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.

What we see in the case of Christopher Dorner is a pattern as old as man: wounded pride, the perception of injustice, resentment, revenge, and the initiation of retributive violence leading ultimately to self-destruction. The Bible, at once the most divine and human of books, is full of such stories; in Genesis, we see that Cain’s pride is wounded by the Lord’s enthusiastic reception of his brother Abel’s gifts. Cain perceives this apparent preference for Abel as unjust and conspires to kill his brother. When the murder is found out, Cain is deprived of his livelihood and banished, forced to wander the earth. Of his punishment Cain says, “It is too much to bear.”

The elder sons of Jacob are offended by their father’s favoritism toward their youngest brother, Joseph. Their sense of injustice is deepened with Joseph relates to them a series of dreams in which he is their master. In response, they seize him and cast him into a hole in the ground to die. Later, when a caravan comes along bound for Egypt, the brothers sell Joseph into slavery.

In the Book of Judges, we see the cycle of injustice and revenge played out time and time again between Samson and the Philistines, a cycle that eventually climaxes in the brutal deaths of all the antagonists. In Acts, Stephen stands up before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious council, and accuses them of having repeated the sins of their fathers in the execution of Jesus, and of having twisted the Law to their own sinful purposes. The mob in attendance is infuriated by this apparent assault on the honor and motives of the Sanhedrin and stone Stephen to death. In the process, Stephen becomes the first martyr of the Christian faith.

Time and again throughout history, the same story is played out on stages large and small: in families, communities, between nations, and even in our churches. It has even played on a cosmic stage: let us not forget that Lucifer himself, the most beautiful angel in creation, believed it to be an injustice that God and not he should be the master of the universe. And so he rebelled, leading his angels in a violent assault on heaven itself!

Violence is the fruit of our pride. It is the product of our perverted sense of justice and our twisted desires, for prestige, for possession, for autonomy from one another and from God. Jesus shows us a different way. Though he had every reason for pride – his structural and personal innocence, his exalted identity as the Second Person of the Trinity – the Lord of the universe “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness, and found human in appearance. He humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:7-8).  The cross of Christ is a stumbling block – a skandalon – because it deprives us of the satisfaction that comes from asserting our own honor and enforcing it violently: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly” Luke 6:27-28). As Christians, we have only one source of honor that must be vindicated, one template for justice that must be achieved, and it can only ever be accomplished by love, never by violence. The revolution in moral consciousness inaugurated by the revelation of God in Christ is a movement from the sacrificial to the sacramental, from the immolation of offenders to the self-donation of victims. A scandal, to be sure, but “may I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Galatians 6:14)

Let us stipulate that an injustice may well have been done to Christopher Dorner in his dismissal from the LAPD, a department with a long and notorious reputation. Dorner’s response, because of its brazen violence, is easy to condemn. The question for all of us on this first day of Lent is whether we will allow our pride to take the injustices we each face, real or imagined, and convert them into a desire for revenge and violent thoughts, words, or actions. Dorner deliberately chose a response at odds with the message of Christ, writing in his manifesto, “… as good Christians we are to turn the other cheek as Jesus did. Problem is I’m not a ____ing Christian.”

Are we? Am I?

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.

In summary, the Obama Administration believes it has the right to kill American citizens abroad if those citizens may at some indistinct point in the future become threats to the United States, or if they have recently been involved in threatening  “activities.” Once that test has been met in the mind of a “high-level” government official, he may proceed without judicial review, in accordance with the constitutional war powers inherent to the Executive Branch.

In some ways, none of this is new. In a speech last March, Attorney General Eric Holder made substantially the same argument. What is new is the degree of “wiggle room” available to those in a position to decide whether to conduct the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen abroad or not. The expansive definition of “imminent threat” and the addition of what appear to be retributive criteria create new questions about the ethics, legality, and limits of this policy. Just yesterday, for instance, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert Moeller, refused to say whether these criteria could be applied to a citizen within the United States. When that question is open for discussion, we have clearly entered new territory.

These developments raise critical questions for all American citizens, of course, but particularly for Catholics, who have received a body of teaching that addresses many of the issues involved, and who in any case are called first to be followers of Jesus Christ. The first question concerns constitutionality, or the adherence to the rule of law. The Catechism speaks to this issue when addressing the powers of secular authorities: “It is preferable that each power be balanced by other powers and by other spheres of responsibility which keep it within proper bounds. This is the principle of the ‘rule of law,’ in which the law is sovereign and not the arbitrary will of men” (1904). This admonition mirrors many of the complaints that are being lodged against the Obama Administration’s policy in the secular debate: that the criteria for carrying out this policy are too broad and indistinct, that the exercise of this power is unbalanced, that it circumscribes the proper role of the judiciary.  Regardless of whatever else these targeted individuals may be, they are citizens of the United States, and as such are entitled to the protections and privileges accorded to them by law. And while, in the words of Justice Robert H. Jackson, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” there nevertheless ought to be a much higher bar placed on the deliberate violation of an American citizen’s constitutional rights. The Administration’s policy includes no due process protections for targeted citizens apart from vague assurances that “informed” but unnamed officials will responsibly substitute their judgment for that of prosecutors, courts, juries, and the Constitution itself.

There are also questions arising from Catholic just war theory, which holds that “governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.” Apart from the question of whether “all peace efforts” have in fact failed in these cases, for military action to be just, it must meet the following threshold conditions: “damage inflicted by the aggressor… must be lasting, grave, and certain; all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; there must be serious prospects of success;” and that “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated[.]” Given the gauzy conditions for taking action laid out in the DOJ memo, especially given its retributive character, there are real questions about whether this policy meets the just war test. What about the “prudential judgment” of policymakers? It is true that the Church gives considerable leeway to authorities in the application of just war principles, but not when those principles themselves are undermined or contradicted.

Of course, a wider question involves the violation of national sovereignty in places like Yemen and Pakistan, and the implications of those violations for international law. The Constitution of the United States has a clear procedure for going to war: Congress declares, and the President conducts. The growth of what some have called the “imperial presidency” since World War II has obviously frustrated the intent of the Framers in this regard. But until recently, presidents at least sought resolutions or other formal congressional acts to endorse military action abroad. Today, under cover of the undeclared War on Terror, we are witnessing the routine and repeated application of American force in many different countries without any authorization beyond the say-so of the Commander-in-Chief. This trend is directly at odds not only with the American constitutional tradition, but also with the spirit of the Church’s call for a just and peaceful international order, which recognizes a nation’s right to self-defense, but within the limits prescribed by international convention, and only in pursuit of the universal common good, integral development, human rights, and a just peace.

