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.