Press Release

DENTON, Nebraska – 30 August 2010 – The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter is pleased to announce the completion of a 28 minute DVD entitled “To God Who Giveth Joy To My Youth.”

The title, taken from the opening words of Mass in the Extraordinary Form, embodies the essential goal of priestly formation in the Fraternity of Saint Peter.  This new video explores in particular the work of priestly formation in the Fraternity’s English-speaking seminary in Denton, Nebraska.

The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter presents through this DVD an introduction helpful for generous young men discerning a priestly vocation.  At the same time, the film will provide everyone with a thorough portrait of daily life at the seminary.

In the Church, the members of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter have the fundamental charism of sanctifying themselves through the faithful celebration of Holy Mass and the Sacraments in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite.  At the same time, they offer to souls the fruits of the graces of their vocation by making the liturgy in the Extraordinary Form available to all Catholics.  Throughout the seminary’s intensive seven year program, each of the various elements and stages of formation has as its purpose the formation of priests whose union with God is pursued through the traditional liturgy.

Viewers are invited to see how the Fraternity seminary, drawing on the Church’s rich tradition of priestly formation, forms zealous priests through the study of Thomistic philosophy and theology, Latin, Gregorian Chant and also through the elements of community life including spiritual direction, manual labor and recreation.

Discover how one seminary receives a man and prepares him for his transformation into an Alter Christus, “Another Christ” for the glory of God and needs of souls.

Watch the seminary video here at FSSP.com on the right-hand sidebar or at the following sites:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omJ83APSdXA&feature=related

http://vimeo.com/14474135

http://gloria.tv/?media=95133

For DVD copies or for more information, please contact:

Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary
7880 West Denton Road
Denton, Nebraska  68339
Phone (402) 797-7700

About the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter

Established in 1988 by Pope John Paul II, the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter is a Society of Apostolic Life of Pontifical Right.  The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter strives to serve the Catholic Church by means of its own particular and specific role or objective, i.e. the sanctification of priests through the faithful celebration of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite.  Through the spiritual riches of the Church’s ancient Roman liturgy, the priests of the Fraternity seek to sanctify those entrusted to their care.  The Priestly Fraternity instructs and trains its priests to preserve, promote, and protect the Catholic Church’s authentic liturgical and spiritual traditions in over 16 countries worldwide. The Fraternity has over 200 priests and 125 seminarians studying in its two international seminaries in Bavaria, Germany and Denton, Nebraska.  For more information, please go to www.fssp.org.

About Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary

Located in rural Denton, Nebraska, is the English-speaking seminary for the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter.  Men from all over the world, come to study for the priesthood in the seminary’s seven year program.  A few represented countries include Australia, Hong Kong, the French West Indies and England.  For more information, please go to www.fsspolgs.org.

The Past
By Dennis McInerny

There would seem to be two major ways of mistreating the past. The first is to look upon it nostalgically; the second is to not look upon it at all, or at least not seriously, to treat it as something which has little or no bearing on the present, and which therefore any brave, progressive, ever forward-looking people can afford to ignore.

A bit of nostalgia every now and then need not necessarily be a bad thing, but what I have in mind by referring to a nostalgic regard for the past is an attitude which is put in place by the practice of imaginatively doctoring and reshaping the past so that it becomes something which, in fact, it never was. It is a practice which fosters a dreamy, sentimentalized rendition of the past, transforming it into a kind of Never-Never Land, to which one is constantly appealing, usually as a standing indictment against every aspect of the present, and the obsessive commitment to which serves to prevent a person from living fully and responsibly in the present. This attitude produces an essentially fictionalized past, into which one can attempt to escape every now and then to elude the pressing demands of the here and now. In the end, a nostalgic regard for the past then turns out to be, ironically, a way of not dealing with the past at all, not with the real past, at any rate. The “past” being dealt with is a distortion; it is what one supposes the past to have been, or, often, simply what one wishes it to have been. Such an attitude can have nothing to do with a healthy understanding of and respect for tradition.

The second way we can mistreat the past is to pretend that it is something which can be blithely discounted, as having no practical applications to the present. This is the delusion which often burdens those people who are mindlessly dedicated to the idea of Progress—understood as that grand and glorious process by which god-like man becomes the mastermind and chief project engineer of his own destiny.

There are any number of clichés by which, albeit perhaps only obliquely, an attempt is made to denigrate the importance of the past. Let’s consider a few of them. “The past is past,” we are solemnly informed, as if we didn’t know as much. But the idea being implied by the phrase is that the past is irrelevant. “You can’t relive the past.” A truth no sane person would be prepared to deny, but a healthy regard of the past does not consist in a futile attempt to relive it, but rather simply in living in the present (that, after all, is our only option), but with a lively sense of what the past has to teach us. “There’s no going back.” Of course not, if by that one means that some sort of science fiction time-travel excursion into the days of yore is a real possibility. However, there is a kind of “going back” with regard to the past which is not only possible but absolutely necessary. Finally, we hear it said, “You can’t set back the clock,” which is flatly false. Not only can we set back the clock, we must do so every autumn, otherwise we are going to be out of step, time-wise, with the rest of the world.

But how is it that it is not only possible but even necessary to “go back” with regard to the past? Generally, we must continuously go back to the past in the sense that we must keep in constant touch with it, habitually refer to it, consult it, review it, all for the sake of our own edification and education. The past must serve as one of our principal teachers. In more specific terms, we must go back to the past because it is the complete record of all of our travels which explain how we got to where we presently find ourselves. Let us say that, with regard to this or that matter, where we presently find ourselves is not where we really should be. Somewhere in the past, distant or proximate, we took a wrong turn, and ended up on a road which led us to a rather bad situation. It would not be a sign of wisdom to be content with remaining in a bad situation. The thing to do is to get out of that situation as soon as possible. And in more cases than not this would involve some serious back-tracking. We would need to retrace our steps, go back to that fork in the road where we took the wrong turn which led us to a place where it is not at all to our benefit to be. To continue to follow a road which has brought us to an admittedly bad situation would be only to bring us eventually to even worse situations. And that would be the height of irrationality. There are times in life when the only responsible and rational way we can go forward is by going back, returning to the point where we became disoriented and started going in the wrong direction.

No, we cannot relive the past, but there is a sense in which the past can be redeemed, by attempting to undo the damage which we have done in the past, insofar as that is possible. This is what the concept of reparation is all about.

