Mainly, it appears, what happened was something unexpected and momentous: the Catholic priest scandals of the early years of this decade, which for two reasons have profoundly changed the ground rules of what can—and can’t—be said in public about the seduction and rape of the young.

In other words, it logically created a whole new class of anti-pederasts. And since the Church’s harshest critics are, generally speaking, the same sort of enlightened folks from whom pedophilia chic had floated up, there lurked in all of this a contradiction.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable theologian Paul Griffiths seems to have had enough of the idea of Natural Law. In his essay in the December issue, he writes, “The nature of human desire, then, is that no particular desire is natural. A full appreciation of human nature—a sort of meta-naturalism—properly denies the natural. And this denial applies even to the drives we have genetically: our urges for sex and food and violence. Even these are capable of formation, reformation, and deformation, to the point of their own erasure. This is why we have Casanovas and celibates, gourmands and hunger artists, torturers and pacifists.”

Even the editor of First Things has had enough—in his case, enough of the growing attack on religion. In “A Demand for Freedom,” in The Public Square column in the new issue, Joseph Bottum writes:

The real problem is that Christians in America today feel embattled and hemmed in—nagged and teased and bullied from a hundred directions. This is not a good situation for the Church, and it is a terrible situation for the nation. To travel much among believers is to feel a growing sense that the day is rapidly coming when religious people will not have the freedom to live ordinary lives in accord with their faith. Oh, the Amish option is always available: Retreat from the world, forego the technologies and enjoyments that others have, and build an isolated refuge. But, otherwise, the ordinary things of life seem increasingly to require not just acquiescence but participation.”

As Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants of many denominations, Christian believers do not hold all the same beliefs. But all believers must stand up now and make a declaration. We must demand from the powers of the world genuine freedom for believers: the freedom to earn their livings, the freedom to educate their children, the freedom to practice their charities, and the freedom to speak the truth—all without compulsion to violate, along the way, the conscience formed by faith in Jesus Christ.

Wesley J. Smith, too, has had enough. In “Pulling the Plug on the Conscience Clause,” he writes: “Society is approaching a crucial crossroads. It seems clear that the drive to include death-inducing techniques as legal and legitimate methods of medical care will only accelerate in the coming years. If doctors and other medical professionals are forced to participate in these new approaches or get out of health care, it will mark the end of the principles contained in the Hippocratic Oath as viable ethical protections for both patients and medical professionals.”

Then, Reuven Kimelman adds a sharp and careful reading of the Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel, and, in “The Needle’s Eye: Why America’s Economic Recovery Needs the Global South,” the economist Reuven Brennan joins First Things’ senior editor David P. Goldman to argue:

The destinies of the aging but affluent people of the West and the young but impoverished people of the Global South are joined—and joined by a very simple economic fact: The old tend to have savings, while the young tend to have energy. To fund their retirements, old people must find young people to whom they can lend. And to start families and businesses, young people must find old people from whom they can borrow.

We ought to help the poor, and we need to improve our own economic situation—and yet, somehow, we seem unable to do either. . . . If America looks outward, toward the young people of the Global South, rather than inward, toward the exhausted consumers of the baby boom, the ensuing economic boom could outpace the great expansion begun by the Reagan administration.

Out of the present crisis, the world might enjoy one of the longest and fastest economic booms in history. Or it might remain in an economic mire for the foreseeable future.

And then there all the books covered in the new issue—’cause it’s almost the Christmas season, you know, and the time is coming when you have to fill some stockings, and, besides, no one has ever had enough of books. So, a special Christmas section opens with “Wondrous and Silly,” a survey of new picture books by Margaret Perry, who writes, “Anyone who thinks there are few worthy children’s books being produced these days just isn’t looking carefully.”

It’s followed by “Lives and Legacies,” in which Justin Torres takes up the year’s crop of new biographies, and by “Thrillers and Throwbacks,” in which the great Edgar-award-winning mystery reviewer Jon L. Breen sketches the year in detective stories.

Next, the great critic John Sutherland reads the posthumous Nabokov novel, The Original of Laura, the philosopher Thomas Hibbs reads David Walsh’s The Modern Philosophical Revolution, and the theologian Gary Culpepper reviews N.T. Wright’s new book, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision:

Nearly five hundred years after the Reformation, debate over the doctrine of justification continues to divide Christians. What is interesting about the current form of the debate, however, is that it has returned to scriptural foundations. The focus is no longer on Martin Luther’s condemnation of late-medieval works righteousness but on Paul’s epistles—and the decisive question is this: What does Paul mean


by “the righteousness of God”?

