Priorities vs. Possibliities

So, I was browsing the web when I came across someone's blog that had this counter on it:

Is this figure right? Unfortunately, it probably is. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States there are somewhere between one and one-and-a-half million abortions in the United States annually.

Can we do anything about it? Probably not. According to the consensus of polling data, not only do a mere one third of Americans favor banning abortion, but this number hasn't changed a bit since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.

Compare this if you will, to the fall in support for the war in Iraq. According to New York Times polls, support for the war has plumeted since January 2003, when 64 percent of Americans said the United States did the right thing in taking military action in Iraq. Current numbers show a complete reversal, with 35 percent saying the United states did the right thing and 61 percent saying the country should have stayed out.

So — do we live in the real world, or what?

Do we, as Catholics continue to waste our political capital trying to change a law that the vast bulk of Americans agree with, or do we push for an end to our imperialistic adventure in Iraq?

Freakonomics = The Same Old Bourgeois Materialism

Since it seemed like all of my friends were reading it, or rather my secular friends, and since I found a used copy at a book fair for only $2-, I have just finished reading Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner [William Morrow, N.Y.C., 2005].
The authors begin by telling us right off the bat that, in their eyes, economics is an entirely material science postulating only material motivations for human behavior.

If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them — or, often, ferreting them out — is the key to solving just about any riddle from violent crime to sports cheating to on-line dating.

Levitt is the economist here (Dubner just the journalist who helped him write the book) and he is a tenured professor at the University of Chicago. His basic method is to look for an apparent contradiction in data and then seek other correlations that would seem to “explain” these data. Unfortunately, human behavior is not something that lends itself to repeatable experiment, people often lie about their motivations, and Levitt himself is colored with a secular bourgeois bias, so many of his “startling conclusions” are not merely counter-intuitive, but demonstrably false.

Let’s start with Chapter Five, “What Makes a Good Parent.” Levitt asserts that it is what the parents are, not what they do, that makes a difference in children's lives. He gives paired examples of things that do and do not make a statistical difference in the success of children at school. Let’s look at a few examples:

Matters: The Child has highly educated parents.
Doesn’t: The child’s family is intact.

An intact family doesn’t matter? Where on earth did he get these figures? My experience is entirely contrary to that! For instance, my daughter Pumpkin attended the most highly selective high school in Chicago (the International Baccalaureate Program at Lincoln Park High) and over the years I met at least thirty or forty of her friends in this program. Most of them, probably nine out of ten, came from intact families and all of them regularly saw both of their parents. I don't need to tell you that this is well above the average.

Ah, that’s anecdotal you say. Well, how about some statistics? How about the fact that a boy who grows up in a home without a father is five times more likely to become a juvenile offender. Or the fact that a child is twenty times more likely to be sexually abused by a step-father than by their natural father. I haven’t got figures on the educational performance of children from broken homes, but every statistic that I have seen shows a demonstrable adverse effect.

Matters: The child’s mother was thirty or older at the time of her first child’s birth.
Doesn’t: The child’s mother didn’t work between birth and kindergarten.

This is the old “day-care is just as good” myth and we can demolish it statistically by a simple reflection that “child’s mother didn’t work” includes both mothers who stayed at home because they wanted to and ghetto mothers who were unemployable. Remember, this represents an average and for every college educated mother who neglected a profitable career to nurture her child, there was probably a teen-age drop-out mom who raised her kid on welfare and television. It is also a statistical fact that college and graduate educated women have the smallest number of kids and are the least likely to “interrupt their careers” to take care of their children. Unfortunately, the kids with the best chance in school (educated mother, prosperous home, family work ethic) are also the least likely to have the benefit of a full-time mom.

And remember those kids from Lincoln Park I.B.? All of them had stay-at-home moms. Not just some, not just most, everyone of them!

Matters: The child’s parents speak English in the home.
Doesn’t: The child’s parents regularly take him to museums.

Matters: The child has many books in his home.
Doesn’t: The child’s parents read to him nearly every day.

Oh? And how do they know that parents take the child to museums and read to him regularly? I’m certain this is a matter of self reporting and we all know how to answer questions like that. Why, if someone were to ask you if you washed your hands every time you went to the lavatory — well, you know the “right” answer to that, don’t you?

Back in the sixties it was found that if you asked someone if they were racially prejudiced, they would almost always answer no. But if you asked that same person if any of his neighbors were racist you were certain to be told about the fellow next door who was a bigot.