We can never live fully in the present unless we live in such a way that we are always, so to speak, carrying the past along with us as we move along from day to day, not as a burden that inhibits genuine progress, but as an illuminating guide that makes genuine progress possible. We must pause occasionally to carefully scrutinize the past, for the purpose of identifying therein the mistakes we have made, the wrong turns we have taken, so that, armed with that knowledge, we can then take remedial action. And isn’t this precisely what we do, on a personal basis, whenever we examine our conscience?

Institutions as well as individuals must live with a lively awareness of the past; they too must, as it were, periodically examine their consciences. As is the case with individuals, institutions can take wrong turns, and begin heading down roads which could lead them into very precarious predicaments. To ignore the past is to poison the present and jeopardize the future. And for institutions to suppose that it is never necessary for them to “go back” in order meaningfully to “go forward” is for them to keep to a road which could terminate in complete disaster.

This article originally appeared in the April 2009 North American Fraternity Newsletter.  To receive our newsletter free by mail, please visit our subscription page.

by Dennis McInerny

The essential spirit of any given age or society is often most directly revealed by what it estimates to be the principal virtues, and the most heinous vices. If we were to allow the mass media to be our guide in this matter, we could easily conclude our age rates tolerance as among the highest of virtues. There is certainly much emphasis given to tolerance today. We are constantly being reminded how important it is to be tolerant of one another. And, negatively, we are regularly warned of the evils of intolerance.

What are we to make of the emphasis that is currently given to the subject of tolerance? Should it be regarded as just one more sign of the vigorous moral health of the society in which we live? Or does it lend itself to another, considerably less favorable, interpretation?

In attempting to answer these questions it is well that we begin at the beginning. It might seem, at first glance, that tolerance should be classified as a moral virtue. Regarded as such, if the question is, “should we strive to be tolerant and avoid being intolerant?” the unhesitant response would be, “Yes”. After all, who would not want to be virtuous, who would not want to avoid vice? If tolerance just as such is a moral virtue, then tolerance just as such is a good thing. But are we justified in unqualifiedly accepting tolerance as a moral virtue? I think not.

We need to clarify our ideas concerning this important subject. What is tolerance? The word “tolerance” derives from the Latin verb tolare, which means to bear, to endure, to put up with. The object of tolerance, that which is borne or endured or put up with, is invariably something negative. We speak, for example, of people who have a low tolerance for distractions, meaning that they are easily distracted. Or, to cite another example, the physiologists tell us that women, on average, have a higher tolerance for physical pain than do men, meaning that they can put up with pain better than can men.

Now, the thing to note about tolerance is that, just as such, it has no immediate moral dimension to it. The inability to tolerate distractions may be simply a matter of natural temperament, and the ability to tolerate pain can be explained in terms of one’s physical make-up, things over which a person has no direct control. Whether or not tolerance takes on a virtuous character very much depends on its being an attitude which is deliberately assumed.

To the best of my knowledge, St. Thomas never regards tolerance, just as such, as a moral virtue. It would seem that the actual moral virtue that tolerance comes closest to is patience. The virtue of patience, unlike tolerance, is not the mere enduring of something difficult or painful, but it is doing so for a higher end. Saint Thomas teaches that patience represents a conscious, willed effort to preserve a rational good in the face of sorrow. The patient person puts up with difficulties for the sake of a good that transcends those difficulties. So, we take note of the fact that the saints are always patient, because they bear all the crosses that are sent to them for the supreme good which is the love of God.

Is it ever permissible to tolerate things which are not merely negative but positively evil? Not only is it permissible, sometimes it is unavoidable. There are certain circumstances in which particular evils must be put up with, and this is because any attempt to get rid of them would very likely only give rise to yet greater evils, and our second state will be worse than the first. But such circumstances should be considered exceptional, and the salient point to stress here is that to tolerate evil in such circumstances does not at all mean to approve of it. The evil is simply “put up with,” borne, as a painful presence which, if it were possible to do so, one would promptly take action to get rid of it.
A critical distinction has to be made, then, between tolerance as simply putting up with an evil which at the moment cannot be gotten rid of, and tolerance which, beyond taking a permissive attitude toward evil, actually approves of it. It is this second understanding of tolerance, tolerance which involves both permitting and approving of evil, which is being so energetically fostered in our society today. And it is to be just as energetically resisted. We will call this understanding of tolerance—a grave misunderstanding, really—indiscriminate tolerance.

Indiscriminate tolerance, which is indifferent to the moral quality of the object to which it is directed, is quite irrational, and radically destructive in its effects upon society.

The fervent advocates of indiscriminate tolerance would want us to believe that they are completely “open” and “non-judgmental” in their own attitudes, and that they are willing to tolerate just about anything. But the fact of the matter is that they are very selective in their tolerance, and the one thing they will absolutely not tolerate is that free play be given to  opinions contrary to their own. What is considerably worse, many of the advocates of indiscriminate tolerance are promoting an attitude that entails the permitting and the approving of behaviors which are intrinsically evil. In other words, they are advocating a subjective tolerance for what is objectively intolerable. In their vocabulary “tolerance”

It is imperative, in trying times such as these, that we battle unstintingly on behalf of the objective status of the moral law, and thereby preserve our own moral integrity. We must not allow ourselves to be cowed or intimidated by a distorted understanding of tolerance, and of the role it should play in society. We must keep our moral wits about us. Let us think clearly and speak without evasion or ambiguity concerning the moral law. Tolerance is good only if it implies no endorsement whatever of evil. If there is anything in this world which is emphatically and unquestionably intolerable, it is the approving toleration of evil.

This article originally appeared in the March 2004 North American District Fraternity Newsletter.  To receive our newsletter free by mail, please visit out subscription page.

Free Will and God’s Will
by Dennis McInerny

It is an act of the will to deny free will, and those who insist upon doing so deserve to be put in the same category as those who refuse to accept the fact that the earth is a sphere. As Catholics, we of course take free will for granted, as well we should, for it was granted to us as a free gift. Besides, it would not contribute much to good mental or spiritual health to deny the obvious. There is no questioning the sheer factualness of free will, but that does not mean that serious questions concerning the nature of free will cannot be raised, as well as questions about how free will is to be properly understood with respect to our relation with the omniscient and all-powerful God.

