By contrast, the other side is bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, whence came the 9/11 attacks and which Jews are forbidden to enter, in stark contrast with their reserved parliamentary representation in certain other countries. (As an uprising at least spearheaded or directed by totally unreconstructed Communists overthrows a characteristically unpleasant Western client in the Arab world, to where does he flee? Why, to Saudi Arabia. Of course.) Guess which side is busily restoring Beirut’s historic Maghen Avraham synagogue, a project which would be preposterously profligate if there really were as few Jews left there as certain interests would have one believe. Likewise, look at that mainstay of the Axis of Evil, Syria:

Israel’s Channel 10 reported on Monday night that Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad has agreed to the restoration of his country’s synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, especially those in Damascus and Aleppo.

The report mentioned that Assad had made this pledge during a meeting last week with Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The meeting had been set up by a Jewish-American businessman with Syrian roots.

The report added that Assad recently opened up the country for visits by Syrian Jews.

Assad’s initiative, Channel 10 said, is an attempt on his part to improve ties with the US.

Hoenlein came to the meeting with a message for Assad from Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu concerning the two countries resuming negotiations.

Assad told Hoenlein that the resumption of talks was conditional on Israel agreeing on a complete withdraw from the Golan Heights.

Netanyahu implied that there mediation between Syria and Israel was under way when he noted in a meeting of the Israeli government that Assad refused to concede this condition.

It is true that Egypt restored the Maimonides Synagogue in Cairo last year; would that she treated her Christians anything like so well. But it is in Iran that the Jews have reserved parliamentary representation. Why is any of these countries doing such things? To curry favor with Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu? Hardly! Netanyahu and Lieberman look and sound like no Jew that they have ever met. Except, perhaps, Malcolm Hoenlein. He has no reason to wish to restore a synagogue in an Arab country except so that the local Jews may congregate there. And there is no reason for any such country’s government to spend money on any such restoration except to that same end. No Jews left there, or at most too few to form the necessary quorum, with those remnants desperate to move to Israel? Who told you that? Tell them to tell it to Assad, to Ahmadinejad, to Hezbollah and friends, and, it must be conceded, to Mubarak. For that matter, tell them to tell it Malcolm Hoenlein.

A member of the One True Faith, I prefer Christmas, but I certainly have much respect for Judaism, and thus am all about Hanukah (and once made a beer-and-wine-bottle menorah for a desperate Jewish roommate one year). I’m less inclined to utter a shout of glee for Kwanzaa and the Solstice, but I am more than happy to let those who celebrate these go about their thing.

The one thing that all four holidays share is the elevation of something greater — whether the birth of Christ, the rededication of the Temple, Black heritage, or the beginning of winter — over the mundanity of our consumerist, materialist, Hollywood-drivel-driven faux-culture of Black Fridays and shopping-trip widowers. The commercialization of Christmas (et al.) is nothing new, but this advertisement denigrates the “Holiday Season” more so than anything that I can remember, not merely — not even — urging us to buy things, but encouraging us to embrace holiday cheer by doing whatever feels good — consequences be damned, presumably.

Calling for a boycott of The Gap seems to me to be a pretty infantile, futile action, but we really ought to consider the gravity of the anti-”Holiday Season” message and the deeper antipathy that contemporary society harbors toward anything more sacred than the accumulation of wealth as an ends in and of itself and a means to joyless possession and meaningless consumption.

Long live Christ the King (on the Pauline liturgical calendar)!

*Neither I nor The American Conservative in any way condones or advocates anyone’s committing conversion at The Gap or elsewhere. However, it may be an interesting legal experiment to see if one can use a commercial’s telling you to “eighty-six the rules, [to] do what just feels right” to justify snatching a sweater.

My friend Roque tipped me off to this doozy from Sunday’s Washington Post, a mind-bogglingly bad opinion piece on Benedict’s recent opening of the gate — building a bridge over the Tiber, if you will — for Anglicans. You know that it’s going to be atrocious when you see that the title asks, “Is Pope Benedict a closet liberal?” You incline toward turning to the comic pages, but cannot help yourself: Must. Read. Foolishly. Titled. Piece.

