Dialogue of the deaf

Irshad Manji has a must-read column in Friday's Globe and Mail urging a dialing back of the dialogue of the deaf between believers and self-styled new atheists.

What's especially delightful is Manji's presentation of herself as a believer in God who yet respectfully insists on reason and reasonableness as part and parcel of a life of faith.

"The point is whether, in the name of God or godlessness, dogmatists commit barking mad atrocities," she writes.

Her admonition to temper our tongues and our torts is something Manji has lived out in her maturation from an enfant terrible of Canadian journalism to an international thinker who appears on stages with Salman Rushdie and gives lectures at Oxford where Richard Dawkins is a heckler.

Her call for fresh reason and freshened arguments in the theist-anti-theist debate, then, is as wise as it is welcome, though she stops short of offering what I think is the most reasonable argument of all: silence. Not silence in the sense of simply cutting off the discussion with all sides retiring behind their barricades still equally grumpy and dissatisfied. Rather, silence as the acknowledgement of faith as a necessity for sanity. To avoid going barking mad, after all, we must occasionally be able to stop ourselves from barking.

Believers, of course, live their faith by proclaiming, exhorting, calling, converting. Anti-believers feel compelled to dispute, disprove, debunk and even disparage. A point of common ground for both camps is the demonstrable truth that there is a point—call it the silence point—beyond which language cannot go but knowledge never stops. The silence point is essential to the functioning of the mysterious and the mundane alike. How would music, art, and poetry work without the necessary silences through which their knowledge is conducted, and which language cannot compute?

Mathematics can be seen as a whole language of silence (think how algebra usurps the alphabet) whose history is one of constantly inventing new forms of mathematical language (new silences?) to ultimately explain eternal reality.

Even something as ordinary and ubiquitous as commercial marketing, though, is predicated on the faith that a particular "promise" will take it beyond the limitations of our ordinary understanding of the word promise. We normally mean a promise as something that will be done as specified. But marketing is about branding and branding is not, by definition, about specific deliverables. It is about the generalized intangibles we "know" are being silently promised to us by a given brand.

That is not an argument for placing our faith in the promises of marketers. It's just making the point that faith is evident in all we do and, more, exists at the point where language stops and knowledge continues—in other words, in the silence that is the sine qua non of human existence. To deny it would define insanity.

We do not need to retreat into monastic life to find this silence. We do need to actively listen for the opportunities it provides. Several months ago, I had the opportunity to meet a Protestant pastor named Bill Hybels at an event hosted by two of Cardus' wonderful and generous supporters. As head of perhaps the largest mega-church in the U.S., Bill Hybels runs an organization that makes a lot of noise inside and outside the Christian world. But at the breakfast where I met him, he sat quietly at the end of a board room table and told a story about a close friend of his whose journey to God involved sitting each morning on a patio chair saying nothing, praying nothing, doing nothing but staring into the silence all around him. There was the sanity he desperately needed in his life. There was faith. There was God.

I've thought about that story a lot over the intervening months. It recurred when I read Irshad Manji's column in Friday's Globe and Mail. Perhaps to her welcome call for a dialing back of the dialogue of the deaf between believers and anti-believers, we might respectfully invite all involved to try the experiment in reason of being still until they know there is a God.

Why do people say such things?

Why do people say such things? In a letter published in Friday's National Post, John Kneeland of Hamilton claims that, in Uganda, numerous factors, including condom use, "played more of a role in declining HIV prevalence than abstinence . . . "

Mr. Kneeland cites a study presented at a recent international conference on retrovirals to support his claim. If any study actually did say such a thing, it wouldn't be worth publishing, never mind reading, never mind citing.

It is not logically possible for any factors to contribute "more" to the decline of a sexually transmitted disease than abstinence. It is like saying that new and improved ladders contribute more to a reduction of falling off the roof than does standing on the ground.

By definition, the thing that must contribute most to prevention of falling from the roof is not going up on the roof to begin with. Similarly, sexual abstinence, by its nature involves the transmission of nothing. How could potentially transmitting something possibly contribute "more" to the potential reduction of disease than transmitting absolutely nothing at all?

What Mr. Kneeland really means is that while nothing is more certain than abstinence in reducing—indeed, eliminating—sexually transmitted HIV, 21^st-century ideology forbids us asserting a moral burden of abstinence on those who insist on taking risks. Instead, we must euphemize the realities of epidemiology in the prophylactic language of "realism" and write letters to the editor proclaiming things that can't possibly be true.
Why?