Then Thomas V. Berg reviews Neither Beast Nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person by Gilbert Meilaender, Richard W. Garnett reviews In Defense of Religious Liberty by David Novak, and Robert Bruce Mullin reviews The New Shape of World Christianity by Mark Noll: “This vitality is transforming the face of world Christianity. As Noll shows, the missionary wave no longer flows from Europe and North America to Africa and Asia. It goes, instead, in the other direction: At present 35,000 foreign missionaries labor in the United States, while thousands more serve in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.”

Just to spice up the mix, the December issue of First Things features a poem by former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia, his first new publication in some time—together with new poetry from Sr. Lou Ella Hickman, Julie Stoner, Timothy Murphy, Rhina P. Espaillat, and Gail White.

Shouldn’t you be having all this delivered to your doorstep? Shouldn’t you be subscribing?

The opponents of abortion aren’t vexed—they are mobilized, focused, and driven to succeed. The Catholic bishops took the lead in pushing for the Stupak amendment, and they squeezed legislators in a way that would do any K Street lobbyist proud. (One never sees that kind of effort on behalf of other aspects of Catholic teaching, like opposition to the death penalty.)

It’s a throwaway, really: red meat to an audience Toobin knows all too well, and loves to feed. In a parenthetical phrase, Toobin claims that the Catholic hierarchy is being hypocritical in that it lobbies more aggressively against abortion than capital punishment. I’m sure Toobin thought he was scoring an easy point when he wrote that sentence. For most readers of the New Yorker, I’m sure he did.

What’s troubling, though, is how frequently these kinds of tricks are being used in our national debates. It simply doesn’t matter whether or not the indictment is true. The damage, it is assumed, has been done, the point taken. In this case, for example, Toobin ignores the fact that numerous Catholic organizations, intellectuals, and bishops have been outspoken critics of the death penalty in the United States, right alongside the USCCB. He also, knowingly or not, makes the common mistake of assuming that all Catholic teachings are equal in their weight and importance—and would therefore somehow merit equal lobbying efforts. (As it happens, though, abortion is, unlike capital punishment, viewed by the Catholic Church as an intrinsic and immutable evil.)

I wonder what Toobin expects from the Catholic bishops at a time when abortion has suddenly become one of the most prominent issues on the national stage. Does he really count on bishops to give equal attention to topics that are, politically speaking, nonissues when everyone from Planned Parenthood to Emily’s List is focusing on one thing, and one thing only: making abortion coverage part of healthcare reform? I doubt it.

I think instead that, for Toobin, all of the nuances and intricacies of Catholic social teaching were completely beside the point—not to mention too complicated to flesh out for a thousand-word article. Toobin simply wanted to finish off his column with a twist of the knife, a little reward for the readers that stayed with him till the end. But what does it say about the level of our public discourse when the lead article in one of the leading magazines in this country has to resort to simple and dishonest insinuations of hypocrisy to drive home his point? Certainly nothing good.

What we really need at this critical time in our nation’s history is the willingness to listen honestly to those who disagree with us and engage their thinking with arguments that are rigorous, legitimate, and based in truth. Toobin’s charge of Catholic hypocrisy meets none of those standards.

Ryan Sayre Patrico is assistant editor of First Things.

“(Nancy) Pelosi is speaker and she’s pro abortion every minute of every hour of every day as speaker,” Shadegg said in an interview with POLITICO Saturday evening. “This is a vote to help her move the bill forward.”

In the end, the Stupak amendment passed on a 240 to 194 vote. Although at least a handful of Republicans entertained the idea of voting present, Shadegg was the only one to do so. The GOP leadership released a statement that seemed to respond, a bit defensively, to those who wanted to bring down the amendment. “To be clear, the Stupak-Pitts Amendment’s passage is the right thing to do,” Representatives Boehner, Cantor, and Pence said. “We believe you just don’t play politics with life.”

There are many problems with the Shadegg/Americans for Prosperity gambit, but perhaps the biggest one is that it simply wouldn’t have worked. The bill would have passed anyway. In fact, in the long-run, defeating Stupak would have hurt chances of defeating Obamacare.