David Gibson writes,

Thus far, Benedict’s papacy has been one of constant movement and change, the sort of dynamic that liberal Catholics — or Protestants — are usually criticized for pursuing. In Benedict’s case, this liberalism serves a conservative agenda. But his activism should not be surprising: As a sharp critic of the reforms of Vatican II, Ratzinger has long pushed for what he calls a “reform of the reform” to correct what he considers the excesses or abuses of the time.

Reasonable enough. Reading this after a series of paragraphs in which Gibson carries on about the purportedly “extraordinary concession” that Benedict made in the form of the “principal innovation” of opening the Church more fully to the Tridentine Mass is a bit disconcerting, insofar as it suggests cognitive dissonance on Gibson’s part: Restoring the Mass that predominated for nearly four centuries is hardly innovative, and the only thing extraordinary about it, really, is the form of the Mass, itself. Nonetheless, Benedict has been “liberal” inasmuch as his actions may not always strike the observer as being “conservative” in the sense of prudential and moderated, but when the revolutionaries strike, one ought to don the reactionary’s cape.

Things take a turn from the absurd, though. Having made quite clear that Benedict, however “liberal” his means, is stridently “conservative” (Really, he’s just an orthodox Catholic, but debating religious semantics with David Gibson, I fear, is probably a battle unworthy of my time.), Gibson proceeds to smack the reader across the face with this gem:

More important, with the latest accommodation to Anglicans, Benedict has signaled that the standards for what it means to be Catholic — such as the belief in the real presence of Christ in the Mass as celebrated by a validly ordained priest — are changing or, some might argue, falling. The Vatican is in effect saying that disagreements over gay priests and female bishops are the main issues dividing Catholics and Anglicans, rather than, say, the sacraments and the papacy and infallible dogmas on the Virgin Mary, to name just a few past points of contention.

That is revolutionary — and unexpected from a pope like Benedict. It could encourage the view, which he and other conservatives say they reject, that all Christians are pretty much the same when it comes to beliefs, and the differences are just arguments over details.

*FACEPALM*

The sacraments, the infallible dogmas on the Blessed Mother, and even, to a lesser degree, the papacy (with the Anglo-Tridentines primarily, I think) are already points of contention within the AC, and not merely apparently not-as-important divisions between Rome and Canterbury. Gay priests and female priests and bishops may be the camel’s-back-breaking straws, but Anglicans have been a fractured group over more theologically profound questions far much longer than they’ve cared about how priests are using their penises — or if they have them at all. Some Anglicans, of course, accept the Assumption, and a good number the Immaculate Conception. Others prefer Eucharist as “symbol” (To hell with it!) and Calvinistic nonsense about predestination.

If anything, that female priests (not to mention bishops!) are out of the question in Catholicism and that openly gay priests will not be tolerated are enticing to, rather than problematic for, the Anglicans who are most likely to come home. What will keep them — those otherwise most inclined toward Rome — in the Continuing Anglican Church, or elsewhere within the crumbling AC, are reservation about the papacy, inter alia. Absolutely nothing from Benedict has suggested otherwise; permitting Anglicans to keep an Anglican Rite (just as we now freely hear the Tridentine Mass, as I do every Sunday, in Chicago) is not at all the same as permitting them to reject the Real Presence or the papacy. Benedict hasn’t If the latter, especially, were the case, they’d probably remain smell-and-bells Anglo-Catholics. B XVI is not opening the door without reservation; he’s decidedly not trying to turn the Church into the new “Roman Communion”, where you can believe just about anything and still be a good Catholic (a term that I use aware of the potential danger: A number of Catholics who don’t fall in line at all still think themselves to be good Catholics, and I mean not to judge them, but the distinction is clear: Catholics are supposed to believe X, Y, and Z to be Catholic; Anglicanism, lamentably, really is an à la carte religion).

Please, Washington Post, EDIT.

For now, I direct y’all to some solid commentary on this indescribably important papal pronouncement.

At the main TAC Weblog (@TAC, for the unfamiliar), Freddy Gray offers wonderfully nuanced reflection.

At Vox-Nova, the more progressive-leaning Catholic Morning’s Minion has a delectably snarky fable attributed to George Weigel, in response to Weigel’s predictably wrong-headed orthodox-capitalist response.

