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Vocations and altar servers.

One somewhat-controversial topic in liturgical circles is whether altar servers ought to be all boys, or boys and girls.

Serving at the altar used to be a no-girls-allowed thing until fairly recently. (Girls still can't serve at Masses in the extraordinary form.) Even now, bishops are permitted to restrict altar-serving to males in their own dioceses, and where bishops have permitted girls to serve in this way, pastors are permitted to restrict it to males in their own parishes.

Unsurprisingly, some folks would rather live in a parish with children of both genders serving at the altar, and some folks would rather it be only boys. I suppose the arguments on the side of girl altar servers are pretty obvious: Rome permits it, so there is nothing inherently wrong about it; men and women are equal before the Lord, and even if men and women properly play different roles it is rather complicated to explain that to children; girls who want to serve should be able to, etc. Arguments against it have to do with the reality that the priesthood is open only to men, that vocations to the priesthood are nurtured in altar service, and that more boys serve when altar serving is restricted to boys.

I attend a parish in which only boys are altar servers (though adult men and women both assist as extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, and sometimes assist with serving). Anecdotally, the notion that more boys serve when girls are excluded is supported here: We have upwards of a dozen servers at each ordinary Mass, and 75 is not unheard of.

I think I prefer the boys-only tradition, as long as it is accompanied by careful catechesis, because it is more supportive of our male-only priesthood -- it echoes the reasoning, and it brings more boys into close contact with the Eucharist, and it is a seed for vocations. I think the dearth of altar servers today (typically only one to three at many parishes) is an unintended consequence of opening the role to girls. (Who would have expected that fewer children would serve if twice as many became eligible?) But I don't fault pastors and bishops for choosing to permit girls to serve, now that permission is available. Rome permits it, and that means the decision is theirs to make.

I wonder if perhaps a more fruitful attitude would help both boys and girls who serve at the altar. Pope Benedict recently gave remarks to a pilgrimage audience of French altar servers, both boys and girls:

Pope Benedict told the young people they were blessed to be "particularly close to Christ Jesus in the Eucharist. You have the enormous privilege of being close to the altar, close to the Lord."

The pope prayed that being an altar server would help the young people deepen their friendship with Christ and enthusiastically share God's love with their friends and families.

"And, if one day you feel called to follow the path to the priesthood or religious life, respond generously," he told the youngsters.

 

Luckily for you, I can read French, so I can give you the whole quote from the Vatican website. Here is my translation:

It is with affection that I greet the dear altar servers, come from France for their national pilgrimage to Rome, as well as Monsignor Breton, the other bishops who are here and the chaperones of this important group.

Dear young people, the service that you faithfully carry out permits you to be particularly close to Christ Jesus in the Eucharist. You have the enormous privilege to be near the altar, near the Lord. Be conscious of the importance of this service for the Church and for yourselves. Let it be for you the opportunity to grow a friendship, a personal relationship with Jesus. Don't be afraid to transmit with enthusiasm to those around you the joy that you receive from his presence! Let your entire life be resplendent with the happiness that comes from this nearness to the Lord Jesus! And if one day you hear the call to follow him on the way of priesthood or the religious life, respond to him with generosity!

To all of you I wish a good pilgrimage to the tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul!

I generally accept that one of the purposes of having young boys serve at the altar was to nurture vocations to the priesthood, and that's why I generally support the decisions of pastors to restrict altar service to males (though, as I tried to express, I am not hostile to the pastoral decision to permit girls to serve at the altar). I know there are plenty of traditionally-minded Catholics who feel similarly to me, that boys-only altar service will better serve the Church's need for priesthood vocations.

But Pope Benedict's remarks make me wonder if we who feel this way haven't perhaps lost some of our focus on vocations in general. After all, vocations to the priesthood are not more noble than other vocations to religious life (or than marriage, for that matter). Perhaps part of the lack of reverence and lack of appreciation of the importance of altar service is not really caused by the admission of girls, though perhaps that change might have triggered events that revealed more symptoms of the problem. Maybe the problem is that we aren't looking on altar service as a place where religious vocations of all types are planted and grow.