As a former US Army officer, the father of a two-time Iraq War combat veteran, and a faithful Catholic citizen, I find the Obama Administration’s policy on the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens abroad to be deeply troubling. Certainly, we want to do what we can to prevent terrorist acts, both here and abroad, but that end cannot be achieved by surrendering our values, by undermining the rule of law, or by forgetting what kind of nation we want to preserve for our children. If we do these things, we may wake up one day to realize that what we once sought to protect we have in fact destroyed.

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.

Sure enough, that Friday the schedule came out for the following week. Dave was slotted into the second shift for three of five workdays. Ellen tried to make things work at the nursing home by offering shifts to co-workers, but the quick Friday to Monday turnaround at Home Depot made it impossible to manage, and she had to leave her job after a couple of weeks. I encountered the couple nearly three months later when they were behind a month’s rent and hadn’t paid their electric bill since Ellen had left her job. We were able to help them with their previous month’s rent and put them in touch with a diocesan agency that covered a portion of their electric bill, but it was just a band-aid, and I later learned that the family was subsequently evicted and returned to Maine.

I tell you the whole story because of something Dave said to me in our last meeting. Summing up his treatment at the hands of the giant retailer, he said, “Home Depot destroyed my hope.”

By now, we’re all familiar with the litany of deleterious effects that big box retailers have on local communities. Our friends at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) have consolidated references to many of the relevant studies here. They show that big box retailers scour local communities of their small businesses and consumer dollars. The arrival of big box retailers means fewer net jobs and lower net payrolls, along with higher rates of poverty and reliance on public assistance. Big box development reduces the stock of social capital, including good schools and financial support for charities; increases traffic; destroys vast tracts of potentially productive land; and relies on huge government subsidies, even as it adds ever-higher infrastructure costs to town, city, and state budgets. Big box retail even means higher average consumer prices in certain classes of goods!

But there are additional effects we can’t see or even quantify, including the impact of big box retail on the psychological and even spiritual well-being of those living on the margins of the economy, especially the working poor. The dependence of this population on chain retailers for employment and shopping ultimately seduces them into becoming co-conspirators in their own disenfranchisement. For people with higher incomes, big box retail may be just one shopping choice among many. Indeed, in many communities a Saturday tour of stores and markets will reveal strong class divisions among shoppers, with higher income earners crowding locally owned retailers and the poor or near-poor flocking to places like Wal-Mart. For the economically and socially marginalized, big box retail represents an ugly form of corporate feudalism that replaces the values of community and social solidarity with a corrosive rootlessness that can in turn contribute to political disengagement, social isolation, and even psychological pathology: in short, a loss of hope.

Wendell Berry, drawing on his mentor Wallace Stegner, has long identified two kinds of Americans, “stickers” and “boomers.” “Boomers,” he says, “are those who pillage and run, who want to make a killing and end up on Easy Street, whereas stickers are those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” According to Berry, “the boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power … Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.”

I think Berry’s depiction of American types is incomplete. I would add another type: “drifters.” Drifters are those who either out of choice or necessity reflect the essential rootlessness of modern American life, a rootlessness defined not just by the lack of attachment to and affection for place, but by a disinterest in education and achievement, a detachment from the social mores and customs that bind individuals to families and the wider community (including, most ominously, marriage), and a pervasive sense of hopelessness about their own futures. Those of us who have spent time in service to the working poor recognize the signs: hostile, tattooed young men routinely enmeshed in the criminal justice system; single-mother homes in which three or four children each have a different last name; the loss of self-control over habits, including diet; self-defeating financial choices; a seeming inability to form worthwhile goals in life and make plans to achieve them. Of course, it’s common in certain political circles to point to these signs as proof of the essential laziness or moral corruption of the poor. In fact, they are evidence a loss of hope that manifests itself in alienation, attenuated willpower, resignation and finally despair.

Speaking about the ugliness of suburban sprawl the writer James Howard Kunstler once said, “We have about 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the United States today. When we have enough of them, we’re gonna have a nation that’s not worth defending. And I want you to think about that when you think about those young men and women that are over there in places like Iraq spilling their blood in the sand and ask yourself what is their last thought of home. I hope it’s not the curb cut between the Chuck E. Cheese and the Target store, because that’s not good enough for Americans.”

It’s not good enough for any American, in any sense, aesthetic or otherwise. Big box retail isn’t the only reason for the widespread appearance of the drifter type in American life, of course. Mass media, rising inequality, permanent structural changes in patterns of employment, the waning of civil society, the growth of the bureaucratic federal state, the secularization of American culture generally, and other factors all play their part. But big box retailers are critical because they play such important roles in the lives of drifters, often as conduits of or contexts for other contemporary pathologies. They help to strip away the rich spiritual soil of communities in which individuals and families are nurtured and hope flourishes. For that reason alone, apart from their economic consequences, big box retailers should be abjured by communities concerned about their civic character and the well-being of their citizens.

*To protect the identity of this family, changes were made to names and workplaces.

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.

Where Nisbet has run afoul of contemporary conservatives is his observation that this process is active in democratic republics as well as frankly totalitarian states; that war is a mechanism for extending and making permanent this process, even and perhaps especially in democratic societies; and that the atomizing force of economic and political liberalism has been the handmaiden of state power rather than its counterbalance.

Nisbet notes two kinds of democratic republics. In the “unitary” form, whose origin Nisbet locates in Rousseau’s concept of the “General Will,” the “will of the people” is interpreted and rationally applied by the centralized state on behalf of the whole nation.

“State and individual were the two elements of the unitary theory of democracy. The abstract individual was conceived as the sole bearer of rights and responsibilities. The State, conceived in the image of people who lay incorruptible beneath the superstructure of society, would be the area of fraternity and secular rehabilitation. All that lay between these two elements – guilds, churches, professions, classes, unions of all kinds – were suspect for their fettering influence upon the individual and their divisive consequences to the people’s State.”