Davey (a fine Protestant, coming to Pope Benedict’s defense as these dissenters attack him!) at Theopolitical has his thoughts on Caritas here and a few comments on Weigel’s and Michael Novak’s thoughts (the latter of which I have yet to examine) here.

Halden, at Inhabitatio Dei, speaks of “The Heresy of Novak”.

Scott Richert, of Chronicles, offers his two cents at About.com

And at Mirror of Justice, Fr. Robert J. Araujo, S.J., presents this, which I’ve not yet read, either — but by my logic, it must be good because it’s long (and is at M.o.J.).

(Cross-posted at The Other Right)

Via Upturned Earth, Hitchens is in Athens.  I’ll leave the historical criticisms to more competent parties, but I just feel the need to kvetch about this for a moment:

Don’t let me blast on too long about how absolutely heart-stopping the brilliance of these people was. But did you know, for example, that the Parthenon forms, if viewed from the sky, a perfect equilateral triangle with the Temple of Aphaea, on the island of Aegina, and the Temple of Poseidon, at Cape Sounion? Did you appreciate that each column of the Parthenon makes a very slight inward incline, so that if projected upward into space they would eventually steeple themselves together at a symmetrical point in the empyrean? The “rightness” is located somewhere between the beauty of science and the science of beauty.

I don’t want to be trite here, or to insert polemics where they might not belong, but to reduce the Parthenon’s aesthetic appeal to scientized beauty, as Hitch does here, is to misunderstand the building and its purposes. As incredible as it is from an architectural standpoint, the building’s original purpose was just as much about accord with the rest of the polis, particularly the city’s religious andpolitical life, as it was about the pure technical accomplishment. Those congruent rooftops? The sanctuary to Athena? The large quantities of money in the basement? It would be misleading to identify this place as a church (at least until it got made into one) but it would also be a mistake to deny that it was a place where the civic and religious orders of Athenian society intersected fruitfully.  Yet addressing that possibility would throw quite a wrench into Hitchens’s devaluation of religious moderates, since it suggests a social order in which muthosand logos stand in a fruitful relation to each other, rather than their permanent irreconcilability.

All of which may be rather beside the point…  This is an article about Athens, not Atheism. Still, you got to get your jabs in where you can, especially when the pickins’ is this easy.

(Cross-posted at The Other Right)

Like Nathan, I’m also curious what the next encyclical will have to say… Undoubtedly it’ll make some demands for a return to a more moral economy, but I’ll be curious if the Church’s longstanding interest in subsidiarity and community translates into a more explicit localism or if the spatial side of things won’t enter into it much. My guess is not, but we’ll have to wait and see.

On that note, America has a piece up this morning about the end of consumerism and Catholic political life.  Some of it’s policy prescriptions sound rather 1972 (full employment? srsly?) but at least its a start in the right direction, particularly on connecting the excesses of consumerism with environmental destruction.  Nonetheless, this part gave me pause:

7. The church and subsidiarity. A principal objective of publicly proclaimed laws and regulations is to stigmatize certain types of behavior and to reward other types, thereby influencing individual values and behavior codes. Aristotle understood this: “Lawgivers make the citizens good by inculcating habits in them, and this is the aim of every lawgiver; if he does not succeed in doing that, his legislation is a failure. It is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.” While families, peer groups, churches and schools play the most important role in shaping behavior and inculcating values, public laws have a role to play as well. While civil law, for example, cannot make people stop holding racist beliefs, it can stop them from engaging in certain types of racist behavior. Over time that behavior (refusing service in a restaurant, for example) becomes delegitimized in public opinion.

Though this certainly isn’t my area of expertise, I think this does abuse to both subsidiarity and Aristotelian constitutionalism.  In Aristotle’s case, the task of cultivating good behavior is directly tied to the polis‘s immediacy. To quote from Ernest Barker’s introduction to The Politics,

It [the polis] is a small and intimate society: it is a church as well as a state: it makes no distinction between the province of the state and hat of society; it is, in a word, an integrated system of social ethics, which realizes to the full the capacity of its members and therefore claims their full allegiance. A limit of size is imposed upon it by its very nature and purpose; being a church and a system of social ethics, it cannot be a Babylon.

