Church & Culture
Liberty
Celebrating America’s independence is on the calendar this week, which means for most it’ll be a slow week at the office. Summer is nearly halfway over, and as we reflect on the courage it took for the United States to stand up to the British Empire, it’s a good time to reflect philosophically on what we truly have gained.
Freedom and liberty are used somewhat interchangeably, but are generally understood as the ability to do what you want, when you want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Many have laid down their lives to protect and defend our American way of life, and we owe it to them and their sacrifice to strive for a higher ideal.
One of the many benefits of practicing religion is that it calls you to be your fullest, best self. You understand the context of your life, your place in the universe, and how you are uniquely created to be here in this time and place. Many aspire to touch the lives of millions through broadcast media, sports, or politics. True impact, however, is almost guaranteed when you pour yourself into those around you.
When you live as you ought, when you are truly free and have the liberty to pray, serve, and love those around you, you build not just a life of fulfillment, but a life of impact. It’s why we’re more likely to remember the model of a friend, relative, or teacher rather than some far off celebrity.
Too much time is wasted scrolling, being anxious about a polarized society, or fretting about far off problems. The solution is not a moonshot to bring the whole world together with this one weird trick. The solution is to be the best version of yourself, to espouse a higher form of freedom, and to use your liberty for of others.
Frozen
In vitro fertilization is back in the news. The Alabama Supreme Court in recent weeks issued a ruling that recognized frozen embryos stored for use in IVF were accorded the rights of personhood under the law. Politicians on both sides of the aisle latched onto this political football, with everyone praising what they consider to be the essential good of IVF as an answer to a couple’s desire to have a child. Regrettably, they’re still wrong on the ethics and on the facts.
No one has a right to another person. This is a foundational principle that we wield to battle, in law and life, the evils of slavery, racism, sex trafficking, torture, and kidnapping. Every person is worthy of dignity and protection simply because they exist as a human person. The human body is a complex organism, a delicate machine with millions of parts, intricately functioning to maintain life. Human reproduction requires not one, but two people to achieve success. There’s dysfunction in every body, and some couples may not be able to have children due to these dysfunctions.
Thankfully, there are ethical medical solutions to these dysfunctions, but far too many are counseled that their solution and savior is IVF. The strong emotional response to the loss of fertility drives these couples to make the emotional, and destructively wrong, decision to use IVF.
IVF is morally wrong because, in every step of the process, it violates the basic dignity of the human person. It first promotes the philosophy that one person has a right to another. It intentionally creates multiple children through fertilization, with full knowledge that most of those embryos will be discarded. These fertilized eggs have a complete, unique DNA sequence. They have the essential blueprint that, given adequate hydration, nutrition, and shelter, would develop through all stages of life. They are human persons, like you or me, simply at a different stage of development.
IVF wrongfully deprives the child of the inherent right to be created through an act of mutual love by one’s parents. Instead, they are crafted in a sterile lab by an anonymous technician they will never meet. Once created, the embryos, a scientific term that simply refers to the earliest stage of human development, are frozen. Held in suspense, not permitted to die a natural death, they remain in this metaphysical hell until a scientist deigns to implant them in their mother’s womb.
Many embryos are implanted during the procedure with the hopes that just one of them will result in pregnancy. IVF has a dreadful success rate, meaning that even if a pregnancy is achieved, some number greater than one of these embryos dies in the process. One life created, built on the destruction of untold others.
Emotions are an important part of the human psyche, but they’re also deeply flawed and often wrong. Turning the desire of wanting to have a family into a scorched earth quest to achieve pregnancy at any cost distorts the “essential good” that IVF feigns to offer. It’s akin to a loving father wanting to keep his children safe, so he never lets them leave the house. That’s not love; that’s prison.
