop of the Episcopal Church’s diocese of Northern Michigan hit a snag in July when—as announced by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori—a majority of the Episcopal bishops and diocesan committees refused to give their necessary consent to his election. Forrester will not be a bishop, and we can’t think why not. His rejection, we learn, is entirely due to doctrinal worries over his orthodoxy. Forrester reportedly denies the existence of satan, doesn’t believe God sent Christ to die for the sins of the world, accepts universal salvation, received Buddhist “lay ordination” in 2004, and once read the Qur’an in worship declaring it “the Word of God.” Now surely, as more than one Episcopal bishop one time or another has accepted one or more of the propositions at issue, perhaps it is a case of Forrester believing too many of them all at once?

· The United Methodist Church’s conferences are voting on a measure that would open church membership to active homosexuals. Twenty-seven of forty-four regional governing bodies reporting voted no. There are sixty-two conferences in total (not all have reported their votes), and the proposal requires support from two-thirds of the conferences for adoption.

The United Methodists have another seventy-two conferences in Africa, the Philippines, and Europe. Those votes are ongoing, and the results will not be known until the spring of next year. Observers, however, point out that African opposition is a large factor in UMC efforts to revise how Methodists officially regard homosexuality. With American Methodists declining and developing-world Methodists growing, conservative African Christian influence will only increase. Coincidently, or perhaps not so coincidentally, the conferences were also required to wade through some twenty-three constitutional amendments that would have altered relations between American Methodists and other Methodists, permitting national churches—like that of the U.S.—to “contextualize” outreach for homosexuals, among other things. Under the same two-thirds rule for adoption, none passed. The UMC has eight million members in America and another three and half million members outside the United States.

· Rachel’s Tears, Hannah’s Hopes: Liturgies and Prayers for Healing from Loss Related to Childbearing and Childbirth to the Enriching our Worship is a liturgical supplement adopted at the Episcopal Church’s 2009 General Convention specifically addressing women and men experiencing guilt and a sense of sin from abortion. Initiated in 2003 by Georgette Forney, president of Anglicans for Life, it took six years to convince Episcopalians that some women and men may indeed come to suffer for their role in securing an abortion. There is a deep, deep reluctance, previously noted on these pages, to acknowledge that women receiving an abortion may one day come to regret it.

· One opponent to the liturgical resource, the Rev. Nina Churchman in Denver, Colorado, found herself “sickened to discover that the rite for abortion is couched wholly in terms of sin and transgression.” Well it is a service of confession and reconciliation. The rite is expressly intended for those women and men who have come, belatedly, to recognize the sinfulness of aborting their very human unborn babies. One rather presumes there must be something to confess if there is to be reconciliation with God. The Rev. Churchman believes nothing of the sort. She was especially distressed that the order includes such phrases as “I seek God’s forgiveness...” and “God rejoices that you have come seeking God’s merciful forgiveness...”

· In point of fact, says the Rev. Churchman, “women should be able to mourn the loss of an aborted fetus without having to confess anything. God, unlike what the liturgy states, also rejoices that women facing unplanned pregnancies have the freedom to carefully choose the best option—birth, adoption, or abortion—for themselves and their families.” Whether God rejoices over choice is a very much disputed assertion, but we are confident in asserting that among the “best” options among Churchman’s choices, the preferred option of the unborn child is not consulted.

· Possibly you noticed the goofy formulation in that Episcopal rite for abortion: “God rejoices that you have come seeking God’s merciful forgiveness.” We’re told it could have been worse. Initial drafts included invocations of the “Mothering God” and “Daughter Jesus.” By comparison, the God who rejoices in the other God’s merciful forgiveness doesn’t sound too bad.

· Georgette Fortney, Anglicans for Life president, took up the Episcopal confessional rite for abortion and took it up very personally. She obtained an abortion when she was sixteen, and it was not until many years later that the weight of it hit her. She began asking for an Episcopal healing service for women like her. “This is a ministry,” she told us, “that is necessary in the [Episcopal] church. So many people hurt over it and experience a great distance from God. They have come to believe this is the ‘unforgivable sin.’ They need an opportunity to know God can and will forgive and love them.”

· Last month’s issue of First Things was spotted by a reader in the New Age section at the Barnes & Noble in Overland Park, Kansas. We can’t think how it ended up in that part of the bookstore, but perhaps the manager concluded that anything with “apocalypse” on the cover belonged there. Think of it: A customer trying to dope out the real meaning behind 13.0.0.0.0, the last date in the baktun cycle of the Mayan Long Count calendar (December 21, 2012), instead walks out with a copy of René Girard under his arm. It’s the end of the world as we know it.

· Every six months or so another two or three books by Benedict XVI show up from Ignatius Press. Here’s a roundup of the latest.

Faith and the Future is a collection of radio addresses Ratzinger delivered in 1969 that draw heavily on his then recently published Introduction to Christianity. Here he argues that faith is a form of trust required for knowledge, a decision to embark on the adventure of loving God and entrusting our lives to him. Faith, he says, may never rely solely on “a bundle of philosophical certainties,” but instead to “prove its own legitimacy in advance” it must reflect “on its own inner reasonableness and by presenting itself as a reasonable whole” it may “be offered to men as a possible and responsible choice.”

A brief discussion of faith in Christ over manmade progress follows, after which Ratzinger reflects on the Church at the time of the Enlightenment and its similarity to the postconciliar Church, chiefly in the sterility of renewal based exclusively on rationalism in contrast to a more organic reappropriation of tradition. Ratzinger’s calls for fidelity to Christ over the politics and demands of the world stir the heart, and his predictions of a smaller, less influential but more devout Church continue to ring true forty years later.

Next, Saint Paul, a collection of papal audiences that together offers a basic, short introduction to the Apostle’s life and writings. These are not scholarly, but pastoral. Benedict pays special attention to Christology and the doctrine of justification, teaching old truths with interesting historical notes. On justification, for instance, he notes that the wall of legal and cultural distinctions keeping Jews from corruption by pagan religions was no longer necessary because of Christ. Because Christ unites us “ with and in the one God . . . the wall is no longer necessary; our common identity within the diversity of cultures is Christ, and it is he who makes us just. Being just simply means being with Christ and in Christ. And this suffices. Further observances are no longer necessary.”

Finally there’s Credo for Today: What Christians Believe, a “greatest hits” collection of passages from Benedict’s most famous works on topics of basic Christianity. On faith and love, for example, he writes: “For what faith basically means is just that this shortfall that we all have in our love is made up by the surplus of Jesus Christ’s love, acting on our behalf. He simply tells us that God himself has poured out among us a superabundance of his love and has thus made good in advance all our deficiency. Ultimately, faith means nothing other than admitting that we have this kind of shortfall; it means opening our hand and accepting a gift. In its simplest and innermost form, faith is nothing but reaching that point in love at which we recognize that we, too, need to be given something. . . . To that extent, faith is already present in and with true loving; it simply represents that impulse in love which leads to its finding its true self: the openness of someone who does not insist on his own capabilities, but is aware of receiving something as a gift and of standing in need of it.”

· We knew about evangelical romance novels and Mormon vampire fiction, but we didn’t know about Beverly Lewis. The author of The Secret, The Missing, and the forthcoming The Telling, is acclaimed as “the top name in Amish fiction.” What will they think of next?

· The Office of Religious Life at the University of Southern California extends official recognition to some eighty-six campus religious organizations. Sixty of them are Christian, seven Jewish, four interfaith, three each for Buddhists and Muslims, and one group each for nine other organizations with other affiliations. So who should be the next director of Religious Life on a campus that is largely Christian with small but visible minorities of Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim students?

The obvious answer: Varun Soni, glowingly described as “the first Hindu primary spiritual leader at any American university.” “I feel proud,” Soni said. “I feel like I can be a proponent of Hinduism in the public sphere.” And why not? Except, of course, imagine the outcry at the school if a Catholic priest, appointed director, had proudly said that the job made a proponent of Catholicism in the public sphere.

· The headline from a recent Newsweek article by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend reads: “Why Barack Obama represents American Catholics better than the Pope does.” An alternative does suggest itself. “Why Barack Obama represents Kathleen Kennedy Townsend better than the Pope does.”

· My Sister’s Keeper is a film about Anna, an eleven-year-old girl genetically designed by her parents to be her ailing sister’s ready organ bank. Tired of hanging around only for the purpose of sending a steady supply of body parts on to her sister—a kidney this time—Anna initiates a lawsuit against her parents seeking “medical emancipation” so that she never again has to worry about her parents’ harvesting of her organs.

Movie reviewer Roger Ebert, writing a review of the film in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times, suggests the movie is, really, “a practical parable about the debate between pro-choice and pro-life. If you’re pro-life, you would require Anna to donate her kidney, although there is a chance she could die, and her sister doesn’t have a good prognosis. If you’re pro-choice, you would support Anna’s lawsuit.”

Come again? Ebert’s characterization of pro-life vs. pro-choice views is inept at best, simplistically stupid at worst, and heavy handed in all events. The pro-life segment of the audience would demand Anna’s submission to medical utilitarianism—you exist, therefore you donate? The pro-choice portion would excuse Anna of any familial obligation—it’s your sister, no skin off your nose? Besides, movie parables are rarely practical.

· Researchers have learned that unborn babies at thirty-weeks gestation are forming short-term memories. By the time unborn children reach thirty-four weeks in development, they are “able to store information and retrieve it four weeks later.” Doubtless, this is something to put in the memory bank for later retrieval.

· Periodic suggestions are made to remove “In God We Trust” from U.S. coinage and currency—a motto regarded as a horrible transgression against separation of church and state in some quarters. Conversely, not a few regard removal as a naked assault against religion. We haven’t got a dog in this fight, frankly, but viewing removal as an attack against religion is a doubtful premise. The motto in fact stirred up all sorts of mixed reaction when it first appeared on the now obsolete and short-lived U.S. two-cent piece in 1864, the result of a proposal offered by a Congregationalist minister that such a motto would boost Union morale in the Civil War. President Lincoln passed it on to the treasury department and there you go.