If Republicans followed Shadegg’s strategy (at least 47 Republicans would have had to have voted present to defeat the Stupak amendment), a couple things could have happened. One, as the House GOP leadership argued, the pro-life Democrats, having voted their consciences and felt double-crossed by Republicans, would have voted for final passage anyway. “If that ended up being the case, [Republicans] did the right thing” by voting for the Stupak amendment, says Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity.

Two, if Pelosi didn’t have the votes, she could have pulled the bill from the floor and brought it up for consideration this week—in all likelihood with weaker abortion language after the pro-life Democrats had been humiliated by Republicans. AFP’s Kerpen argues nonetheless that there’s a chance this could have thrown the Democrats into disarray. “If you wanted to kill the bill, the only thing that stood a chance of doing that was taking down the [Stupak] amendment,” he says.

But chances of this strategy defeating the bill were slim. And Republicans had much to lose by voting down the amendment.

Substantively, the Stupak amendment was a “tremendous victory for pro-lifers, and the size of the vote actually should occasion some comment about the audacity of the Democratic leadership to try to block the overwhelming will of the House,” says National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, author of The Party of Death. “I think we have really pushed far into the future any chance that they’re going to make a run at the Hyde amendment.”

Strategically, the Stupak amendment has divided the Democrats on the health-care bill. Pelosi’s decision to allow a vote on it elicited “tears from some veteran [Democratic] female lawmakers.”

”Planned Parenthood Federation of America has no choice but to oppose HR 3962,” the group declared in a statement, and the Washington Post reports that “Although House liberals voted for the bill with the amendment to keep the process moving forward, Rep. Diana DeGette (Colo.) said she has collected more than 40 signatures from House Democrats vowing to oppose any final bill that includes the amendment—enough to block passage.”

It’s going to be exceedingly difficult to strip the Stupak language from the conference report. Passage of the Stupak amendment in the House puts pressure on pro-life Democratic senators Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania to settle for nothing less than the same language in the Senate bill, but pro-abortion senators are vowing to strip the language.

If Nancy Pelosi does double-cross the pro-life Democrats and strip the pro-life language from the conference report, she would almost certainly lose at least 3 of the 42 members who voted both for Stupak amendment and final passage—enough to defeat the bill. So Democrats are left playing a game of chicken.

But if Republicans had voted down the Stupak amendment on Saturday night, they would have taken the issue off the table. “It would have looked extremely cynical,” says Ponnuru. According to a House Republican aide, the “only message that would have come out of the Shadegg stunt is that Republicans only want to protect the unborn when they are in charge, but are willing to sacrifice them for political gamesmanship.”

”If the Democrats had put up a phony amendment, that would be another story—then we would have to call them out, but they did exactly what we asked. 183 Members, including Shadegg, asked for a vote on the Stupak amendment,” the staffer added.

Senate Republicans could hardly have demanded that the bill bar federal funding of abortion after House Republicans had defeated the measure. Republicans would have been murdered in the press, and their pro-life reputations tarnished at least through the next couple election cycles.

Bringing down Stupak would have seriously hurt the effort to defeat Obamacare. The minority Republicans need public opinion and moderate Democrats on their side to defeat the health-care bill. Betraying pro-life Democrats and playing the part of cynical politicians for the media would have damaged that effort.

The fight on the Stupak amendment—and, I should add, the Democrats’ health-care legislation—is far from over. Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut may join a Republican-led filibuster of the entire bill over fiscal issues. On abortion, there will be pressure on red-state Democratic senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Evan Bayh of Indiana to join pro-lifers Casey and Nelson to vote for the Stupak amendment, while abortion-funding is probably necessary to get liberal Republican Olympia Snowe to consider voting for the final bill. If a bill passes the Senate—and that’s a big if—the House and Senate would have to reconcile their bills and be approved by both houses of Congress. Abortion advocates and abortion opponents have both pledged to vote against final passage if they don’t get their way. For the bill to pass, one side would have to cave in.

And what does Barack Obama do during this fight over taxpayer-funding of abortion? Behind the scenes, his staff may work quietly to push a phony abortion-funding compromise in the Senate. In public, Obama will stand on the sidelines and speak out of both sides of his mouth, hoping to sign whatever bill the Congress can put on his desk.