We have so much work to do in order to build a culture of life. That’s especially true in these days when it’s a true challenge to convince most of the electorate that there should be some, any limits to abortion. Many of the referendums passed in the days since Dobbs have resulted in even fewer restrictions on abortion than Roe. Parental consent, alternate counseling, doors wide enough for emergency medical equipment to pass through, and physician credentialing are all barriers to abortion too high under the law. If a physician in any other discipline practiced medicine without these basic safeguards, they’d lose their license, be the piñata of the trial bar, and likely jailed.
Despite this challenging work, we can never equivocate because that is the nature of ethics; they are unchanging. No one has a right to possess another person, and no one has the right to kill another person.
Platitudes
A frequent criticism of Christians is that, in times of great sorrow or difficulty, we fall back on platitudes rather than meaningful action. It’s true that we quote Scripture as a form of consolation and encouragement, but it should hardly be regarded as a platitude.
The Bible, and the ancient prayers of the Church, find their roots in very human expressions. Many books of the Old Testament, for example, were written while the Jewish people were in exile, longing for their homeland. Many were born and died in exile, never seeing the land promised to them. These authors wrote down their experiences, their hopes, and their dreams to encourage their nation and its decedents. They didn’t want them to forget God’s promise, and all the good things He had done for them.
The books of the Bible in the Canon of Scripture were written in adverse conditions, persecutions, war, violence, abject poverty, and even scandal. But the hope that they convey, encourages us to rise above the current circumstance and see God’s plan coming together. So when we are challenged, when we are tested, we do not fall into despair but see the small part that we play in salvation history.
These words were intended, from their authoring, to encourage, to give hope, and to strengthen. They were written to remind us of who we are, whose we are, our heritage, and our inheritance.
Breaking Faith
It’s challenging to remember the feelings we experienced at the election of Pope Francis. A total wild card, a true Vatican outsider, swept onto the world stage and took the Chair of St. Peter by storm. It was, in some ways, a bit refreshing. Pope Benedict XVI was deeply intellectual, providing the theological underpinnings that we need to sustain the faith. Still, we longed for the charismatic and energetic days of Pope John Paul II.
In those early days, Francis lamented the parochial clericalism. He dispensed with bestowing the rank of Monsignor on priests as a sign of gratitude for their good works. He asked us to go out and make a mess in our dioceses. Indeed, in this regard, he’s truly practiced what he’s preached.
Over the last decade, under the influence of living at the Curia, Francis has become a creature of the Vatican. He’s become exactly who he asked us to reject. He wields administrative law against his opponents, and uses the media as a tool of his decidedly ideological agenda.
The first few off-the-cuff remarks to the press that caused a stir could be understood. As a local bishop in Argentina, his media profile was a fraction of the attention that the pope receives. Now, ten years on, it’s his preferred method of stirring the pot. He knows the weight of papal words, even in casual settings, and has used them to move the ball down the field.
At the root of it all, the main problem is that Francis intentionally sows confusion. The Catholic Church is the only organized institution existing today that existed in the same format during the days of the Roman Empire. Why? It’s a ship steered by certain fundamental, immutable principles that keep it on course.
In many ways, Pope Francis is the quintessential theocratic political operative. He grants the Chinese Communist Party the co-authority to appoint bishops, and shrugs when they bypass him anyway. He creates counterfeit sacraments, but admonishes the clergy to only use them if they won’t be confusing. Francis calls an entire conference of bishops who dare question his agenda “backwards” and “reactionary.” He tells the world that our understanding of faith and morals “evolves.” He makes promises that no pope can ever make good on, and then winks when he inevitably cannot deliver.
Throughout Church history, there are many periods when the Church falls into disrepair, and the responsibility to right the ship falls to those outside of the highest echelons of authority. As the ironies pile up, one of the most clear examples is the life of St. Francis himself. Constant reform is the way of the Christian life, and it falls to the vibrant religious communities and the laity to rebuild God’s Church. We find ourselves in need of a new St. Francis to repair the inestimable damage wrought by Pope Francis.