Not everyone was pleased and it has come in for jabs and jibes ever since. President Theodore Roosevelt went so far as to remove it from gold coinage in 1907, but relented following an ensuing uproar. But even before that, the motto was the target of frequent barbs. Even the famous Morgan silver dollar, first minted in 1878, wasn’t spared. The Christian Union at the time suggested instead “Forgive Us Our Debts” might be a better one.

Another critic, noting the silver content was worth about ninety-two cents at the time, offered a footnote: “At About 8 percent Off.” The Hartford Courant would have preferred “One Hundred Cents” but added regretfully, “that would be more of a whopper than the other.”

· Counting money, Time magazine breathlessly the reader informs, increases one’s social happiness and, confirmed by a separate study, also serves as a pain reliever. Just two more reasons, as we count them, for you to count your money when renewing your subscription to First Things.

Public Square Sources: God’s Partners, Ben Smith in Politico, August 19, 2009. Barry W. Lynn, Beliefnet.com, August 24, 2009. Fishy Email Box, New York Times, August 17, 2009. Tevi Troy, National Review Online, August 20, 2009. David Saperstein, Religious Action Center, August 24, 2009. Sarah Palin, ABC News, August 7, 2009. Editorial against Palin, National Review, August 17, 2009. Orszag and IMAC, Office of Management and Budget, August 4, 2009.

While We’re At It Sources: Hay Rustling, Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2009. Ginsberg, New York Times, July 12, 2009. Bishop’s Email, Gospel Tide news release, August 19, 2009. Money’s Motto, Morgan Silver Dollars: A Complete History and Price Guide. Baby Bella, Dallas Morning News, July 21, 2009. Belmont Abbey, LifeSiteNews.com, August 14, 2009. Toronto’s Parks, Toronto Star, May 28, 2009. Killing Cars, Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2009. Not Bishop Forrester, OneNewsNow.com, July 28, 2009. Methodists, UMC News, August 2009. Rite for abortion, Episcopal Life Online, August 2009. Georgette Fortney, FIRST THINGS telephone interview. Fetal Memory, Washington Times July 16, 2009. Amish Fiction, Publisher’s Weekly, July 27, 2009. Hindu Chaplain, Daily Trojan (June 3, 2009). Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Newsweek, July 9, 2009. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, June 24, 2009. Counting Money, Time, Jul 25, 2009.

WWAI Tips: Lawrence Blume, Lee Cerling, Ken Colston, Meghan Duke, Michael Linton, Stefan McDaniel, Emily Nelson, Stephen R. Ogden, Ryan Sayre Patrico, Nathaniel Peters, Santiago Ramos, Russell E. Saltzman, Gregory Wong-Hing.

Who made poverty legal?
Who made poverty at all?

Eating a cold pork sandwich
out of greaseproof paper
as I cross to Circular quay
looking down the last Harbour miles
that the world-ships furrowed
as they brought poverty

dates this day to my midlife.

Out of my then suburban city
rise towers of two main kinds:
new glass ones keyed high to catch money
and brown steeples to forgive the poor

who made poverty illegal
and were sentenced for it.

And the first Jumbo jets descend
like mates whose names you won’t recall,
going down behind the city.

This midlife white timber ferry
scatters curly Bohemian glass
one molecule thick, to float above

green dark of laws older than poverty
and I hold aloft my greaseproof rose.

He stalks by night—and, happily for us,
at twilight too, along the bayou’s verge,
immobile nearly, fishing without fuss,
obedient to nature’s constant urge.

We call him “Our Bird,” though he’s wild and free,
indifferent to our admiring gaze,
his being wholly bound in what we see,
beyond the pale of reprimand or praise.

Settled in our travel cot,
he stares at her with old brown eyes:
anxious, though, He never cries,
she boasts. Good boy. We'll see if he’s
adoptable—(what if he's not?)
The thing is, you can never keep
a child. They go their way. We snap
the light off, leave the door ajar.
In the other room, before the fire,
all sorted now, we sit and drink.
The sherry and the evening sink.
Firelight shudders on the floor,
in the darkening window where
our reflected faces loom and pass
like faces glancing from a bus,
watching us briefly; and through these
apparitions, the empty trees.

The Episcopal Church, grande dame of mainline Protestantism, is not what she used to be. Of course, we all know that, but William Murchison, longtime Episcopalian and columnist for the Dallas Morning News, tells with verve and skill the story of how his church changed during his time in the pews. As he explains it, the story is in large part a tale of the church’s flight from authority, and her exchange of the God of Israel for the small, less demanding gods of the prevailing winds of American culture.

Murchison is an exponent of the Protestant Episcopal tradition, a type not much seen anymore—he argues with passion for the beautiful, penitential language of Cranmer’s prayer book, against the ordination of women to the priesthood, and against same-sex blessings and the consecration of Gene Robinson. Some readers might dismiss all of this as yet another “change is bad” exercise in knee-jerk conservatism, but they would be wrong. Murchison’s book is written in a spirit of friendly debate; his aim is conversation, not condemnation, and he himself has quite clearly chosen the path of active engagement in the Episcopal Church.

More important, the deeper problem identified by Murchison is not change itself, but the way in which changes in the church have come about—more often than not, he says, revisions have been understood as a casting-off of the outdated, “authoritarian,” and “guilt-obsessed” teachings of Scripture and prayer book, in favor of new movements in the spirit of our therapeutic age, gussied up and repackaged as the Holy Spirit. The end result, he argues, is a church that no longer knows what it means to kneel before her Lord—a church almost impossible to distinguish from the world around it. I fear that the book will not find many sympathetic readers among the church’s leadership, as they have stopped listening to such arguments long ago. It is a pity.

—Jordan Hylden

Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion
edited by Ronald L. Numbers
Harvard , 302 pages, $27.95

We all know the aphorism—“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, but what you think you know that just ain’t so.”

Now, thanks to the historical sleuthing of eminent science historian Ronald Numbers and his cadre of two-dozen “myth-busters,” we have ample evidence that much received wisdom concerning the historical relations between science and religion has caused real intellectual trouble because it just ain’t so. The book’s title names one of the iconic myths from a canon of false claims in the history of Western science. The volume contains twenty-five such guffaws in all, each with its own brief chapter devoted to defusing the myth. One by one they fall, beginning with the “greatest myth,” the notion that the history of encounters between science and religion is a tale of “constant conflict.”

The volume’s careful organization and execution reveal the kind of planning and teamwork absent from too many edited collections, but which have come to be expected from Numbers. Each chapter of Galileo Goes to Jail begins with two or three epigraphs that clearly convict scholarly and popular literature of perpetuating the myth in question. Most authors then explore the nuances of the myth, its origin, complexity, and longevity, before telling the “rest of the story.”

Was Galileo imprisoned and tortured for advocating Copernicanism? Of course not, despite the fact that the clueless and ignorant persist in recycling all those long-ago discredited accounts.

Nor did medieval Christians teach that the earth was flat, nor did Copernicanism demote humans from the middle of the cosmos. Further, Darwin neither destroyed natural theology nor inspired Nazi biology nor converted back to Christianity on his deathbed. And depending upon the company one keeps, some think they know that Christianity gave birth to modern science while others are sure that the scientific revolution liberated science from religion. Neither happened.

From the Church Fathers’ encounter with ancient science to the recent attempts of new-age mystics to coopt quantum physics, this volume has something to intrigue and instruct both popular and academic readers, whatever their theological tradition.

While a couple chapters do little more than tear down mythical straw men and another is overly derivative from previous publications, these are minor weaknesses. Numbers and his colleagues have successfully called propaganda by its real name and demonstrated, in the words of one contributor, that “history fails to be reliable whenever it neglects to show us the world as it looked to the historical actors themselves.”

—Mark A. Kalthoff

Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives
by Peter C. Bouteneff
Baker Academic, 256 pages, $22.99

Peter C. Bouteneff, of St. Vladimir’s Seminary in New York, has done a great service to Scripture scholars and systematic theologians alike by compiling in one volume several patristic interpretations of the biblical creation narratives. Before his examination of such writers as Justin Martyr, Melito of Sardis, Theophilus of Antioch, and Irenaeus of Lyons, Bouteneff devotes a chapter to Paul and the New Testament. The Pauline theme most pertinent to his discussion is Paul’s juxtaposition of Adam and Christ. Readers may find Bouteneff’s reliance on Stanley Stowers in his discussion of Paul a bit unnerving, and Bouteneff’s own position on whether Adam is merely a literary technique is seemingly unresolved. At the end of the chapter on Paul, one is left wondering if Adam really matters at all, or if Paul simply needed a foil for Christ. This lack of clarity, perhaps intended, is a thread that runs throughout the subsequent treatment of the Fathers.

Aside from the main theme of the text, Bouteneff reflects ably on the process of scriptural canonization and the distinctiveness of the Septuagint in the Church’s nascent theological development. Some readers may be annoyed with Bouteneff’s use of gender-inclusive language (despite his sincere caveat) and the sympathetic titling “B.C.E.” for the epoch formerly known in its relation to Christ. Nonetheless, Bouteneff has proven himself capable of researching and discussing a wide range of issues pertinent to many fields of theology: Scripture, patristics, and creation theology. Beginnings deserves a place on the shelf of anyone interested in a coherent and thorough discussion of how those fields intersect.

—Joseph R. Upton

Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic
by Paul A. Rahe
Cambridge, 432 pages, $90

In 1637, Marchamont Nedham graduated from All Souls College, Oxford. Both facts, that the prestigious All Souls has ever had students and that Nedham was a founding father of modern politics, have been forgotten.