Presidential candidate Obama pledged in a speech to Planned Parenthood in 2007 that “reproductive care,” including coverage for abortion, was at the “at the center, the heart of the plan that I propose.” But President Obama pledged in a speech to a joint session of Congress this fall that “under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.”

Obama provided ABC News two similarly contradictory statements in the course of two minutes last night. “We’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions,” he said, adding that the fact that “there are strong feelings on both sides” about the Stupak amendment tells him “that there needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we’re not changing the status quo.”

In fact, the Stupak amendment is the only thing that could keep federal tax dollars from paying for abortions, despite what people’s “feelings” about the issue tells the president.

John McCormack is deputy online editor at The Weekly Standard.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cell.

For all its archetypal supremacy, however, Keats’ poem is not necessarily any more distinguished than a great many others in the English canon. A case can be made that Thomas Hood’s “Autumn” is every bit as accomplished, and every bit as successful in conveying a sense of the dying year’s somber beauty. Again, the first stanza:

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;—
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,
Pearling his coronet of golden corn.

This is splendid, as are all the verses that follow. And Edward Thomas’s “October” is a quiet tour de force. To quote only its first lines:

The green elm with the one great bough of gold
Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one,—
The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,
Harebell and scabious and tormentil,
That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,
Bow down to...

Some of the finest Autumnal poetry in English, moreover, is the simplest. I have a certain tender regard for Walter Savage Landor’s “Autumn”:

Mild is the parting year, and sweet
The odour of the falling spray;
Life passes on more rudely fleet,
And balmless is its closing day.

I wait its close, I court its gloom,
But mourn that never must there fall
Or on my breast or on my tomb
The tear that would have soothed it all.

And growing up has done nothing to diminish my admiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Autumn Fires”:

In the other gardens
And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!

That, as far as I’m concerned, is pure genius.When I turn to poetry in French, I have to admit, the pickings become slimmer—and I say this as a confirmed Francophile. In fact, for the most part French poetry is far poorer in nature verse than English poetry. Why this should be, given the beauty of the French landscape, it’s hard to say. Perhaps it’s because Romanticism arrived so late, and in such a decadent form, in France. The sheer severity of French classicism was often peculiarly inhospitable to any but the most urbane of themes. All the lovely, austere, exact Alexandrines of the French Golden Age stage taken together do not possess the power of four or five lines from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to summon up either the delicacies or the grandeurs of nature. And later French verse, to a greater degree than the English, remained largely a poetry of the city. These are generalizations, of course, susceptible of endless qualification.

But it seems to say something that two of the most famous French poems to mention autumn in their titles—“Sonnet d’automne” and “Chant d’automne”, both by Baudelaire—have practically nothing to do with nature at all, and everything to do with the poet’s arrested emotional development. In the first, the actual season appears only in the closing lines: “Crime, horreur et folie! —Ô pâle Marguerite! / Comme moi n’es-tu pas un soleil autumnal, / Ô ma si blanche, ô ma si froide Marguerite?” (“Crime, horror, and madness! —O, pale marguerite! Are you not, like me, an autumnal sun, O my Marguerite, so white, so cold?”). And the second uses Autumn as little more than a metaphor for every morose discontent and hysterical premonition the poet can wring out of his own pathologies: “Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres; / Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts! /
J’entends déjà tomber avec des chocs funèbres /
Le bois retentissant sur le pavé des cours” (“Soon we shall plunge into the cold shadows; Farewell, delightful brightness of our too short summers! Already I hear the wood already falling, with a funereal shock, resounding over the courtyard pavement”). And the mood gets sicklier from there on.

Probably the best known French poem about autumn, at least among English readers, is Verlaine’s “Chanson d’Automne”, which is so limpidly simple as to verge on the dainty, and whose gauzy effect no translation can really capture:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon cœur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure.
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens,
Et je pleure.

Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
De çà, de là,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

(The long sobs of the violins of Autumn wound my heart with a monotonous languor. // Stifling everything, and wan, when the hour sounds, I recall the old days and I weep. // And I depart with the ill wind that carries me away, now here, now there, just like a dead leaf”).

This is all right, I suppose, in a tenuous, Gymnopédies sort of way, but somewhat lacking in the cider-soaked merriment of harvest time.