One question which is often raised regarding the matter of free will is this: How is it related to God’s foreknowledge? Put more pointedly, how is our free will to be reconciled with God’s foreknowledge? Let us begin by stating the problem clearly. God, both faith and reason tells us, is omniscient. He knows every aspect of our lives, down to the tiniest detail. Furthermore, He knows what St. Thomas calls future contingencies. What this means, in plain terms, is that God knows exactly what you will freely choose to do tomorrow afternoon, or next Tuesday morning. But does not God’s foreknowledge then determine what you will do tomorrow afternoon or next Tuesday morning, so that you will not be acting freely after all? The basic idea is this: because God knows what you will do in the future, what you will do has already been settled, and though you may think you are acting freely, you really are not. God’s knowledge has programed you, so to speak, to act in a certain way, and you are destined to act in precisely that way no matter what.

Is that an accurate account of what actually happens? No, it is not. God’s foreknowledge of our free acts in no way impedes, much less cancels out, the freedom with which we perform those acts. By way of offering an imperfect but nonetheless helpful explanation for this, I invite you to consider how it is the case, even on a purely human level, that foreknowledge does not determine free acts. Is it not true that sometimes we can be pretty sure, perhaps almost positively sure, how certain people, people whom we know very well, are going to act in certain situations? Given the person, given the situation, we can confidently predict what is going to happen. Take the case of my cousin Cassandra. If you bring up subject X with Cassandra, I can guarantee that she is going to respond in Y way. I’m willing to bet on it. Cassandra will be here in five minutes or so. I ask you, when she arrives, to bring up subject X with her. Cassandra arrives. You bring up subject X, and, sure enough, she responds just in the Y way I said she would. Now, here’s the point: Did Cassandra act freely when she responded in the Y way to subject X? Yes, she did. Did the fact that I knew beforehand how she was going to respond make her act a bit less free? No, it did not.

That explanation is far from perfect, for there is no comparison between God’s foreknowledge and our own, for His knowledge is infinite and absolutely infallible. I can be wrong about what Cassandra will do in certain circumstances, in fact, in most circumstances; God is never wrong about what we will do in any circumstances. A footnote to the above. We speak of God’s “foreknowledge,” but that is actually a misnomer, a concession to our limited, time-bound intellects. The term suggests that God looks into the future, but there is no future for God, nor any past. He lives in an eternal Now, and by a vision which is forever of the present, He sees what is for us past or future.

Another question regarding free will has to do with how it is to be reconciled with the fact that everything, literally everything, we do is ultimately explained by the sustaining and enabling power of God’s will. It is fitting that we recall here Our Lord’s arresting words: “Without me you can do nothing.” We are incapable, without the enabling power of God, of performing any act at all, even a sinful act. (And that, by the way, is what makes sin so supreme an insult to the Divine Majesty.) But does not that then mean that it is God who is doing everything, and that we are not really free agents? Is it not He who acts, not us?

In times past there have been certain well-meaning but misguided philosophers and theologians who argued that God is in fact the direct, one and only cause of everything that happens in the universe. What this erroneous line of thinking does is remove the critical distinction between primary and secondary causation. God is indeed the First Cause, the ultimate explanation, of everything that is, and everything that happens. But in His divine wisdom He has created a whole array of secondary causes, causes which, though they act in subordination to and in absolute dependence upon His primary causality, are nonetheless real causes, acting with the kind and the degree of autonomyHe has given to them. You and I, as free agents, are secondary causes. Albeit not without the enabling power of God, we are the true efficient causes of any number of things that happen in our lives, a fact which none of us have any doubts about. Because we are truly free agents, we are responsible for what we bring about through our free agency. But think how it would be if what the above-mentioned philosophers and theologians taught was true. If God were, as they say, in fact the one and only cause of everything, that would mean that He is also the cause of sin, and that, of course, is blasphemy. “In no way,” proclaims St. Thomas, “is God the cause of sin.”

But back to our question: If we are incapable of doing anything without God’s enabling power, how can we be said to be truly free agents? As is the case with God’s omniscience, in this case too there is no incompatibility between God’s omnipotence and our free will. Here is the key to the issue. God enables us to act precisely as creatures who are possessed of free will, just as He enables all of the non-free agents in the universe to act according to their proper natures, in strict obedience to the laws He has established for them. God’s power is the explanation for the actions of non-free agents, as non-free agents; and His power is the explanation for the actions of free agents, as free agents. The fact that we can do nothing without God does not cancel out our freedom; it in fact makes it possible, for what He enables us to do is to act as free agents. God wills that we should act just as the creatures He created us to be, that is, as intellectual beings who are themselves the originating sources of the choices they make.

It is God’s power that explains the necessity behind the apple falling from the tree to the ground. It is God’s power that explains the freedom of the man beneath the tree who bends down and picks up the apple. “Without me you can do nothing.” Yes, but what we do, as rational creatures, we do freely.

This article originally appeared in the November 2009 North American District Fraternity Newsletter.  To receive our newsletter free by mail, please visit our subscription page.

Language and Truth (Part II)

By Dennis McInerny

The movement which was known as the Higher Criticism represented a particularly serious—perhaps we should say, the most serious—attack on language, understood as the bearer of truth, because the movement had the temerity to call into question the integrity of the Bible. Knowing as we do by our faith that the author of the Bible is no other than God Himself, it would be no exaggeration to say that the whole approach of the movement amounted to an elaborate exercise in something very much like blasphemy.

If modern intellectuals saw fit to show contempt for a divine author, it is little wonder that, over the course of time, human authors, and the language in which they expressed their ideas, became the objects of an even more thoroughgoing contempt. And that is precisely what is happening today on a rather large scale.  The name to be given to the contemporary general attack upon the integrity of language is Deconstruction. And Deconstruction can be taken for a more polite way of saying “destruction.”

Deconstruction, which has been aptly described by Father Stanley Jaki as “the latest fad in intellectual self-extermination,” is for the most part the brainchild of academic intellectuals. Deconstruction is a narrow, self-serving, and crudely reductionistic form of critical analysis which is applied to many disciplines, but which to date has been operating principally within the field of literature, with that field having suffered much damage as a result. A poignant account of the havoc wreaked by Deconstruction within contemporary literary studies is provided us by Professor R.V. Young, in his book At War With the Word, which I highly recommend.

