Catholic Carnival III

At Living Catholicism this week.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/09/04 06:03:32 PM
Categorized as Catholic Carnival & Religious.

"Values, Values, Who's Got the Values?"

A monumental blog at The Remedy.

RTWT.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/09/04 05:52:42 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

Re: Bork Specter

These are real considerations to which I wouldn't give as much credence if I didn't put a lot of stock in his opinion.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/09/04 05:39:47 PM
Categorized as Political.

Bork Specter

Thanks to a fellow blogger for calling our attention to this editorial at NRO, yesterday:

Republican senator Mike DeWine of Ohio is a great friend of the pro-life movement. His voting record consistently earns a 100-percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee. He cosponsors important pro-life legislation, from the famous (the ban on partial-birth abortion) to the currently obscure (Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act). "Mike DeWine is one of the United States Senate's strongest advocates in supporting efforts to protect the lives of unborn children," boasts his own website. "He is fighting tirelessly to ensure that those who cannot speak have a voice."

Today, DeWine is in a unique position to continue fighting tirelessly. As a GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he can do his part to prevent his Republican colleague Arlen Specter, an abortion-rights die-hard, from becoming chairman of the panel that will shape the Supreme Court....

And here's an editorial at the Mobile Register, Nov. 7:

Neither President George W. Bush nor Republicans in the Senate should allow Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Specter, by virtue of seniority, is in line to become chairman of the committee in January. But his views and record on judicial matters are not in line with those of the president, nor with those of the majority of the voters who supported Mr. Bush.

Most infamously, Sen. Specter was the Republican who cast the key vote in 1986 to deny a federal judgeship to Alabamian Jeff Sessions. Mr. Sessions is now, of course, a senator who sits on the same Judiciary Committee that Mr. Specter hopes to chair.

That was far from Mr. Specter's only apostasy. The Pennsylvanian has bedeviled conservative Republicans for years on many other issues and nominations. And amazingly enough, just the day after being re-elected earlier this week — for a seat to which his own party would not have renominated him were it not for the intervention on his behalf by President Bush — Sen. Specter had the gall to warn the president against nominating judges who might be pro-life.

Even worse, he implied that opposition to the abortion-legalizing decision of Roe vs. Wade was somehow of a kind with opposition, in this day and age, to the civil rights decision of Brown vs. Board of Education -- as if a person being pro-life is on the same immoral plane as a person still pining for state-sponsored segregation.

Whatever one thinks of legalizing abortion, it is clear that such a willingness to smear the other side gives evidence of an injudicious mind-set and temperament.

Nobody of such temperament should be in a chairmanship which involves deciding whether judicial nominees themselves have an acceptably judicious mind-set and temperament.

Republicans should push Sen. Specter to another committee. And it would be poetic justice if Alabama Sens. Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby led the way.

Jeff Sessions, you may know, was nominated for a federal judgeship by Ronald Reagan, but was torpedoed by the Judiciary Committee. In return, he decided to run for the Senate. He won. And he now sits on... the Judiciary Committee.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/09/04 07:43:31 AM
Categorized as Political.

"Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual"

A great article by Mark Bauerlein at The Chronicle Review, dated Nov. 12:

.... The first protocol of academic society might be called the Common Assumption. The assumption is that all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals. Liberalism at humanities meetings serves the same purpose that scientific method does at science assemblies. It provides a base of accord. The Assumption proves correct often enough for it to join other forms of trust that enable collegial events. A fellowship is intimated, and members may speak their minds without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions.

The Common Assumption usually pans out and passes unnoticed — except for those who don't share it, to whom it is an overt fact of professional life. Yet usually even they remain quiet in the face of the Common Assumption. There is no joy in breaking up fellow feeling, and the awkward pause that accompanies the moment when someone comes out of the conservative closet marks a quarantine that only the institutionally secure are willing to endure....

After Nixon crushed McGovern in the 1972 election, the film critic Pauline Kael made a remark that has become a touchstone among conservatives. "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won," she marveled. "I don't know anybody who voted for him." While the second sentence indicates the sheltered habitat of the Manhattan intellectual, the first signifies what social scientists call the False Consensus Effect. That effect occurs when people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. If the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way.

The tendency applies to professors, especially in humanities departments, but with a twist. Although a liberal consensus reigns within, academics have an acute sense of how much their views clash with the majority of Americans. Some take pride in a posture of dissent and find noble precursors in civil rights, Students for a Democratic Society, and other such movements. But dissent from the mainstream has limited charms, especially after 24 years of center-right rule in Washington. Liberal professors want to be adversarial, but are tired of seclusion. Thus, many academics find a solution in a limited version of the False Consensus that says liberal belief reigns among intellectuals everywhere....

The final social pattern is the Law of Group Polarization. That law — as Cass R. Sunstein, a professor of political science and of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, has described — predicts that when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs. In a product-liability trial, for example, if nine jurors believe the manufacturer is somewhat guilty and three believe it is entirely guilty, the latter will draw the former toward a larger award than the nine would allow on their own. If people who object in varying degrees to the war in Iraq convene to debate methods of protest, all will emerge from the discussion more resolved against the war....