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The demise of the daily newspaper will close the wondrous window on the world that is the letters to the editor section. The comment capabilities of web sites and blogs will never come close to matching a good letters section.

The immediacy of the responses on most web sites means they are primarily the monopoly of 37-year-old cretins wearing only stained underpants in their mother's basements. The vast majority of what appears on them is illiterate, moronic or as energetically pointless as the advice of fans shouted from the nosebleed sections of sports stadiums.

Letters to the editor, by contrast, go through filtering by, well, an editor, meaning they are the product of the citizen in the street abetted by an actively employed intelligence.

As such, they are a beneficial medium between the narcissistic blurts of professional pundits and the dregs of so-called "streeters" in which newspapers send out their greenest or laziest reporters to ask people in shopping malls what they think about the creation of the universe.

(One reporter I know, who loathed doing such "vox pop" stories, learned early to simply attribute invented quotes to members of her large extended family, taking care to re-mix first and last names so no one was ever the wiser. "I know what they all think—and they're citizens, too," she rationalized.)

It was fascinating to learn in Friday's National Post letters section, for example, that Joan Harper of Victoria, weighing in on the always-hopping topic of abortion, believes that "in a democracy, no one has the right to force their opinions on another". At the same time, in a gesture of magnanimity to her fellow citizens who oppose abortion, Ms. Harper allows that: "It is unfair to force people who object to it to pay taxes that support it."

Both her points are, if this is not too harsh, stupendously wrong. The whole purpose of democracy, after all, is to force our opinions on each other through argument, persuasion, voting and majority rule. Democracy is the peaceful way of getting our way even if others don't like it.

The catch, of course, is those "others" always have equal access to that democratic privilege. It means we end up endlessly awash in debating bombast but that is preferable to an endless series of detonating bomb blasts.

The absence of violence is precisely what makes it "fair" to expect citizens to pay taxes for the things they find disagreeable. Our power to peacefully change things in a democracy requires we surrender to paying for things we don't like as we're waiting our turn.

What's engaging about Joan Harper's erroneous thinking, though, is not her misunderstanding of the basics of our political system. It's that what she, as a citizen, believes can appear literately, concisely, prominently for us all to see through the wondrous window of a daily newspaper letters section.

I, for one, will miss it dearly when it's gone.

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On Thursday I had the chance to listen to Ottawa writer Bill Brown read his wonderful short story "Folly" to a class at Marianopolis College in Montreal. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a reminder of the true purpose of literature.

You did not, and as he said you will likely never, see Bill's name on the Giller Prize short or long lists. He's not waiting for a Governor General's jury to notify him that he has won the literary lottery.

What Bill does look forward to is getting up at 4 a.m. to write "painfully slowly" for three hours every day, crafting exquisite short stories that he makes public through the small press, Siren Song Publishing, or through the small magazine, Front and Centre, that he co-edits.

It is the approach of a genuine amateur in the full and true and best sense of that word: one who does what he does for the pure love of doing it. It is, as Bill told the Marianopolis students, a major part of the "blessed life" he lives.

Bookish gadfly John Metcalfe was pilloried in the 1980s and 1990s for insisting this is the authentic home of literature. Metcalfe argued to anyone who would listen (few would) that literature, particularly in Canada with its miniscule book-reading public, is essentially a "coterie" activity. He did not mean the word as a pejorative but as an accurate descriptor.

This is not to superciliously look down upon prizes, writer's grants, subsidized publishing and other accretions to literary activity as somehow impure or ignoble. They're not. They're as real a part of the writing life as pencils or word processors. What they can risk, however, is a kind of teleological warping so that they shift from support to sine qua non.

The enthusiastic reaction of the Marianopolis students to Bill Brown's reading showed what hangs in the balance. They sat in rapt attention while he read, asked thoughtful and in quite pointed questions afterward, then hung around for almost 40 minutes just to chat, have copies of their books signed, find out first-hand a bit more what this writer-fellow, and this literature business, is all about. For most, it was probably the first opportunity they'd had to do so. For some, it might be the only such opportunity they'll ever have.

It's a chance that might never have come to them were Bill not part of a "coterie" of writing friends that includes Zsolt Alapi, the teacher of the Marianopolis class and the brains behind Siren Song Publishing.
Friendship begets many great things besides itself. In this case, it created an opening for a class of engaged students in their college years to learn that literature is not, at heart, a matter of economics or theory, but rather a genuine gift of the human condition.