As Paul A. Rahe tells us in his erudite and fascinating account of English politics under the republic (1649–1660), Nedham was the first person in modern times to realize the importance of the press. He used it to its limits, editing a “newsbook,” or political weekly as we would call it today, in order to make the opinions of ordinary people matter.

Politics and political survival was everything to Nedham. To those of us who want to employ moral categories, he was a man without principles, a political mercenary. Yet Nedham was politically “dexterous” and “risk averse,” Rahe notes, and “if he was quite often bent, Nedham never once bowed.” Nedham, with his idea of raison d’etat, made material interest—not justice, honor, or religion—a regulative principle in politics, and thus he was not only a student of Machiavelli but a real embodiment of Machiavelli’s teaching. It was partly thanks to him that Machiavelli’s pernicious “new science of politics” made inroads into England.

Nedham’s contemporary, the poet John Milton, supported Oliver Cromwell. And for Milton—who was, after all, a representative of classical republicanism with virtue as its foundation—the failure of the republic was due to the fact that Britain was “not over fertile of men able to govern justlie & prudently in peace.” Its collapse may have been the result of what Milton saw, but Nedham’s ability to adapt to every political turn only proves that a new breed of political activists was already in existence.

Thomas Hobbes was also a new breed and is today the most widely read of English political theorists. But, as Rahe argues, it was Nedham and James Harrington who were England’s true progeny of the Italian sage. Their influence stretched far beyond England, and their writings became vehicles for Machiavelli’s new ideas in France and America.

Today, our almost instinctive faith in democratic procedures makes us either naively dismissive of, or oblivious to, the ancient idea of virtue in politics. Not surprisingly, historians of American history tend to gloss over some rather disturbing words from Benjamin Franklin: “Constitution . . . can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.” Although Rahe does not cite Franklin’s admonition, he, like a gadfly, reminded us of virtue’s necessity in his magnum opus Republics Ancient and Modern.

—Zbigniew Janowski

When Peter Seewald published a book-length interview with Cardinal Ratzinger in 1996, it was met with silence by the German intellectual and theological establishment. As a former editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote, “An interview that a freelance journalist has held with someone is out of the question for us”—especially if, as in this case, that someone was the same prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith whom German theologians and intellectuals had tried to blackguard and ignore. No matter. The Salt of the Earth: Christianity and the Catholic Church at the End of the Millennium eventually sold half a million copies in twenty languages.

Now, in a new biography of that cardinal—the man who has since become Pope Benedict XVI—Seewald adds a demonstration that he understands as well as anyone the many-sided scholar who is today the successor of St. Peter. Benedict XVI: An Intimate Portrait effectively brings the pope to the wider world—mostly because its author is a journalist able to ask the questions nontheologians and nonbelievers find interesting. A communist when he first encountered the future pope, Seewald nonetheless had insight and integrity that gradually enabled him to recognize the central claims of Christianity, even when he could not accept their truth. And, as his work with then Cardinal Ratzinger on The Salt of the Earth progressed, he managed to escape the narrow constraints of the German intellectual and theological world, coming to admire his subject.

Indeed, by his own account, the answers Seewald received “grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.” He started to read the gospels regularly and to go to Mass. Belief became a burning issue for him and he was horrified by the possibility that his questions had no answers. He has now quietly returned to the Church, acknowledging that, by Catholic criteria, only a conservative can be progressive—which is to say, only someone who keeps the treasure of faith complete and intact is able to achieve progress.

Press stereotypes have framed the questions typically asked about Joseph Ratzinger’s personal development. He was, after all, a progressive peritus at the Second Vatican Council, an adviser to Cardinal Frings, and one of the champions of reform. How could he have possibly become the dour “Panzer Kardinal” in charge of the Holy Office, who pursued dissident theologians? And, given his persona as a brutal enforcer, what can explain his apparent further development into a benign and gentle pope, drawing enormous crowds of pilgrims to hear him?

Seewald is convincing in his account of Benedict’s personal story as one of steady, logical development rather than a series of abrupt conversions provoked by adversity or ambition. The cardinals who elected Joseph Ratzinger pope acknowledged his theological expertise, but they knew as well that he was a Bavarian gentleman of the old school, with a quiet charm and unfailing courtesy that the wider world would like when they encountered it.

The secular press’s profiles of Ratzinger while he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith were often wrong, and it is not surprising to read Seeward’s story about how, while his first article on Ratzinger was being prepared, the editors rejected the first twenty-five photographs of the cardinal because he looked “too good.”

Ratzinger has clearly been reinvigorated by his election to the papacy, but his personal style has not changed. It is true that, while he was a professor, he was a clear-headed opponent of the Marxist radicals at Tübingen in 1968. But, contrary to the claims of Hans Küng, he was never shouted down by his students and never treated badly by them. After the Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx had lectured at the university, a panel discussion was scheduled, which included Küng and Ratzinger. In the animated discussion, Ratzinger said nothing until the students started to call out “Ratzinger must speak.” He did so for fifteen minutes, summarizing and analyzing so successfully that the chairman concluded that nothing more needed to be said and closed the meeting happily.

The real cause of his change, if change there was, proves to be his working out the consequences that flowed from the two forces driving the changes of the Second Vatican Council: aggiornamento, bringing the Church up to date, and ressourcement, returning the Church to the biblical and patristic sources. An overemphasis on adaptation quickly led, in some cases, to a surrender to the world, to the salt losing its savor. As early as 1966, Karl Barth asked Paul VI in an audience, “What does aggiornamento mean? An accommodation to what?”

As radical liberalism gathered steam, especially in some Western countries, pastors, congregants, and theologians alike got caught up in the lust for change, and their leaders revealed more of their hidden ambitions. Without doubt, a good deal of the postconciliar religious collapse was self-inflicted. But that fact does not require us to minimize the immense sociological changes occurring in the 1960s and 1970s with the invention of the contraceptive pill and the consequent sexual revolution. Paul VI smelled the “smoke of Satan” in the Church too late.

Ratzinger was one of an important group of theologians who realized that the primacy of the biblical Christ and the integrity of the Catholic tradition were threatened. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and the Polish Karol Wojtya were of the same mind.

Benedict has now been pope for over four years, and in Benedict XVI: An Intimate Portrait, Seewald enthusiastically lists his achievements, correctly noting the Muslim–Catholic dialogue that followed the Regensburg address (potentially a development of enormous import) and especially the “Benedict Effect” in Germany, where conversions and returns have increased and the numbers leaving the Church declined. More would be helpful, but the biography was concluded before more recent controversies over the lifting of the excommunications of the Lefebvre bishops, the Brazilian abortion, and condoms in Africa. Still, Benedict is in good health and in good form. With modern medicine and God’s blessing, he could approach the longevity of Leo XIII. Surprises could still lie ahead.

Traditionally, the papacy has been enriched by a creative tension between the Secretariat of State, which usually espouses a more pastoral or diplomatic approach, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, concerned to preserve the purity of the apostolic tradition.

Benedict’s secretary of state was secretary at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, while Cardinal Levada—a man with a strong doctrinal background and wide pastoral experience—now heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It is a little early to judge whether this change of leadership styles has been completely successful.

Perhaps unintentionally, Seewald also demonstrates another characteristic of the Holy Father. He does not rush to decision quickly or lightly. When Seewald first broached the idea of the Salt of the Earth interview, he heard nothing for some months, until a letter from the cardinal’s secretary informed him that the project was being prayerfully considered.

Two months later, the project was approved and moved forward slowly, with many stops and starts. And when the final text was delivered for approval, it sat for nearly four months before a reply came, which recommended no changes at all.

Benedict XVI continues to move serenely, with his own style and at his own pace, even with the liturgy. He believes the crisis in the Church springs largely from the disintegration of the liturgy, even in our era of “violent change” and “epoch-making upheaval.” These are unusual perspectives, even for the first pope elected in the third Christian millennium. We await further developments with faith, hope, and love.

George Cardinal Pell is archbishop of Sydney.

Tony Campolo
St. David’s, Pennsylvania

Alan Jacobs put into words much of the discomfort I myself felt when I first came across The Green Bible in the local bookstore. Yet there is one issue Jacobs did not touch on: the editors’ too narrow definition of creation. Given that the Scriptures are unified by the grand narrative of God’s dealings with his creation, especially with his image-bearing creatures, I should think that any edition of the Bible claiming to focus on this subject would properly have to print everything in green.

David T. Koyzis
Redeemer University College
Ontario, Canada

Regarding the Pain of Others

“It is remarkable with what Christian fortitude and resignation we can bear the suffering of other folks,” said Jonathan Swift. Like other anti-euthanasia writers, Sally Thomas holds no truck with use of the words unacceptable suffering, release, merciful, or love. But my experience has convinced me that these are indeed the appropriate words to use when faced with the imperative to end pointless human pain.

I was once given a tour of a large state hospital for children in California. We were shown ward upon ward of micro- and micra-cephalic infants who would never know a parent or a home. To say that these people were created in the “image of God” begs the question. At the existential moment between life and death, is it not sufficient for us, the living, to commend these lives to God? What else can we do? Thomas offers few specifics.

The old argument still runs that only God has the right to decide the terminus of any life. But God is no longer the only one determining how long men and women live. Man himself is determining that, having extended his average lifespan from the thirties in colonial days to nearly seventy now. Medical advances often prolong the hopeless suffering of those whom Nature, left to herself, would release. Man must shoulder the responsibility thus thrust upon him and must devise some way of mercifully liberating the helplessly ill from needless existence.

Duane A. Walker
Carlsbad, California

It took me some time to break the spell cast by Sally Thomas’ wonderful article (“Shadows in Amsterdam,” May 2009). When I finally recovered the use of reason, the first thing that came to my mind was: Why is Thomas surprised?