The other form of democratic republic Nisbet identifies is the “political” or “pluralistic” form, in which the

“ … State emerges as but one of the associations of man’s existence.  Equally important to a democratic theory founded on this perspective is the whole plurality of other associations in society. The intermediary associations and the spontaneous social groups which compose society, rather than atomized political particles, become the prime units of theoretical and practical consideration. The major objective of political democracy becomes that of making harmonious and effective the varied group allegiances which exist in society, not sterilizing them in the interest of a monistic political community.”

Of course, Nisbet attributes this democratic form to the liberal tradition of John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Jefferson, and notes that it is especially strong in England, the United States, Scandinavia and Switzerland. The problem with sustaining pluralistic democracy, according to Nisbet, is that

“The founders of liberalism abstracted certain moral and psychological attributes from a social organization and conserved these the timeless, natural qualities of the individual, who was regarded as independent of the influences of any historically developed social organization. Those qualities that, in their entirety, composed the eighteenth-century liberal image of man were qualities actually inhering to a large extent in a series of institutions and groups, all of which were aspects of historical tradition. But, with the model of Newtonian mechanics before them, the moral philosophers insisted on reducing everything to human atoms in motion, to natural individuals driven by impulses and reason deemed to be innate in man.”

In other words, by attributing to natural individuals qualities that grew out of the historical relationship of those individuals to mediating groups, the liberal philosophers made a fundamental mistake that over time would erode the “communities” – church, family, place, guild – that conferred those qualities in the first place, as well as, post hoc ergo propter hoc, those qualities themselves. As a result, citizens in a pluralistic democracy wind up in much the same situation as those in the unitary form: prey to the totalizing, community-building mechanisms of the modern state. We can see the effects of these mechanisms in the community-building role that the President of the United States, the nation’s head of state, now plays for average people. A school shooting in Connecticut? For many Americans the thing isn’t concretized as a shared experience until the chief executive of the national state arrives on the scene and has something to say. “Victory” in battle? Not until the President alights upon the deck of an aircraft carrier in a crotch-hugging flight suit to declare it so. The Christmas season has begun? Only when he flips the switch.

According to Nisbet, this substitution of the State for older, traditional allegiances – a process which can be seen in the progress of the American Republic since the Civil War – is accelerated by the preparation for and conduct of modern war:

“One of the most impressive aspects of contemporary war is the intoxicating atmosphere of spiritual unity that arises out of the common consciousness of participating in a moral crusade … when the goals and values of a war are popular, both in the sense of mass participation and spiritual devotion, the historic, institutional limits of war tend to recede further and further into the void. The enemy becomes not only a ready scapegoat for all ordinary dislikes and frustrations; he becomes the symbol of total evil against which the forces of good may mobilize themselves into a militant community [emphasis mine].”

One thinks of Andrew Bacevich’s contemporary critique of the permanent national security state that emerged after the last spiritually “pure” American war, World War II, and especially of the deformations it has wrought on American democracy, particularly in the now 13-year old “war on terror.”

As we’ve seen, Nisbet views the philosophical assumptions of political liberalism as a key contributor to the destruction of traditional “communities” and, by extension to the growth of the totalizing State. The same can be said of economic liberalism, and in particular the ideology of laissez-faire capitalism. “Society,” Nisbet writes, “was envisaged by the classical economist as being, naturally, an aggregate of socially and culturally emancipated individuals, each free to respond to the drives that lay buried within his nature. Economic freedom would be the result, it was declared, of the same conditions that produced economic equilibrium: masses of autonomous, separated individuals, a minimum of social constraint of any kind, and a reliance upon the automatic workings of the free market.”

For over two hundred years, this revolutionary conception of man has been an active agent in disassembling the social institutions that give human life identity and keep the totalizing State at bay, as Nisbet observes:

 “Unfortunately, it has been the fate of these external institutions and relationships to suffer almost continuous attrition during the capitalist age. First the guild, the nucleated village, and the landed estate underwent destruction. For a long time, however, the family, local community, tangible property, and class remained as powerful, though external, supports of the economic system which the rationalists saw merely as the outcome of man’s fixed instincts and reason. But, in more recent decades … even these associations have become steadily weaker as centers of security and allegiance. Modern rationalization and impersonalization of the economic world are but the other side of  … the ‘decline of custom’ and which we may see as the dislocation of certain types of social membership … and in this whole process the directive role of the political State becomes ever greater.”

Even its apologists recognize (and some even trumpet) the tendency of capitalism, especially in its Anglo-American form, to scour civil society of the mediating institutions that embody and preserve tradition. In his book War Against the Terror Masters, neoconservative theorist Michael Ledeen wrote, “Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law … Of all the myths that cloud our understanding, and therefore paralyze our will and action, the most pernicious is that only the Left has a legitimate claim to the revolutionary tradition.” Ledeen made this claim in precisely the Promethean spirit that eventually leads not to liberation from State power, but enslavement to it. Man will have community and, by extension, culture; and when the subsidiary natural institutions that provide him with it are lost, he will turn to the State.

In the last section of the final chapter of The Quest for Community, Nisbet calls for a “new philosophy of laissez-faire” which will “create the conditions within which autonomous groups may prosper …” Because of its mistaken assessment of human nature and atomizing policy prescriptions, the old laissez-faire, “far from proving a check upon the growth of the omnicompetent State … actually accelerated this growth. It’s indifference to every form of community and association left the State as the sole area of reform and security.” The new laissez-faire, by contrast, would be one in which “the basic unit will be the social group.”

Nisbet affirms that “the liberal values of autonomy and freedom of personal choice are indispensable to a genuinely free society,” but notes that “we shall achieve and maintain these only by vesting them in the conditions in which liberal democracy will thrive – diversity of culture, plurality of association, and division of authority.”

It should be clear why Nisbet is accorded little attention in the parlors of the contemporary conservative establishment. His realism about the limitations of liberal democracy – and particularly the philosophical assumptions embedded in its Lockean and Jeffersonian roots – his indictment of the warrior state, and his critique of the atomizing influence of Classical Economics are all anathema to a movement that makes a fetish of the American constitutional order, celebrates global empire and permanent war, and promotes a vision of man as a deracinated homo economicus.

On the other hand, it is equally plain to see why Nisbet’s The Quest for Community is treasured by those who locate the “good life” in the civil space between State and Market, and who long for a polity that privileges the rich fabric of local, natural and immediate associations in which human persons can truly flourish.

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.

I take as my political litmus test what Blessed John Paul II wrote in Veritatis Splendor: “Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat laborers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons . . . .all these and the like are a disgrace … and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.” By this test, both Obama and Romney fail, and fail miserably.