Reading it, hearing it read, writing it yourself, belongs to a blessed life.

Love as a knock on the door

Originally published:

http://www.ilsussidiario.net/articolo.aspx?articolo=124705 (5-Nov-10)
http://www.timescolonist.com/life/Ahousaht+David+Frank+shares+healing+journey+after+abuse/3790764/story.html (7-Nov-10)

David Frank knew coming home would require attention to change. Though no world traveller, he is a man who knows what it means for the heart to shift and find its new place.

"That was my first time out of America," the community health services manager for the Ahousaht First Nation says a few weeks after his return from Rimini, Italy, and the annual Meeting of Friendship Among Peoples. "I had never really taken a vacation before."

"Over there, it was really alive, really vibrant, there was just so much. It was almost overwhelming. Coming home meant getting myself to slow down a bit."

It is the understatement of a man who has stepped off a cliff describing the need to move his arms to avoid stubbing his toe upon landing. In his mid-60s, Frank and his wife, Ginger, travelled from their reserve on the west coast of Vancouver Island across the Atlantic to the Italian Adriatic resort town of Rimini for the meeting in August.

The annual event, the largest summer cultural fair in Europe, hosts 800,000 visitors in a week. There are 1,800 people in the entire Ahousaht First Nation, which can be reached only by boat or float plane.

But Frank wasn't there this year just to observe the seven-day frenzy of political discussions, arts exhibitions and sporting events. He was there to address an audience accustomed to keynote speakers such as Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Tony Blair and Pope John Paul II.

A man who spent most of his working life as a fisherman off the Canadian coast, he would stand alone at the front of a cavernous auditorium, speaking through a translator to at least 500 people who needed a map projected on the wall to know where he was from. And he would be talking about himself.

No—he would be talking about his capacity to forgive the Roman Catholic priest who sexually abused him as a child, something he had never spoken about in a public forum before.

"A question I still ask myself is what did happen? How did it happen?" Frank says in the voice of a man who, even as he is speaking, is also listening to an ancient, beautiful story being told in another room. "I just said my prayer and let everything go."

The combination carried him, someone might say mystically, above the gulfs of culture, language, history, geography, to the shared place in human hearts where listeners sit in silence waiting for word to follow word.

The word David Frank gave them, above all, was love.

"I remembered that when you love all people, you have no enemies," Frank said into the silence that day. "I realized I needed to ... love the person that hurt me."

In a series of quick verbal block cuts, he gave them his history: An aboriginal Canadian raised in the Catholic and Protestant faiths, as well as in the religious healing traditions of his ancestors, sent off by government to a church-run residential school as a child, abused, devastated, enraged, addicted, suicidal. Then again, love. The love of a solitary knock on the door on the night when Frank was raising his own hand against himself to end his life.

"There was a knock on the door, a priest walked in, he'd come to see me. He asked how I was. It was at that time I realized God was alive, a loving God. I heard the teachings of my mom and my dad, heard the teachings in my heart. I heard the need to love all people," he told his listeners.

But more. He did not tell them his experience of change was the necessary and sufficient ground of redemption. He did not teach them it was the essence of salvation. He thanked them for being good and generous people. He sat down.

After his speech in Rimini, after the breaking of the silence and the swarming of the crowd wanting to shake his hand, pat his shoulder, thank him for his words, his love, he and his wife got a chance to go to Rome for a few days before returning home. The frenzy of the Eternal City in August can drive even seasoned travellers mad. What chance did David and Ginger Frank, fresh from Ahousaht, really have?

"It was amazing, all that history," Frank says. "It brought me back to some of our history from home. When I was standing in the [Sistine] Chapel, looking at the ceiling, seeing all the paintings and what Michelangelo did, all of the hard work, it made me think of here, how ours was preserved in songs and dances.

"You see that in some of the beautiful songs you hear, the old, ancient songs that come out once in a while. You can feel it, too. It made me think of that."

Talking while listening. A small voice in a cavernous place. The story from the other room. Coming home.

"I was singing under my breath," David Frank says. "Yes, I was singing quietly."

Pope Benedict XVI put it perfectly

Pope Benedict XVI put it perfectly: “Only my readiness to encounter my neighbor and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well.”

Okay, almost perfectly. The part left out is what I am supposed to do if I live in rural Tweed, Ontario or on a gracious street in Canada’s capital, and my neighbor in either place happens to be Russ Williams.

