Well, now we know. NPR has just reported why Bruce Ivins mailed the anthrax letters in 2001. He was Catholic, and his family was pro-life.

As NPR puts it: “Bruce Ivins may have targeted Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy with anthrax-laced letters in 2001 because he saw them as bad Catholics owing to their votes in favor of abortion rights, officials close to the investigation say.”

Of course, that doesn’t explain why he also sent letters to ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News, together with the generally conservative New York Post, and the utterly apolitical gossip tabloid, the National Enquirer. But, no matter. There is circumstantial evidence that Ivins might once have read a negative essay about Catholic politicians who support abortion. And he and his wife did send their kids to a Catholic school. And his wife is active in a Maryland chapter of a right-to-life organization. What more evidence do you want? According to the unnamed FBI sources unsuspiciously quoted by NPR, “Being Catholic” is now on its face a plausible explanation for a crime.

In today’s New York Times, we read: “Obama’s View on Abortion May Divide Catholics“:

Sixteen years ago, the Democratic Party refused to allow Robert P. Casey Sr., then the governor of Pennsylvania, to speak at its national convention because his anti-abortion views, stemming from his Roman Catholic faith, clashed with the party’s platform and powerful constituencies. Many Catholics, once a reliable Democratic voting bloc, never forgot what they considered a slight.

This year, the party is considering giving a speaking slot at the convention to Mr. Casey’s son, Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who like his late father is a Roman Catholic who opposes abortion rights.

The Times goes on: “Mr. Casey’s appearance would be an important signal to Catholics, especially those who follow church teachings and oppose abortion.” But is it a signal of any substance, or just a display? Apparently, it is “part of Mr. Obama’s strategy to emphasize that there are other issues on which they can base their votes.” But, for a voter who considered abortion the voluntary termination of human life, does any other issue currently match the gravity of the abortion issue?

I applaud the the Times for looking to Archbishop Charles Chaput, in comments he references here on the First Things website, for an answer:

In a column earlier this year, Archbishop Chaput wrote that Catholics could support a politician who supported abortion only if they had a “compelling proportionate reason” to justify it. “What is a ‘proportionate’ reason when it comes to the abortion issue?” the archbishop wrote. “It’s the kind of reason we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life — which we most certainly will. If we’re confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.”

The Times acknowledges this is “a tough standard for Mr. Obama, or any supporter of abortion rights, to meet.” But without a moment’s hesitation, the Times throws the reader way back to left field: “Republicans are gearing up campaigns to depict Mr. Obama as a radical on the question of abortion, because as a state senator in Illinois he opposed a ban on the killing of fetuses born alive.”

Fetuses born alive. Now that’s creative. What anyone else would call live, born, breathing human beings, the Times here calls “fetuses born alive,” putting Obama’s truly radical position on abortion in a softer light. It remains to be seen whether that convinces Catholic voters this November, but my guess is it will take more than symbols and nice talk.

Here at the office we just received an advance copy of the upcoming Salt + Light Television production entitled, Road of Hope: The Spiritual Journey of Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan. The cardinal’s life was a powerful testimony to faith and fidelity, and now a larger audience will get the chance to hear his extraordinary story.

If you’re interested in a preview, an online trailer is available. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait until September 21st, when the movie premiers on Salt + Light Television.

You never know what treasures you’re going to find in the First Things archives. In this case, it was a symposium on “The Ethics of Everyday Life” from the ancient days of 1995. The stakes were not as high nor the tensions as great as for other FT symposiums, but still the disagreement was marked, even impassioned. The contributors?—an A-team assembly including Amy and Leon Kass, Midge Dector, Gilbert Meilaender, Mary Ann Glendon, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Richard John Neuhaus. The topic?—a children’s story, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.

The responses are varied, and worth a quick perusal if you have any interest in children’s literature–or in the complexities of self-sacrificial love, explored in deceptively simple sticks and stick-figures. Interestingly, the reactions divided more-or-less by gender.

“What it tells us—hardly the message I would wish to be conveyed to my grandchildren—is that life after childhood is a progressive, and progressively distasteful, falling off,” writes Midge. “This isn’t a happy story,” adds Jean. “It’s a sappy one. . . . I do not aspire to stumpdom.” Mary Ann is still more emphatic: “The fact is that tree’s qualities would make her a terrible mother—a masochist who, quite predictably, has raised a sociopath. . . . Is the story meant, then, to be an allegory of divine love? If so, the author has got his Bible mixed up with his Sears Roebuck wishbook.”

Leon Kass, in contrast, praises the ideal of self-sacrificial mother-love portrayed in the story, and Timothy Jackson is similarly struck by the tree’s ineffaceable love, “the carved heart with ‘M.E. + T.’ inside”; “We must think the tree happy, not like the absurd Sisyphus but like the Suffering Servant.” William May, especially, sees in Silverstein’s tale the profundity of a masterpiece:

The tree begins, to be sure, offering a love that resembles philanthropic love; its gifts do not cost. It provides utterly costless shade, and it gives of its leaves and its fruit (both highly renewable resources). But then the story turns darker. Or does it turn toward the transcendent, the sublime? The tree presses on to a level of giving which the philanthropist can only interpret as self-diminishing, self-destructive. But the tree apparently doesn’t see it that way. It says that it is happy.

What is this claim? The slaphappiness of the compulsive giver? Or something more? The clearheaded affirmation of a self that cannot diminish itself through its own expenditure because self-expenditure is its unfailing core? And so the tree offers its branches, its trunk, even its stump: “‘Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest.’ And the boy did. And the tree was happy.” What kind of tree is this? Some sort of cross between the human and the divine? I am stumped.

Is it possible to love too much? Dangerous and destructive, or admirable and sublime? Do God’s generosity and love know no limits and, if so, should ours? I won’t pretend to arbitrate, but, finding my sympathies aligning with my sex, I can’t help thinking of an observation my pastor once made: No prayer goes unheard and unanswered. Ever-attentive, God responds to all our pleas. Sometimes, however, his answer is a gentle No. “Tough love,” I have heard it called—the love that truly desires what is best for another, even when it hurts. As any parent knows, this is the hardest love to give.

Our understanding and judgment are frequently stumped; our hopes and desires are sharply limited. God’s wisdom and love, I trust, are not.

Back home in New York, after a month out in the Black Hills of South Dakota, this oldie but goodie came to mind:

Paul Goodman, “The Lordly Hudson”

“Driver, what stream is it?” I asked, well knowing
it was our lordly Hudson hardly flowing.
“It is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing,”
he said, “under the green-grown cliffs.”

This is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs
and has no peer in Europe or the East.
Be quiet, heart! Home! Home!

Actually, I’m not as enamored of New York as some of our friends (are you there, Richard?), but it is good to get back. For that matter, Paul Goodman was a nut of the first water, and why, all those years ago, Commentary magazine published his “Growing Up Absurd” is one of those questions Norman Podhoretz will have to take with him into the afterlife.

But the poem has always been one of my small favorites, and it has a nice setting to music by Ned Rorem. Our friend Terry Teachout recommends as the best available recording the one by Susan Graham and Malcolm Martineau.