Euthanasia is the logical course of action for anyone who is not living a life of faith, hope, and love—that is, for the vast majority of the population on this planet. The only way to endure suffering when earthly life can give us nothing more is the redemptive love of Our Lord. Unplug that and everything comes tumbling down.

Thomas is probably too young to know this, but the spiritual struggle for most people in the last phase of life resembles that of Gethsemane. Satan takes over and shows us, facts in hand, that our life has been a failure, that our prospects are not any better, and that what awaits us is horrible. It’s the hour of darkness: God withdraws in the background and we are left alone with Satan.

Satan’s arguments are compelling, and Our Lord had to muster all his strength to keep faith, hope, and love. His battle continues in history in each and every individual who consciously confronts death (Christian or not). Today the word agony associated with Gethsemane means intense pain. For the evangelists and their audience that same word meant the personal fight in battle or in the arena.

We need to move beyond surprise and scandal toward love and empathy for the human ocean that surrounds us. They will have to confront Satan without the armor that Paul urges us to put on, and their only hope is a lethal dose of a drug. The Lord is merciful and will come to their help, but they don’t even know that.

Steve Clemente
Los Angeles, California

Sally Thomas replies:

I thank Steve Clemente and Duane A. Walker for their responses. I appreciate Clemente’s assumption that I am too young ever to have witnessed firsthand anyone’s end-of-life sufferings, physical, mental, or spiritual, and that my youthfulness has rendered me naive.

Why am I surprised, he wonders, that anyone would take the road of euthanasia? I suppose my response, first, is that I’m not so young never to have encountered, in successive waves, the various ways in which ill and aging people wait for death. I have seen the shadow of despair that haunts many of them in the absence of a sustaining faith.

A friend of my mother’s, for example, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and caused herself untold grief in settling her living situation and her affairs so that her adult children never have to come to see her, or even think about her, if they don’t want to. As she told my mother, “This is my gift to my ­children.”

Pardon my naivete, but this is an outrage. I don’t care how many times or in how many forms the scenario plays itself out: It is an outrage, a shame and a scandal and a sin, that the old and ill should feel that they are alone with their demons, that those demons render their lives worthless, and that the only sensible, charitable thing to do is to take themselves and the demons as far out of everyone else’s way as possible. It is wrong, plainly and simply wrong, that a culture should arrange itself around such an assumption about the worth of human life. If I fail to be scandalized by this state of affairs, then I run the risk of moral numbness. I have an aging, widowed mother; if for no other reason, I need to be scandalized, frankly, in order to stay awake at the wheel.

Walker, meanwhile, takes me to task for my Christian willingness to “bear the sufferings of other folks,” as Dean Swift put it. He wonders what I think people ought to do, other than having their loved—or unloved—ones put down when their usefulness on this earth has been outlived.

I would offer as one example the experience of a family we know, a family of many children and limited means and cramped living space. When the wife’s father, in his nineties, became unable to live alone, the family took him in. They converted their living room into a room for him. The two sons, then fifteen and thirteen, took care of his bodily needs, bathing and dressing him, carrying him to and from the car when the family went out. The daughters kept him company. The priest visited often.

The father died a year ago in May, in his bed, surrounded by family who loved him enough to have gone on caring for him indefinitely, who had not tired of him and his needs, who bore his sufferings with him, who found him even in his infirmity to be good company worth having for as long as he stayed. They still speak of the year he lived and died with them as the best year in their life together, and of the burden of his care as a blessing.


Crediting Faith

Gary Anderson (“Faith & Finance,” June/July 2009) argues that smooth functioning of the finance system depends on trust and belief. Anderson insists that the economy can recover only if we restore trust and belief in our financial institutions. But where is this belief going to come from? Virtues can come only from God, and faith, belief, is his gift. He has also ordained that faith and reason belong together, however, and therein lies the problem.

Since creation is a continuum, a dilution of religious belief has led to a lowering of moral standards, which has in turn necessarily resulted in lower standards in business ethics. George Washington identified these necessary connections in his Farewell Address. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” he said “religion and morality are indispensable supports. . . . Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice. And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”

According to Anderson, charity provides the wealth for our heavenly treasure. With Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, he has purchased our redemption. Even so, Christ wants us, like the poor widow in the gospel, to contribute our tokens as a sacrificial offering for the redemption of our souls. Charity strengthens our faith. But, Anderson goes on to say, in our modern state, social justice substitutes for personal charity. The personal sacrificial offering conducive to grace is replaced by the use of someone else’s property. Instead of charity, we substitute class warfare and the invidiousness of some other mortal’s blessings (their property). In the Christian view of things, that is not charity but its opposite. It does not result in any increase of our heavenly treasure (as in faith) but rather depletes the previous savings or credit we might have accumulated.

In the Jewish midrash discussed in the article, the rabbis conclude that if God is one’s surety there is credit— credo, “I believe.” This is the consequence of personal charity. If instead the devil is your surety (and he is no doubt the promoter of conflict, strife, invidiousness, and class warfare), there will be no credit. This is where we stand today.

In response to Anderson’s insistence that belief in the financial institutions be restored, we must demand that this trust be reasonable. People should not ignore the reality of widespread immorality in the world of finance, or its source in weakened religious belief. As Washington put it in his Farewell Address: “Can it be that providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue?” It has indeed. There is no shortcut around the life of grace. Our eternal welfare and temporal welfare stand together. Let us pray to God that we recover the faith that alone can be the source of our fortunes in this life and in the next.

Luis F. Caso
Worthington, Ohio

One would not guess from reading “Faith & Finance” that the Christian concept of Redemption had anything to do with the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The author thus succeeds in avoiding the “scandal of particularity” but leaves one wondering how he would relate his thesis to such Bible passages as Mark 10:45, Romans 3:21–26, Ephesians 1:7, 1 Peter 1:18–19, Revelation 5:9, and so on.

Keith Masson
Portland, Oregon

Gary A. Anderson replies:

Luis Caso provides a good summary of several important points in my article. In particular, I had stressed how belief in God and belief in the credit markets have considerable overlap in Jewish and Christian thought. Nowhere is this more evident than in the idea of establishing a “treasury in heaven,” a concept quite dear to Jewish and Christian writers of the Second Temple period. I quite agree with Caso that a big problem currently has been the eroding of faith on the part of creditors due to poor business practices. The restoration of trust will not come about with a snap of the fingers or congressional mandate but only when an appropriate level of confidence (“faith”) returns to the markets.

As for Masson’s worry, my article dealt with the issue of heavenly treasuries, not the sum total of the Christian concept of redemption. If he wants to see how I work the Cross and Resurrection into this particular framework of debt and credit, I would refer him to my recent book Sin: A History.


Baby Talk

Blessed are the married with children for they will stabilize housing prices. David P. Goldman’s theory of economics and fecundity (“Demographics & Depression,” May 2009) is fascinating, but he attributes much more importance to fecundity and the prevalence of two-parent families than the facts warrant. He writes, “Perhaps the world is poorer now because the present generation did not bother to rear a new generation. . . . We are grayer, and less fecund, and as a result we are poorer, and will get poorer still—no matter what economic policies we put in place.” Poorer than when exactly? The U.S. poverty rate is far lower now than it was in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the GDP per capita is far higher. By any standard, the world is much richer than it has ever been in the past. Increasing the population never by itself increases GDP per capita; only productivity gains do that.

Goldman also writes, “Too few [children] are seated around America’s common table, and it is their absence that makes us poor.” The U.S. fertility rate in 2006 and 2007 was 2.10, which is precisely at replacement level and the highest since 1971. Largely due to immigration, our population is expected to continue to grow. We also have a lower dependency rate (that is, more workers per dependent) than we had during the baby boom.

The heart of Goldman’s argument is that the U.S. housing market, and in large part the world economy, is driven by one variable—two-­parent families with children—and since that variable has not been growing, neither can housing demand. Because the market somehow overlooked this well-known demographic fact, people vastly over-invested in housing. Housing demand, however, depends on many other variables. One is GDP per capita. When Americans have more money, they tend to buy more and bigger houses, and GDP per capita is far higher than it was during the baby boom and has been increasing steadily (until the current recession) and will doubtless do so in the future. Moreover, non-two-parent families also buy houses. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 55.2 percent of all single-person households owned homes in 2007, up from 49 percent in 1990. The figures for other kinds of non-two-parent households are ­comparable.

In other words, in recent decades a greater percentage of all kinds of households have been buying houses than comparable households did in the past. In fact, there may even be a correlation between socially disruptive behavior and demand for housing. In a divorce, often one parent will keep the old house and the other will buy a new one (increasingly possible as GDP grows).

Large families are good for many reasons. But something may be a moral and cultural good without being the single key to the world’s economic growth. Conversely, a social evil, such as the decline of the two-parent American family, need not be the cause of all the world’s ills, such as the bubble in the housing market. There is much responsible work being done by economists on the causes of that bubble, but none of it treats the number of two-parent families as significant. Goldman has written some fine things about demographics, but here he has allowed his favorite themes to expand into all-compassing explanations of everything.

Gregory Barr
Notre Dame, Indiana

David P. Goldman’s article is a good start on an important subject. The first thing God said to Adam and Eve was not “Thou shalt not eat of it” but “Be fruitful and multiply.” That seems to imply an ever-growing economy. A large portion of mankind, however, has decided it prefers a growing GDP without the needed multiplication.

Goldman describes the result of this preference in the housing sector. It is not important whether this description is accurate in all its various aspects—the prophetic message is loud and clear: We need to rear a next generation. All else is bookkeeping and ultimately trivial.

Cor Labots
Alberta, Canada

As much as I love David P. Goldman’s article, and as much as I agree with his analysis, I find it slightly amusing that he neglects to mention the most serious hindrance to demographic growth: sex. Sex is now considered a private recreational activity, with no moral or social significance. The default setting in this society is that sex is sterile. Childbearing is available as an optional lifestyle extra, if you happen to like that sort of thing.