Given the horrendous crimes committed by the former colonel who commanded the country’s largest air force base, am I not entitled to want to jerk him to Jesus rather than showing him love?

Surely, sensitivity to any concept of god demands that I not love pure evil in the form of a fetish-maddened, underwear stealing, cross-dressing, raping, murdering sociopath.

Williams, after all, only loved his neighbors for having houses that he could break into, for having privacy and dignity that he could violate, for having children he could sexually assault and kill.

As National Post columnist Barbara Kay asked angrily this week: isn’t it only the weakest form of liberal sentimentalism to repay Williams’ particular perversion of “love” with life in prison rather than the death penalty?

Kay was among the first out of the gate to call for the Williams’ case to re-ignite Canada’s capital punishment debate and, this time, end it with the triumph of good, solid, conservative, common sense justice.

“Williams lives in comfort at our expense because kitsch triumphs justice in liberal minds,” she wrote.

To be historically accurate, of course, Williams will live behind bars for at least the next 25 years because Brian Mulroney’s Conservative majority government of the mid-1980s defeated Parliament’s last attempt to revive state-sanctioned killing.

Anyone who has ever spent time inside a maximum-security prison filled with lifers will know, as well, that none are places of comfort. Williams will spend a good part of the next quarter century in one of the most dangerous, fear-ridden, psychologically toxic environments imaginable. It will give him a long taste of what his victims suffered, and that would certainly be justice after a fashion.

The issue for supporters of capital punishment is that it is not justice enough, or not justice that is rough enough. To refuse to kill cold-blooded killers such as Williams is to fall prey to misguided mercy or, God forbid, charity.

The emotional appeal of this argument is understandable. Its logical appeal, however, requires accepting the premise that we can—must? —sever justice from mercy and charity. In his great encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI demonstrates why separating justice from mercy only separates us from our full humanity.

“There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love,” His Holiness writes. “Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such.”

Not just the individual bad man who has perpetrated monstrous crimes. No. Rather, “man as such”—that is, humanity as a whole.

The protection of that whole must be paramount over the gratification that comes from eradicating perceived evil in our midst. Justice, giving what is strictly due, must be rendered proportional through temperance by mercy (giving more than is due) and charity (love that expects no due).

Such proportionality is the necessary and sufficient ground for conservatives, indeed anyone of any political inclination, to fully and finally reject capital punishment.

It is true that any society has the prerogative to protect itself from internal as well as external harm. The prerogative is strictly limited by a response in which justice, mercy, and charity are proportional to the threat.

Soldiers defending their country cannot simply slaughter their disarmed enemies even, as we were reminded by a recent case, when the enemy combatant lies mortally wounded. It is only just to shoot back at someone firing a machine gun at your head. Mercy requires the return fire stop when the machine gunner is taken as a prisoner of war. Charity and full humanity demand giving the POW food and freedom from mistreatment.

This is what it means to love our neighbors even when they are our enemies. The same principle applies internally.

Russ Williams was a neighbor who became an enemy, but we have disarmed him. He can no longer cause us harm. Even if it could be shown that killing him would be his strict due—justice—it would be disproportionate for its elimination of love. It would “eliminate man” as such.

Here’s one way that elimination works. Years ago, I covered an execution in Texas. I was outside the prison walls when the family of the murder victim emerged after having witnessed the lethal injection of the monster they had waited almost 20 years to see killed by the state. I walked over to them and asked simply whether the day had been worth the wait.

The son, a generation older than he’d been when his mother was murdered, turned and said simply: “No.”

Nothing, that day, had changed. His eyes were dead. His body language was that of a man who has suffered the crushing defeat of a lifetime’s hope left unrealized.

By contrast, I had interviewed the previous day a convict who’d long shared a cell with the condemned man. I asked how it was possible to live on death row for two decades.

“It beats the hell out of the alternative,” he said.

“That sounds remarkably like hope,” I said.

“If I didn’t have hope, there wouldn’t be any point in taking a (first) breath in the morning,” he said.

The man who was waiting to be jerked to Jesus, so to speak, was able to hold on to hope. The other? What happened to him was not at all what he was ready for.

The Winds of Ezra

As usual, guest speaker Ezra Levant said it best without fully appreciating the significance of what he’d just said.

“The average age would not be 25 for a right-wing event in Alberta,” Levant told 500 conservatives gathered in Quebec City for the first meeting of the Quebec Freedom Network. “I feel like an old man.”