Free
It’s hard to not be grateful when we realize the blessing of being born into this country. For all of its faults, we’ve built a Republic that thrives on pluralism. In South America, poverty, gang warfare, and narcoterrorism rule the day. In Europe, a land war rages on. In Asia, autocrats squeeze out dissent at home and abroad. Slavery, violence, oppression and subjugation are themes of human history, and the continue today unabated. And yet, in North America, we are at peace.
The stability and prosperity of our nation is a blessing, and one that we should not disparage. Our freedoms allow us to work, associate, play, and pray as we so choose. It’s a freedom that few other humans, outside the ruling class, have experienced.
We should fight furiously to preserve them and enter each day with a sense of profound gratitude to our Creator.
Slow Progress
We awake to find ourselves suddenly in a Post-Roe world. The question of abortion is thrown back into the political process, and it’s dawning on all of us that we spent 40 years praying for this day, and almost no time preparing for it.
The early political setbacks are hard to take. How is it that our intellectual opponents have so many people convinced that it’s a woman’s right to end the life of her child if it’s inconvenient? How can a society so moral and sensitive not only be permissive of this idea, but fanatically in favor of it?
In times like these, I find it helpful to consider things from a broader perspective. We exist in a tiny moment in history. Our lives of 60, 70, or 80 years are a blink of an eye. The positive impact that the Church has effected in society is remarkable. We are simply fighting the final battle.
In the days of the early church, children had zero value in society. They were entirely disposable, with infanticide occurring regularly. Newborn children could be taken to a certain part of land on the outskirts of town and abandoned to die.
Over the centuries, the Christian concept of the human person started to be accepted by society and enshrined in law. No longer were people valued for their utilitarian values; they were valued for existing. Christians placed a value on the life of a child, and the world followed.
Fifty years of terrible law informed the morality of modern-day America, teaching people that some life is disposable. It will take time, effort, and still more prayer to remove this cancer so entrenched in our morality. But it’s a fight that the Church must continue, to eradicate evil in the world, and to bring the Good News and freedom of the Gospel to all people.
Worth Celebrating
At every point in our Nation’s life, all 246 years, there have been voices predicting its imminent collapse. There’s no doubt that we have struggled in this unique experiment of human governance. Never has a group of people as diverse as our population come together and governed for so long with such prosperity. It’s never happened before, and therefore, some conclude it can never survive.
Yet, from our humble beginnings, we built a nation of innovation. A technological, economic, and military powerhouse with the ability to set the world order. With this great power and influence, we chose to use it for good, for the advancement of humanity, not our self-interest.
Throughout these years, we’ve made many mistakes. As we crafted our laws, which inform the morality of our population, we wrongly denied basic human rights to ethic groups. We separated child and people in communal spaces, we warred with one another, and we even, for a while, pretended that the Constitution didn’t guarantee fundamental rights to all people.
Despite our errs, our democracy has shown a remarkable propensity for self-healing. Without need of external military intervention, we demolished the institution of slavery, broke down the barriers of segregation, and revoked the flawed logic that said that some lives weren’t worth living.
The voices of despair rise and fall, and we hear them daily today. But they look at a narrow window of our nation’s history, a snapshot in time that fails to capture the stunning progress that we’ve made. We are a flawed people, but despite our shortcomings and mistakes, we still seek to build a more perfect union.
The Work Begins
For 49 years, our voice on the fundamental issue for society was silenced. A contrived legal theory, enshrined in precedent, permitted a mother, with few limits, to take the life of her child for any reason. Just not a theory, but a position that argued that it was as the framers of the Constitution intended. We marched, we prayed, we did the work, and had our rights finally restored.
Like the return of Aslan to Narnia, the cold, brutal grip of the White Witch is broken, but her power is not destroyed. The question of the morality and legality of abortion is again up for debate, and now we must begin the hard work of winning hearts and minds.
We live in a society where people violently question the legitimacy of our legal system because things didn’t go their way. They lost, and now they want to change the rules. Deeper than that is the rage at the notion that mothers shouldn’t be permitted the right to kill their child; that a child has fundamental worth that ought to be protected.