We have built our entire social structure around these presumptions. Women are permitted to participate in the economic and educational systems as long as they agree to chemically neuter themselves until finishing graduate school and establishing careers. The housing market, which Goldman addresses so eloquently, has been built on the assumption of two-income households. Add, to high mortgage costs, the crushing college debt that many young people face, and it is small wonder that so many young couples feel themselves unable to start families. By the time they are financially prepared, a woman’s peak fertility is past her. Even if she wants a large family, it may well be out of her reach.

So, I would add the following to Goldman’s recommendations: The government should stop subsidizing contraception and comprehensive sex education. The contraceptive ideology is the linchpin of the whole sexual system. If people want contraception, they can pay for it themselves.

But for the government to promote the idea that sex in any circumstance is an entitlement, that all possible problems associated with sex can be contracepted away—this is not government neutrality. This is the government actively promoting a deeply flawed ideology, with many problems beyond the demographic winter Goldman so eloquently ­discusses.

The truth is that none of this was necessary. These attitudes toward sex were foisted upon us in the name of women’s freedom and gender equality. A more humane feminism, along the lines sketched by John Paul II, could have spared us, and may yet spare us, much grief.

Jennifer Roback Morse
San Marcos, California

David P. Goldman replies:

It is true, as Gregory Barr observes, that most economists’ models look at other variables than demographics. But that is precisely why none of these models predicted the housing-price crash. Why did Standard and Poor’s now infamous rating model for subprime bonds fail catastrophically? Because it relied on variables like GDP per capita, which kept growing until the housing market blew up. The economists were in the position of turkeys, whose correlation models worked perfectly well until Thanksgiving. By contrast, demographically attuned economists such as Arthur C. Nelson at Virginia Tech (whom I cited) had been warning for years of a coming price drop in large-lot, single-family homes.

It is true that single-person households bought large homes, but the fact that people who could not afford large homes bought them regardless helped cause the crash. The idea that we should stick to the same models that guided us over the cliff in the first place recalls J.M. Keynes’ definition of a responsible banker, namely “one who is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows.”

Defending Nora’s Honor

I enjoy reading your unique publication, even if I do not always agree, but sometimes you do require correction of facts. Zbigniew Janowski’s review of The Art Instinct (“Darwin in the Louvre,” May 2009) describes Nora Helmer, the heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, as not wanting to “procreate” and insinuates that she was guilty of adultery!

Both claims are incorrect. Nora was a good, loving mother. Consider the first scene of the play which shows her carrying an armful of gifts for her children. And the misdeed that drives the plot is not adultery but Nora’s forging of her father’s signature—for her husband’s sake.

Roberta Bauccio
San Francisco, California

Zbigniew Janowski replies:

I am puzzled by Roberta Baucci’s claim that because a woman is a loving mother she cannot be adulterous. Does the love of one’s children necessarily entail the love of one’s husband? Or, does the love of one’s children preclude adultery? Is adultery the act of sex with someone other than one’s spouse or is it anything resembling an emotional affair where one shares intimate knowledge of oneself, not necessarily physical contact?

It is instructive to invoke Graham Greene’s Doctor Fischer of Geneva in this context. Fischer’s wife betrayed her husband not by having sex with another man, but by sharing her passion for music with someone—something she could not do with her husband. Was she an adulteress? Certainly not by traditional standards. What one finds in Greene is perhaps a more subtle insight into marriage than what one finds in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novels: the lack of fulfillment in marriage and the need to seek this in the company of someone else. If true, one can suspect that many spouses would be guilty of this sin.

The Real Crusades

Thomas F. Madden (“Inventing the Crusades,” June/July 2009) complains about nonspecialists getting the Crusades wrong and then proceeds to make a questionable generalization about a period outside of his own area of academic specialty. “For Christians [of the first millennium], therefore,” Madden writes, “violence was ethically neutral, since it could be employed either for evil or against it.”

Not quite. One need only consider the perspectives on violence in Tertullian’s Apologia and De Corona Militis, Origen’s Contra Celsum, the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, the Martyrdom of St. Marinus, St. Paulinus of Nola’s Letter 25, and Book XIX of the City of God, to see that significant Christians of the first millennium either rejected violence outright or were profoundly uneasy with it.

This is not to say that most Christians were strictly nonviolent or to deny that some Christians thought violence was ethically neutral (though ethical neutrality is a concept whose applicability to the world of ancient Christianity is itself debatable).

It is merely to insist that Christianity in the first millennium, like Christianity in the second, encompassed a wide range of views on matters of significance.

The result was that violence meant a lot of things to a lot of different Christians. By skirting the complexity of historical Christianity, and by doing so to strengthen his own arguments, ­Madden risks placing his scholarship on the level of those pacifist revisions of history whose slanted narratives he correctly dismisses.

Mike Schorsch
Iowa City, Iowa

In his review of The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Thomas F. Madden writes that “we are left with the gaping chasm between myth and reality. . . . If that chasm is ever to be bridged, it will be with well-written and powerful books such as this.”

Madden also mentions that within a month of September 11, 2001, former president Bill Clinton lectured the students at the Jesuit institution Georgetown University that “de­scriptions of the [Crusades] describe soldiers walking on the Temple Mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees.”

Up to their knees? Does anyone really believe that?

This sort of thing is personal to me, because I entered college as an agnostic, and part of the reason that I returned to being a Catholic is learning the true history behind many of the anti-Catholic myths I was told.

Don Schenk
Allentown, Pennsylvania

I hope that Thomas F. Madden will forgive me for not joining in his gleeful reassessment of the Crusades. As a Jew, I would find it exceedingly hard to do so.

For all the unabashed piety that the Crusaders brought to their tasks, the Crusades were an absolute disaster for the Jews. Contemporaneous accounts make it clear that the Crusaders destroyed countless Jewish communities on their way to Jerusalem. Those destructions left deep wounds and prompted the adoption of many customs of public mourning, such as memorial prayers on the major festivals ( yizkor) and the commemoration of the anniversary of a death ( yahrzeit), that are observed to this day.

Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin
Marietta, Georgia

Thomas F. Madden replies:

Mike Schorsch is certainly correct to point out that not all Christians who lived before A.D. 1000 agreed on an issue as complex as violence. Yet, as his bracketed insertion into the offending sentence suggests, I made no such claim. Instead, the sentence in question was part of a discussion of Augustine’s view of just war and its subsequent implications during the medieval crusading movement. Reading additional sentences would also have revealed that the article was a book review and, as book reviewers are wont to do, I tried to lay out the main arguments of the book in question. In this case, on page 13 of Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, in a discussion of Augustine, just war, and medieval thought, we read: “The second was the conviction that violence was ethically neutral.” Neither Riley-Smith nor I meant to suggest what Schorsch thinks we suggested.

Don Schenk is correct to disbelieve stories—told by presidents or others—of Jerusalem’s streets running with blood to knee level after the Crusader conquest of 1099. Although several Western sources use this description (or even more exaggerated ones), it was the employment of a widely recognized figure of speech. It was never meant to be taken literally. The best analysis of the conquest, by Benjamin Z. Kedar of Hebrew University, puts the death toll at around three to four thousand. By medieval Middle Eastern standards, that was more than usual but not dramatically so.

I am sorry that Rabbi Salkin believes that I am “gleeful” in my reassessment of the Crusades and that, as a Jew, he finds it is “exceedingly hard” to engage in a reassessment of them. Plenty of historians—many of them Jews—have been able to reassess the Crusades by looking dispassionately (rather than gleefully) at the evidence in an attempt to better understand this important period in history. I would direct Rabbi Salkin to any of the excellent books by Robert Chazan or Jeremy Cohen. We now know much about the anti-Jewish pogroms that occurred alongside some Crusades.

Catholic Matters

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput (“St. Paul in the Public Square,” June/July 2009) says there are 65 million Catholics in the United States, but it seems to me that many of these so-called Catholics are members in name only. Furthermore, many eventually quit the Church. (The second largest religious group in the United States is supposedly ex-Catholics.)

Why is this? The answer is the Church’s current policy of baptizing any infant whose parents promise to rear him in the Catholic faith. But how believable are such promises when they come from nonpracticing Catholics? The Church stipulates that one godparent has to be a practicing Catholic—how about further ­stipulating that one parent must be a practicing Catholic? And how about a declaration that, in the event of death or divorce, the Catholic party does not waive the right to pass on the Catholic faith to their children? These modest changes might help a great deal to hold people accountable to the community for the faith they promise to pass on to their children.

A second issue is the bishops’ credibility. Why do so many laymen simply not believe the bishops? Let me suggest that there is not enough fraternal correction. For example: The pope is the successor of St. Peter. He is therefore due the kind of respect that St. Peter received, but not greater. St. Paul did not hesitate to hold his brother Peter publicly accountable when he erred. But the present successors of the apostles never hold their brother bishops accountable.

The bishops enjoy a superficial unity, but the people rightly distrust this appearance and so do not follow them. Differences are real; burying them is deleterious to the credibility of the teaching office. Our bishops must learn from the Church Fathers, who had great disagreements but produced great theology and were excellent pastors.

Both these issues are about accountability. Each of us has received gifts from the Lord; we are all accountable for their exercise—including the exercise of faith. The teaching office is also accountable to the Church, since the gifts of the Spirit are mediated by the Church. At present the bishops are contemplating changes in the Mass without any consultation with the priests or faithful who will be affected: another example of a lack of accountability. Insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Is that what we in the Church are doing?

The Rev. Paul A. Hottinger
Naperville, Illinois

For forty years, the American bishops have been constrained by the NCCB/USCCB ethos to speak as a committee. But Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not appointed as a committee to write a gospel. Each wrote the gospel in his own voice. Would we be better off today with a single gospel ratified by majority vote?

Archbishop Chaput has exercised his rightful apostolic independence. He writes not as the weak bishops of recent American times past but as the Father Bishop of ancient times past.