The main thrust of the destructive activity which is the heart of Deconstruction is directed against the authority of the author, and, more broadly, against the very purpose of language as the bearer of objective meaning and truth. Traditionally, the critic approached a book and its author in an attitude of respectful deference. He came to them first and foremost as a simple appreciator. The critic saw his task as the discernment, and then the explication, of the meaning the author intended to convey through the book he had written. The meaning the critic sought was objective, incorporated within the language of the text.

The Deconstructionist critic turns this traditional understanding of literary criticism topsy-turvy. The authoritative status of the author is cavalierly disregarded, and the meaning which the author may have intended to convey in his book is now seen as something of only incidental interest. Under the new dispensation created by Deconstruction, it is the critic of the book, not its author, who is to tell us what it really means. And the book itself, the literary text, effectively loses its status as a conveyor of objective truth. It becomes malleable clay in the ever active hands of the Deconstructionist critic, who gratuitously transforms it into a means for furthering his heavily ideological agenda.

If Deconstruction were no more than the latest in-house diversionary amusement of academic intellectuals, there would be no good reason for being especially concerned about it. But it is considerably more than that. Two points are worth considering here. First, academic intellectuals have an immense albeit indirect influence upon society at large, for they have before them daily, in the form of the captive audience which is their students, the next generation of a society’s leaders. Second, Deconstruction is not simply a new methodology for doing literary criticism; it is a methodology which is inspired and driven by a philosophy which has become essentially nihilistic.

Deconstruction is one of the most recent, and particularly virulent, strains of philosophical idealism. Philosophical idealism is a philosophy which, as its name suggests, puts more value on ideas in the mind than on the things in the world of which ideas are the representations. In other words, it is basically subjective in its orientation and commitments, in contrast to the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, which is pronouncedly objective in every respect. For St. Thomas, and for Scholastic philosophy in general, the thing in the world always takes precedence over the idea in the mind. Ideas are most certainly important, but as the means by which we come to know things, and not as ends in themselves.

The principal problem with any kind of philosophical idealism is to be found in its rooted subjectivism. If ideas take precedence over things, it follows necessarily that the subjective order, represented by the individual entertaining the ideas, is going to take precedence over the objective order. And what follows upon subjectivism, as surely as night follows day, is relativism, for ideas are intensely personal, and if I count ideas as more important than things, then my ideas become the standard for truth. And the same is the case with you, if you are committed to philosophical idealism. With a situation like this, the objective status of truth is quickly lost sight of. Truth becomes relative to this or that person. Such relativism, if it becomes pervasive in any society, can never become a permanent state of affairs. Either the society recovers its sanity, and returns to health by recognizing the objective status of truth, or the society slowly but surely lapses into nihilism.

Not all forms of philosophical idealism necessarily descend into nihilism, but this is what has happened to Deconstruction. It is at war with the word, in Professor Young’s telling phrase, because it rightly sees the word—i.e., language in general—as the bearer of truth, and it is the enemy of truth.
Deconstruction represents an abdication of the most serious responsibility of any genuine literary scholar: the dedicated attempt to understand the workings of the mind of another human person, as expressed in a text written by that person—certainly one of the most challenging tasks any of us can take on, requiring much patience and perception. The Deconstructionist critic opts for the easy way out. He does not have to strain to determine the objective meaning embodied in a text, because he is bent on making a text mean only what he wants it to mean. The point is not to grasp the written thought of others, but to impose one’s own thought upon what others have written. There are a variety of ways we can insult our fellow human beings, past and present, but this has to stand as among the more devious, and cowardly.

The damage which has been done, and continues to be done, by the phenomenon called Deconstruction is considerable. What should be our response to this? A young man once came to an old sage, complaining about the manifold abuses of language that abounded in the society in which they lived, and asked what he could do about it. He was expecting to receive from the sage an elaborate response to his question. The sage simply told him, “Speak the truth.” “Is that all?” the young man said. “That is everything,” the sage responded.

This article originally appeared in the October 2004 North American District Fraternity Newsletter.  To receive our newsletter by mail free, please visit our subscription page.

Politics and Virtue
By Dennis McInerny

How many of us today would be inclined to associate virtue with politics? Not many, I would suspect.And for good reason. It would take only a superficial glance at the contemporary political scene. Pick any country you choose to corroborate what we doubtless already suspected, that virtue is not much in evidence there, if it is to be found at all. But what if we were to shift our attention from the factual to the theoretical, and ask: How often do we hear it said, or even suggested, that virtue should play an important role in politics? How many people today, be they average citizens, or political scientists or commentators, would tend easily to commingle in their thought the idea of virtue and the idea of politics? And how many, do you think, seriously believe, and would even be willing to argue the point, that the principal qualification for elected office, pure and simple, is virtue, that to be a good political leader you must be in the first instance a good person? I would suspect, once again, not many.

Most people today would be rather surprised in some cases pleasantly, in some cases not so pleasantly to learn that there should be a natural affinity between politics and virtue. Not that we should to be too quick to blame them on that account, for, if they are at all aware of what typically transpires in the political realm, they could be excused for believing that it is not virtue, but its very opposite, which is the key prerequisite for securing in that realm a thriving, even an illustrious, career.

The fact that it would seldom dawn on us to think of politics and virtue together is but one more indication (as if we needed another) of the extremely muddled quality of our thought. We have become strangers to wisdom. The only remedy for that estrangement is to go to the wise and to listen to what they have to say to us, and to learn from them. And who are the wise? Those who bask in the wisdom of God. Ite ad Thomam, “Go to Thomas!” the great Pope Leo XIII admonishes us, the Thomas in question here being of course St. Thomas Aquinas, the Universal Doctor.

For St. Thomas, it was elementary that politics and virtue should go together. In this he did not consider that he was being at all original, but simply repeating one of the seminal truths of the perennial philosophy, particularly as expressed earlier by philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, who in this were reflecting how closely attuned they were to the natural law. For all three of these thinkers the only truly human society was a just society that is, a society which was characterized by the dominance in it of the virtue of justice, the preeminent social or political virtue and the foundational explanation for a just society is just leadership. A truly just leader would be an all-around virtuous person, for we know that the moral virtues stand or fall together. No one can be truly just and lacking in the other virtues. So, it is virtue in general that ensures a healthy political community.