Barack Obama

Barack Obama seems to be a nice man: personable, intelligent, a good husband and a great father. He is also, I believe, an honest and earnest public servant who has done the best job he could under very difficult circumstances. But as president he has not only continued to deepen the Democratic Party’s antipathy toward the unborn, but he has extended that antipathy to the born, including American citizens who he deems to be “terrorists” and therefore eligible for assassination, as well as the millions who huddle nightly in fear of America’s fleet of aerial robots. I believe that if Obama is re-elected, Israel will receive the green light for a pre-emptive attack on Iran, probably within six months, and will receive full American military and logistical support. Whether undertaken directly or indirectly, an American pre-emptive war on Iran, which is no threat to the United States, will be a grave evil, in my view. Meanwhile, Obama has doubled or tripled down on the national security state here at home, pouring billions upon billions into electronic, physical and satellite surveillance or American citizens. As the link above notes:

Most striking is the normalisation of domestic surveillance under Obama. The federal government now employs 30,000 people to monitor phone conversations in the US; the Department of Homeland Security, formed only in 2002, is now the third-largest federal bureaucracy, surpassed only by the Pentagon and the Department of Veteran Affairs. The construction of a 1m sq ft (93,000 sq m) domestic surveillance data centre costing $2bn has just been started in Bluffdale, Utah.

Obama also singed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the arrest and indefinite detention without charge of American citizens suspected of having ties to terrorism. Habeas corpus, anyone? While I opposed the Obama Administration’s arrogant and intolerant HHS contraception mandate, I find it laughable that so many have construed that to be the great threat to “liberty” under Obama. A far greater threat to all Americans is his accelerating commitment to the permanent police-state.

I will credit Obama with attempting to solve the terrible problem of healthcare coverage in the United States. This is an issue that hits very close to home for me, and at least one member of my family will be voting for him precisely because of the Affordable Care Act. So I respect that point of view. But even the ACA was a complete sop to the insurance industry and as such represented the worst kind of crony capitalism: gigantic profits secured by private interests with the connivance and at the direction of the national government. He would have done far better to have pushed for a single-payer national health system and paid for it out of savings from dismantling the American’s global military empire.

In the end, though, I can’t in conscience pull the lever for Obama because of his stands on abortion, war, and assassination, combined with his contempt for the rights of ordinary citizens, including their religious rights. I find all of this opposed to fundamental Catholic teaching.

Mitt Romney

Which brings me to Mitt Romney. As a man, I find him to be the purest embodiment of ambition imaginable, mendacious to the core, without a shred of conviction beyond his own wealth and power. I live in Rhode Island, hard against the Connecticut border, but even at that I’m only thirty miles from Massachusetts, my native state, where most of my family still lives. I remember well Romney’s campaign for Senate in the 1990′s, and his term as governor. He was Scott Brown before there was a Scott Brown, and every New Englander knows that his claim of a conversion on the issue of abortion since 2007 is, to put it mildly, complete bullshit. If support for partial-birth abortion were required to secure the GOP nomination for president, he’d be foursquare in favor of it.

Still, his nominal position on abortion, insincere and incomplete though it is, doesn’t disqualify him from my consideration. What does disqualify him are his positions on war, torture, workers’ rights, and the treatment of the poor and immigrants. Mitt Romney was an enthusiastic supporter of the war in Vietnam, going so far as to lead anti-anti-war rallies, even while securing for himself a number of draft deferments that enabled him to avoid service. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Gulf War, and the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, even though not one of his five strapping sons ever bothered to wear the uniform and risk his own neck. Now, Romney has all but promised to launch a pre-emptive war on Iran, not explicitly – he hasn’t said “I will take us to war” – but in his unhinged rhetoric about the Iranian “threat” and in his choice of key foreign policy and military advisors, almost all of whom are neocons of the Michael Ledeen type (of the “Ledeen Doctrine,” a term approvingly coined by neocon writer Jonah Goldberg. The Ledeen Doctrine states that “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”).

Romney explicitly promises to reinstate the Bush torture regime, and approves of the NDAA, the Patriot Act, Obama’s illegal and immoral drone warfare campaign, and the growth of the national security police state here at home. He has promised to further militarize American foreign policy and even the American industrial base (40% of which is already tied to “defense”) through huge increases in our military budget, which now exceeds the combined military budgets of the rest of the developed world, including China and Russia. War is a growth business for Romney, and like a good investor he’s prepared to put your money where his mouth is, knowing that he and his won’t have any skin in the game if things go bad.

On the other hand, Romney the businessman sees the poor, the elderly, the handicapped and the unemployed as bad investments, and he has promised to undermine decades of bipartisan commitments to help those who struggle with poverty and infirmity. Romney’s endorsement of the Paul Ryan’s Randian budget – which would cut the legs out from under Medicaid and other social safety net programs – along with his repeated indictment of food and housing aid, his disparagement of the 47% of Americans who receive some form of transfer payment from the federal government, and his tax proposals that favor the wealthy all demonstrate that his Mitt Romney’s America would exercise a preferential option for the rich, in direct contradiction of Catholic Social Teaching and the spirit of the Gospel.

Both Romney’s preferential option for the rich as well as his overwhelming mendacity are on display when the issue turns to healthcare. He has promised to reverse Obamacare “on Day One.” That promise is his go-to applause line on the stump, and he no doubt intends to fulfill it (or else his credibility with the right would be shot by Day Two). He offers NO alternative for 40 million or so uninsured Americans, or for those driven into poverty by insurance industry practices that exclude pre-existing conditions or cap lifetime benefits or permit post-treatment policy cancellation. The wealthy never have to worry about healthcare coverage or provision. The sick rich get attention, maybe even a private room on a special floor. The sick poor get the shaft, the elevator shaft leading to the door. That plays in Alabama (for some reason), but not in Massachusetts, where one Governor Mitt Romney, under pressure from a Democratic legislature, happily embraced universal healthcare. Now, of course, when Alabama is more important than Massachusetts, Romney’s had another of his conversions. Here’s a fact: Opposition to universal healthcare is un-Catholic. Period. Full-stop. Want proof? “Justice requires guaranteed universal access to health care.” It is one of the “inalienable rights of man.” So said Benedict XVI two years ago, a fact conveniently forgotten by Catholics who promote precisely the “pharmacological, medical and surgical consumerism” (read: free market) lamented by the Pope.