His tone is nearer that of Augustine, Anselm, Chrysostom, Basil, Paul, and Peter than that of the USCCB.

William G. White
Franklin Park, Illinois

Archbishop Chaput has delivered a strong, objective message deserving wide attention. An equally strong word of caution, however, is needed for his somewhat abstract “practical lesson” on “how to engage the culture of today.” Being “creative” is one thing, but “the language of popular culture” can be a Trojan Horse. Weren’t the Pharisees versed all too well in the language of popular culture? Didn’t Paul fail to sway the crowd at the Areopagus?

One should also clarify the meaning of “information technologies.” If this means the Internet and blogging, it will prove a slippery slope indeed. Depth of thought is not exactly a characteristic of the Web, where much is gossip—­occasionally helpful gossip but still not conducive to the reflective attitude needed to receive what Benedict XVI calls Jesus’ “great word and . . . sublime message.” It is worth noting that Benedict has expressed skepticism about the benefits of modern information technology precisely because (as Chaput notes, drawing on the work of Neil Postman) it alters the “structure of our interests . . . the character of our symbols . . . [and] the nature of community,” perhaps in unavoidably vicious ways.

In the end, Chaput’s basic message retains its force—“the truth in Christ”—which shows us the way, often regardless of, or even contrary to, popular culture. The archbishop undoubtedly sees this, but it won’t hurt to remind readers to take care. Christian resistance to rap culture, tattoos, atonal shrieking as music, gross obscenities for humor, and the like, can certainly make imaginative use of new technologies but should not itself stray from reverence and decorum. John Paul II’s generosity toward modernism and the media needs great restraint to avoid the new golden calves that often go by the name “modern culture.”

W. Edward Chynoweth
Sanger, California

I thank Archbishop Chaput for his incisive analysis in his essay on “St. Paul in the Public Square,” regarding the Church’s role in the American public square given the election of a stridently pro-abortion administration. His admonition to examine what we have become is salient and wrenching.

He cites poor formation over the past forty years as a root of Catholic disengagement from truth. I know regularly attending septuagenarians who believe that their Catholicism is consistent with their vote for President Obama, thus demonstrating the need for continuous catechesis and conversion among all the faithful.

To his list of practical advice, I would add one point. The Church must rise up in sustained prayer. Every offertory should include one or more petitions to end abortion and to beg God for forgiveness and healing. The Church’s prayer concerning abortion is largely nonliturgical and laymen led. I laud all these efforts.

But it is past time for the Church as a whole to bring that prayer into the very heart of her worship. Only the bishops can lead that movement. In twenty-first-century America, what petitionary prayer is more important than the prayer to end abortion? Can we imagine the Church having any real impact on abortion without such prayer?

Is there any better way to teach our own hearts to desire an end to this travesty and thus pray our way toward a better answer to the question of what have we become?

Lynn C. Murray
Toledo, Ohio

To read A Brief Inquiry is to be led to ponder whether, as Wordsworth wrote, the child is father of the man. For the book makes available a text that was not generally known to exist, the senior thesis written by the late John Rawls in 1942 to complete requirements for graduation from Princeton. After graduating, Rawls enlisted in the army and served in the Pacific—returning after the war to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy and become an extraordinarily influential moral and political philosopher.

Thus, A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith makes available the thoughts of a twenty-one-year-old Rawls and, perhaps surprisingly to many who know his mature work, a deeply religious Rawls. The book also includes a brief piece titled “On My Religion,” written (though not for publication) by Rawls sometime in the 1990s. In it he makes clear that by June 1945 he had abandoned the Christian beliefs so resoundingly asserted in the thesis three years earlier, and he offers some speculation about why his beliefs had changed.

Along with these two pieces by Rawls himself, the book contains an introduction written by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel, which attempts to sort through continuities and discontinuities between the young Rawls of the thesis and the well-known scholar of later years. It also includes a roughly seventy-five-page essay by Robert Merrihew Adams called “The Theological Ethics of the Young Rawls and Its Background,” which examines the argument of the thesis in detail. Adams’ essay is helpful for understanding and situating Rawls’ thesis—though seldom has a piece of undergraduate writing received such rigorous analysis from an eminent scholar, and it led me (perhaps counterintuitively) to wonder whether the thesis really merits quite this level of attention.

Cohen and Nagel write that “the thesis is an extraordinary work for a twenty-one-year-old, animated by youthful passion and powerful ethical conviction, often vividly ex­pressed, and informed by erudition and deep philosophical reflection.” This strikes me as rhetorical overkill, although clearly the author of the thesis is a very bright and thoughtful student. As a stylist, the undergraduate author is clearly father of the man. There is a labored quality to the thesis, as it sets out what will be done and extends promissory notes in a manner all too reminiscent of A Theory of Justice, the great 1971 work that was to make Rawls’ reputation.

What is most striking to me about the undergraduate thesis is a feature about which I am somewhat ambivalent, for it goes beyond work one might ordinarily expect from an undergraduate in its theoretical ambition. The young Rawls does not content himself with analyzing and evaluating the work of important scholars. (He does, though, make use of some, perhaps especially Emil Brunner and Anders Nygren—and makes still more use of the Bible, “always the last word in matters of religion,” as he writes.) The thesis is less analytical than constructive, as the undergraduate Rawls attempts to develop his own view of “the inner core of the universe,” at the heart of which are the concepts of community and personality.

About this I am, as I said, ambivalent. Even granting that a senior thesis comes at the end of the undergraduate experience, one’s energies may be better focused on understanding and analyzing the thought of important thinkers than of constructing one’s own system. And certainly, at least for this reader, it is the constructive parts of the thesis that are least clearly formulated. One may, as Cohen and Nagel do, note certain continuities and discontinuities between them and views developed by the mature Rawls, but there’s not much else to be gained from them.

About the content of the thesis I will say relatively little. Rawls develops a distinction between what he calls naturalism and the view for which he argues, which makes personality and community central. He acknowledges that his use of the term naturalism is somewhat idiosyncratic and stipulative. Roughly, he means to distinguish natural relations, in which a person is drawn toward an object, from personal relations, in which two subjects meet in mutual community. In natural relations, an active subject stands over against an object; the relation is not mutual. In a personal relation, both subjects are active—revealing themselves to each other and, sometimes, judging each other.

Thus, any ethics that focuses on our desire for various goods, even one that is quite concerned to distinguish proper from disordered desires, is condemned by Rawls. From this perspective he can and does lump together Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. “They have all failed to understand the communal problem and consider ethics a matter of relating persons to proper objects, such as the Form of the Good, Truth, or God, who is conceived by Augustine and Aquinas as the most desirable object.”

One sees here the considerable influence of Nygren on Rawls, even when it comes out with undergraduate confidence in these sentences from the preface: “I do not believe that the Greek tradition mixes very well with Christianity, and the sooner we stop kowtowing to Plato and Aristotle the better. An ounce of the Bible is worth a pound (possibly a ton) of Aristotle.” And in the rejection of every eudaimonistic strain of thought (since even the attempt to sort out ordinate and inordinate loves still assumes that the point of the moral life is to relate ourselves properly to desired objects), one can see the germ of Rawls’ later Kantianism, which took shape in a theory of justice based not on goods to be sought but on fair terms of cooperation.

Having developed his reasons for rejecting naturalism in favor of persons-in-community (with, by the way, the inner life of the triune God as a model), the young Rawls completes the thesis with chapters on the meaning of sin and the meaning of faith. These chapters are also constructive, as he attempts to think through theological concepts from the normative standpoint he has developed. The “appetition” that seeks God as its object turns out to be, fundamentally, sin. “If one cannot have faith in God just because He is what He is, but has to add that He is most satisfying in His beauty and such an object that we shall never crave anything else—then perhaps it is better not to be a Christian at all.”

There is, I would note, no creaturely neediness here. The young Rawls’ religion is fundamentally ethical, concerned with the proper structure of personal relations in community. But the most fundamental religious impulse of all—to worship the One for whom we are made and apart from whom we cannot be fully ourselves—is less in evidence.

Those interested in connections to the political theory of the mature Rawls are likely to be struck by the thesis’ rejection of any community “based upon mutual egoism or mutual advantage.” Indeed, he writes, “all ‘contract’ theories of society suffer from this fundamental defect.” Because Rawls might be said to be the greatest social-contract theorist of the last half of the twentieth century, this looks like a large discontinuity in the development of his thought.

In their introduction, however, Cohen and Nagel argue that such is not the case. Rawls’ mature concept of justice as fairness did not depend, they suggest, on a vision of self-interested individuals bargaining about the terms on which they would live together in society. Rather, he used “the idea of a contract under the veil of ignorance principally as a device for representing the value of fairness.” This seems strained, for, even behind the imagined veil of ignorance, in which one does not know one’s own life circumstances, one must somehow ask what sort of risks one would be willing to run in order to share a life in community. Self-interest has not been eliminated.

The concluding chapter on faith includes a long discussion of conversion, an intriguing attempt to interpret the doctrine of election in communal more than individualistic terms, and a puzzling rejection of the “false conception” that God might be angry and punish. What Christians may sometimes imagine as the anger of God is really the experience of being “left within the aloneness of sin.” What makes this puzzling is its appearance in a thesis that exalts personal relations between subjects, who may, of course, hold each other responsible and judge each other. Why God should here be conceived less personally than human subjects is hard to understand.

One of the peculiarities of the short later document, “On My Religion,” is that at certain places it articulates viewpoints the author of “A Brief Inquiry” should have known were questionable. For instance, the older Rawls rejects a notion of “salvation by true belief,” even though the young Rawls had already distinguished faith (as trust) from belief (as a cognitive state). He rejects notions of predestination, characterizing them as depicting “God as a monster moved solely by God’s own power and glory,” even though he had himself once taken the meaning of election to be that “God is working to establish a community.” And perhaps most surprising, the man who had placed community at the heart of Christian faith writes that “Christianity is a solitary religion.” The last of these, in particular, is genuinely puzzling.