Conservative Canada’s Mr. Saturday Night spent 75 minutes last Saturday morning delivering his trademark snappy patter on the horrors of human rights commissions, the grim litany of threats to free speech in this country, and the evils of acquiescing to the “fascist theocracy” of militant Islam.


Yet it was his ad lib exit line on the youthful composition of the audience, and his own relationship to it, that stood as his most compelling observation – and perhaps the most hopeful single thing said during at the inaugural Freedom Network gathering.


It was only 14 years ago, after all, that Levant was himself one of those mid-20somethings at Calgary’s Winds of Change conference, which he not only attended but helped organize with David Frum.


Ultimately, the Winds of Change set in motion the same sort of conversation shift among Canada’s conservatives that the Quebec Freedom Network hopes to stimulate in la belle province.


No one would pretend that the 1996 gathering in Calgary, like last weekend’s meeting in Quebec City, was anything but a tentative first step. It took a decade of false starts, electoral disasters (many of which seemed, curiously, to have the callow Mr. Levant involved), and wound-healing for fractured Canadian conservatives to forge an effective coalition within Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party. The time frame is a realistic one for conservatives in the Quebec Freedom Network to keep in mind if their end is power and not just talk. The Quebec network’s primary goals remain unclear since no one seems to know whether it will be just be a talking shop, try to re-energize the troubled ADQ provincially, or lead to creation of a whole new political party.


Still, as with Winds of Change, there was an unmistakable feeling of something significant having begun in terms of organizers’ stated ambition of shifting Quebec’s political dialogue from the insular polarity of sovereignist-federalist disputes to the left-right axis conventional in modern nation states.


As political philosopher Frederick Tetu told the Freedom Network audience, the interminable binary proposal of either sovereignty or federalism has left zero space or energy to debate the kind of economic state Quebecers want, or need, to have. With culture dominating the discussions, the commerce required to support that culture has been ignored, much to the province’s fiscal peril.


Put another way, discredited socialism remains entrenched within Quebec because the fixation on federalism versus sovereignty has left no time to challenge the left-nationalist orthodoxy that only the State can protect the nation.


Maxime Bernier, the Conservative MP for the Beauce region south of Quebec City, pointed out the poisonous paradox that after 50 years of debate, and two torturous referendums on “the national question”, Quebec is economically weaker and more financially dependent on Canada than it was when sovereignty first emerged as the primary political option.


In fact, he argued, the “two nationalisms of Canada and Quebec” have reinforced each other in a co-dependency relationship that was toxic to the economic growth and the genuine autonomy of the province.


“Successive governments in Quebec have undermined our autonomy by demanding more and more from the federal government,” Mr. Bernier said. “They want independence, yet they are more dependent than ever.”

Quebec, he said, need only insist on respect for the autonomy it’s already guaranteed in the Canadian constitution. The result would be a Quebec that regains its legitimate constitutional autonomy within a united Canada, thereby allowing Quebecers to see their fellow Canadians as colleagues, not threats.


Such talk, of course, directly affronts the left-nationalist orthodoxy that created and sustains the so-called Quebec model of omnipresent state intervention in both economics and culture.


Here, however, Mr. Levant once again stepped out as the unrealized embodiment of the shift in Quebec that those behind the Freedom Network seek to represent. The unilingual Jewish kid from Pump Hill in Calgary, called upon to address an audience that was almost unanimously francophone, tossed off his telling observations and trenchant one-liners entirely in English. And no one batted an eye.


Ten or 15 years ago, back when Mr. Levant was young, it’s virtually certain there would have been showy walkouts, or at the very least audible hissing, had the founding of a new Quebec political movement been kicked off by a speech from a high-profile anglophone unable to speak French in Quebec City.


Last Saturday morning, though, they applauded even when Mr. Levant asked such pointed questions as: “How did Quebecers forget their lineage of freedom?”


In truth, most of the audience was too young to remember that forgetting (huh?), which bodes well for the Quebec Freedom Network as it develops in the years ahead - while Mr. Levant ages to become the grand old man of Canadian conservatives.

Reason and Rudeness

In Reason, Faith and Revolution, Reflections on the God Debate, Terry Eagleton chastises ultra-orthodox rationalist critics of faith for too often buying their "rejection of religion on the cheap.”