More immediately, any political community becomes just, and maintains itself in justice, through the instrumentality of just laws. And of course just laws could have no other reasonable source but just legislators. This being so, it does not the least bit surprise us to learn that, for St. Thomas, the principal purpose of civil law is to make men virtuous. Law should be a significant contributor to our moral betterment. How far we have fallen away from this critically important and beautiful principle! We have now descended to the tragic state of affairs where some of our laws, far from promoting virtue, are specifically designed to facilitate vice, such as the laws governing abortion, which give sanction to the commission of the most heinous, the most unnatural kind of crime.

St. Thomas believed that monarchy was the best from of government, because this kind of government approaches nearest in resemblance to the divine government, whereby God rules the world from the beginning. Lest we be prompted peremptorily to dismiss this point of view, as being hopelessly obsolete and quite irrelevant to our times, let us pay heed to the learned Dominican. St. Thomas was not naive, and while he declares monarchy to be the best form of government, it was also for him the most dangerous, for, fallen human nature being what it is, a king lacking in virtue can quickly turn into a tyrant. (By the way, to the extent that we should think that monarchy, broadly defined, is a thing of the past, we might ponder a devolved phenomenon respecting the chief executive office of the United States, which many historians now commonly refer to as the regal presidency. The U. S. president, in many respects, has become in the exercise of his powers much like a king, in flagrant contradiction to what the Founding Fathers had in mind.)

Monarchy is the best form of government only if the king is virtuous, and, to boot, the most virtuous person in the realm. There is nothing that I have been able to find in St. Thomas’ writings to indicate that he ever favored an hereditary monarchy. In any event, he is explicit in stating the opposite: the king is to be elected by the people. Because the burdens of government would be too great for any one person, no matter how virtuous, the king would be assisted by aristocrats. We might reflexively blanche at that term, dyed-in-the-wool democrats that we probably all consider ourselves to be. But wait. The term “aristocrats” comes from the Greek aristoi, which simply means “the best.” The best in this case are the morally best, the most virtuous. Thus, the virtuous king is surrounded by virtuous assistants. Let us listen to St. Thomas as he sums up for us what he would consider to be the best form of government.

Accordingly, the best form of government is a political community or kingdom wherein one is given the power to preside over all according to his virtue, while under him are others having governing power according to their virtue, and yet government of this kind is shared by all, both because they are eligible to govern, and because the rulers are chosen by all. For this is the best form of polity, being partly kingdom since there is one who is the head of all, partly aristocracy insofar as a number of persons are set in authority, partly democracy, i.e., government by the people, insofar as the rulers can be chosen from the people, and the people have the right to choose their rulers.

Is such an arrangement realizable, especially in the light of present day political realities? Perhaps not, at least not in every respect. But it is by no means to be dismissed as having no application to the conditions of our times. What we must be chiefly guided by is the governing principle of St. Thomas’s own political thought, that principle which, very much to our detriment, has become foreign to us: the idea that politics and virtue should go hand in hand. We must learn how to see and appreciate something which should be for us, but in fact is not, a most obvious, common sense truth that a “good society” is impossible without good people, and that “virtuous person” and “good leader” should be regarded as synonymous terms.

This article originally appeared in the May 2009 edition of the North American Fraternity Newsletter. To receive our free newsletter by mail please visit our subscription page.

by Rev. Fr. John Rickert, FSSP

This  Tuesday, the 29th of June, is the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. The more the Church faces attack, the more we need to be grateful that we are established on the rock established by Christ, against Whom the powers of hell will not prevail.

“Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build My Church.” +

These days it is very sad but clear that our society is drifting away from Christianity, and I would argue that that is what inevitably happens, at least in the long run, when one departs from the only authentic, original Christianity given by Christ Himself directly to His Apostles with St. Peter as head. It is not uncommon these days to run into people who claim to be Christian or at least to be “spiritual” in some sense who say things like, “I’m religious and I believe in God, but I don’t believe in organized religion.”

But then we have to ask: What if God Himself is the one Who organized it? If a religion is organized by God Himself, then we would not be sincere in saying that we truly believe in Him if we refused to follow the religion He Himself has given us. And in fact we do believe and profess that Our Lord did organize a religion, that this is reflected in what we see in the Bible and Sacred Tradition, that this Church still exists, and it is the Catholic Church.

“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church,” Our Lord says, in Matthew ch. 16. His Church, He says, not Peter’s or anyone else’s. God has organized, constructed, and established His own Church, to the point that He calls it His own mystical body. If we sincerely believe in God, we must accept what He has established for us.

The primacy of St. Peter is especially clear in the verse I just mentioned, which also talks about the conferral of the keys of the kingdom to St. Peter. His primacy is also clear from several other passages in Scripture. For example, the list of the Apostles given in St. Matthew calls Peter “the first,” even though the narrative shows that he was not the first one to be called.  (Matthew 10:4) Another example is on Easter morning: St.Peter and St. John run to the empty tomb, and St. John gets there first, but he waits for St. Peter to enter

before him. ( John 20:4-8 ) “St. Peter appears first in all things,” Bishop Bossuet says,( Sermon on the Unity of the Church.) “the first to confess the faith ( Matthew 16:18 )…the first of the Apostles to see Christ risen from the dead ( 1 Cor. 15:5 )… the first to confirm the Faith by a miracle, ( Acts 3:6-7 ) the first to convert Jews, ( Acts 2:41 ) and the first to receive Gentiles. ( Acts 10:45-48 ) The first in everything.”

Another example is more indirect, but it is significant, because the symbolism is so clear. You recall the time when Our Lord and the Apostles were in a boat and a terrible storm arose. Our Lord was asleep in the hull of the ship and the rest were all afraid that they were going to die. St. Peter goes over to Our Lord and says, “Wake up! Don’t you realize we are about to drown?” And Christ then calms the waters.

Now, this event sounds almost exactly like one we know from the Old Testament, from the first chapter of Jonah. Jonah is asleep in the hull of the ship, a terrible storm arises, and the captain of the ship comes to Jonah and says, “Wake up! How can you be you sleeping? We’re about to drown!” So, in both cases we have a ship, a storm, and the savior asleep in the hull of the ship. Jonah clearly corresponds to Christ. Who is the captain?

It is no surprise, then, that the Church has been called “the barque of Peter,” – b a r q u e, a ship. And it is true that on a ship, one captain is just the right number. If there were no captain at all, the situation would differ little, really, from a mutiny. If there were more than one captain, there would be an uncertainty on which way to turn the rudder. The same is true for the Church. One Pope is enough and not too many. The office and character of the papacy are unique in the Church and they can’t be anythingother than unique.

