Archbishop Chaput has been a very busy man of late. He’s just come out with a new book from Doubleday entitled Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. There is also his recent article on real hope and change here at First Things. And sometime during all of this he managed to sit down for an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. Here are some interesting highlights:

Well, there’s tremendous amount of energy in the Church. I just came back a couple of weeks ago from Australia, and World Youth Day. And to see all those young people gathered together because they were called together by Pope Benedict was a heartening experience. And so even though the practice is small in some ways, the people who are faithful Catholics seem to be reenergized and really committed. So perhaps we’re at the point of a new Pentacost, as Pope John Paul II sometimes talked about our time. I certainly hope so, and you know, the Church was much smaller then. And in the course of a couple hundred years, converted the whole Roman empire. So I hope we can reconvert ourselves by cooperating with the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives these days.
. . .
I think it’s a duty of a good Catholic not only to vote, but to know the issues. It’s more than just voting. You know, voting is kind of a minimal thing, but a vote is foolish if it’s not based on knowledge. So we have to know candidates, we have to be aware of party platforms, we have to be really engaged on the issues or our votes will be wasted, and maybe even turned in the wrong direction.
. . .
If I was a member of Congress, and I voted for a bill that encouraged abortion or funded abortion, or encouraged access to abortion, I would be complicit in a very direct way in the abortions that would flow from that, from voting for that bill, and I participated. I was actively involved in something that led to the death of others who are innocent. And you can see why, I mean, I think everybody looking at it naturally can see why this is not a position that would be in communion with where our Church stands. And when you go to Communion, it’s not only an issue of personal worthiness, it’s an issue of integrity. You shouldn’t say you’re in communion with the Church unless you are. And going to Communion is not just the private relationship with God. It’s a corporate relationship with His community, His bride, the Church. And it would be a lie to pretend you’re in communion with the Church when you’re not. So going to Communion under those circumstances is lying.

My friend John Wilson, the editor of Books & Culture, knows about my recent obsession with Mars, and so he asked me to review a science-fiction book about a flight to the planet, which I was glad to do.

I’m not sure, however, that he was glad to receive the review, since I used it as an excuse to walk through the entire history of fiction about Mars:

It all started with Schiaparelli, I suppose—Giovanni Schiaparelli, the Italian astronomer who aimed his telescope at Mars in 1877 and saw craters and canyons and dust storms, all the albedo features, linking up in lines that looked, from 36 million miles away, just like, you know, canals.

From there it passed into the hands of that fine American eccentric, Percival Lowell, from the Boston brahmin family of Lowells that seemed, in every generation, to rear up both a staid set of Harvard University presidents and a lunatic set of goofballs. In a series of books he wrote after the 1894 establishment of his Lowell Observatory in Arizona, Percival explained how the Martians had built the huge canals to access the ice caps at the poles, one of the final sources of water for an advanced civilization on a planet slowly dying.

Now, there’s a picture: a failing people on a dehydrating world, alien and yet so near, an extraterrestrial vehicle for almost any allegory or message a writer could want. And for the next forty years or so, the world of popular fiction responded to the new maps of Mars with an almost indecent joy. In the 1897 War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells didn’t bother with the canals, but he kept the notion of a desiccated Mars, whose vicious denizens decide to invade Earth in order to seize its oceans. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 A Princess of Mars features Mars as a desert crisscrossed with giant irrigation canals. For his 1938 allegory Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis decided that the canals were deep watery canyons that made life possible on an otherwise completely dried-out Mars. (more . . . )

The review did serve one good purpose: It prompted a reader to write and complain about how such works are a waste of time—and a distraction from the effort that should be directed toward understanding the Bible. “Remember,” he demanded, “we are being saved from sin and speculation.”

I can’t quite agree that genre fiction is so worthless, but still: Sin and speculation. What a great, almost Augustinian phrase.

I’ve been reading Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, struck by the austere beauty of the landscape she paints:

In all his travels, the Bishop had seen no country like this. From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals. They were not crowded together in disorder, but placed in wide spaces, long vistas between. . . . The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was splotched with masses of blooming rabbit brush—that olive-colored plant that grows in high waves like a tossing sea, at this season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange like marigolds.

This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into a mountain plain, plateau. The county was still waiting to be made into a landscape.

Silent and barren, craggy and unknown–almost uncreated in its solitary expanse. Not unlike the human heart. But, as Bishop Latour will come to realize, the land is set alive with the occasional dogged spring, and aglitter with the burning sun. The desert, also, has its blooms.

Then, after a decade of working in the New Mexico mission, the bishop is parted from his longtime friend and faithful vicar, who sets off for Colorado on a mission of his own:

Father Joseph drew rein and looked back at the town lying rosy in the morning light, the mountain behind it, and the hills close about it like two encircling arms. “Auspice, Maria!” he murmured as he turned his back on these familiar things.