The landscape has changed, and the people in every state must now determine how they wish to live. It’s true that with Roe overturned, many states will enact statutes that allow unlimited abortion, on demand, until the moment of life. In others, abortion will be completely outlawed. Many states will land in between.
Polls tell us that abortion is broadly accepted, and the overwhelming majority of Americans think that contraceptives, abortifacient by design, are morally acceptable. Yet, these same people seem baffled at why racism, sexism, and violence abounds in our communities. You cannot chip away at the integrity of the human person, with carveouts and exceptions, and not expect contagion to follow.
Our message, from the very beginning, is so simple that we teach it to kindergartners. Every person has value and is worth protecting. Now if only we can get our society to internalize it.
Applied Bioethics
One of the best outcomes from majoring in Philosophy is how it nurtured my sense of curiosity. The toolset that I gained helps me look critically at the world and think deeply about issues. Alison and I’s story is in its twelfth year. We started dating the final semester of college, and the story continues today.
Our days color our conversations. Alison brings home fascinating stories from clinic. These stories deal more with themes of humanity than clinical descriptions. Medicine may be a hard science, but its application deals exclusively with people. Patients come through the doors seeking help for the things that ail or annoy them. The causes are attributable to lifestyle, behavior, and family history.
Philosophy applied to medicine is bioethics. Science possesses great capacity to heal and relieve suffering, but it’s amoral. It can just as easily help as it can hurt. Regrettably, there are plenty of instances today where medicine is a tool to destroy life rather than restore and heal it.
This blog is in its ninth year of publication, with more than 850 articles about my experience of married life. Looking through posts, I see the timeline of Alison and I’s relationship. I see my personal growth and struggles, and my advice for myself. In addition to the blog, these themes led me to write and publish three books. It’s a great body of work that represents my intellectual contribution to humanity.
This Spring, I’m adding to that work. Last week, I finished the final draft of a new digital magazine that I’ll publish twice a year. It’s called Applied Bioethics Magazine, and it takes the complex topics of medicine and bioethics and, like this blog, breaks them down into manageable pieces.
Like on this blog, I take the Catholic worldview and apply it to bioethics. The tone and readability will feel familiar to regular readers, as well as anyone who’s read one of my books. My goal is to not be an expert authoring a textbook, but a knowledgeable friend passing on helpful information. Each issue can be read in 30 minutes or less.
We’re living longer, which means that we must face the difficulties of caring for our aging parents and managing our complex healthcare decisions. When making care decisions, we need the intellectual tools to choose the ethical path and to make them with confidence. That’s my goal with this new magazine.
The first issue will be out in April. I hope that you’ll consider taking 30 minutes twice a year to build up your toolset so that you can make choices for you and your family that promote and protect the dignity of the human person.
Image and Likeness
2021 was supposed to be the year of civility and normalcy. Well, we didn’t get it. Instead, we got more acrimony and animosity. Last year I wrote about walking under the stars and listening to the Bible. I had started the Bible in a Year podcast with Fr. Mike Schmitz. I didn’t make it past day 25 or so, but I’m starting over.
One of the interesting points that Fr. Mike makes is the reason why we should read the Bible. It’s not only to discover God’s wisdom for us. It’s to help us craft a worldview. There are many points of view on offer, most of which are served up through advertising and social media feeds. But what does it mean to have a Catholic worldview?
The Catholic worldview rests on a simple premise: all people are created in the image and likeness of God.
We’ve heard that phrase many times, but have we considered its weight? It asserts that every single human person is known by, loved by, and belongs to God. Adopting it as our worldview has the potential to radically change how we live our lives.
How would our driving habits change if we saw not a driver with annoying habits, but God’s daughter at the wheel? How would we read the news differently if each news story was seen involving God’s children? How would our political temperature change if we saw ideas being put forward by a child of God?
Our families, our communities, and our society does best when we stand together. But we can only stand together if we’re willing to reach out our hand and grab on to someone else’s. That becomes much simpler when we see one another as we truly are, a person that belongs to God.