Relatively recently, Our Holy Father Pope Benedict expressed this with refreshing vigor and clarity. He gave a long and excellent series of Wednesday audiences on the Fathers of the Church. These are available from the Vatican’s website (for free) and collected in book form (but not for free). In his general audience of June 7, 2007, the Holy Father said this in regard to St. Cyprian:

The Church was easily his favorite subject. Cyprian distinguished between the visible, hierarchical Church and the invisible mystical Church but forcefully affirmed that the Church is one, founded on Peter. He never wearied of repeating that “if a man deserts the Chair of Peter upon whom the Church was built, does he think that he is in the Church?” Cyprian knew well that “outside the Church there is no salvation,” and said so in strong words (Epistles 4, 4 and 73, 21); and he knew that “no one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as mother.” (De Unitate, 6.)  An indispensable characteristic of the Church is unity, symbolized by Christ’s seamless garment (ibid. 7): Cyprian said, this unity is founded on Peter, (ibid. 4) and its perfect fulfilment in the Eucharist. (Ep 63, 13.)

Thank you, Holy Father. And on March 5, 2008, the Holy Father said this in regard to the outstanding pontiff and Doctor of the Church, Pope St. Leo the Great:

This faith in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, was affirmed by the Pope in an important doctrinal text sent to the Bishop of Constantinople, the so-called “Tome to Flavianus,” which, when read at Chalcedon, was received by the bishops present with an eloquent acclamation, as recorded in the acts of the Council: “Peter has spoken through the mouth of Leo!” the Council Fathers exclaimed with one voice. From this intervention, and from the others made during the Christological controversy of those years, it is evident how the Pope noted with particular urgency the responsibility of the Successor of Peter; which role is unique in the Church. For, “to a sole Apostle is entrusted what is communicated to all the Apostles,” as Leo affirms in one of his sermons on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul [Sermon 83.2] And the Pontiff knew how to exercize this responsibility, in the West and in the East, by intervening in different circumstances with prudence, firmness, and clarity through his writings and legates. He demonstrated in this way how the exercize of Roman primacy was necessary then, as it is today, for the efficacious serving of communion, a characteristic of the unique Church of Christ.

Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia. Where Peter is, there is the Church. Please pray every day for the Holy Father, for our bishop, and for all bishops and priests.

Language and Truth (Part I)
by Dennis McInerny

Language is one of our most precious possessions, and, like many other of our precious possessions, we have, alas, learned how to subject it to considerable abuse. Why is language so precious? Because it is the principal means by which we come to know the full truth of things. Language was created to be the bearer of truth. What a profanation of language, then, if it is used for any other purpose than that for which it was created!

People sometimes wonder why St. Thomas was so uncompromising in the stern attitude he took toward lying. The explanation for this is quite simple: seldom has there lived a man with a greater respect for the truth than Friar Thomas of Aquino. For him, nothing was more important than the truth because he knew that, ultimately considered, the truth is not simply something; it is the supreme Someone, for God is Truth. Truth, then, is divine, and the Word that Truth speaks is divine, and in that eternal locution Love is eternally made present. The profoundest and richest of truths is the mystery of the Holy Trinity, in which, in a sense, all things are encompassed and explained.

There is a veritable war being waged against language today. It is a war that has been going on for better than 200 years, and at the moment things are not faring especially well for language. Because the very purpose of language is to be a bearer of truth, it is really truth which is the enemy this war seeks to destroy. And that is what makes this war an especially unholy one.

The war against language, at least in its modern version—which in historical terms may be considered to be its most serious version—can be said to have begun in the late eighteenth century, with the attacks launched against the integrity of the language of the Bible. This was done within a movement known as the Higher Criticism, which prided itself on being seriously “scientific,” and made much use of what was called the “historical method.”

Whatever positive aspects might be cited with regard to the Higher Criticism, say in the form of certain purely technical approaches it took toward the interpretation of literary texts, there is no question but that its dominant effects were pervasively and destructively negative. That is explained by the basic attitude which this movement took toward the Bible.

All the books that have ever existed in the world, that now exist, or that ever will exist, can be divided into two categories: there is the Bible in one category, and there are all the rest of the books in the other. The Bible, in other words, is literally unique, sui generis, and the obvious reason for this, of course, is that it is the inspired word of God. However it would need to be qualified, the statement that “God is the Author of the Bible” is foundationally and incontestably true.

If any scholar comes to the serious study of the Bible without a lively sense that he is dealing with the most special book in the world, without, that is, regarding it as the inspired word of God, then that scholar, whatever might be his learning in other respects, is burdened with a completely incapacitating ignorance. He is simply blind to the true identity of the object of his study. He would be like Christopher Columbus on his first voyage into this hemisphere, thinking he was exploring the Indies when in fact it was the Americas he was dealing with.

But the proponents of the Higher Criticism did not get the true identity of the Bible wrong through an honest mistake. They had a very definite agenda in mind. They deliberately set out to show that the Bible, though perhaps deserving of special status as a book, was not to be regarded as divinely inspired. These men took a purely naturalistic approach toward Sacred Scripture, completely stripping it of the specialness owed it because of its supernatural origins.

For the Higher Criticism, the Bible was not something that came down from high; it came up from below, was solely the product of human imagination, as reflective of human desires and elevated aspirations. The Bible, for them, was to be recognized as just another form of mythology. The stories in the Bible were not to be taken as literally true, and certainly not those stories that have to do with miracles. The Higher Critics became past masters at explaining Biblical miracles by explaining them away, by transforming them into anything else but miracles.

One of the principal projects of the Higher Criticism was the “de-mythologization” of the Bible, which was simply a process by which the supernatural was reduced to the level of the natural. The principle result of the attention the Higher Critics gave to the New Testament in particular was the denial of Christ’s divinity. They created the specious distinction between the “historical Jesus” and the “Jesus of faith.” According to this distinction, the historical Jesus was a man who was born in Palestine during the reign of Caesar Augustus, and who lived and taught there for some thirty-three years. But that was exactly what he was—a man and no more.

The Jesus of faith, the Jesus who has come down to us through the medium of the movement called Christianity, that is to say, the Jesus who is regarded as divine and as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, that Jesus is no more than an invention of his followers—sincere people, no doubt, devout and touchingly enthusiastic, but severely deluded. In the end, for the Higher Critics, Jesus of Nazareth was an essentially good man, perhaps, but he certainly was not the eternal Son of God and the Redeemer of the world.