Romney’s contempt for workers and workers’ rights is on display every time he degrades the contributions made by unions to building up and sustaining the middle class. This rhetoric is of a piece with his own record as a businessman. Not only was Romney’s Bain Capital one of the pioneers in outsourcing American jobs overseas, but even here at home Bain was a leader in pushing big box retail on thousands of American communities, at the expense of local office-supply, hardware, and other small businesses and their workers. Subsidiarity and respect for work and workers, anyone?

Finally, Mitt Romney promises to make life so unbearable for undocumented immigrants that they will beg to pass back through the borders. This, of course, flies in the face Church teaching, and has even threatened the religious liberty of Catholics who offer service to undocumented families, as Archbishop Dolan acknowledged in this interview with MSNBC. Throughout the primary season, Romney gleefully joined in the GOP chorus that heaped insults on the heads of our (mostly Catholic) brothers and sisters, who come here to work and raise their families.

In the end, I can’t in conscience vote for Mitt Romney because his positions on war, torture, and the dignity of workers, the poor, and immigrants. These are not “negotiable” issues for serious Catholics, in my view, because they directly oppose fundamental Catholic teaching and even the Gospel itself.

Conclusion

As blogger Mark Shea has noted, it is not a prissy perfectionism that leads some of us to withhold our votes from these two candidates. Rather, it is conscience, formed by attention to the fullness of Catholic teaching. I can respect someone who, acknowledging the deficiencies of both Obama and Romney, decides in conscience that a given issue is of sufficient weight to cause them to reluctantly cast a vote for one or the other. Oddly, I can even respect someone who honestly says that party loyalty outweighs even conscience. What I cannot respect is the person who attempts to sanctify a candidate’s policy prescriptions or record out of a desire to justify their partisan vote. As for me, I firmly believe that choosing the lesser of two evils still implicates me in evil, and that I am not willing to do.

So, I will write in the name of Wendell Berry, the sage of Kentucky, who I heard deliver this year’s National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center, and who once wrote: “The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth – that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community – and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”

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.

It is but natural that in opening this Universal Council we should like to look to the past and to listen to its voices whose echo we like to hear in the memories and the merits of the more recent and ancient Pontiffs, our predecessors. These are solemn and venerable voices, throughout the East and the West, from the fourth century to the Middle Ages, and from there to modern times, which have handed down their witness to those Councils. They are voices which proclaim in perennial fervor the triumph of that divine and human institution, the Church of Christ, which from Jesus takes its name, its grace, and its meaning.

Side by side with these motives for spiritual joy, however, there has also been for more than nineteen centuries a cloud of sorrows and of trials. Not without reason did the ancient Simeon announce to Mary the mother of Jesus, that prophecy which has been and still is true: “Behold this child is set for the fall and the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted” (Lk. 2: 34 ) . And Jesus Himself, when He grew up, clearly outlined the manner in which the world would treat His person down through the succeeding centuries with the mysterious words: “He who hears you, hears me” (Ibid. 10:16), and with those others that the same Evangelist relates: “He who is not with me is against me and he who does not gather with me scatters” (Ibid. 11 :23).

The great problem confronting the world after almost two thousand years remains unchanged. Christ is ever resplendent as the center of history and of life. Men are either with Him and His Church, and then they enjoy light, goodness, order, and peace. Or else they are without Him, or against Him, and deliberately opposed to His Church, and then they give rise to confusion, to bitterness in human relations, and to the constant danger of fratricidal wars.

Ecumenical Councils, whenever they are assembled, are a solemn celebration of the union of Christ and His Church, and hence lead to the universal radiation of truth, to the proper guidance of individuals in domestic and social life, to the strengthening of spiritual energies for a perennial uplift toward real and everlasting goodness.

The testimony of this extraordinary Magisterium of the Church in the succeeding epochs of these twenty centuries of Christian history stands before us collected in numerous and imposing volumes, which are the sacred patrimony of our ecclesiastical archives, here in Rome and in the more noted libraries of the entire world.

The Origin and Reason for the Second Vatican Council

As regards the initiative for the great event which gathers us here, it will suffice to repeat as historical documentation our personal account of the first sudden bringing up in our heart and lips of the simple words, “Ecumenical Council.” We uttered those words in the presence of the Sacred College of Cardinals on that memorable January 25, 1959, the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, in the basilica dedicated to him. It was completely unexpected, like a flash of heavenly light, shedding sweetness in eyes and hearts. And at the same time it gave rise to a great fervor throughout the world in expectation of the holding of the Council.

There have elapsed three years of laborious preparation, during which a wide and profound examination was made regarding modern conditions of faith and religious practice, and of Christian and especially Catholic vitality. These years have seemed to us a first sign, an initial gift of celestial grace.

Illuminated by the light of this Council, the Church — we confidently trust — will become greater in spiritual riches and gaining the strength of new energies therefrom, she will look to the future without fear. In fact, by bringing herself up to date where required, and by the wise organization of mutual co-operation, the Church will make men, families, and peoples really turn their minds to heavenly things.

And thus the holding of the Council becomes a motive for wholehearted thanksgiving to the Giver of every good gift, in order to celebrate with joyous canticles the glory of Christ our Lord, the glorious and immortal King of ages and of peoples.

The opportuneness of holding the Council is, moreover, venerable brothers, another subject which it is useful to propose for your consideration. Namely, in order to render our Joy more complete, we wish to narrate before this great assembly our assessment of the happy circumstances under which the Ecumenical Council commences.

In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, none the less, the teacher of life. They behave as though at the time of former Councils everything was a full triumph for the Christian idea and life and for proper religious liberty.

We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.

In the present order of things, Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which, by men’s own efforts and even beyond their very expectations, are directed toward the fulfilment of God’s superior and inscrutable designs. And everything, even human differences, leads to the greater good of the Church.

It is easy to discern this reality if we consider attentively the world of today, which is so busy with politics and controversies in the economic order that it does not find time to attend to the care of spiritual reality, with which the Church’s Magisterium is concerned. such a way of acting is certainly not right, and must justly be disapproved. It cannot be denied, however, that these new conditions of modern life have at least the advantage of having eliminated those innumerable obstacles by which, at one time, the sons of this world impeded the free action of the Church. In fact, it suffices to leaf even cursorily through the pages of ecclesiastical history to note clearly how the Ecumenical Councils themselves, while constituting a series of true glories for the Catholic Church, were often held to the accompaniment of most serious difficulties and sufferings because of the undue interference of civil authorities. The princes of this world, indeed, sometimes in all sincerity, intended thus to protect the Church. But more frequently this occurred not without spiritual damage and danger, since their interest therein was guided by the views of a selfish and perilous policy.