At least in our parish, where the connection between vocation to the priesthood and service at the altar is preached explicitly, and where the pastor has made it clear that he is deliberately reinforcing the connection by restricting altar service to boys, families willingly and joyfully encourage (or require) their sons to serve at the altar and hope that from among these boys new priests will step forward.

But why not, in a parish where girls are permitted to serve, still try to make a connection between service at the altar and vocations to the priesthood, or to consecrated virginity, or to contemplative religious life, or to active religious life as a sister or brother? Why couldn't it be, in such a parish, that families willingly encourage sons and daughters to serve, and express hope that from among these boys and girls that new priests, brothers, sisters, vowed lives of service to the Lord, will emerge?

I admit that I have never really seen such a connection made explicitly, except in the parish I attend now. I have always attributed it to the boys-only policy. But maybe the real reason is something deeper than which of two permitted pastoral choices the pastor has made.

 

The Amish population.

Do you think of the Amish as leading an "endangered" lifestyle? Maybe it's that we associate them with being old-fashioned, so to speak, but I confess that when I have considered them -- whether when teaching my kids about the impact of Wisconsin v. Yoder or buying preserves from a farm stand -- it has been with a sort of wistfulness. Surely they won't be able to hold out forever against the encroachment of the wider world around them.

Not so: in fact the Amish are one of the fastest-growing religious groups in the country, according to an Ohio State University census:

The study, released July 27 at the annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society, suggests a new community sprouting every three and a half weeks.

Nearly 250,000 Amish live in the U.S. and Canada, and the population is expected to exceed 1 million around 2050.

The growth may not be visible outside Amish country, but the rural settlements definitely see the boom.

"This place has grown," said Daniel Miller, 52, who has spent his life on an Amish settlement here. "It's because all of the kids."

...The Amish double their population about every 22 years, said Joseph Donnermeyer, the Ohio State professor who led the census project as part of the recent 2010 U.S. Religion Census.

Interesting, no?

 

Catholic geeks.

Yesterday, SF author and blogger John Scalzi wrote a piece  entitled, "Who Gets To Be a Geek?  Anyone Who Wants To Be" that delighted me.  

(The piece was in response to an article at CNN by Joe Peacock, believe it or not, disparaging -- for not being genuine geeks -- pretty, sexily-dressed women who come to events like ComicCon, including the ones who are hired by sponsors to work at the booths.  I am not the sort of geek who goes to that sort of convention, so I really can't judge the Peacock piece on the merits of its claims.)

But I loved John Scalzi's response, because of the way he encapsulated geekdom:

Geekdom is a nation with open borders. There are many affiliations and many doors into it. There are lit geeks, media geeks, comics geeks, anime and manga geeks. There are LARPers, cosplayers, furries, filkers, crafters, gamers and tabletoppers. There are goths and horror geeks and steampunkers and academics. There are nerd rockers and writers and artists and actors and fans. Some people love only one thing. Some people flit between fandoms. Some people are positively poly in their geek enthusiasms. Some people have been in geekdom since before they knew they were geeks. Some people are n00bs, trying out an aspect of geekdom to see if it fits. If it does, great. If it doesn’t then at least they tried it.

Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think — and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking — that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It’s the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love.” When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER.”

Any jerk can love a thing. It’s the sharing that makes geekdom awesome.

This is wonderful.  I mean, really wonderful.  

For one thing, it neatly skewers the notion that being a geek is really all about being an outcast because The Greater World doesn't understand the stuff the geeks do understand.  If that were so, it would be impossible to be a geek about anything that happens to be, at the moment, popular.  The boundaries of geekdom would shift with the winds of popular culture.

But you know, and I know, that being a geek is something about who you are, not about who accepts you or even about who accepts your interests.

The reason that the world stereotypes socially inept outcasts as geeks, and geeks as socially inept outcasts, is because -- these days, anyway -- the world considers it socially inept to betray a deep interest in any subject.  To care about an idea, or a subject, and to care about getting the details right more than caring about what other people think.  

Some people have the sort of charismatic personality or way with words -- or other sort of attractiveness -- that makes them perfectly able to publicly express enthusiasm in a way that infects others.  Not all geeks have this gift, because the world is mostly turned off by people who don't have the habit of disparaging deep interest.  The habit of cool -- figuratively, being at most lukewarm about everything and everyone, because warmth betrays caring. 