The basic message of the Higher Critics was that the language of the Bible is not to be trusted. The book does not say what it seems to say; it does not mean what it purports to mean. But are the Higher Critics themselves above criticism? Not at all. Actually, the radical flaws of the whole approach of the Higher Criticism were there to be seen and pointed out right from the beginning. But many highly placed intellectuals became quite enamored of the movement, and chose to be blind to its flaws, with the result that the Higher Criticism proved to be very influential, especially within Protestant circles. In fact, one of the chief causes of the secularization of the mainline Protestant denominations, which is now quite evident, was the influence of the Higher Criticism. With its emphasis on sola Scriptura, Protestantism was particularly vulnerable to the repercussions of a concerted effort to undermine the integrity of the Bible.

Today the radical flaws of the whole Higher Critical approach to Biblical studies are being systematically exposed by the impressive work of a growing cadre of competent scholars who, by and large, come out of the Evangelical Christian tradition. One of the ironies of the current situation is the fact that Catholic Scriptural scholarship, which for years showed itself to be healthily resistant to the seductions of the Higher Criticism and the so-called historical method, has now, sadly, succumbed to them. This turn of events is comparable, in its comic dimension, to what happened with those Catholic theologians who decided to jump on the bandwagon of Marxism after all its wheels had fallen off, and the rest of the world was finally recognizing the utter fraudulence of this philosophy. When Catholic scholars choose to put more emphasis on being scholars than on being Catholic, they are fated to dedicate themselves to lost causes. Shall we call it poetic justice?

This article originally appeared in the September 2004 issue of the North American Fraternity Newsletter. To receive our free monthly newsletter by mail, please visit our subscription page.

by Dennis McInerny

The irony of certain situations is sometimes so overpowering that it fairly takes one’s breath away. Such was the situation when Pontius Pilate uttered his famous question, What is truth? The reality which he was having doubts about he could have literally reached out and touched. And that is often how it is with all of us: the truth is right before our eyes, but we do not see it, and we do not see it because we do not want to see it. A corrupted will has succeeded in blinding the intellect.

What is truth? If the question is to be taken seriously—and there are few questions more worthy of being taken seriously than this one—then it deserves a considered philosophical response. In answering the question, philosophy begins by making a distinction between ontological truth and logical truth. Ontological truth is the truth of the actual existence of things. (“Ontological” comes from a Greek word meaning “existing things.”) To say that something is ontologically true, then, is to do no more than acknowledge that it really exists. To be true in this sense means simply to be an indisputable matter of fact. It is clear that this is the most foundational meaning of truth, where we must necessarily start—with actual existence.

But something can be ontologically true, an indisputable matter of fact, without anyone being the least bit aware of its existence. Enter logical truth. When a human mind becomes aware of the existence of something, call it X, and when it knows X as it really is (as opposed to having a distorted idea of the reality of X), then it can be said that the mind is in possession of the truth with regard to X. Thus the essence of logical truth is the correspondence between ideas in the mind and things in the world. The truth which is in the mind is made public through language, specifically through that linguistic unit which grammarians call a declarative sentence and which philosophers call a proposition. If any proposition corresponds with the facts, if it faithfully reflects what is actually the case in the real world, it is a true proposition. And of course if it fails in that respect it is a false proposition. “The moon is a satellite of earth” is a true proposition because that happens to be the way things really are, whereas “The moon is made of crushed popcorn” would qualify, most astronomers would agree, as a false proposition.

Given how ontological truth is related to logical truth, we can see that the latter is dependent upon the former. In order that there be a correspondence between an idea in the mind and a thing in the world, there must first be that thing in the world to which the idea in the mind can correspond.

Pontius Pilate’s scepticism toward the  truth did not represent a novel phenomenon. Throughout the entire course of their history, men have never been free, burdened as they are by a darkened intellect, from the baneful influence of scepticism. It is more prominent in some eras than in others, and it has to be said that our own era is suffering from a veritable plague of scepticism. The truth is under siege. Expediency has become the governing consideration. There are too many people today who are  concerned not so much with what is true as with what will work. A statement need not be true; what is important is that it have the capacity to move people to follow a certain course of action, and often irrespective of the moral quality of that action.

Relativism is the spawn of scepticism, and is, in a sense, more dangerous than scepticism, at least that extreme scepticism which attempts to deny the very reality of truth. Extreme scepticism is, after all, intrinsically self-contradictory, and this is because it must rely on the very thing, truth, which it claims does not exist. The extreme sceptic boldly proclaims, “There is no truth,” but how does he expect us to take that statement? As true, of course. He wants to have his cake and eat it too.

The peculiar danger of relativism lies in the fact that it robs truth of its proper meaning, and cynically redefines it for purely practical purposes. In a gesture of profligate magnanimity, relativism proclaims that there are many truths, as many, indeed, as there are individuals who want to invent it. In other words, truth, for the relativist, loses its critical objective status and becomes entirely subjective. I may think it true that abortion is wrong, and my neighbor may think it true that abortion is right, but not to worry, the relativist sweetly assures us. That is called pluralism, and pluralism is a good thing. In a pluralistic society everyone can be right and nobody has to be wrong, for it is up to each individual to decide what is true what is false. Needless to say, thinking along these lines provides a surefire blueprint for disaster. A purely “subjective truth” is not truth at all, for the foundation of truth is what actually is so, not what you or I might like to be so.

It is sometimes no easy matter to see the truth, even when it is right in front of our faces, nor is it easy steadfastly to adhere to the truth once we have grasped it. The ultimate explanation for this is to be found within ourselves. When it comes to attaining the truth, we must always begin with ourselves. We would be totally incapable of seeing the truth “out there” if we did not first have a truthful conception of who and what each of us, as individuals, really are.  Saint Teresa of Avila rightly makes humility the very first step for advancement in the spiritual life (which could be called the quintessential life of truth), and humility follows naturally upon our gaining a thoroughgoing and completely honest knowledge of ourselves.