An Irish Catholic Marxist, who is among the Anglo-American academic world's leading cultural theorists, Eagleton saves special scorn for the "ignorance, prejudice and intellectual indolence" of those who mock the Jewish and Christian Scriptures by creating a "worthless caricature of the real thing."

Two of his particular targets in the book—which comprises the Dwight H. Terry lectures that Eagleton delivered at Yale in 2008—are Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. His deeper theme is the hyper-aggressive incivility, indeed barbed-wire intolerance, that characterizes the broader anti-theist movement.

Those of us who nurture the inexplicable addiction of reading newspaper letters to the editor can't help but notice the increased evidence of anti-theist incivility and intolerance on a daily basis. Nor can those with even semi-sharpened eyes fail to recognize the stupidity of snobbery in so many of the anti-theist letters published.

Yesterday’s Globe and Mail brought no relief, with not one but two letters spitefully denigrating, of all things, expressions of faith from the families of the 33 Chilean miners who were rescued after being trapped for 69 days in a desert gold mine.

The shorter of the letters is typical Globe reader ain't-I-cleverism from a Toronto woman who appears to believe she is the first to discover theodicy. The longer letter verges on the wicked in its castigation of a wife who urged her trapped husband to sustain faith in God until rescue came.

"Do people who place their faith in some arbitrary yet interventionist deity have no idea how offensive such statements are?" demands David Bright of St. Catharines, who goes on to argue that scientists, engineers, and government officials, not "cobblers elves" deserve the real credit.

Offensive? The woman's husband is trapped hundreds of metres underground. If she had called on the Big Dipper constellation to come down from the sky and use the power of its stars to scoop her husband out of the earth, she would not be fair game for such shameful, opportunistic sneering. She wants the man she loves brought home safe and sound. Who, with an ounce of compassion in his or her heart, could possibly be "offended" by whatever source of emotional and spiritual sustenance she calls upon to achieve that end?

Yet such is the irrationality of the rage against God exhibited by the current crop of anti-theists that any cheap shot rudeness, all lack of common human courtesy and understanding, is justifiable, even laudable, if it illuminates their posture as intellectually superior "rational" beings.

Such ideologues are the public spawn of the intellectual mutant hybrid that Terry Eagleton dubs "Ditchkins"—a conflation of Dawkins and Hitchens—and whom he dismisses as soft-bottomed couch warriors incapable of grasping the transformative power of love.

"Plenty of people repudiate God for eminently creditable reasons . . . Ditchkins reject him for reasons that are both boring and politically disreputable," Eagleton writes.

We might reasonably add insufferably sanctimonious as well.

Exit Scratching Head

The mystery of modern day death merchants continues to confound me. On the front page of yesterday’s National Post we find featured Australian right-to-die doctor, Philip Nitschke, who is in Toronto holding seminars on proper protocols for wrapping a plastic bag around your head for a truly effective suicide. Additional information is available from Dr. Nitschke on the precise combination of pills to take to make your self-administered death a piece of cake.

Now, this is conundrum number one. Dr. Nitschke calls his do-it-to-yourself instructional sessions Safe Exit workshops. His most successful clients end up dead. So how, exactly, are the dead safe? Are they safely dead? Or deadly safe? How can one be dead and safe at the same time given that when one is dead, one is no longer around to be safe?

And so to head-scratcher number two. What is this aspiration in the death retail sector for fastidious neatness at the time of expiration? What is this fetish for putting yourself in a plastic bag first before the coroner comes to put you in a rubber case? Put another way, why do Dr. Nitschke and his kind not give equal advisory time on how to acquire an illegal handgun prior to blowing the back of your head off or, if etiquette remains the main concern, how to properly grip a snub-nosed .38 between your teeth in a manner that would meet Emily Post's approval?

The third, and the most compelling mystery of all, is how we as a culture have come to swallow whole the sanitized, death-merchant lie that death itself can be somehow made dignified. When you die, you crap your pants. Your bladder empties of its own accord. Some poor schlub has to come and cart your bag of guts, as well as your dainty little plastic bag, away.

Humans throughout our existence as a species have always known that death, when it comes, is messy. There's no escape hatch, no safe exit, from that reality. It is just one of the myriad of reasons we have always sought to engage in the mystery of life for as long as we possibly can.

The lasting potential of papal media coverage

Sporting his journalist’s pork pie hat with his press card prominent in the hatband, Father Raymond de Souza uses his National Post column today to admirably wrap up his coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to Britain.

