The Fever Chart

This piece originally appeared at Aleteia.

Christopher Dorner’s reign of terror came to a fiery end last evening in Big Bear, Calif., east of Los Angeles. For two weeks, Dorner, a 33 year-old former Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer, had conducted a private war against his erstwhile colleagues, killing four people and attracting national attention. Two of Dorner’s victims were Monica Quan, 28, the daughter of the officer who had represented him at his LAPD termination hearing, and her fiancé, Keith Lawrence. Reportedly, Dorner later telephoned Quan’s father to taunt him about the murder. Two police officers were also shot and killed by Dorner.

In a bizarre, 18-page testament, Dorner – who was black and a one-time Naval Reserve officer – complained about pervasive racism in the LAPD, the US Navy, and even the elementary school he attended in Norwalk, Calif. He attributed his release from the LAPD in 2008 to his having reported an incident of police brutality involving a white officer and a homeless man. Dorner asserted that he had been railroaded out of the LAPD by a police bureaucracy that is fundamentally hostile to African-Americans, including black officers themselves, and protective of its image to the point of paranoia.

The dragnet for Dorner eventually focused on the area around Big Bear Lake, not far from San Bernardino. After being spotted and chased by uniformed officers of California’s fish and wildlife agency yesterday, Dorner barricaded himself in a cabin and engaged in a furious firefight with police. Late yesterday afternoon, the cabin suddenly burst into flames and eventually burned to the ground. The remains of what officials believe to be Christopher Dorner’s body were recovered at the scene, and samples of those remains have been sent for DNA analysis to confirm their identity. It is not known whether Dorner died from a gunshot, self-inflicted or otherwise, or whether he perished as a result of the fire. Read the rest of this entry »

This piece originally appeared at Aleteia.

On November 3, 2002, the American way of war entered a new era when the first-ever attack by armed drone aircraft was conducted in the Marib district of Yemen. The strike, which was directed from the Joint Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida, killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, an Al-Qaeda operative who had led the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and five others. Since that day, the United States has launched thousands of drone attacks in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Libya.

On September 30, 2011, another drone strike in Yemen killed Ayman Al-Awlaki, an American citizen, Muslim cleric and reported Al-Qaeda leader.  Another American citizen, Samir Khan, was killed along with Awlaki. Two weeks later, Awlaki’s 16 year-old son, Abdulrahman, also an American citizen, was assassinated in a separate strike.

This week, NBC News obtained a confidential Justice Department memo that lays out the Obama Administration’s legal justification for the assassination of American citizens overseas. The memo, titled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force,” relies on a doctrine of self-defense that stretches the boundaries of imminence, a key element in that doctrine. Specifically, the memo states that, “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” The memo goes on to assert that it is within the government’s right to target and kill an American citizen even retrospectively; that is, if the citizen has been involved in “activities” that might have constituted a threat “recently.”  As for deciding when, where, and against whom to authorize a lethal strike, the memo identifies only a hypothetical “informed, high-level” government official. Finally, the memo rejects any requirement of judicial approval or review, claiming that to seek such approval or to provide such mechanisms would violate the constitutional separation of powers and unduly burden the President’s exercise of his prerogatives as Commander-in-Chief. Read the rest of this entry »

This piece originally appeared at Solidarity Hall.

A few years ago, my wife and I were assigned a case through our local conference of the Society of St. Vincent DePaul. It involved a family – Dave, his girlfriend Ellen and their three small children* – who had fallen behind on their rent and electricity bill. When we met with the family, Dave explained that he was a full-time employee of Home Depot. He had moved to southern New England from Maine when Home Depot offered him a position as manager of a department at the local store. The position only paid $13 per hour, but Dave saw it as a chance to move up with the company.

The family rented a three-bedroom apartment in our town, and Ellen found a job working second shift as a certified nursing assistant for $9.00 an hour at a local home for the elderly. It was a good arrangement because Dave worked first shift and got home in time to take care of the kids in the evening. The couple’s combined income would allow them to cover the costs of their apartment and utilities, with a little left over to buy that a “new” used car they sorely needed.

About three months into this arrangement, Dave’s boss called him into the office and announced that Home Depot corporate had ordered the store to cut a third of its payroll in response to sluggish revenue during the previous quarter. Dave’s department was to be stripped of all employees, save one per shift, which meant there was no more need for a department manager. Dave was to be immediately re-assigned with a floating schedule that would include both first and second shifts, and as a non-manager his wage would be reduced. Dave pleaded with his boss to let him continue to work first shift only, even at the lower wage and reduced role, because of Ellen’s job. His boss refused to even try. Moreover, Dave was told that the only way he could be guaranteed first shift hours was if he moved to part-time and at an even lower wage, which would have meant losing healthcare coverage for his family. Read the rest of this entry »

 This piece originally appeared at Solidarity Hall.