If I am blind to the truth about myself, there is no way I will ever be able to discern truth from falsity in the world outside myself. There is a close association here between love and truth. We all know that we are under solemn mandate to love our neighbor as ourselves. But if I am debilitated by self-hatred, I am therefore insuperably prevented from fulfilling that mandate. A healthy self-love, then,  is a necessary condition for a genuine love of others. The situation is comparable with respect to the truth. The man who is wilfully blind to the truth about himself is for that reason going to be blind to all other presentations of the truth round about him. In fact, what he will end up doing is falsifying everything he sees, imposing his interior darkness on the world at large, turning that world upside down, seeing black as white and white as black. And if while in that condition he has the presumption to suppose that he is qualified to be a leader of others, then both he and those whom he leads will end up floundering about in the ditch.

This article originally appeared in the February 2009 North American District Fraternity Newsletter.  To receive our monthly newsletter free by mail, please visit our subscription page.

by Dennis McInerny

The eminent Thomistic philosopher Jacques Maritain took as his motto the phrase Distinguer pour unir, which I translate freely as, “Distinguish so that you will be able to unite.” Unless we form the habit of making critical distinctions, so that we clearly see how things differ and are separate from one another, we will never be able to discover the underlying unity that binds all things together. We cannot have a clear and complete vision of the “big picture” unless and until we appreciate the distinct things that go together to compose that picture.

So many of the difficulties with which we are beset today, both within the Church and in society as a whole, can be explained by our systematic failure to make distinctions. The most important distinction that we need constantly to be aware of—and the failure to acknowledge results in utter disaster—is the distinction between truth and falsity. It is upon that distinction that all other distinctions rest.

Clearly, the distinction between sickness and sin is an important one, and quite real. A real distinction, in contrast to a logical distinction, is one that actually exists in the objective order, and is independent of the mind. So, for example, the distinction between a hand and a foot is a real distinction; it is not one made up by the mind simply so that it can better understand the world. Likewise, the distinction between sickness and sin is a real distinction. No sane person would confuse the conscious killing of an innocent human being, an obvious sin, with the circumstance of, say, being afflicted by muscular dystrophy. And yet in contemporary thought there is much blurring of the distinction between sickness and sin.

What is the critical criterion for establishing the distinction between sickness and sin? It is the fact that sin is always the result of conscious, willed action on the part of a human agent. Let us recall the basic conditions that have to be met in order for a sin to be a sin. (a) There must be a thought, word, or deed that is contrary to God’s law. (b) The person must know what he is about when he thinks a certain thought, says a certain word, or does a certain deed that is contrary to God’s law. (c) The person must freely will what he knows. All this can be summed up by saying that sin is something we are responsible for. Sin does not simply happen to us. We make it happen. If we sin, we have literally no one else but ourselves to blame for the sin.

In contrast to this, it is possible for us to become sick, perhaps seriously sick, through no fault of our own. By definition, one cannot sin and be morally innocent. But sickness, physical or mental, and complete moral innocence can go together, and often do.

But we must take note of a significant kind of overlapping that can take place between sickness and sin. Once again, we are always responsible for sin, and that is because sin is something done knowingly and willingly. (Conversely, if there is not sufficient knowledge and full consent of the will, there is no question of sin.) A sinner, in other words, is always at fault. This is obviously not the case with a person who is sick. We can become sick and not be in any way morally responsible for our sickness. It can indeed be something that simply happens to us.

But is this always the case? No, it is not. We all know that sometimes we can bring sickness upon ourselves, by the free actions that we perform. Furthermore, sometimes the free actions that we perform which result in sickness may be sinful actions. Think of the man who deliberately sets out to get drunk, succeeds, and as a result spends the whole following day in bed, quite sick and incapacitated. And as a result of his escapade he misses two days of work. Or, more seriously, consider the man who habituates himself to grave sexual sin, and as a result he contracts a deadly disease. These men are not innocent. The sicknesses they suffer are sicknesses they brought upon themselves.

At times, then, we ourselves can be the cause of the sicknesses we suffer. There are instances where sickness does not just happen; we make it happen.Let us consider another circumstance. Would it ever be possible that a physical or mental sickness with which a person is afflicted, through no fault of his own, could be a cause of sin in that person? The answer is No. We remind ourselves of a basic truth, often stressed by St. Thomas: the human will is the cause of sin. There is nothing in the universe, not Satan himself, that can cause us to sin, and this includes sickness. Granted, mental or physical sickness can affect a person in such a way so as to make it more difficult for him to combat the temptations to sin. But in such a case, as St. Paul assures us, the grace of God will always be sufficient.

We could imagine a situation where a person is so seriously ill, either mentally or physical, that the ability of that person to think clearly and to exercise his will with perfect freedom would be impaired. But in a situation of that sort the person would not be morally responsible for his actions, for the two conditions that must be met in order for sin to be present—sufficient knowledge, full consent of the will—would not be met. But the important point here, worth repeating, is that no state of sickness, mental or physical, just as such, can cause us to sin.

We live in an age that does not at all like the idea of sin, but—to use its own language—is quite “comfortable” with the idea of sickness. The intellectual elite that shapes our culture studiously avoids explaining adverse human behavior in terms of sin. Indeed, it is considered to be bad taste even to mention the word. But we are more than willing to explain just about all adverse behavior in terms of sickness. No one is a sinner. Everyone is merely sick. And if there is not an immediately available sickness by which a certain kind of aberrant behavior can be designated, then one will be quickly invented.

Modern psychology must bear much of the blame for this whole mode of thinking. “Mental illness” has now became a very capacious category; “syndromes” proliferate like bunny rabbits; and who can keep track of all the “addictions” and “disorders” by which the human race is now supposedly being victimized. The purpose behind the movement to remove “sin” from our vocabulary and replace it with “sickness” is as obvious as it is self-serving: to relieve human beings of the burden of responsibility for their actions. It is as if there is a dedicated effort to establish a perpetual game of passing the buck, to the accompaniment of a catchy ditty: “Everyone nicely is the same, no one really is to blame.”

Our concern here is with the importance of distinctions. There is, to be sure, a real distinction between mental health and mental sickness. Mental sickness, in other words, is not simply a fiction. But to attempt to reduce all adverse human behavior to mental illness blurs a real distinction, and serves to diminish the reality of genuine mental sickness, and its seriousness. It also has the devastating effect of destroying human dignity, for that dignity rests squarely on the fact that we are truly free, and are truly responsible for our actions. Take away the freedom and responsibility and the dignity is gone, and without the dignity men are reduced to the level of animals. Confession, repentance, and reparation are replaced by therapy.

This article originally appeared in the August 2004 North American District Fraternity Newsletter.  To receive our newsletter free by mail, please visit our subscription page.