Geek and cool are opposites by nature.  And "cool" is highly prized today.  Fortunately, there are other ways of standing out -- society's not so far gone that it doesn't sometimes appreciate the not-cool.  And so geekdom and outcasts are not identical sets.

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Although once my husband called me "nerdy-cool."  Which is just about the most romantic thing I can imagine.

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Here's another place I found the term "geek," or sometimes its almost-interchangeable synonym "nerd," is useful.  

A few weeks ago when Bearing Blog Epidemiologist ChristyP was in town for a conference, she introduced me to a colleague, whose name I knew well because he has published numerous articles about natural family planning and about the bioethics of reproductive health.  

He asked me, "How is it that you found out about NFP?"  

I started with "Well, I'm Catholic --"

He said, quite correctly, "That isn't a sufficient answer."

I paused and said slowly: "I'm kind of a Catholic nerd."  Turned and looked to ChristyP -- "That kind of sums it up, doesn't it?"  -- and she indicated that it would do, at least for the purposes of that brief conversation!

Thinking back on it, I believe it does suffice.  (I used "nerd" because I wasn't sure whether "geek" has too recent a vintage to mean something to this gentleman -- indeed the usage frequency of "geek" has lagged about 8 years behind that of "nerd" since about 1980.  But I meant something exactly like the "geek" of Scalzi's piece.)   

I mean, I think most of us who intend to live Catholic doctrine as if we really believed it, as written, to be correct sometimes use shorthand like "orthodox Catholic" to refer to others who decline to dissent in any way from Church teaching, but that term doesn't satisfy.  For one thing, it's easily confused with "Orthodox Christian" which is a distinct ecclesiastical community, or it may be construed as some weird kind of shorthand for Eastern Rite Catholics.  

For another thing, it's often used as if it were the opposite of terms like "progressive Catholic" or "liberal Catholic" or "social justice Catholic", when that's really not so.  One can adhere to every bit of what's in the catechism and yet feel more affinity with liberal or progressive politics (remember:  we operate in every country in the world) or perceive that one's particular evangelistic calling is centered around topics that get classified as "social justice."  

For a third thing, although it's useful shorthand in private conversation with others you agree with, I doubt that "orthodox" is understood the same way by the wider culture of English-speaking Catholics.   Self-identified Catholics dissent for a lot of reasons -- many are intellectually honest, informed, and deliberate, many "own" their position, but others are lashing out in anger and hurt, while still others oppose a strawman.  I haven't taken a survey, but it strikes me that a large number of those people would take some umbrage at us toe-the-line types for claiming the term "orthodox."  And terms are no good in discourse unless you agree on the meaning.

For a fourth thing, and I mean no disrespect -- I don't think all the "orthodox Catholics" are also "Catholic geeks."  (And likely as not there are Catholic geek dissenters.) 

But "Catholic nerd," though, or "geek," seems to fit the bill pretty well, and more precisely than just "orthodox" -- at least for me.  With that term, I'm trying to get across that I'm interested  in Catholic theology, liturgy, and moral life.  I'm interested in getting it right, in being able to split hairs, because ZOMG I LOVE IT PLEASE COME WITH ME AND LOVE IT TOO. 

It implies, I hope, not just that I wish to toe the line, but that I have, in fact, drunk the Kool-Aid.  TASTE AND SEE.

In many ways a geek is a geek.  Others call us hairsplitting or even jesuitical (Jesuits:  Perhaps the original Catholic geek organization, regardless of where they find themselves today), but it's no less fun to pick apart difficult moral questions than it is to have passionate arguments about, say, literature or physics.  

I mean, really:  there's a certain affinity among these:

• having a passionate argument using fluxes and mass balances about the question "Does running in the rain make you wetter or dryer than walking?"  (real example I remember from the lunch table in graduate school)
•  having a detailed email discussion on the question  "If a woman has suffered multiple ectopic pregnancies, is it licit for her to request surgical removal of the Fallopian tubes, because of a reasonable suspicion that there is something wrong with them, on the grounds that it is generally permissible to remove a 'diseased body part' and that the consequent sterilization is a secondary, undesired effect that is nevertheless permitted under the principle of double effect?  Or does double effect not apply, because in fact the directly desired effect is prevention of all pregnancies, this being the means by which the prevention of a specific disease in the Fallopian tube  is to be brought about?"
• insisting that it's a vital blow to the preservation of American film culture that George Lucas whitewashed the fact HAN SOLO TOTALLY SHOT FIRST?