“I started [the war] as a believing orthodox Episcopalian Christian, and abandoned it entirely by June of 1945,” Rawls writes in “On My Religion.” He does not claim that he can really account for or explain the change, but he mentions three incidents that, at least in memory, seem to have been important. The first of them is something for which an unnamed Lutheran pastor, then serving troops in the Pacific, has a lot to answer. At least as Rawls remembered it, this pastor “gave a brief sermon in which he said that God aimed our bullets at the Japanese while God protected us from theirs.” This depiction of so clearly partial a divine providence angered Rawls; he even says that he “upbraided” the pastor for using Christian teaching in a way designed simply to give false comfort.

The second incident—a striking one that we can easily imagine would embed itself in Rawls’ memory—grew out of the death of Deacon, a friend and fellow soldier. One volunteer was needed to give blood; a second, to scout out some Japanese positions. Because Rawls happened to have the needed blood type, Deacon received the other assignment and was killed by a mortar attack.

The third incident—“really more than an incident,” Rawls notes—was news of the Holocaust, gradually making its way to troops in the Pacific. The link between these three incidents seems clearly to involve a questioning of the notion of divine providence. A religion that had been focused on morality ran aground when it came to seem out of kilter with morality. “To interpret history as expressing God’s will, God’s will must accord with the most basic ideas of justice as we know them.”

These issues are, of course, profound and troubling. One could hardly argue that Rawls was wrong to be troubled by such questions. His reflections seem to have led him away from Christianity, though not from some form of theism. What he lost in that movement, however, was a God who cares enough about us to involve himself in our life and history. Lacking such a God, we are left with our own efforts—both theoretical and practical. In his last major work, The Law of Peoples, a work with explicit ties to Kant’s vision of perpetual peace, Rawls concludes by claiming that, because it is not entirely unreasonable to hope for the establishment of a just social order, we have reason enough—even apart from the realization of such an order—to “reconcile us to the social world.” So long as it is reasonable to hope that we—or others in the future—may achieve such a society, we can do our part now in pressing toward that goal.

An eschatological hope, a quasi-religious conviction, continued to be needed to give meaning and point to the work to which Rawls devoted his life. This is, however, a rather different hope from that with which the young Rawls concluded his senior thesis, picturing the entire Creation as moving toward “that great day” of the Lord, which “may not be so far off as we think.” Whether the hope that moved the younger Rawls, grounded in a God who enters our struggle and fulfills what we are unable to do, was not in fact the more reasonable hope is a question that the trajectory of Rawls’ work may invite us to consider yet again.

Gilbert Meilaender, a member of the First Things editorial board, holds the Deusenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University.

Recent events have brought the ordinarily neglected subject of judicial duty to the front pages. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama told us that in choosing judges—and especially justices of the Supreme Court––he would look for “somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

When asked her view of this empathic ideal during her confirmation hearings before the Senate judiciary committee, however, President Obama’s nominee to the Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, declined to embrace the president’s position. “I...wouldn’t approach the issue of judging in the way the president does,” she told the committee. “He has to explain what he meant by judging. I can only explain what I think judges should do, which is judges can’t rely on what’s in their heart. They don’t determine the law. Congress makes the laws. The job of a judge is to apply the law. And so it’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it’s the law.”

Sotomayor’s repudiation of the president’s empathy criterion raised eyebrows and not a few questions about her sincerity. But in truth her answer was a powerful tribute to the traditional American commitment to the rule of law. Even facing no serious threat to her confirmation, Sotomayor found it necessary to embrace an ideal of judging as old as the republic.

One prominent law professor, however, found Judge Sotomayor’s response “disgusting.” Michael Seidman asked, “How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First-year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate—that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments.” Ronald Dworkin likewise took on the notion of being “faithful to the law,” arguing that “the phrase means nothing, because there are so many contesting views about how to discover what the law is that ‘fidelity to law’ means fidelity to your own conception of law.” Surely many more in the academy were thinking the same thing.

It is a shame that no one on the judiciary committee asked Sotomayor the question posed by Seidman and Dworkin: When the law is not clear, what does it mean to say that “the job of a judge is to apply the law”? Without elaboration, the statement is more platitude than commitment. What could it mean? And it would have been interesting to ask Judge Sotomayor why a judge should not decide hard cases based on her own moral judgment.

As it happens, a recent book by Columbia Law School professor Philip Hamburger is devoted to just this subject. In Law and Judicial Duty, Hamburger provides by far the most comprehensive historical account of the ideal of judicial duty that undergirded our framers’ construction of the federal judiciary. Hamburger insists that judicial review, the power of courts to hold acts of the political branches unconstitutional, is not a distinct and discretionary power but simply an aspect of the more general judicial duty to decide cases in accordance with the law of the land. This explains why the power of judicial review is not mentioned in the text of the Constitution. A proper, historically grounded understanding of judicial duty, Hamburger argues, reveals “a judicial power both more authoritative and less dangerous than that which prevails today.”

Hamburger traces the development of modern conceptions of law to the realization, in Europe and especially Britain, that human reason rarely provided clear answers to moral questions and therefore that an attempt to ground law in divine will, or a search for abstract reason and justice, would inevitably lead to discord. As a result, “Europeans increasingly located the obligation of law in the authority of the lawmaker rather than the reason or justice of his laws.” The task of judges, then, was not to seek after elusive notions of justice and right reason but to enforce the law of the land. Natural law shifted in emphasis from moral content to legitimacy and authority, and increasingly to an understanding of authority based on the will of the people.

Judicial duty often led to the protection of the rights of unpopular minorities, but Hamburger stresses that such decisions—such as the nineteenth-century protection by North Carolina judges of manumitted slaves against retrospective legislation that would have re-enslaved them—was not a product of any empathy the judges felt toward the slaves. Quite the contrary. The judges “probably owned slaves” and “revealed no inclination to challenge slavery.” Rather, the judges accepted a duty to enforce the law, “notwithstanding the overwhelming weight of public sentiment” against the protected parties.

The judicial duty to enforce the law extended to enforcement of limits on local legislation, colonial legislation, and even exercises of royal prerogative, but it did not extend to judging the constitutionality of acts of Parliament, both because Parliament was understood to be the highest court in the land and because the British constitution was customary and so did not provide explicit limitations that were enforceable against Parliament in court. In America, however, legislatures lacked judicial authority and constitutions were written. “Thus, while working on the same principles as judges in England, the judges in most colonies ideally were free to decide the constitutionality of any American governmental act—executive, judicial, or legislative.”

The authority of judges is thus, Hamburger tells us, more firmly grounded in history than is commonly understood. But it is also more limited. The same understanding of judicial duty that required judges to invalidate acts of the king also required them to subordinate their own “fears and passions” to the dictates of laws made by others. Alexander Hamilton famously asserted in Federalist 78 that “the courts must declare the sense of the law; and if they should be disposed to exercise will instead of judgment, the consequence would equally be the substitution of their pleasure to that of the legislative body.”

As Hamburger demonstrates at length, this contrast between judgment and will was deeply ingrained in the traditional understanding of judicial duty and was presupposed by the framers of our Constitution.

The distinction was necessary to “segregate judicial duty from lawmaking power, to protect parties from injustice, and to keep judges within their sphere of independence and authority.” It was part of the duty of judges to resist the temptation to rule in accordance with their own predilections, however powerfully felt.

This ideal of dispassionate decision making in accordance with the law was never uncontroversial. Even in the centuries prior to our founding, according to Hamburger, “men with relatively academic perceptions of law and judicial duty” hoped that “judges would bring an academic-style rationality and justice to bear on English law” and “decide in accord with a broader range of law than that of the land.” The difficulty, though, is that this style of judging would constitute a return to the chaotic world of medieval divine- and natural-law theory.

Hamburger insists that traditional ideas both of judicial duty and of law “rested on a worldly skepticism as to whether men could reliably agree about reason and justice.” It is odd and scarcely realistic (despite the label of “legal realism,” which is accorded this alternative understanding) to think that the law is indeterminate but that reason and justice, let alone empathy, are less so.

A conception of judicial authority that is “above the law of the land” is therefore “dangerous” in much the same way that the king’s “claim to be the final judge of his prerogative,” or Parliament’s “own claim of absolute power, which is based on its status as the highest court in the realm,” were dangerous. Far better, according to Hamburger, is the more modest and quotidian view of judges as enforcers of the law rather than unchecked pursuers of rationality and justice.

As Hamburger tells the story, supporters and opponents of the U.S. Constitution during the ratification debates of the 1780s clashed on many significant issues, but “both sides shared the ideal of clarity and limiting judicial discretion.” The Anti-Federalists, to be sure, worried that the Constitution “was so vague as to leave discretion in federal judges,” but the Federalists “insisted that the Constitution was clear or at least as clear as human language permitted.” No one at the founding appeared to take the now popular academic view that the Constitution was deliberately framed in terms of heroic generalities precisely to give federal judges a wider scope for discretion.

Rather, as Hamburger emphasizes, when objective sources of constitutional interpretation run out, judges in the traditional vein do not seize on ambiguity to impress their own vision of good government on the nation. Instead they defer to legislative judgments and intervene only when constitutional principles are clear. Vagueness is not an excuse for judicial creativity but evidence that legislative action is within the legitimate range of constitutional meaning. Thus, in hard cases judges consult first the language of the Constitution, understood in light of its public meaning at the time of adoption. If there is a legitimate range of meaning, judges look to established practice and precedent to narrow its scope. But in the end, if constitutional meaning is uncertain, judges look to legislative judgments as the source of law rather than to their own preferences.

