Ditch Doc

The chief difference between Protestants and Catholics is this:

Protestants wear their religious emotions like women wear scarves: right up front. They show them prominently, they talk about them, they inquire politely about those of their friends. Catholics think of our emotions more like our undergarments. We do have them, in fact we value them quite highly, but we’d be mortified to find them sticking out, and we’d rather chew rocks than discuss them in public.

English translations of Vatican documents are notoriously loose, and the critical reviewer can sometimes sniff out what looks like a deliberate distortion. The Holy Father’s letter to the Bishops explaining his Motu Proprio of July 7, 2007 offers a tidy example. The English translation twice refers to the Mass of Bl. John XXIII as the ‘former usage’. In the same places, the French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese use ‘ancien’, ‘antiguo’, ‘antico’ and ‘antigo’. I know too little German to be certain, but I think that translation uses ‘alten’. All these words describe existence in a previous time, while allowing for continuation into the present. ‘Former’, on the other hand, is reserved for things that are no longer. For illustration, imagine applying first the word ‘ancient’ and then the word ‘former’ to the faith. Does one of these not quite match up? Not much further commentary is necessary on this point, except to provide a popular North American English idiom which sums up my reply to the nameless translator:
“In your dreams.”
God bless the Pope.

Certainly, the chief purpose of Friday abstinence is penance, but let’s not forget the collateral benefits of leisure and luxury. If you don’t know what I mean, then sit on your front porch next Friday at supper time with a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese, an apple and a mug of beer, and eat them slowly. Here is real leisure: there was no cooking, and there will be no dishes to wash. And here is luxury: at the end of a day without beef, you remember just how delicious an apple tastes. A good Friday meal is not a wallowing in culinary gloom, but a reminder of the extravagance of God’s smaller gifts, in the light of which you can see the bigger ones more clearly. No one enjoys the filet mignon so well as the one who revels in the potato next to it.

Theocracy is the wrong word. We call Australia a democracy because we think the people rule, we used to call Iraq a cleptocracy because we thought a thief ruled, and sometimes we take a sardonic poke at Canada and call it a bureaucracy when it seems like the desks rule. But who ever thought God ruled Taliban-era Afghanistan? Not Christians. Not atheists. And here’s the kicker: not the Taliban. Theocracy means God is the head of state, and gives day to day instruction on everything from criminal justice to strategy in war.* Unless I’m mistaken, not even the Taliban claimed to be acting out God’s contemporaneous commands. So why use a word that no one thinks is accurate? I don’t want to see Richard Dawkins behind every tree, but I think I catch a whiff of the same sarcasm perfuming phrases like “God fighting on both sides.” ‘Well, yes, they treat their women like cattle, and yes, the penalty for apostasy is death, but what do you expect? They let God run things.’ If we’re to have a fruitful discussion of the relationship between religion and politics, let’s restrict the word to the only nation it truly describes: the people of Isreal in the period from Moses to Saul. And find a new word for the Taliban.

*Countries ruled by God’s deputies based on earlier divine commandments don’t count. That’s why we don’t call Vatican City a theocracy.

The language and music of the liturgy use our minds and bodies to express God’s love of man and our love of Him. Although visual art expresses the same thing, it does so with an inanimate medium, and so has a secondary place in worship.

That is why you can kneel in a beautifully decorated gothic Basilica untouched by the iconoclasm of the last forty years, in misery over the sickly-sweet vapidity of “Peace is Flowing Like a River.” And it’s why you can be brought to tears by a small congregation confidently singing the Kyrie in a cramped, misshapen church. You have entered the cave in Bethlehem, where the faithful have found the Lord in unworthy surroundings and come to do Him homage. The first scene recalls instead the Temple in Jerusalem after the veil was rent, when the great edifice still stood to the glory of the Lord, but the Lord had left. It is among Christ’s greatest mercies that he will never leave the tabernacle to escape bad music.

Last year’s prayer service for those who had donated their bodies to the anatomy department was really quite tasteful. I’m always impressed when a quasi-liturgical function with little foundation in tradition is carried off well. Had my grandfather’s name been one of those on the list, I would have thought him well-treated. But one of the speakers left me with a whole new set of questions about “multi-faith” prayer.