All of these are the kinds of questions that only true geeks care about, at least deeply enough to argue about it at length instead of doing what other people might call "getting on with their lives."

Frederick Douglass and an inspiration: a rhetoric-based approach to high school history?

First, the Douglass.

Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy has posted the entire text of Frederick Douglass's speech of 160 years ago today, "What July 4th Means to the Negro."

Since this is a blog of religious practice among other things, I am excerpting (emphasis and some paragraph breaks mine) this part about the Fugitive Slave Act (which, among other things, required all states to enforce within their own boundaries the property "rights" of slaveholders):

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were nor stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

...But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!

They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty and leave the throne of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and with out hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation-a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons, and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea’ when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

...The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday School, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery, and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds, and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared-men honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning... [G]reat religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example of the Hebrews, and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.2

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are....

...[T]he anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable instead of a hostile position towards that movement.

The whole speech is long, covers many more points than this one, and is a wonderful piece of argument.

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Now, the inspiration.

I am preparing to teach 19th-century American History again this fall with a crop of late-elementary school kids, and Frederick Douglass is one of the personages whose biography we'll highlight; this piece makes me wish it were easier to teach 19th-century American rhetoric directly to kids under eleven or so.

In my vision for homeschool high school, I have generally assumed that a "survey of American history" course would be a necessary evil -- you know, pack the entire thing into one school year, anchored by a text that necessarily runs broad but not deep. I thought the best I could hope for would be to find a really well-written text (and that not necessarily a text made for schools).

I wonder now if, especially given the way I taught elementary school history, if I couldn't put together a sufficiently informative U. S. History course based primarily on pieces of rhetoric. I think you would still have to have the history spine to hold it together, provide a time-sequence, and give context, but perhaps I would not have to work so hard to find a wonderful "main text" if the intellect and imagination were fed by primary sources -- not meta speech, but speeches. And pamphlets, and laws, and opinion-pieces, and court opinions, even advertisements.

I suspect I would have to cut back a bit on other literary analysis in order to fit it in -- or conversely, I could make that the same year that "literature and writing" focuses on persuasion, analysis, satire, and the like -- er, rhetoric, I suppose -- so that History and Literature/Language Arts dovetail.

Thoughts?

"Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits/Who walked back into burning houses to die with men..."

Marc Barnes at Bad Catholic put up a post today in which he quoted a few lines from a poem by C. S. Lewis that I didn't know -- a poem that appeared to mock the idea that the modern world is falling into "paganism," on the grounds that paganism is much cooler and certainly manlier than whatever it is the modern world is falling into today.   I thought my classics-loving 11-year-old would like it, so I went looking.

Here's the poem, Googled and presented for your enjoyment.

Cliche Came Out of Its Cage

by C. S. Lewis

1

You said 'The world is going back to Paganism'. 
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House 
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes, 
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes, 
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses 
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem. 
Hestia's fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before 
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands 
Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother 
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour 
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave 
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush 
Arose (it is the mark of freemen's children) as they trooped, 
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance. 
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods, 
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men, 
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged 
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die 
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing. 
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune 
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions; 
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears ... 
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.

2

Or did you mean another kind of heathenry? 
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth, 
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm. 
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll 
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound; 
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods, 
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand, 
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope 
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them; 
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die 
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong 
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last, 
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side. 
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits 
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men, 
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals 
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim. 
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs; 
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event 
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).

Fun, isn't it?

Lent, Monday one.

Last Friday, the kids and I met Mark at church for the fish fry dinner, then he took the three younger ones off to run errands while the 10-y-o and I stuck around to attend Stations of the Cross followed by Eucharistic Benediction.  I pointed out that the booklet (it's the Liguori stations) contained the Stabat Mater in Latin as well as in parallel English translation, and out of the corner of my eye watched him happily flipping back and forth trying to make out the Latin as best he could.  It's exactly the sort of thing I would have been doing as a ten-year-old, and I had  to hide my smile.