2013 marks the 60^th anniversary of the publication of Robert Nisbet’s landmark book, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. Over the years, Nisbet has sometimes been cited as a father of postwar American conservatism, and The Quest for Community hailed as one of the movement’s early texts. But these encomia rest on a conception of “conservatism” that is passé in the Age of Limbaugh, and it is unlikely that Nisbet would be welcomed to any tea party that included such “conservative” luminaries as Paul Ryan, Bill Kristol, or Mike Huckabee. This may account for the fact that today The Quest for Community is more popular today with people who cross partisan and ideological boundaries, people concerned most of all with strengthening integral local communities, including a “new” economics based on place, scale and sustainability.

Sociology is to anthropology as journalism is to history: a first cut, the assembly of data that over time take shape as first trend, then truth. Nisbet was t rained as a sociologist but he wrote from the perspective of an anthropologist. His area of interest was the effect of human social arrangements on patterns of political behavior. His analytical lens was what he viewed a basic human need: the desire and quest for community. In Quest, Nisbet’s thesis was that the “single most decisive influence upon Western social organization has been the rise and development of the centralized territorial state.” He believed the modern state to be, in von Gierke’s words, “a process of permanent revolution,” that scours the polity of older, more organic “communities” based on family and clan, place, faith, and even work. As it slowly supplants these traditional, diffused ways of being human in community, the state substitutes alternative, often synthetic forms of “community” that it can transform into ideology and thereby effectively leverage into unflinching allegiance: race, nation, class, and so on.  The state accomplishes this by undermining civil society, the thick web of mediating institutions that in traditional societies form a prophylactic barrier between the state and the individual. Read the rest of this entry »

If it is to survive, the Republican Party must come to represent a conservatism that hews closer to the vision of Burke, Kirk, Fleming, Oakeshott, Burnham, Weaver, Scruton, Berry and Blond; a conservatism that stands opposed to the corrosive cultural influence of laissez-faire capitalism and the mass consumer society; opposed to the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of private interests or the state; opposed to empire and the militarization of foreign policy; a conservatism focused on the care of creation, including the land and sea, as well as the small human ecologies of family, congregation, town, and small business; a conservatism that privileges the farmer, the industrial worker, the teacher and the Main Street merchant over the financial baron, the defense contractor, the big box retailer and the Washington lobbyist; a conservatism of the town hall meeting, not of slick ad campaigns; a conservatism of communities, not corporations. And yes, it must be a conservatism that defends the unborn, but also one that supports and honors their mothers, both before they give birth and long after. And yes, it must be a conservatism that defends marriage, but not by demonizing or marginalizing families that don’t fit a certain mold. Yes, it must be a conservatism of limited government, but within limits defined by justice, equality before the law, peaceableness, and the care of the aged, the infirm, the poor, and the unemployed.

Last January, I predicted that Mitt Romney would win the Republican nomination for president and go on to beat Barack Obama for the White House. I’m sticking to that prediction, although I also thought that Romney would be running with Governor Susanna Martinez, and that Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden would flip roles. The lesson there is that I’m a lousy oracle, so readers would be advised to take any prediction of mine with a large grain of salt.

For my part, I won’t be voting for either Obama or Romney because both promise to pursue policies that violate my understanding of fundamental Catholic teaching. To invest my democratic franchise in either would, in my opinion, be an abrogation of my first responsibility, which is to to witness to the Gospel in all its dimensions. For me, there can be no disjunction between the two. To permit any other allegiance, identity, issue or ideology to trump the Gospel – even temporarily or provisionally – is, again in my opinion – a form of idolatry. Christian discipleship must be marked first of all by an unyielding evangelical integrity: “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness …” (Matthew 6:6). And just as I would hope not to choose a “lesser” evil in my personal or business life, neither can I do so as a citizen. As I’ve often written here, when you choose the lesser of two evils, you still get evil. Christians shouldn’t be in the business of choosing evil.

I want to briefly review for readers the specific issues and policy positions that have compelled me to repudiate both candidates, and I will do so below. I will not, however, indulge in the Scholastic trigonometry of “material cooperation,” “prudential judgment” and the like because those concepts, while valuable, are too often deployed as smokescreens for advocacy, not genuine moral analysis. I have one friend, for instance, who insists that abortion, same-sex marriage and “religious liberty” are the only non-negotiables in this election, and that everything else a candidate might advocate – from pre-emptive war and torture to the abuse of workers, the environment and the poor – falls under the category of “prudential judgment.” I find that sort of Weigelian “analysis” to be suspiciously convenient and transparently self-serving. It is Republican partisan advocacy dressed up as moral argument.