In this regard, we confess to you that we feel most poignant sorrow over the fact that very many bishops, so dear to us are noticeable here today by their absence, because they are imprisoned for their faithfulness to Christ, or impeded by other restraints. The thought of them impels us to raise most fervent prayer to God. Nevertheless, we see today, not without great hopes and to our immense consolation, that the Church, finally freed from so many obstacles of a profane nature such as trammeled her in the past, can from this Vatican Basilica, as if from a second apostolic cenacle, and through your intermediary, raise her voice resonant with majesty and greatness.

The Principle Duty of the Council: The Defense and Advancement of the Truth

The greatest concern of the Ecumenical Council is this: that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously. That doctrine embraces the whole of man, composed as he is of body and soul. And, since he is a pilgrim on this earth, it commands him to tend always toward heaven.

This demonstrates how our mortal life is to be ordered in such a way as to fulfill our duties as citizens of earth and of heaven, and thus to attain the aim of life as established by God. That is, all men, whether taken singly or as united in society, today have the duty of tending ceaselessly during their lifetime toward the attainment of heavenly things and to use. for this purpose only, the earthly goods, the employment of which must not prejudice their eternal happiness.

The Lord has said: “Seek first the kingdom of Cod and his justice” (Mt. 6:33). The word “first” expresses the direction in which our thoughts and energies must move. We must not, however, neglect the other words of this exhortation of our Lord, namely: “And all these things shall be given you besides” (Ibid. ). In reality, there always have been in the Church, and there are still today, those who, while seeking the practice of evangelical perfection with all their might, do not fail to make themselves useful to society. Indeed, it from their constant example of life and their charitable undertakings that all that is highest and noblest in human society takes its strength and growth.

In order, however, that this doctrine may influence the numerous fields of human activity, with reference to individuals, to families, and to social life, it is necessary first of all that the Church should never depart from the sacred patrimony of truth received from the Fathers. But at the same time she must ever look to the present, to the new conditions and new forms of life introduced into the modern world, which have opened new avenues to the Catholic apostolate.

For this reason, the Church has not watched inertly the marvelous progress of the discoveries of human genius, an has not been backward in evaluating them rightly. But, while following these developments, she does not neglect to admonish men so that, over and above sense — perceived things — they may raise their eyes to God, the Source of all wisdom and all beauty. And may they never forget the most serious command: “The Lord thy God shalt thou worship, and Him only shalt thou serve” (Mt. 4:10; Lk. 4:8), so that it may happen that the fleeting fascination of visible things should impede true progress.

The manner in which sacred doctrine is spread, this having been established, it becomes clear how much is expected from the Council in regard to doctrine. That is, the Twenty-first Ecumenical Council, which will draw upon the effective and important wealth of juridical, liturgical, apostolic, and administrative experiences, wishes to transmit the doctrine, pure and integral, without any attenuation or distortion, which throughout twenty centuries, notwithstanding difficulties and contrasts, has become the common patrimony of men. It is a patrimony not well received by all, but always a rich treasure available to men of good will.

Our duty is not only to guard this precious treasure, as if we were concerned only with antiquity, but to dedicate ourselves with an earnest will and without fear to that work which our era demands of us, pursuing thus the path which the Church has followed for twenty centuries.

The salient point of this Council is not, therefore, a discussion of one article or another of the fundamental doctrine of the Church which has repeatedly been taught by the Fathers and by ancient and modern theologians, and which is presumed to be well known and familiar to all.

For this a Council was not necessary. But from the renewed, serene, and tranquil adherence to all the teaching of the Church in its entirety and preciseness, as it still shines forth in the Acts of the Council of Trent and First Vatican Council, the Christian, Catholic, and apostolic spirit of the whole world expects a step forward toward a doctrinal penetration and a formation of consciousness in faithful and perfect conformity to the authentic doctrine, which, however, should be studied and expounded through the methods of research and through the literary forms of modern thought. The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another. And it is the latter that must be taken into great consideration with patience if necessary, everything being measured in the forms and proportions of a Magisterium which is predominantly pastoral in character.

How to Repress Errors

At the outset of the Second Vatican Council, it is evident, as always, that the truth of the Lord will remain forever. We see, in fact, as one age succeeds another, that the opinions of men follow one another and exclude each other. And often errors vanish as quickly as they arise, like fog before the sun. The Church has always opposed these errors. Frequently she has condemned them with the greatest severity. Nowadays however, the Spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity. She consider that she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations. Not, certainly, that there is a lack of fallacious teaching, opinions, and dangerous concepts to be guarded against an dissipated. But these are so obviously in contrast with the right norm of honesty, and have produced such lethal fruits that by now it would seem that men of themselves are inclined to condemn them, particularly those ways of life which despise God and His law or place excessive confidence in technical progress and a well-being based exclusively on the comforts of life. They are ever more deeply convinced of the paramount dignity of the human person and of his perfection as well as of the duties which that implies. Even more important, experience has taught men that violence inflicted on others, the might of arms, and political domination, are of no help at all in finding a happy solution to the grave problems which afflict them.

That being so, the Catholic Church, raising the torch of religious truth by means of this Ecumenical Council, desires to show herself to be the loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of mercy and goodness toward the brethren who are separated from her. To mankind, oppressed by so many difficulties, the Church says, as Peter said to the poor who begged alms from him: “I have neither gold nor silver, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise and walk” (Acts 3:6). In other words, the Church does not offer to the men of today riches that pass, nor does she promise them merely earthly happiness. But she distributes to them the goods of divine grace which, raising men to the dignity of sons of God, are the most efficacious safeguards and aids toward a more human life. She opens the fountain of her life-giving doctrine which allows men, enlightened by the light of Christ, to understand well what they really are, what their lofty dignity and their purpose are, and, finally, through her children, she spreads everywhere the fullness of Christian charity, than which nothing is more effective in eradicating the seeds of discord, nothing more efficacious in promoting concord, just peace, and the brotherly unity of all.