He argues convincingly, having followed the pontiff’s historic state visit step for step, that it forged triumph from predicted humiliation by confounding a hostile media and legions of fashionable pope-haters alike. More, Father de Souza points out that Benedict’s was the right kind of triumph precisely because of his steadfast refusal to water down the Gospel message to make the Church more “attractive” to the Times and the times. 

Such clear-eyed, knowing contrarianism—the gift to give issues a context few readers would have thought of by themselves—makes for truly fine journalism and a worthy read.

The one caveat comes when Father de Souza’s clerical collar shows a little too obviously around the neck under the journalist’s hat. He is a journalist-priest but he is a priest first, after all. It’s understandable that hostility toward the pope, toward the Church herself, would affect him more deeply, more personally, than it might others. The result is an unfortunate undercurrent that because of its hostility, the media is somehow blameworthy for the nightmare the Roman Catholic Church is going through because of the child sex abuse scandal in its ranks.

What’s lost is the opportunity to publicly use that hostility as a goad within the Church to begin truly cleansing it of the underlying causes of the abuse and of the scandal.

Was it predictable that the British media would give saturation coverage, during Benedict’s visit, to the issue of child sexual abuse by priests? Emphatically, yes. Was such saturation coverage justified? Even more emphatically: yes. At the institutional level, it’s difficult to imagine any single issue in Christianity being of greater urgency today than the abuse crisis engulfing the faith’s largest denomination. The capacity of the billion-member Roman church’s evangelical and moral mission depends on the purity of the charity—not just justice—it extends to the victims of priestly pedophiles.

That alone makes the abuse story infinitely newsworthy before even beginning to consider the narrative power of the human tragedies suffered by thousands of children.

So surely the last question to ask is this: if it was predictable, and if it was justifiable, is there any way the media coverage can be made beneficial to the church? Yes—if it produces a process to root out any perpetrators who remain hidden, and hastens the extermination of the very moral vision that allowed such crimes against humanity to continue for so long.

Despite Benedict XVI’s enormous outward dignity as pope, Joseph Ratzinger the man must writhe inside at the indignity of suffering repeated media scourging for the sins and crimes of fellow priests who lack the minimal Christian forbearance needed to keep their hands to themselves when children are in the room.

Wouldn’t it be something if the black-hearted British media expiated some of its own sins by provoking the pontiff to resurrect his erstwhile reputation as the Vatican’s pit bull?

Yes, yes, emphatically yes.

Why everyone should care about the silencing of the religious voice

Benedict’s warnings last week about the silencing of Christian voices in the public square provided a wonderful argument for why the Roman church’s current agonies matter far beyond its own pews. Yet the news-skewering effect of the abuse scandal pushed his warnings to the bottom paragraphs of most news reports.

More, an institution perceived as silencing the innocent during sexual crimes, then brow beating them to keep the secret afterward, hardly seems credible crying out against the stilling of the voices of the faithful.

Yet if the Roman Catholic Church is, ultimately, able to make just and charitable recompense for the offenses of its priests, if it is able to renew its evangelical and moral mission with the abuse scandal as part of its history, Benedict’s speech at Westminster Hall last week may contain the words to rally not just Catholics, not just Christians, not just believers, but even those who put their faith purely in secular liberal democracy.

http://thepapalvisit.org.uk/Replay-the-Visit/Speeches/Speeches-17-September/Pope-Benedict-s-address-to-Politicians-Diplomats-Academics-and-Business-Leaders

In his remarkable address, Benedict argued not just for faith as a man of faith, but for freedom as a child of dictatorship. Joseph Ratzinger witnessed first-hand as a young man the full evil of what might be called associational silencing, i.e. denying human beings full status as citizens simply because of the sources of what they say. As a result, he urged us to see that democracy, not dogma, suffers most from misunderstanding or abusing the separation of church and state. After all, the great monotheisms have survived for millennia under every political system that humans can connive. Humanity’s innate religious sense apparently pre-dates even language.

But we need only skip back in time the short distance to the current pope’s adolescence to be reminded of what can happen to tolerant, liberal democratic societies when faith is first pushed into private, and then the faithful themselves are deemed insufficiently human to merit entry to the public square. 

Is such an outcome a necessary consequence of every diminishment of religious freedom? No. But an abundance of caution, not to mention an enduring love of tolerance and liberality, should prompt all who care about democracy to speak out against what Benedict rightly identifies as the silencing of the religious voice.