Try this experiment: go to a museum and see who's there. It is overwhelmingly white and Asian families, with well behaved children, who are cleaner, better dressed, and more articulate than the yahoos spending Sunday afternoon at amusements like Navy Pier or shopping malls. Want to double the bet? Go to a museum on Super Bowl Sunday — it’s about 80% Asian! Fact: the people you see in museums are exactly the sort of people whose children we would expect to excel in school.

Ah, but books in the home! Either they’re there or they’re not. An interviewer in the home can see instantly and it’s also not the sort of thing one thinks to lie about.

Do any of these cases seem to prove that children succeed because of who their parents are (educated, prosperous, late marrying), rather than what they do (discipline, good habits, attentive)? If we wanted to see if being a good parent counted, then why don’t we study cases of children who came from economically disadvantaged families and rose to bourgeois achievement. I’ll bet they had parents who did all of those things that Levitt says don’t matter!

Of course, Levitt’s most controversial assertion is that the otherwise inexplicable drop in crime statistics beginning around 1990 are traceable to the legalization of abortion in 1973. It is his contention that since large numbers of “unwanted children” were disposed of before they were born the numbers of potential criminals were reduced enough in the early 1990’s to affect crime rates.

I will concede that I have no idea of why crime rates fell in the 1990’s, and Levitt pretty well demolishes the conventional reasons given (innovative policing, tougher gun laws, capital punishment, etc.), but once again I think looking at other statistics will discount Levitt’s thesis.

If the effect of legal abortion were to get rid of “unwanted babies” then we should see this reflected in lower rates of bastardy and child abuse and smaller families among the impoverished.
As far as I know, none of this has happened. The principle social effects of abortion that I am aware of are a precipitate drop in fertility among educated women and the disappearance of adoptable white babies. Bastardy, one of the problems abortion was meant to solve, has, of course, gone up.

Anyway — about I year ago, I had a chance to phone in to Milt Rosenberg’s radio show and ask Dr. Levitt if the things that we would expect to follow directly from the expunging of “unwanted babies” had actually happened. Were rates of bastardy and child abuse lower? Had impoverished families refrained from having children they could not afford? He didn’t know. So I then asked if it wasn’t a stretch to attribute an indirect consequence to legal abortion without examining the direct result? He answered that his conclusions “had proven controversial.” Wow! Now there’s a non-answer for you.

Well anyway, after finishing the book I began to sniff around to see if there were any actual statistical conclusions about the abortion/crime matter, and indeed there are. Steve Sailer has found that exactly the reverse correlation exists! In his essay "The Freakonomics Fiasco in Perspective" he shows that the murder rate spiked just as the children of the high abortion rate late seventies were entering young adulthood. Furthermore, Christopher Foote, a senior economist at the Boston Fed, and Christopher Goetz, a research assistant, say the research behind Levitt's conclusion is faulty.

So how does this tie in with the struggle to live a good Catholic life?

It is yet another warning not to be taken in by secular propagandists who dress up their claims as being “scientific.” While I don’t claim to have disproved Dr. Levitt’s claims, I believe that I have shown that his underlying secular, bourgeois bias has definitely colored his conclusions to the extent that they can no longer be called “scientific.” Saint Augstine insists, in De Genesi ad litteram, that science and faith must be reconciled and so it is our task, not to disprove science, but to remove the secular bias from truly objective inquiry.

The Free Market Speaks!

Ayn Rand on the Pro-Life movement:

"I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object...Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life."

— Ayn Rand

This is a pretty crass analysis by Rand, but it shows that it is Capitalism, not Socialism, that is ontologically materialistic. Perhaps the most treacherous false path that mankind has ever gone down is belief in the notion that Socialism can be successful as a materialist philosophy. A materialist world outlook will undermine any form of Socialism from within, just as surely as Capitalism ultimately forces a materialist world-view and undermines the spirituality of any society that embraces it philosophically.

The task before us is plain: take Socialism away from Marx and give it back to Jesus!

An Absolutely Stunning Admission

There are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts.
— Gore Vidal

We All Worship the Same God?

You know, I always wondered how to answer people who said “It doesn’t matter what religion you are — we all worship the same God.” And then I heard this parable:

One day a man went into Macy’s and tried to buy some sox with a bogus twenty dollar bill. The salesgirl spotted that the money was counterfeit immediately and notified her manager, who then notified the police. When the police came and searched the man they found $50,000 in counterfeit twenties, so they clapped the cuffs on him and began to march him off to the station. But on the way out he began to point at another customer buying sox and asked, “Aren’t you going to arrest him?”

“Why should be arrest him,” the policeman asked, “He’s using real money?”

“But it’s the same sox!” the counterfeiter insisted.