Clearly these are not the conditions under which we live; the functions of church, state, city, and locality are divided for us along completely different lines, and so the state’s attempts to establish mores (either left or right) does not posses the intimacy necessary to shape the character of the people. It can, and should, protect the rights of individuals to be free of undue persecution, but without the support from those other pillars of civic life, the outcome will not be the better public character: it will be culture war.

Now this shouldn’t turn us away from trying to address questions of civic character; it merely means that they must be addressed at whatever level best approximates the dynamics of the polis, specifically, at the level of the town, the church, and the neighborhood. This is why the biggest flaw in Wilbur’s policy outline, and in the Vatican’s current stance, is the lack of a fully articulated localism which recognizes that thepolis, and the law, requires more than the institution of the state, more even than the legal recognition of groups in abstract: it requires that our ways of life be actually intertwined with those of others, something possible only when our commitment to place and community is central to our outlook. ]]> http://www.theamericanconservative.com/postright/2009/06/18/286/feed/ 1 http://www.theamericanconservative.com/postright/2009/06/16/caritas-in-veritate/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=caritas-in-veritate http://www.theamericanconservative.com/postright/2009/06/16/caritas-in-veritate/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:43:57 +0000 Nathan P. Origer http://www.amconmag.com/postright/?p=66 MINT-AND-CORN COUNTRY, INDIANA — By way of NOR‘s Daily Links: Pope Benedict XVI’s eagerly awaited (at least by yours truly) social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, “is expected to be signed by the pope on June 29, and released at the beginning of summer.”

Unsurprisingly, the current global economic situation has piqued curiosity in this forthcoming document, and, one suspects, perhaps has influenced just what the former Cardinal Ratzinger has to say. From the article, a quotation from the pope, from February:

It is the Church’s duty to denounce the fundamental errors that have now been revealed in the collapse of the major American banks. Human greed is a form of idolatry that is against the true God, and is a falsification of the image of God with another god, Mammon. We must denounce this courageously, but also concretely, because grand moralizations are not helpful if they are not supported by a familiarity with reality, which helps us to understand what can be done concretely. The Church has never simply denounced evils, it also shows the paths that lead to justice, to charity, to the conversion of hearts. In the economy as well, justice is established only if there are just persons. And these persons are assembled through the conversion of hearts

Scott Richert has a lot more to say about the encyclical here:

Yet both [capitalists and socialists] fail to see that the problem is much more basic, as John Paul II (and Leo XIII and Pius XI before him) saw. In a world that values consumption above our duties to God and our fellow man, no economic system will ever in itself make up for our moral failings.

That, I believe, will be the theme that Pope Benedict XVI will pick up in Caritas in Veritate and carry forward. Those who believed (wrongly) that Centesimus annus “baptized capitalism” will be disappointed—but so, I think, will be those who believe that the answer to our current economic crisis is the revival of socialism [My emphasis. - NPO].

Instead, Pope Benedict will follow the course charted by his eminent predecessors as successor to Saint Peter, explaining why “economic law” cannot be allowed to trump Christian charity. The result will be a message that the modern world needs to hear; yet it will also be one that few, sadly, are likely to heed.

Notwithstanding the failings of the Holy Mother Church with respect to sustaining the sort of culture
that a vigorous Faith requires and the flaccidity of political Catholicism, I can think of nothing that the world needs now more than a new social encyclical, particularly from the first “crunchy pope“. The modern-day soi-disant Catholics — the Bill O’Reillys, Sean Hannitys, and Newt Gingriches, not to mention the Pelosis and Kennedys, who exist in a dimension so distant from our own as to require, one should think, theological-breathing apparatuses — may not heed this, but there are those of us — Catholic, but also Orthodox, Protestant, non-Christian, irreligious — who will appreciate the veritatis splendor in Pope Benedict’s proclamation and continue to build and to sustain local cultures and societies that place duty to God, family, and community before the idolization of stuff, that focus on economies (Kunstler: “Community is economy.”), rather than some silly abstraction called “the economy” that has more to do with the Gross Domestic Product than domestic productivity.