By the same token, I have friends who react to the Democratic Party’s vigorous promotion of abortion on demand, assisted suicide, or embryonic stem cell research by erecting an elaborate exculpatory apparatus anchored by supposed degrees of moral distance from the underlying acts. This, too, is self-serving and oh-so-convenient; and it only demonstrates to me that some people are Democrats first and Americans second, with Christian coming in a distant third.

Bob Dylan once wrote that “people don’t do what they believe in, they just do what’s most convenient, then they repent.” I would much rather a person admit to choosing evil for the sake of convenience or partisan loyalty than engage in the sort of intellectual sleight-of-hand intended to infer that either party’s platform is aligned with the Gospel and the teaching of the Church. Yet this is the voting booth reality for too many of us. It was my own reality for much of my adult life. No more. The Church is both my party and my country, and I have to be faithful to her whole teaching, regardless of partisan or nationalist entreaties to the contrary. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. We can expect all the various factions in the Church to offer their perspectives on the Council and its legacy: what went wrong, what went right, what opportunities were seized, what opportunities were missed, what this or that document “really” said or meant, or didn’t say or mean.

Rather than jump into that endless and often self-serving debate, I think the best way to mark this anniversary is to review Blessed Pope John XXIII’s opening remarks. After all, it was he who called the Council, and it was his vision that animated the Council’s work, even following his untimely death in mid-1963. Reading this address, one is struck by the degree to which John XXIII was both a man of the Church and a product of the modern world. We who have lived most of our lives in the turbulent backwash of the Second Vatican Council can learn much about faith, constancy, humility, and openness from his words.

Address of Blessed Pope John XXIII on the opening of the Second Vatican Council, October 11, 1962.

Mother Church rejoices that, by the singular gift of Divine Providence, the longed-for day has finally dawned when — under the auspices of the virgin Mother of God, whose maternal dignity is commemorated on this feast — the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council is being solemnly opened here beside St. Peter’s tomb.

Ecumenical Councils of the Church

The Councils — both the twenty ecumenical ones and the numberless others, also important, of a provincial or regional character which have been held down through the years — all prove clearly the vigor of the Catholic Church and are recorded as shining lights in her annals.

In calling this vast assembly of bishops, the latest and humble successor to the Prince of the Apostles who is addressing you intended to assert once again the Magisterium (teaching authority), which is unfailing and perdures until the end of time, in order that this Magisterium, taking into account the errors, the requirements, and the opportunities of our time, might be presented in exceptional form to all men throughout the world. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the disturbing legacies of the past two decades is that war has become something of a national pastime, a spectator sport in which the United States deploys its wealth and power, not to mention the bodies and futures of its soldiers, in order to establish the principle enunciated by neocon Brett Decker that “Evil advances when America isn’t feared or respected.” Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen once bluntly suggested the means by which such fear and/or respect is to be achieved: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” That conviction was endorsed explicitly in the pages of National Review by neocon columnist Jonah Goldberg, who called himself an “admirer” of the “Ledeen Doctrine.” But Goldberg isn’t alone. Versions of the “Ledeen Doctrine” have been adopted and promoted by neocons of every stripe, and it is on florid display whenever one of them says something like Decker, above. “Fear” of and “respect” for America must be extracted at the point of a cruise missile or at the business end of an M1 Abrams tank.

If Mitt Romney is elected next month, the neocons will be back in a big way. Romney’s national security advisory team counts among its members a number of the most prominent neoconservative theorists and bureaucratic practitioners, including Eliot Cohen, Kim Holmes, Eric Edelman, Robert Kagan, Walid Phares, Dan Senor, and others. They, like Mitt Romney and his five strapping sons, share one thing in common: none of them ever bothered to wear the uniform of the United States, much less actually fight in any of its wars. They are “scholars” and bureaucrats (or missionaries and businessmen, in the case of the Romneys) for whom war is an abstraction and the lives of soldiers and civilians mere distractions from the grand vision they share. That vision is characterized five core convictions, as described by Colonel Andrew Bacevich (US Army, Ret.): Read the rest of this entry »

My wife called me shortly before 9:00 am to tell me that something frightening was happening in Manhattan. I was in my office at Enders Island and I turned on the radio just in time to hear someone report – live – that a second plane had plunged into the WTC. Shaken, I walked over to the chapel, where Mass had just started. We were hosting a retreat for priests, and during the Prayer of the Faithful I gently informed the group of what was happening by offering a prayer for “those who within the last hour have lost their lives in a terrorist attack in New York, their families, their murderers, and our nation.” When Mass ended, we all headed to the main house to watch the unfolding horror. The next day the acrid stench of burning mortar, plastic, rubber, and worse reached Enders Island and hung in the air for weeks, a tangible reminder of the evil that men do. Within days there were other reminders, including the unfocused desire for revenge that would take hold of the United States. Three weeks later, I made a pilgrimage to lower Broadway in Manhattan, where the fires still burned and families still waited and mourned. By all means, let us remember 9-11; but let that memory be both a memorial to the dead and a warning about the nihilism of hatred and violence. Let it strengthen our resolve to build a culture of life, a civilization of love.