The Unity of the Christian and Human Family Must Be Promoted

The Church’s solicitude to promote and defend truth derives from the fact that, according to the plan of God, who wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (l Tim. 2:4), men without the assistance of the whole of revealed doctrine cannot reach a complete and firm unity of minds, with which are associated true peace and eternal salvation.

Unfortunately, the entire Christian family has not yet fully attained this visible unity in truth.

The Catholic Church, therefore, considers it her duty to work actively so that there may be fulfilled the great mystery of that unity, which Jesus Christ invoked with fervent prayer from His heavenly Father on the eve of His sacrifice. She rejoices in peace, knowing well that she is intimately associated with that prayer, and then exults greatly at seeing that invocation extend its efficacy with salutary fruit, even among those who are outside her fold.

Indeed, if one considers well this same unity which Christ implored for His Church, it seems to shine, as it were, with a triple ray of beneficent supernal light: namely, the unity of Catholics among themselves, which must always be kept exemplary and most firm; the unity of prayers and ardent desires with which those Christians separated from this Apostolic See aspire to be united with us; and the unity in esteem and respect for the Catholic Church which animates those who follow non-Christian religions.

In this regard, it is a source of considerable sorrow to see that the greater part of the human race — although all men who are born were redeemed by the blood of Christ — does not yet participate in those  sources of divine grace which exist in the Catholic Church. Hence the Church, whose light illumines all, whose strength of supernatural unity redounds to the advantage of all humanity, is rightly described in these beautiful words of St. Cyprian:

“The Church, surrounded by divine light, spreads her rays over the entire earth. This light, however, is one and unique and shines everywhere without causing any separation in the unity of the body. She extends her branches over the whole world. By her fruitfulness she sends ever farther afield he rivulets. Nevertheless, the head is always one, the origin one for she is the one mother, abundantly fruitful. We are born of her, are nourished by her milk, we live of her spirit’ (De Catholicae Eccles. Unitate, 5).

Venerable brothers, such is the aim of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, which, while bringing together the Church’s best energies and striving to have men welcome more favorably the good tidings of salvation, prepares, as it were and consolidates the path toward that unity of mankind which is required as a necessary foundation, in order that the earthly city may be brought to the resemblance of that heavenly city where truth reigns, charity is the law, and whose extent is eternity (Cf. St. Augustine, Epistle 138, 3).

Now, “our voice is directed to you” (2 Cor. 6:11 ) venerable brothers in the episcopate. Behold, we are gathered together in this Vatican Basilica, upon which hinges the history of the Church where heaven and earth are closely joined, here near the tomb of Peter and near so many of the tombs of our holy predecessors, whose ashes in this solemn hour seem to thrill in mystic exultation.

The Council now beginning rises in the Church like daybreak, a forerunner of most splendid light. It is now only dawn. And already at this first announcement of the rising day, how much sweetness fills our heart. Everything here breathes sanctity and arouses great joy. Let us contemplate the stars, which with their brightness augment the majesty of this temple. These stars, according to the testimony of the Apostle John (Apoc. 1:20), are you, and with you we see shining around the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles, the golden candelabra. That is, the Church is confided to you (Ibid.).

We see here with you important personalities, present in an attitude of great respect and cordial expectation, having come together in Rome from the five continents to represent the nations of the world.

We might say that heaven and earth are united in the holding of the Council — the saints of heaven to protect our work, the faithful of the earth continuing in prayer to the Lord, and you, seconding the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in order that the work of all may correspond to the modern expectations and needs of the various peoples of the world.

This requires of you serenity of mind, brotherly concord moderation in proposals, dignity in discussion, and wisdom of deliberation.

God grant that your labors and your work, toward which the eyes of all peoples and the hopes of the entire world are turned, may abundantly fulfill the aspirations of all.

Almighty God! In Thee we place all our confidence, not trusting in our own strength. Look down benignly upon these pastors of Thy Church. May the light of Thy supernal grace aid us in taking decisions and in making laws. Graciously hear the prayers which we pour forth to Thee in unanimity of faith, of voice, and of mind.

O Mary, Help of Christians, Help of Bishops, of whose love we have recently had particular proof in thy temple of Loreto, where we venerated the mystery of the Incarnation dispose all things for a happy and propitious outcome and, with thy spouse, St. Joseph, the holy Apostles Peter and Paul St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, intercede for us to God.

To Jesus Christ, our most amiable Redeemer, immortal King of peoples and of times, be love, power, and glory forever and ever.

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.):

• That American global dominance is a benign force for good;
• That the unilateral exercise of American power is the only thing keeping the world from chaos;
• That military force is the most efficient and effective means of asserting American power (or as Michael Ledeen put it, “peace in this world only follows victory in war”);
• That the military power of the United States must therefore be continually, inexorably enhanced;
• And that war should be the principal means of extending American universal values (“freedom,” “democracy”) to a world that desperately wants them, even if it doesn’t know yet, and even if it resents their imposition at gunpoint.

One can detect the influence of this messianic, militarist nationalism in yesterday’s foreign policy speech by Mitt Romney at the Virginia Military Institute, and especially when the GOP presidential candidate announced that “It  is the responsibility of our President to use America’s great power to shape history.” This statement was of a piece with Romney’s declaration to the VFW convention in July, when he said (bold mine):

I am not ashamed of American power. I take pride that throughout history our power has brought justice where there was tyranny, peace where there was conflict, and hope where there was affliction and despair. I do not view America as just one more point on the strategic map, one more power to be balanced. I believe our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known, and that our influence is needed as much now as ever. And I am guided by one overwhelming conviction and passion: This century must be an American Century.

This sort of idolatry would be bad enough if it were not echoed by Catholic apologists for war and American empire, notably George Weigel, who in a recent column endorsing the exercise of American “hard power” wrote, “Americans are not imperialists by nature; yet history has thrust global responsibilities [read: empire] upon us. How shall we respond? From behind? Or from ahead?” I guess the one-word answer to the first of his rhetorical questions is: WAR! Contrast that view with that of Pope John Paul II, the subject of Weigel’s biography, Witness to Hope: “Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressiveness that spares no one. The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery.” And, “Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.” And, “Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of men.” And, “War is always a defeat for humanity.”