The Bishop rode home to his solitude. He was forty-seven years old, and he had been a missionary in the New World for twenty years–ten of them in New Mexico. If he were a parish priest at home, there would be nephews coming to him for help in their Latin or a bit of pocket-money; nieces to run into his garden and bring their sewing and keep an eye on his housekeeping. All the way home he indulged in such reflections as any bachelor nearing fifty might have.

But when he entered his study, he seemed to come back to reality, to the sense of a Presence awaiting him. The curtain of the arched doorway had scarcely fallen behind him when that feeling of personal loneliness was gone, and a sense of loss was replaced by a sense of restoration. He sat down before his desk, deep in reflection. It was this solitariness of love in which a priest’s life could be like his Master’s. It was not a solitude of atrophy, of negation, but of perpetual flowering.

The desert, also, has its blooms.

The ever-lively and independent Mark Shea explains his refusal to vote for either major presidential candidate thus :

Millions of babies will be killed whichever of these guys is elected. One will zealously try to make sure the maximum number die in sacrifice to the Culture of Adult Desire. The other (an active participant in the Culture of Adult Desire in his own way) basically is interested in appearing pro-life, but has absolutely no intention of overturning Roe. He wants the status quo, as virtually all GOP pols do, because it’s useful for playing prolifers for suckers.

So: since I am faced with *two* candidates who want the current regime to continue, I choose not to vote for either.

This seems far too pat. First of all, to back up his characterization of McCain he links to an atypical and rather confusing statement from nine years ago. More recently, McCain has said clearly (as he has said throughout his political career) that he thinks Roe should be overturned.

But even we could prove that this statement and all previous statements like it were just meant to manipulate, would Shea’s position make complete sense? Isn’t he saying, to put it plainly, that one cannot make a significant choice between bad and worse, between tolerating evil and promoting it?

And for all his cynicism about “GOP pols” could he really doubt that McCain’s nominee to the Supreme Court would be a conservative interpreter of the Constitution, and thus a good deal less friendly to Roe than Obama’s? McCain might give us another Anthony Kennedy, but Obama would give us another Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Surely that, at least, is a difference that makes a difference.

Upon the occasion of Zimbabwe’s independence, Bob Marley wrote a song unimaginatively titled “Zimbabwe.” Marley may not have been the sage many of his fans take him for, but Zimbabwe’s post-independence decline into bloody tyranny makes these lines from the song seem prophetic : “So soon we’ll find out who is the real revolutionaries / ‘Cause I don’t want my people to be tricked by mercenaries.”

The central figure in Zimbabwe’s fight for independence and the chief author of the nation’s subsequent woes is the mysterious Robert Mugabe. Peter Godwin has written a brilliant piece in Vanity Fair which includes a fascinating description of the African dictator. An excerpt:

If you were casting the role of “homicidal African dictator who stays in power against all odds,” Robert Gabriel Mugabe wouldn’t even rate a callback. To look at him and hear him talk, he’s still the prissy schoolmaster he once was—a slight, rather effeminate figure, with small, manicured hands given to birdlike gestures. The huge banners that span Zimbabwe’s streets do their best to make this 84-year-old into something more heroic—he is seen shaking an arm at the heavens, above the words “The Fist of Empowerment.” The image is marred somewhat by the little white handkerchief often held in Mugabe’s fist, and by the outsize gold spectacles that dominate his face, and that seem to be wearing him.

A great comfort to many of my socially liberal interlocutors in college bull-sessions was the seemingly inevitable leftward drift of Western Europe, reflected in the increasing permissiveness of elected officials across the political spectrum. But The Economist says that Britain’s Tories may be bucking the trend.

The watershed moment in this supposed “mini-revival of social conservatism” is a speech given this July (”in a church, no less”) by Tory leader David Cameron. In it he gave a condemnation of moral relativism reminiscent of the world’s most prominent “social conservative,” Benedict XVI. Since then, other Tories, perhaps keyed in to Briton’s growing unhappiness with the current state of society, have joined in:

On August 4th Michael Gove, the party’s schools spokesman, deplored the portrayal of women in men’s magazines. Conservatives such as Iain Duncan Smith, the party’s former leader, and Ed Vaizey, its arts spokesman, have also criticised the British Board of Film Classification for giving the new Batman film a lenient 12A rating.

Of course, as the article notes, the British electorate remains overwhelmingly socially liberal, and the Tories cannot simply remake the nation overnight. But the piece ends on a note of cautious optimism that they may be developing a new, viable style of social conservatism, “not a heavy-handed approach,” which could even be replicated here in the U.S.

Here’s another event in the New York area that you might consider attending. Starting on September 6, on the first Saturday of every month, there will be Witness for Life, an event sponsored by The Helpers of God’s Precious Infants with the help of the Sisters of Life and the Friars of the Renewal.

The schedule is as follows:
8:00 AM with Mass at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 263 Mulberry St. (enter at Mott St.)
8:45 AM Rosary procession to Planned Parenthood, 26 Bleecker St.
10:15 AM Benediction at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral
10:30–11:00 AM Social and pro-life presentation in church hall

For more information call Katia Peacher at (718) 200-5718. If you can’t make the September date, keep an eye out for one in October.