My mind wanders terribly during these things, but a phrase from one of the Stations jumped out at me -- so to speak -- and I decided right there to take it as my Lenten theme.  It's the ninth Station, "Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem:"

"...do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children."

I'm not sure exactly where that will take me, yet, but I think it will take me far in forty days.

* * *

My plans are modest.  I'm hoping to make it to an hour of adoration twice a week during Lent -- just me -- using about two-thirds of what's usually my school-planning time.  And I set some limits for myself on the computer, eliminating some of the extra time and also taking some of the stuff I usually read out of my RSS reader, with an eye towards serenity.  Above that, I'm going to try tentatively giving up some items of food, but on a day-by-day basis.   I swore off giving up food-type things for Lent a couple of years ago, because I felt it exacerbated my eating disorders, but I'm feeling stronger about those now and so I think I'm ready to give it a try again, but carefully.  I also have some spiritual reading lined up.

So, not one big thing-to-do-every-day, but several small things that hopefully will add up to doing something every day.

Could use a little advice here from the cradle Catholics.

So one thing I really don't understand about how Lenten penances are supposed to work out within a family. 

Do your children (older ones -- say 8 year olds and up) take responsibility for their own Lenten devotion?

As far as I know, "giving up something" for Lent is an optional devotion.  It's not optional that we have to observe Lent somehow, with prayer, fasting, penance, almsgiving.  But, say, "giving up chocolate" for Lent, that kind of thing, that's traditional but not obligatory.  Right?

So, as a mother, I feel like my role ought to be to encourage my kids to come up with a Lenten sacrifice and follow through with it.  But I'm really uncomfortable with enforcing it in any way, or even with making gentle reminders.

(Yes, it's my role to enforce religious obligations, e.g., Sunday Mass attendance -- I'm talking about optional devotions.)

 If they were much more mature, like 16 or older, it would definitely be inappropriate for me to butt into their private spiritual lives.  Also, by that time, they should be able to take responsibility themselves for their own sacrifices -- they should be totally voluntary.  I'm clear on the concept for older kids and adults.

So should they be voluntary from the beginning?

Let me give an example.  When my oldest was eight, he announced he was going to give up ketchup for Lent.  I thought that was a really great sacrifice  for a kid -- doable, but noticeable.  For the first couple of weeks he went without ketchup.  Then one night he forgot and put it on his plate.  Just as a reminder -- not at all in a punitive way, I swear -- I said, "Hey, did you forget that you gave up ketchup for Lent?"   And he got this look on his face that said I know.  Please don't remind me.    A few more times that happened, and then by the end it was clear that he didn't want to give up ketchup anymore.  I stopped reminding him.  It felt wrong to "nag" about something that was technically optional and that, if he were fully grown, would be totally his own business.  It definitely felt wrong to speak to him about it at the dinner table, in front of people.  

I get even more nervous when my son announces that he's going to give up something that I just know is going to be really hard for him.  Like, "I'll give up video games."  Great, I think, it's really a good idea, but... do you expect me to be your policeman?  Like, when you're at your friends' house and they're all playing video games, do you want me to come down the stairs and say, "Hey, 10-year-old, you told me you were giving up video games for Lent, so put down the controller?"

I don't have an example for how to do this.  I was not a child growing up in a practicing-Catholic family.   I literally do not know how to encourage a Lenten devotion without becoming Lent Cop Mom. 

Seriously.  Help me out here.  And if you have a blog which gets more traffic than mine, how about asking your readers?  Because I have a feeling I need a lot of ideas.

UPDATE:  Oh, good, Jen at Conversion Diary has kindly linked to my question!  That should help.  So has the other Jennifer, Fitz at Riparians at the Gate.

Double effect, in the bathtub.

Jennifer Fitz, as part of a longer discourse on lying, offers a novel explanation of the principle of double effect.  I think it's very approachable (and as far as I can tell, accurately represents Church teaching) so if this oft-misused principle has ever confused you -- please, check it out.