The Simple Miracles Of A Guileless Age

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Upon hearing the wonderful news that my friend was soon to be heavy with child, I was moved to take action by selecting a saint known to patronize the enceinte and asking for his special attention. Going through a list in my Catholic Encyclopedia I soon enough found a boon companion for her: Saint Ulrich of Augsburg, a simple and unprepossessing abbot and bishop from the dark, early days of the Western resurgence that began with Saint Carlos Magnus.

Ulrich fit a pattern of the day. An educated man of the gentry, pious from early youth, who wished no more than to withdraw to a monastery and live in contemplation of the divine, instead called to lead and protect his people until finally, overcome by eld, he is allowed to live out his wish and retire from the world. Showing early talent, he became both abbot of the cathedral cannons and Bishop of Augsburg. As bishop, he was conscientious in the carrying out of his duties. Each day he visited the hospital, washed the feet of a dozen paupers, distributed alms. As an important bishop he could not help but be involved in the affairs of the state and here too he was a peace-maker, brokering the reconciliation between the Emperor Otto and his estranged son Duke Ludolf of Swabia. When Augsburg was besieged by the Magyars in AD 955 he rallied the people to hold out against the heathen enemy, which they did, and when, during the siege, his cathedral burnt to the ground, he immediately caused a new structure to be built from scraps of lumber such that not a single day might pass without the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass being said. Years later, when he felt death to be near, he had the monks of the Benedictine Abbey where he had retired sprinkle ashes upon the ground in the shape of a cross and sing the Psalms.
Whereupon, he laid down upon this cross and waited for death.

This is a good and pious life, but what really intrigued me was one particular miracle associated with him. One night a weary traveler came to the abbey of Augsburg where he was met by the abbot himself, Ulrich, who promptly gave him a leg of mutton to eat and sent him off to a monk’s cell to rest. Immediately, the exhausted traveler fell asleep. Upon awakening, the traveler cursed his luck, for it was now Friday morning and he was forbidden by Church law to eat the mutton. Miraculously, however, he found that the leg of mutton had turned into a fish during the night which he promptly consumed.

[As a footnote, it is unrecorded that the mint jelly accompanying the mutton turned into tartar sauce, but my faith is sufficient not to doubt that this corollary miracle also occurred!]

W hat a terrific miracle! Sure, sometimes doctors can cure cancer, and we did put a man on the moon, but no doctor or rocket scientist can turn a leg of mutton into a fish! Ever!

Of course, this is the kind of miracle that moderns scoff at. My son (of little faith!) suggests that someone substituted a perfectly ordinary river trout for the leg of mutton sometime before 11:59 on the night in question and then consumed the leg himself. Others might say that with all the suffering abroad in the difficult tenth century of the Christian Era, the good saint might have put his miracle working to something more beneficial such as curing typhus, mending the lame, or ameliorating the frequent crop failures. Protestants are quick to point out that the prohibition of consuming meat on Fridays is mere “superstition” and that the good abbot could just as easily have given the famished traveler a dispensation to gorge himself on flesh despite it being the weekly remembrance of Our Lord’s crucifixion and death.

But these objections point up why I love this particular miracle. People of that benighted age were reconciled to the travails of the flesh, to the inevitability of disease, eld, death, and routine invasions by barbarians. Women were expected to die in childbirth, children were counted as lucky if the lived to adulthood, men accepted it as their lot to be exhausted and broken by constant toil. They offered these sufferings up to God, confident that he had suffered as much for them. But they expected their saints to show heroic virtue. And it is wonderful that Saint Ulric’s hospitality should not only be heroic, but be miraculous! The good saint not only took in the stranger, fed him, and gave him shelter — he insured that the food would remain good even on a day of abstinence from flesh! Can you imagine the talk in Augsburg that day? How the people must have marveled and rejoiced at the hospitality, how reassuring was their satisfaction of having so saintly a bishop, the wonderful frisson of humor at the marvel of flesh turned into fish. Who but an asshole would have scoffed at such a miraculous jape? (I challenge you: name a brighter spot in the tenth century!)

The miracles of the much maligned “Middle Ages” are almost always practical, fleshy, even carnally satisfying. Our Lady was not content to give the scheme of the Rosary to Saint Dominic in a vision — NO! she came down to present both Dominic and Saint Hyacinth with Rosaries of their own to keep. Saint Catherine of Sienna was not merely given the curse of Stigmata and the insight of cardiognosis (which is denied to the Angels), she was also permitted to nurse at the very breast of Mary Immaculate. Saint Carlos Magnus was not merely given the Charism of Saint Ambrose, he was given such modesty that he though there to be nothing extraordinary about this extra ordinary ability. And when a drunken lout known as “Noddo” publicly doubted the chastity of Saint Arnulf of Metz — his pants caught fire!