Our system has departed significantly from that ideal. “American judges,” Hamburger says, “have acquired a taste for power over law.” Presumably that is why the members of the judiciary committee questioned Judge Sotomayor so closely about her views of the judicial office. Empathy is a human virtue, just as rationality and justice are desirable features in the law. But to allow judges to decide cases in accordance with empathy, or to advance their own, necessarily disputed, notions of justice and rationality above the dictates of the law, would accord the judiciary a degree of discretion that is incompatible with an understanding of law based on popular democratic authority.

As Hamburger concludes this excellent volume: “Men will ever be discontent with law and ambitious for power, and judges will ever be vain enough to aspire to a justice above human law, but it is therefore all the more important for judges to recall the common law ideals of law and judicial duty.”

Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford, having recently stepped down from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, where he was a federal judge.

We usually associate the struggles for control of the southern European and Mediterranean worlds with the horrific encounters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—the final decades of the Spanish Reconquista, the fall of Constantinople, the Battle of Lepanto, and the failed attempt of Suleiman the Magnificent to capture Vienna in 1529.

That Ottoman catastrophe at Vienna, along with the Turkish defeat at Lepanto in 1571, are usually cited as indications of Ottoman decline, as the threat from the East receded from Western and Central Europe. But while clear stagnation had set in throughout the empire as early as the sixteenth century, Istanbul was hardly retrenching.

Indeed, the more Istanbul sensed internal weakness, the more it sought remedies in further foreign conquests that might refill dwindling imperial coffers. We sometimes forget that the Ottomans captured European-controlled Chania on Crete at the late date of 1669, while Venetian Crete itself was lost in 1718. And the second attempt to capture Hapsburg Vienna—which came within days of succeeding—was in the summer of 1683.

In retrospect, it is difficult to see why Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa believed he could take Vienna, when the earlier attempt by the far more able Suleiman in 1529—a time when the Ottomans were far stronger—not only failed but failed miserably, leading to near annihilation of the Turkish expeditionary forces. Certain facts had not changed in a century and a half: The road to Vienna was long; the Hungarian summers along the Danube were characterized by frequent rains that made cavalry operations nearly impossible; Vienna was well fortified; and the Hapsburgs could prove to be fanatical defenders once Islamic armies neared the heart of Christendom.

In The Enemy at the Gate, however—an excellent new account of the campaign—Andrew Wheatcroft de-on­strates that logical considerations led Kara Mustafa to believe that he might be successful where Suleiman had failed. Ottoman artillery was both plentiful and lethal against stone fortifications. Turkish siegecraft—especially its legendary sappers—was among the most formidable in the world. Tartar cavalrymen were fearsome allies.

And the Sultan Mehmed IV believed that it had fallen to his lot to clean out the holdout Christian strongholds throughout the Mediterranean and southern Europe as part of renewed and systematic military aggression. An Islamic Vienna would ensure that all the major Turkish acquisitions along the lower Danube—Budapest and Belgrade especially—were finally secure and would remain permanently established Muslim cities.

Lest we think that the war in the East pitted sophisticated Europeans against Eastern hordes, Wheatcroft goes to great lengths—even if his own data and examples sometimes refute his own conclusions—to suggest that the Ottomans’ siege trains, camp organization and hygiene, deference to allies, gunpowder munitions, diplomacy, and adherence to some sort of code of civilized war were at least equal, if not superior, to those of their Hapsburg ­counterparts.

Nonetheless, Wheatcroft argues, Sultan Mehmed IV and his Hapsburg counterpart Emperor Leopold I were more alike than different, uninterested in dissident views of subordinates, and often out of touch with the realities of governance across their vast empires. As it happens, Wheatcroft also demonstrates a far superior statecraft on the part of Leopold, who wisely made an alliance with John III Sobieski of Poland and appointed Charles, duke of Lorraine, as his supreme field commander.

Both were far more capable generals than Kara Mustafa. More important, unlike their less talented and more autocratic Ottoman counterpart, both work






ed well with an array of disparate but skillful subordinates—Hermann, Marquis of Baden, Georg Rimpler, Count Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, and the military genius Prince Eugene of Savoy—to forge a strategy of resistance.

Wheatcroft offers a riveting account of the slow, methodical Ottoman approach to Vienna that began on June 28, 1683, juxtaposed to the Christian preparations upriver on the Danube, especially Leopold’s strategic decision to evacuate Vienna on July 7, which inadvertently caused a panic that resulted in 60,000 residents leaving the city just as defensive measures were in full swing to improve the antiquated and, in many cases, nearly indefensible Viennese ramparts.

Given Ottoman military science, as Wheatcroft judiciously explains it, and the less than adequate resources of the Holy Roman Empire, the final verdict was not at all foreordained—especially in view of the disdain held by supposedly more enlightened Western Europeans for the more backward Eastern Hapsburgs, which resulted in an absence of substantial aid from the West.

In the end, the Christians were vastly outnumbered and had finite supplies. They had to divert precious stores to maintain thousands of Viennese civilians behind the walls. Meanwhile, the Ottoman armies filled the Christian populations with a deep-seated terror that provided the Turks with a psychological force multiplier every bit as important as the efficacy of the feared Janissaries.

By late August, Kara Mustafa had severely degraded the Hapsburg defenses, cut off the city entirely from resupply, killed thousands of defenders, and readied his army for the final assault before the late summer weather turned bad and his own supplies and army’s morale were exhausted. The weeks-long war among the rubble of the outer defenses is often compared to Stalingrad—hence Wheatcroft’s title—and it is an accurate simile, given the barbarity of the fighting and confusion as to who was actually winning and who losing.

But, on August 31, just as the beleaguered garrison seemed about to be overwhelmed the king of Poland, John III Sobieski, appeared on the high ground outside the walls with 15,000 cavalry, among them 3000 hussars (the famed lance-bearing “winged horsemen” of Poland), perhaps the most feared heavy cavalry force in Europe.

On September 12, after meeting up with other relief forces, the Poles did what now seems the nearly impossible: They descended the treacherous slopes into the heart of the Turkish encampments—despite muddy, rough ground and superior Turkish artillery.

With the arrival of Charles of Lorraine and Prince Eugene, the outcome of the siege now hinged on a huge battle outside the walls between the Turkish besiegers and mounted Western relief columns. The defenders aimed not just to relieve Vienna but to destroy the Ottoman forces entirely and leave them helpless, far from Islamic territory. Twelve hours later, the Turks were in full retreat, the city was saved, and the only question was how many of the once grand Ottoman army might make it to safety down the Danube.

At this point, Wheatcroft largely concludes his masterful account of the siege and battle. Curiously, however, The Enemy at the Gate continues for another ninety pages, appending several chapters on subsequent Ottoman–Hapsburg relations and the author’s own analyses. After his descriptions of the Christian resurgence that led to the retaking of Buda, and eventually Belgrade in 1717, the thrust of Wheatcroft’s ­arguments is that the centuries-long conflict should not be looked on simplistically as a holy war—particularly given the later successful commercial relations between the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs. Wheatcroft’s coda in our politically correct age comes off as something of an attempt to suggest that the abject savagery at the core of his book need not mean that there were lasting religious hatreds or justified animosities in subsequent years, much less now in the present.

In a chapter called “Myth Displacing History,” Wheatcroft argues that eventually the two tottering empires, Hapsburg and Ottoman, learned from centuries of interaction that they had much in common, and by 1914 ended up on the same side in a murderous war against Western Europeans and Russians. Muslim soldiers of the Austrian-Hungarian arm­ies, Wheatcroft also reminds us, were among the empire’s most decorated in the First World War. He ends by suggesting that what had once been a murderous rivalry, between 1500 and 1700, finally ended up in a mutually profitable relation and eventual alliance—so that those who, in our own terrorized age, evoke the gates of Vienna are not merely chauvinistic and prejudiced but ahistorical as well: “I have tried to present dispassionately what happened centuries ago. There was, in that time, unimaginable cruelty, savagery, and implacable hatred among all the combatants. Yet in the nineteenth century the bitter attitudes that suffused those struggles diminished, and a new kind of relationship developed, which I have also described. The old feelings and attitudes were (and are) still present, but they were (and are) definitely in abeyance.”

Perhaps. Yet from a close reading of Wheatcroft’s first 200 pages, one receives the impression that the Ottomans—in religious belief, practice toward conquered nations, and treatment of their own people—were not quite the equivalents of the Hapsburg Austrians and Hungarians whom they wished to conquer.

By 1914 many Europeans may have indeed found the Turks convenient and familiar allies, but, for the vast expanse of Hapsburg history in the East, millions lived in deadly fear of what Ottoman armies intended for and could do to them—and quite understandably canonized saviors like Prince Eugene and John Sobieski.

Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, is the Martin and Illie Anderson fellow at the Hoover Institution.

a woman went out to the shrine with her little son, and the child fell asleep. When the ceremony was finished and the sound of the inrushing tide was heard, the woman was terrified and forgot her son in her hurry to get ashore with the rest of the crowd. Then she remembered, and loud were the cries and lamentations she addressed to heaven, wailing and running up and down the beach, hoping she might see the child’s body cast up by the waves. When all hope was gone, she went home and mourned and wept for a whole year.

At the next anniversary of Clement’s death, when the sea dutifully drew back, the grieving woman was the first to the tomb. She prayed at the shrine, and when she arose, the child—as if nothing had happened—was fast asleep where he had been left. “Thinking that he must be dead she moved closer, ready to gather up the lifeless body; but, when she saw that he was sleeping, she quickly awakened him and, in full sight of the crowd, lifted him in her arms.”

I wonder what the Bollandists, those scholars who comb saints’ lives to separate fact from fiction, make of this incident. But that question is not the most important one. Odd things happen, like young couples getting whisked away from a Herodian system to a South Jersey hospital haven. The apocryphal tale of St. Clement, for us, is a true one. For when the tide of this world recedes, we will hold our son again.

Matthew J. Milliner is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Princeton University.