Hint:  The principle of double effect is not just a way of saying, "We can do something bad if we can think up a good enough reason."  Money quote:  "That's the clincher of double effect -- there are two effects."

Double effect (also called “parallel effect”) is actually one of the two principles that work together to keep our moral system sane.  The other is ‘ends don’t justify the means’, but that isn’t our topic today until way down below where I go out on a limb and guess things.  Back to Double Effect:

#1 Reason to love Double Effect: It lets you take a shower.

Because here’s what: Showers and bathtubs are super dangerous.  You could slip and crack your head open. And if the bathroom weren’t bad enough, you probably keep a stove and a water heater around the house, and perhaps even some kind of Vehicle of Death in your garage.  (Or, if you are a Luddite, a Pack Animal of Death for your transportation needs.)

Double effect says that you are allowed to have all this and more!  Because you aren’t actually trying to drown, scald or maim anybody.  Those are unintended consequences of your perfectly reasonable efforts to stay clean, fed, mobile, and so forth.   You’ll try to avoid those bad effects if you possibly can.

[What you can't do: If your enemy fails to drown in his bath, you can't hold him under.  In fact you can't even lay out the bath things and light a scented candle in an effort to lure him to his death.  You may only lead him to the tub for a legitimately good reason, such as to reduce the general stinkiness and discourage the spread of impetigo.  Or perhaps so that he might unwind after a long day driving. you. crazy.  But not to kill him. Barring circumstances we'll get to down the page.]

So that’s the use of double effect.  It lets us do something good, even if there is a some risk of something bad happening in the process.

Now unless you suffer from deep scruples, you probable don’t lay awake nights wondering if your really did the right thing, caving in and buying a water heater.  So where double effect gets famous is because it permits seriously dangerous action if there’s a genuine need for it.

You may not, for example, throw yourself in front of a bus in order to get that drat fly at last. (Even though the fly is germy and annoying, and you only want to give your beloved a peaceful picnic.  Good cause, good action, but the risks are disproportionate.  It’s a no-go.  Hope the bus gets the fly, and live to swat another day.)  But if it is to push your hapless child out of harm’s way, yes you may take the risk of your likely death in order to save the child.  You aren’t trying to die.  You hope to avoid dying.  Everyone will be much happier if a guardian angel steps up and takes care of things.

And that’s the clincher of double effect — there are two effects: There is one thing good you are trying to achieve, and one bad bad you hope to avoid. Even if the bad effect is 100% likely barring supernatural intervention, you can’t be trying to achieve the bad effect.

There's more -- go read the whole thing.  I think Jennifer's explanation is really helpful.  Double effect is a seriously hard-to-understand principle.  I think that's because there's a long separation in logic, and usually time and distance, between convincing yourself in the abstract that the principle of double effect is correct and morally right (which isn't so hard), and many of its applications, which can sometimes seem convoluted and (shall I say it?) jesuitical.    To navigate some of these situations, it's like you have to wander through a long, twisty tunnel.  At the beginning of the tunnel, the principle of double effect is well understood.  At the end of the tunnel, you see the conclusions it leads to.  The principle goes with you through the long, twisty tunnel, your only source of light, and it remains true all the time, but once you get to the end sometimes the conclusion is surprising and hard to understand.

Take one example:  the end-point of Catholic moral theology with respect to ectopic (tubal) pregnancy.  We wind up with what must seem a very bizarre conclusion:  

• A persistent ectopic pregnancy creates a life-threatening disorder from the point of view of the mother.  
• Yes, the out-of-place and growing embryo is a human being who deserves our protection. 
•  No, that doesn't mean that the mother doesn't get medical treatment, because she is also a human being who deserves our protection.  
• So yes, she can seek treatment for it, treatment which will end the pregnancy and inevitably kill the embryo.  
• But (assuming the mother wishes to remain true to Catholic moral understanding of life issues, and understands all this) she won't choose to use the drug methotrexate to end the pregnancy by killing the embryo, even though it is first treatment choice of many doctors and is probably physically the least dangerous option that doctors offer her, 
• and it may be she won't even choose the least-invasive surgical method, salpingostomy (incision in the fallopian tube) followed by killing the embryo by removing it and its amnion;
• but she can choose salpingectomy, which is the removal of the section of fallopian tube containing the misplaced embryo, 
• even though that removal inevitably results in the death of the embryo,
• which we knew all along was going to happen,
• and even though it would be objectively physically safer for the mother to undergo methotrexate or salpingostomy,
• and even though the salpingectomy will likely damage the mother's fertility.