Lest anyone think that this post is some sort of back door endorsement of Barack Obama, think again. At least Romney and his cohort (not counting Weigel, who should know better) come by their convictions honestly. Prior to his inauguration in 2009, there were reasons to think that Barack Obama would think and act differently. But in truth his foreign and national security policies have been neoconservative to the core. Four years on and we’re still blowing up villagers in Pakistan (at least 447 and possibly as many as 880 since 2009). The drone war has widened under Obama to include Yemen and Somalia, and even US citizens abroad, who may now be assassinated without charge or trial.  And of course there was the misadventure in Libya, where the United States launched hundreds of cruise missiles and over 1,200 sorties of combat aircraft. The man who accepted a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, saying “War is justified only when certain conditions were met; if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence,” has become a global warrior at last. And given his radical expansion of the national security state at home – from warrantless wiretapping to indefinite detention to high-tech surveillance of the civilian population – Obama has to be considered one of the greatest enemies of American civil liberties ever. It is yet another reason why I can no more cast a vote for him than I can for Romney.

The differences between Romney and Obama when it comes to the exercise of American military power are negligible. I believe that if Obama is re-elected, Israel will be at war with Iran within six months, with strong American military and moral support. By contrast, I believe that if Romney is elected, the United States will be at war with Iran within six months, supported morally and militarily by Israel. What’s the difference, really? War is war, and the innocent dead or maimed don’t care about the finer points of military strategy. As the Holy Father said, “War is always a defeat for humanity.”

I’ll leave the last word to Chris Hedges, the author and former war correspondent for the New York Times. Unlike Romney, his progeny, Obama, most of the neocons “scholars” and bureacrats, all the chickenhawks on television and radio and the internet, and the vast majority of the American people, Hedges has actually seen war. Up close. Sunday night he gave a talk, sponsored by Veterans for Peace (of which I am proud to be a member), commemorating the 11th – 11th! – anniversary of the Afghan War.

Many of us who are here carry within us death. The smell of decayed and bloated corpses. The cries of the wounded. The shrieks of children. The sound of gunfire. The deafening blasts. The fear. The stench of cordite. The humiliation that comes when you surrender to terror and beg for life. The loss of comrades and friends. And then the aftermath. The long alienation. The numbness. The nightmares. The lack of sleep. The inability to connect to all living things, even to those we love the most. The regret. The repugnant lies mouthed around us about honor and heroism and glory. The absurdity. The waste. The futility.

It is only the maimed that finally know war. And we are the maimed. We are the broken and the lame. We ask for forgiveness. We seek redemption. We carry on our backs this awful cross of death, for the essence of war is death, and the weight of it digs into our shoulders and eats away at our souls. We drag it through life, up hills and down hills, along the roads, into the most intimate recesses of our lives. It never leaves us. Those who know us best know that there is something unspeakable and evil many of us harbor within us. This evil is intimate. It is personal. We do not speak its name. It is the evil of things done and things left undone. It is the evil of war.

We do not speak of war. War is captured only in the long, vacant stares, in the silences, in the trembling fingers, in the memories most of us keep buried deep within us, in the tears.

It is impossible to portray war. Narratives, even anti-war narratives, make the irrational rational. They make the incomprehensible comprehensible. They make the illogical logical. They make the despicable beautiful. All words and images, all discussions, all films, all evocations of war, good or bad, are an obscenity. There is nothing to say. There are only the scars and wounds. These we carry within us. These we cannot articulate. The horror. The horror.

War gives to its killers a God-like power to take life. And there are those here tonight that have felt and exercised that power. They turned other human beings into objects. And in that process of killing they became objects, machines, instruments of death, war’s victimizers and war’s victims. And they do not want to be machines again.

We wander through life with the deadness of war within us. There is no escape. There is no peace. We know an awful truth, an existential truth. War exposed the lies of patriotism and collective virtue of the nation that our churches, our schools, our press, our movies, our books, our government told us about ourselves, about who we were. And we see through these illusions. But those who speak this truth are cast out. Ghosts. Strangers in a strange land.

Who are our brothers and sisters? Who is our family? Whom have we become? We have become those whom we once despised and killed. We have become the enemy. Our mother is the mother grieving over her murdered child, and we murdered this child, in a mud-walled village of Afghanistan or a sand-filled cemetery in Fallujah. Our father is the father lying on a pallet in a hut, paralyzed by the blast from an iron fragmentation bomb. Our sister lives in poverty in a refugee camp outside Kabul, widowed, desperately poor, raising her children alone. Our brother, yes, our brother, is in the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgency and al-Qaida. And he has an automatic rifle. And he kills. And he is becoming us. War is always the same plague. It imparts the same deadly virus. It teaches us to deny another’s humanity, worth, being, and to kill and be killed.

There are days we wish we were whole. We wish we could put down this cross. We envy those who, in their innocence, believe in the innate goodness of America and the righteousness of war and celebrate what we know is despicable. And sometimes it makes us wish for death, for the peace of it. But we know too the awful truth, as James Baldwin wrote, that “people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” And we would rather be maimed and broken and in pain than be a monster, and some of us, once, were monsters.

I cannot heal you. You will never be healed. I cannot take away your wounds, visible and invisible. I cannot promise that it will be better. I cannot impart to you the cheerful and childish optimism that is the curse of America. I can only tell you to stand up, to pick up your cross, to keep moving. I can only tell you that you must always defy the forces that eat away at you, at the nation—this plague of war.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child?
A long ways from home
A long ways from home

Towering about us are banks and other financial institutions that profit from war. War, for some, is a business. And across this country lies a labyrinth of military industries that produce nothing but instruments of death. And some of us once served these forces. It is death we defy, not our own death, but the vast enterprise of death. The dark, primeval lusts for power and personal wealth, the hypermasculine language of war and patriotism, are used to justify the slaughter of the weak and the innocent and mock justice. … And we will not use these words of war.

We cannot flee from evil. Some of us have tried through drink and drugs and self-destructiveness. Evil is always with us. It is because we know evil, our own evil, that we do not let go, do not surrender. It is because we know evil that we resist. It is because we know violence that we are nonviolent. And we know that it is not about us; war taught us that. It is about the other, lying by the side of the road. It is about reaching down in defiance of creeds and oaths, in defiance of religion and nationality, and lifting our enemy up. All acts of healing and love—and the defiance of war is an affirmation of love—allow us to shout out to the vast powers of the universe that, however broken we are, we are not yet helpless, however much we despair we are not yet without hope, however weak we may feel, we will always, always, always resist. And it is in this act of resistance that we find our salvation.

From my new book,

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.