The mediæval saints are wildly colorful in a way that our modern saints are not. A sense of humor has always been a mark of sainthood. Think of the last words of Saint Lawrence who, while being roasted on a gridiron, said to the Roman soldiers, “I am done on this side! Turn me over and eat.” Despite hearing from Bishop Kane, who chanced to have lunch with her once, that Mother Theresa of Calcutta was the “funniest woman he’d ever met,” our saints of today are never thought even to smile. Our image (and undoubtedly this is false) of Pius X, Maximillian Kolbe, and yes, Mother Theresa, is one of a dourly heroic virtue. This is not the popular image of saints in the mediæval era with their mystical ecstasies, nonchalant miracles, and perverse eccentricities. Even modern conversion stories are lack-luster when compared to the sinful savoire vivre and subsequent abject piety of Augustine, Hubert, and Arnulf.

I submit for your consideration this wonderful exposition of the life of Saint Charles de Blois (AD 1319 - 1364) by Johan Huizinga in his insightful study, “The Autumn of the Middle Ages” (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996). [Fair disclosure: Charles, Count of Blois, Duke of Brittany, known as “the Happy,” is my seventh cousin twenty times removed.]

The princely circles managed a few times to produce a saint. One of these is Charles de Blois. On his mother’s side he sprung from the house of Valois and, through his marriage with the heir of the Bretagne Jeanne de Penthièvre, became involved in a dispute about succession that took the greater part of his life. Under the terms of his marriage contract, he was obliged to adopt the coat of arms and battle cry of the dukedom. He found himself confronted by another pretender, Jean de Montfort, and the ensuing conflict over the Bretagne coincided with the beginning of the Hundred Years War. The defence of Monfort’s claim was one of the complications that prompted Edward III to come to France. The count of Blois accepted battle like a true knight and fought as well as the best leaders of this time. Taken prisoner in 1347, just prior to the siege of Calais, he was held in England until 1356. He resumed the fight for the dukedom in 1362 and was killed in 1364 near Aurai while fighting bravely at the side of Bertrand du Guesclin and Breaumanoir.

This war hero, whose life differed in none of its external features from those of so many princely pretenders and leaders of his time, had led a life of strict austerity since the days of his youth. When he was a boy, his father had kept him away from edifying books because such books would be inappropriate for someone of his calling. He slept on straw on the ground next to the bed of his wife, and a hair shirt was found under his armor at the time of his death in battle. He took confession each evening before going to bed, because, as he said, no Christian should go to sleep with his sins unforgiven'. During his captivity in London, he was wont to visit cemeteries and, on his knees, recite the De profundis [i.e. Psalm 130]. The Breton page whom he asked to recite the responses refused, arguing that these locations were the burial grounds of the those who had killed his parents and friends and had burned their houses.

After his liberation, he intends to walk barefoot from La Roche-Derrien, where he began his imprisonment, to Tréguier, the site of the shrine of Saint Ives, the patron of Bretagne, whose biography he had written while a captive. The people hear about his plans and strew the path with straw and blankets. The count of Blois, however, takes a different route and ends up with feet so sore that he cannot walk for fifteen weeks. Immediately following his death, his princely relatives, among them his brother-in-law, Louis of Anjou, attempt to have him canonized. The proceedings, which resulted in beatification, took place in Angers in the year 1371.

The strange thing, if we can rely on Froissart, is that this same Charles de Blois had a bastard.

“There was killed in good style the aforesaid Lord Charles of Blois, with his face to the enemy, and a bastard son of his called Jehans de Blois, and several other knights and squires of Brittany.”

Are we to reject this as and an evident falsehood? Or should we assume that the combination of piety and sensuality that was present in figures such as Louis d’Orléans and Philip the Good was even more noticeably present in the count de Blois?

Think of what we moderns would make of such a man? He might easily be institutionalized for his unrelenting mortifications of the flesh. He would certainly be denounced as a "hypocrite" for his carnality (as opposed to being understood as an ordinary sinner). He would never be considered "saint material." Yet there he is, warts and all, a saint in heaven, able to catch God's ear and put in a good word for us.
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Good news!

I have just found out that my good friend Maggie Baran expects to be delivered of a son in September.

This will be her first child and the fulfilment of her long ambition to live out her vocation as a wife and mother. She is a sweet and wonderful person and my joy at this good news touches me deeply.



Lets all ask Saint Ulrich of Augsburg to watch over her and keep her baby safe!