I mean, if you don't have any understanding of the principle of double effect, this sounds nuts.  Even if you do have an understanding of the principle of double effect, it might still sound nuts.  You have to sit down and take time to connect all the dots to figure out how we got from here to there, or why it matters that we prefer one option to the other when the end result is a no-longer-in-danger mother and a dead embryo for all of them, and especially why "but the salpingectomy is more dangerous!" isn't a good enough reason to use one of the other methods, considering that the embryo is dead either way.

And yet, this is where double effect, properly understood, gets you.  If it isn't obvious, why not head over to Jennifer's blog and see if you can make the connections between her bathtub assailant and the unfortunate ectopic pregnancy problem?  If nothing else, the exercise illustrates why it's important for ordinary Catholics who desire to follow Church teachings -- whether they understand them or not -- to be confident that their local Catholic hospital faithfully follows it, and why the bishops have to guard that confidence even if it means getting bad press.

 

(UPDATE.   Edited slightly to avoid implying that salpingostomy is definitively considered illicit.  See first comment.)

Tagged: Ephesians 5. (Part II - Okay, but like I said, what does "wives, submit to your husbands" mean?)

So Darwin tagged me and asked that question about Ephesians 5, and I went and wrote a post of several paragraphs of, er, scriptural analysis.  Which everyone knows is the easy part.

Now I'm sitting down to try to answer the hard part.

Even though I liked my fellow taggee Dorian's ranty post about it , and I wish to validate her with a "Yeah!  What she said!",  I repeat:  "Wives, submit" isn't about paid work or childcare.   Sure, in a given marriage, paid work may be a big issue.  So can sex, money, whether to have another child....  Ephesians 5 gives us the framework for discussing the issues, not the issue itself.

Thinking that it's about assigning the woman the stay-at-home job (an error peculiar to our age) can even lead us in opposition to Ephesians 5.  In this model we sometimes think of the husband ruling in his providerly way over the external-world sphere, while the wife rules in her nurturely way over the domestic sphere.  But guess what?  The wife doesn't get to rule over the domestic sphere anyway.  Just as the church is subject to Christ, so must women be subject to their husbands in everything.  Everything!

And anyway, does the domestic sphere even count as subordinate to the external-world sphere?  Only in the eyes of the world.  

+ + +

Darwin writes:

It makes sense and seems true to me, and yet I can't think of specific rules as to what "headship" means in our household, much less formulate some sort of universally applicable principle which must apply in all circumstances.

I think it's hard because the only universally applicable principle is apparently "in everything," which either means nothing or it has to be applied uniquely and individually to almost every point of contact between the spouses.  So, no un

I think it's hard because it's exquisitely intimate.  When I try to write about specific ways I "submit" in marriage, I feel unacceptably laid-bare -- I am not writing about sex, but it feels as if I am trying to write about something equally interior and private.  I don't have the right to explain how it is between us.  

And I think it's hard because we're both trying to think of things that we should do.  I think that submitting is more about things that we should not do.

So I come back to this idea that it must mean something  that sets us apart from the "pagans" around us, from those who haven't internalized the Christian message.  Does he order Christian wives to submit because it's natural and right to submit.... or does he have to order us to submit because it does not come natural to us?  Does he perhaps have to tell us to submit because to do so is not natural, but supernatural?

It's within the domestic sphere that this matters, when wife and husband are together, and so perhaps he's warning us against becoming the petty ruler of the home, treating our husband as if he were an intruder or worse, one of our children.  Haven't we known women to say things like this?

It's like I have three children instead of two.

or

I can't get it together on the weekends when he's home, he messes up all my routines.  I don't know how I'll stand it when he retires.

Yeah, we want to be avoiding an attitude like that.

+ + + 

So what is "not submitting" like?