The problem is that the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they've reached an opinion through reasoned debate — instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be logical extensions of principles that everyone more or less shares, and extremists gain a larger influence than their numbers merit. If participants left the enclave, their beliefs would moderate, and they would be more open to the beliefs of others. But with the conferences, quarterlies, and committee meetings suffused with extreme positions, they're stuck with abiding by the convictions of their most passionate brethren....

For this entry, I did what I should have done a long time ago: I made a new educational category. I may put some older entries into this category as I come across them.

(Thanks, Michael.)

[Follow-up: "Academia ... and the Truth".]

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/09/04 07:25:25 AM
Categorized as Educational.

Vere @ Zenit

Zenit interviews canon lawyer Pete Vere (brackets and ellipses in original):

.... Q: What does canon law have to say about pro-abortion Catholic politicians receiving Communion?

Vere: Quite a bit. Unfortunately, canonists are just as divided as bishops and the lay faithful when it comes to this question. Hence the debate continues. Often, the division seems to be along the lines of age.

My own position is fairly well known: We should show compassion to the mothers who abort their children and excommunicate the politicians. For this reason I support stronger efforts to have pro-abortion Catholic politicians excommunicated or denied holy Communion. So, too, do many young canonists with whom I have spoken.

Canon 1398 is clear: "A person who actually procures an abortion incurs an automatic excommunication," the canon states. Abortion is intrinsically evil as an act, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church rightly teaches in paragraph 2271 that abortion "is gravely contrary to the moral law" and an "abominable crime."

My experience in ministry has taught me that most women who abort their child act under some sort of emotional, mental or psychological duress. I seldom come across an abortion that is freely chosen — that is, chosen without coercion from some outside individual or organization.

Thus, the diminishing and excusing factors outlined in canons 1323 and 1324 apply to most women who procure an abortion. In other words, the act is sinful but the women are spared the penalty of excommunication.

Yet, these women are not canonists. Alone and ashamed, the perception of excommunication only further drives them away from the Church. What they need is Christ's healing touch in the confessional, as well as sustained pastoral support from pro-life organizations such as Project Rachel.

Christ took the same approach with the woman caught in adultery: He did not excuse the sin, but he did not turn away the sinner. He invited her to repentance and forgiveness.

My feelings differ towards those who profit — whether financially or politically — from abortion. This is where the Church ought to direct her censures. We need to get tough with Catholic politicians, doctors, pregnancy counselors, nurses and lawyers who continue to support and protect the abortion industry.

With regard to doctors and nurses, the second paragraph of Canon 1329 already provides for their automatic excommunication as accomplices who, "without their assistance, the crime would not have been committed ..."

The canonical situation is more complex when it comes to Catholic politicians. They do not directly participate in abortion. They draft, legislate and protect laws that permit this evil. Therefore the automatic excommunication envisioned by canons 1329 and 1398 would not apply to them since, in keeping with Canon 18, "Laws which prescribe a penalty [...] are to be interpreted restrictively."

Nevertheless, canon law provides other means to punish pro-abortion Catholic politicians. At the very minimum, the Church can and should prohibit pro-abortion lawyers and politicians from receiving holy Communion. Some canonists oppose this type of sanction, pointing out that Canon 912 upholds in the strongest of terms the right of a Catholic to receive holy Communion.

Nevertheless, the second paragraph of Canon 223 states: "Ecclesiastical authority is entitled to regulate, in view of the common good, the exercise of rights which are proper to Christ's faithful."

One is hard pressed to see how permitting pro-abortion Catholic politicians to go unchallenged contributes to the common good — either of the Church or of society as a whole. Rather, abortion destroys the common good in that it destroys the right to life. This is the right upon which all other rights — as well as the common good — are based.

Thus, I'm a strong proponent of making use of Canon 915 in this case. This canon states: "Those [...] who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin, are not to be admitted to holy Communion." ....

(Thanks, Mark.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/09/04 07:08:58 AM
Categorized as Religious.

The Real Difference Between Bloggers and Reporters

The Horserace Blog posts election analyses on Kerry and the Democrats and Bush and the Republicans; also, a farewell.

Here's a bit of the second analysis, concerning one of the Bush's administration's blunders:

.... They were similarly incompetent in this year’s first iteration of the National Guard story. They dumped hundreds of pages of documents in the lap of the media without explaining any of them. It is difficult to do anything that angers the press more than an unexplained “document dump.” They hate having to figure stories out for themselves — particularly when they must derive the story from 30 year old, technical military documents and dental records!...

This, Faithful Reader, is the real difference between reporters and bloggers: reporters hate having to figure stories out for themselves, and bloggers love having to figure out stories for themselves.

:-)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/09/04 06:30:34 AM
Categorized as Media.