The specimens to be found in German seem, on the whole, to offer a somewhat richer range of feeling and color. Goethe’s “Herbstgefühl” (“Autumn Emotion”) strikes just the right balance between wistfulness and celebration:

Fetter grüne, du Laub,
Am Rebengeländer
Hier mein Fenster herauf!
Gedrängter quellet,
Zwillingsbeeren, und reifet
Schneller und glänzend voller!
Euch brütet der Mutter Sonne
Scheideblick, euch umsäuselt
Des holden Himmels
Fruchtende Fülle;
Euch kühlet des Mondes
Freundlicher Zauberhauch,
Und euch betauen, ach!
Aus diesen Augen
Der ewig belebenden Liebe
Voll schwellende Tränen.

(A fuller green, you leaves, up here to my window, along the grape trellis! Swell more crowdedly, indistinguishable berries, and ripen more quickly and more fully gleaming! On you broods the mother sun’s parting glance, all around you rustles the lovely sky’s fruitful abundance; you are cooled by the moon’s kindly and magical breath, you are bedewed—ah!—by the tears overflowing from these eyes of eternally enlivening love.)

I very much like Lenau’s “Herbst,” which has all the valedictory melancholy of Baudelaire’s poems, but without the morbidity. But it hardly evokes the season at all. And the same is true of Hölderlin’s “Der Herbst,” despite a lovely line about the ghost of rain appearing again in the sky.

Perhaps the most strangely affecting piece of autumnal verse in German is Rilke’s “Herbsttag,” “Autumn Day,” which fully displays his ability to infuse the ordinary with an indefinable quality of mystery:

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Fruchten voll zu sein;
gieb innen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

(Lord: it is time. The summer was too long. Lay your shadow across the sundials, and let loose the winds upon the meadows. // Bid the last fruits to be full; give them two more southerly days, urge them on to fullness and chase the final sweetness into the heavy wine. // Whoever has no house already will build none now. Whoever is now alone will long remain so, will waken, read, write long letters, and in the lanes will restlessly wander, here and there, while the leaves blow about.)

Anyway, only a very small selection to be sure. For what it’s worth, my favorite poem about autumn, I think—and the one with which I shall close—is Blake’s “To autumn”: a very early piece, practically a juvenilium, and largely devoid of the peculiar magic of his later, more hermetic verse. Of course, there is the characteristic transformation of its subject into an allegorical persona, which—along with a few other details—marks it as distinctively Blakean (but only just). As for why I would place it first in my affections, it is difficult to say. One never really knows why some poems affect one more than others of arguably equal or superior quality. The diction is a bit rough, even for Blake, and the scansion is somewhat thorny. But it captures something otherwise ineffable in the way the fall feels to me, especially in its personification of the season as a figure who is essentially (in the most proper sense of the word) jovial.

O Autumn, Laden with fruit, and stain’d
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may’st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

‘The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head.

‘The spirits of the air live in the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.’
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose, girded himself, and o’er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

David B. Hart’s most recent book is Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies.

Our American culture, as it exists, is actually the quintessence of all that is decadent in the culture of the Western Christian world. It would seem to be erected on the triple denial that has corrupted Western culture at its roots: the denial of metaphysical reality, of the primacy of the spiritual over the material, [and] of the social over the individual . . . Its most striking characteristic is its profound materialism . . . It has given citizens everything to live for and nothing to die for. And its achievement may be summed up thus: It has gained a continent and lost its own soul.

Over the years, I’ve learned that when God takes something away from a person, he gives back some other gift that’s equally precious. A friend of mine has a son with Down syndrome, and she calls him a “sniffer of souls.” He may have an IQ of 47, and he’ll never read The Brothers Karamazov, but he has a piercingly quick sense of the heart of the people he meets. He knows when he’s loved—and he knows when he’s not. Ultimately, we’re all like my friend’s son. We hunger for people to confirm that we have meaning by showing us love. We need that love. And we suffer when that love is withheld.

We need to be the best people we can be. And, first, we need to be the best Catholics we can be. By our words and by our actions, we need to be witnesses. So: Speak up for what you believe. Love the Church. Defend her teaching. Trust in God. Believe in the Gospel. And don’t be afraid. Fear is beneath your dignity as sons and daughters of the God of life. Changing the course of American culture seems like a huge task. But St. Paul felt exactly the same way. Redeeming and converting a civilization has been done once. It can be done again. But we need to understand that God is calling us to do it. He chose us. He calls us. He’s waiting, and now we need to answer him.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M Cap., is the archbishop of Denver.