One way would be to undermine his authority with the children:  denigrating him in any way in front of them, or colluding with them against him.

Another would be to undermine his standing outside the family:  denigrating him to your friends.  I know.  Many of us do this.  It's a cliche of the culture that women complain about their husbands.   Especially in a group, it's extremely difficult to avoid joining in on the husband-bashing.  Maybe there exists some fine line between husband-bashing and confiding your troubles to a trusted and close friend.   Maybe it depends whether you're trying to find an answer, or whether you're just complaining.  I'm not exactly sure about that.  But it's definitely something to be cautious with.

Yet another would be, ironically, to demand he take a more assertive role in something.  Erm, to put it another way, don't top from the bottom.  "I want you to assert your spiritual headship of this household more forcefully!"  Doesn't really work.  

I once tried to make Mark be more "involved" in the homeschooling decisions.   It didn't go well.  I finally had to accept that I have been blessed with a husband with a very hands-off managerial style, who trusts me to make wise decisions in this area.  Homeschooling is delegated very firmly to me, and in this case, submitting means I don't get to pass the buck to him on day-to-day operations.  

And then there's decision-making.  Often we discuss submission in terms of the hypothetical Big Decision That You Discuss And Discuss And Can't Come To An Agreement On.   Someone has to give, the theory goes, or the marriage can't survive; and if marriage is to survive, the "who's gonna give" must be pre-decided.  Might as well be the guy, for reasons explained in Eph 5.

But how often does this happen in a marriage?  Three or four times, maybe?  A dozen, if one or both of you is exceptionally dramatic?  But aren't there daily or weekly tiny decisions where the wife gets to decide if she's going to do things the way her husband has asked her to or if she's going to do it her own way?   Don't we all do little things that drive each other crazy?  Can we not actually try to stop doing that small thing that we know bugs him so much?    Would it be so hard to try?  

But how about when it's the other way around, when there's something we really think he ought to do that he's not doing?  Demanding that he change is apparently right out.  Is there then nothing we can do?  

On the other hand... "men ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies..."  We can, I think, ask to be loved and provided for in the way we wish to be loved and provided for.  

I remember a disagreement Mark and I had in the past year, one of those situations where I was absolutely, positively sure I was right and he was wrong, and looking back on it I can see how I tried to put my foot down about it and how uncomfortable and awful and wrong and upsetting that felt.  How much better it would have been had I simply ... asked for what I needed, and trusted that he would want to find a solution that would work for both of us.  

(Even without my asking, he did find a solution.  So.)

So what have I come up with?

1. Don't be bossy about how to interact with the house or the kids.
2. Take all his suggestions seriously.
3. Don't undermine his authority with the children.
4. Don't undermine his standing outside the family.
5. Try not to do that thing that drives him nuts.
6. Ask for what we think we need.

Yeah, that's a start.

Diversity.

Our parish started up a lay Carmelite group this past year.  I haven't joined up, but it got me thinking about the lay associates with the various orders.  What's the difference between a lay Carmelite and a lay Dominican?  What are the requirements of becoming one?  Things like that.  

I stumbled across this informative article about lay Dominican spirituality not too long ago.  I'd like to read more about what is unique to other Orders and Societies and especially to their lay associates.

There are so many different ways of spirituality and even of worship within Church Tradition.  Truly mindboggling. 

Sometimes you hear people, even Catholics, trying to be all positive and ecumenical and referring warmly to the great diversity of people's paths to Christ, as if it's actually a good thing that we have Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans and what-have-you all doing something different, all believing something different, all contradicting each other in so many places.  True, much that is good has come of the work of fine people who live and worship and believe in various traditions outside the Church.  But it's a false dilemma, to think that we must disagree to have diversity, that somehow the Protestant Reformation has freed us from stifling uniformity.  It has occurred to me that in a world without heresy, all that energy and vitality that has gone into building the various denominations would have found its expression in an outblooming of wholly unique, wholly individual, wholly Catholic spiritualities and devotions.   

Maybe in some alternate, Reformation-free universe we'd see the mirror-images of wholesome practices that are today associated only with certain denominations, bearing fruit and finding their full expression in full unity of faith and belief with the Apostles.  Who knows, those vines may be grafted back on someday.