A little background: with one or two possible exceptions, all eighty or so donors had very western names. I would be mildly surprised to find anyone on the list not falling into the religious categories “Christian” and “N/A”. And yet this speaker found it necessary to mention as many sects as she could think of, from Islam to Buddhism with stops at Catholicism and something like new-age. It was manifestly not for the benefit of the donors or their families, or even herself. So what was the point? I’ve come up with a couple of hypotheses:

1. She’s used to talking to more mixed audiences. This theory’s boring, so on to the next one.

2. She feels that a service for the dead has to involve prayer. She also feels that in an academic gathering, there is no room for any mention of God. So the best choice is to have prayer, but make it so pluralist that no one suspects you of taking it seriously. Some will think you’re being profound, some will roll their eyes, but anything’s better than making claims of truth you might have to defend later.

This hypothesis feels a bit superficial too, but I can’t come up with a better one. Takers?

The Catholic Church has stepped back of late from the concept of confessional countries. Secular atheists are vigorously dedicated to national confession of areligious humanism. Muslims, and not just radical ones, believe in national confession of the supremacy of Allah as revealed through Mohammed. So here’s the problem: secular atheism as a political force is reaching the end of its limited shelf-life. What should be the Church’s response to the rising influence of an Islam that is waiting for the chance to replace it with an official policy of Islam? The idea of a religiously neutral state dedicated only to temporal matters but recognizing freedom of religion doesn’t seem like the answer. Islam rejects it, and Christians aren’t entirely sold on it themselves. When we’re the only ones left, I don’t see it lasting. (I am, however, willing to be proven wrong by the continued success of the American experiment.) It is, of course, entirely unacceptable to roll over and let our countries become Muslim. So what’s left? I wonder whether, in the years to come, the Church might not revisit the question of confessional countries. If, that is, there remain any countries able or willing to step up to the plate.

So it’s the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, and the second most popular comment on conservative blogs after “All its predictions were right” is “Paul VI picked the worst possible time to publish it.” I don’t get it. Yes, the sexual revolution was just finding its legs, but doesn’t that make it an especially GOOD time to preach chastity? He couldn’t have done it much earlier; the pill had been widely available for less than a decade, and he himself had just entered the sixth year of his reign. He certainly couldn’t have put it off. That would have resulted in widespread use of contraception even by well-intentioned Catholics, out of simple lack of direction. And the thing about the faithful being confused by Vatican II doesn’t cut it either. Certainly, there were some who thought that the council had done away with Magisterial authority, but that means it was time to publish a corrective. Unequivocally setting out the Church’s immutable stance on a hotly disputed moral question, Humanae Vitae was just that. Forty years after its promulgation, we should recognize it for what it was: a deeply prophetic work, issued exactly when it was needed. After all, if a Pope isn’t a sign of contradiction, he isn’t doing his job.

The prayer service for those who donated their bodies to the anatomy department this year was held yesterday. All the donors’ names were read, and every few names a student presented a brief meditation. Here was mine:

“Perhaps it is fitting that every aspiring doctor, at the beginning of his career, is forced to contemplate its end. On the day we received our white coats, we pledged our lives to medicine, to the maintenance and preservation of human health. It was a heady day. Not long after, in the anatomy laboratory, we looked down at the most unsettling basic fact of medicine: no matter how cleverly we outwit death, or how long we hide our patients from his gaze, though we might snatch a thousand years out of his hands, all of our patients, and all of us, will end in the grave. Faced with death, we are forced to ask: what does life mean?

“These donors offer us an answer. This man on the table in front of me, whose name I do not know, loved his neighbours, loved me, so much that he submitted his body to the ignominy of my scalpel, so that I might learn from him how to treat my patients. His sacrifice demands another. To be loyal to this man’s gift, I must take his example and give my own life to those I treat.

“But what can I do for him? Is there anything we can do for those who have gone before? Our very presence at this prayer service proclaims our confident hope that there is. Though his body has been of use to me, I can be of use to his soul. Wherever I go in my medical career, I will keep his memory with me and pray that God might give him what medicine could not: life everlasting. Goodnight, sweet prince, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, and until we meet again, may you enjoy the reward of your generosity. You are in my prayers.”

From the choir loft during Mass today, I noticed a young boy, about eight years old, leaving his pew and walking down the aisle. Four rows out, he realized he’d forgotten something and went back. He reached the end of his pew, put his hand on it, genuflected, and now satisfied, turned again and traipsed out to the vestibule without looking back.