From my new book, Forty Days, Forty Graces, available in print and Kindle versions at Amazon.

At the center of salvation history stands a simple Jewish peasant girl. As the Old Testament began with the story of Eve, the New Testament begins with the story of Mary, the New Eve, mother of the New Adam. She is the Theotokos, the God-Bearer, Ark of the New Covenant. She is the first Christian, and the mother of the Church, which is the Body of her son, Jesus Christ. It is therefore entirely appropriate that we should pause to contemplate this plain Jewish maiden, who is also the Mother of God and our mother in the Faith.

As a former Evangelical, there is still something deep within me that flinches ever so slightly at the invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Though all of my old questions about Mary’s role in salvation history have long since been resolved, and although I’ve now been consecrated to the Immaculate Heart for a decade, I remain conscious of that imperceptible spasm of reservation that awakens upon hearing the Angelus, the Regina Coeli, or any other Marian prayer.

So it is odd that I should always be so moved by reading the great Marian hymn of the East, the Akathistos, which dates from the Sixth Century. The language is florid, as was often the style in the history of the Church; and yet, this hymn – a litany, really – manages to navigate the delicate line between the entirely proper exaltation of Our Lady as humanity’s greatest perfection and the disturbing, near-idolatrous worship of Mary that can sometimes be detected in popular devotion. As St. Louis de Montfort wrote in True Devotion to Mary: “If devotion to our Lady distracted us from our Lord, we would have to reject it as an illusion of the devil.” The Akathistos avoids becoming such an illusion by always placing Mary in a subordinate role to Jesus Christ, our God and Savior. Thus, she is the tendril, not the bud; the soil, not the fruit; the table, not the meal; and the rock, not the living water that springs from it.

Having so sweetly depicted the Mother of God, even a former Evangelical like myself finds no difficulty in joining the ancient Church, as together we sing:

Hail, O you, through whom Joy will shine forth!
Hail, O you, through whom the curse will disappear!
Hail, O Restoration of the Fallen Adam!
Hail, O Redemption of the Tears of Eve!
Hail, O Peak above the reach of human thought!
Hail, O Depth even beyond the sight of angels!
Hail, O you who have become a Kingly Throne!
Hail, O you who carry Him Who Carries All!
Hail, O Star who manifest the Sun!
Hail, O Womb of the Divine Incarnation!
Hail, O you through whom creation is renewed!
Hail, O you through whom the Creator becomes a Babe!
Hail, O Bride and Maiden ever-pure!

My favorite image of Mary is the one found in the Catechism, which calls her “an eschatological icon of the Church.” Mary’s relationship to the Church is at once complex and beautiful. As the first Christian – she believed in him from the moment of her fiat – she is a daughter of the Church, the mother of all Christians. But as the Theotokos, the God-bearer, she is mother of the Church’s Head, and therefore Mother of the Church, his Body. These divergent yet complementary roles are reconciled into one reality in the Eucharist. The Second Vatican Council called the Eucharist “the source and summit of the faith.” To the extent that the Church is Eucharistic, the Church will be Marian. The German writer Carl Feckes summarizes the Eucharistic nexus of Mariology and ecclesiology:

“As Mary bore the earthly Christ, so the Church bears the Eucharistic Christ. As the whole life of Mary is centered upon bringing up and protecting Christ, so again the deep life and solicitude of the Church are centered on the Holy Eucharist. As Mary gives the earthly Christ to the world and from this Gift are born the children of God, so also the Eucharistic Flesh and Blood made present by the Church form the living children of God. As Mary offered up Christ together with Himself at the foot of the cross, so the whole Church, at every Mass, offers His sacrifice with Himself to the heavenly Father.”

Feckes could have gone on to note that as Mary reigns with the Risen Christ in Heaven, so the whole Church will reign with Him there in the final consummation of the Kingdom. To put it all in other words: Mary was what the Church is now, and Mary now is what the Church will be. When we take our eyes off Mary, we can tend to forget where the Church comes from and the purpose for which it presently labors here below. We also forget where and with whom our destiny lays.