There is a concept articulated very clearly in Catholic teaching that goes something like this: “Love the sinner, abhor the sin.”  There may well be other traditions that have this idea, but it seems to get discarded really quickly these days, by Christians of all stripes, including Catholics.  And it usually comes from misguided understanding of love.

Let me make a collectivised version of the argument:

God’s love is unconditional.  Therefore, we Christians are called to love unconditionally.  Unconditional love doesn’t stop because we don’t like something about the person.  In fact, people who make a big deal about other people’s choices in the name of Jesus often act in unloving ways.  So, when people single out things they think are wrong about people (individually or as groups), they’re not really loving them as they are.  So you can’t just separate sin and sinner and call that Christian charity.

The above argument is not without merit.  True enough, some people pound on sins, usually a few favorite vices, in a way that is basically devoid of any charity.  But the argument above has some serious issues.  One is that it misunderstands the entire point of abhoring sin and loving sinners, and the other is that it ends up destroying the very caritas or agape love it thinks it’s promoting.  And here’s why:

I have witnessed the effect of the anti-sin-abhorrence crowd in them, and any who follow it to its end invariably come to the same point:  they lose any sense of what makes a sin, and why it matters.  It is a very feel-good, teddy-bear faith to have a wishy-washy sense of “sin.”  Why?  Because when we reduce sin in this way, the only things that get called sins are either fairly obvious (like, say, murder) or very vague (“imposing on others,” for instance, or “hurting other people”), and everything else, including some very serious sins, become matters of opinion or, even worse, “personal preferences.”  No honesty discussion of morality happens when everything is prefaced by, “Well, this is what’s right for me.” But more importantly, there can be no true love without a strong concept of sin.

That may seem a little weird or backwards, but I am convinced that it’s true.  Why?  Because love doesn’t mean not seeing the flaws, even if a lovey-dovey couple goes through that phase.  When the honeymoon’s over, even the most rose-colored-glasses-wearing pair is going to realise that there are some things that seriously tick them off about each other.  A marriage doesn’t last because they decide that those aren’t really flaws– a marriage lasts because they decide that they love each other beyond those flaws, in spite of them, even.

If we go into Christian love blind to any flaws, we aren’t capable of actual Christian love.  I remember going to confession during Lent at my Catholic high school.  A girl in my math class had decided to pick on me a bit, and I’d finally had enough and started scoring her on her insults in a little scoreboard I made in a notebook called the “Bitch Olympics.”  It wasn’t particularly nasty, but it was somewhat effective, especially as the girl and her friends seemed to find it amusing.  Irony of ironies, we ended up on the same pew waiting for confession, and she said teasing me was on her confession list and I had to admit that the Bitch Olympics were on mine.

I got into the confessional, a nice dark one, with the kneeler and the screen, and even better, a priest I didn’t know at all.  He sounded old, with a withered strength to his voice.  I went through the usual- being mean to siblings, talking back to parents, and then I got to the Bitch Olympics, which certainly ranks among my most inventive sins.  Naturally, I detailed how she teased me, and how I knew it was wrong but did I mention she was teasing me?  And that I just didn’t like her?  The response I got was something like this:

Love isn’t a commandment because it’s easy.  It’s a commandment because it’s hard but it’s the right thing.  And Jesus commanded us to do it.  It doesn’t matter that you don’t like this girl, or that she’s mean to you.  You have to love her anyway.

I think when we take away the idea of sin, we are really robbing ourselves of the true virtue and commandment of love.  If we just accept the sins, downgrading them and acting like they don’t matter, we’re doing everyone involved a massive disservice.  It may seem like it’s no biggie, but think about two options a parent has when his child does something wrong– what about parents of kids who get involved in drugs or become promiscuous?  Who loves the child more, the “anything goes” parent, or the one who still loves his child despite these terrible deeds, and takes all the suffering that comes with it?

And while we’re talking about wayward children, if there isn’t any real sin beyond biggies or vague non-harm principles, why would Jesus bother to die for us?  I know it’s not what’s intended when people say you can’t separate sin and sinner, but the end result is that we actually denigrate the love of God for us.  Dying on a cross for perfect people isn’t nearly as heroic as dying for people who are pretty darn awful.  ”Blind love” that just ignores the things we don’t like doesn’t seem like real love at all.  I could keep going on and on trying to articulate it, but once again GK does it better:

Love means loving the unlovable, or it is no virtue at all. - GKC

Have a great week!

-Rosy

I’ve been mulling over this idea for a while but it was only in a conversation with Plush Appendix over the weekend that I put a name to it. I call it vegetarianism of faith not because of an abstenance borne of good will. Rather, this is the choice to avoid the “meatier” elements of faith, because they are disagreeable to the person.

That is, rather than go for the real core of faith, we stay at a comfortable surface level, where differences are matters of opinion rather than truth and honest discernment. This mentality leads to a tricky kind of idolatry, one which tends to replace God with a shifting notion of “social good” and, as Chesterton put it, “not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”

The common good is certainly a Christian idea, but the mistake is in mistaking that for the whole of faith. These are the sort of people who point to Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day as examples of their kind of Catholocism or Christianity, and then proceed to make all sorts of unjustified assumptions that will aid in their avoidance of the center of their faith. They are very results focused- Mother Teresa is a hero because of all the help she gave the poor. But easily overlooked is why she did those things.

Mother Teresa didn’t do these things because she believed in a social good- she did those things because she loves Jesus. It wasn’t an ideology of common good, or a high ideal, even though those can be parts of it. But mistaking the effects of a deep love for Jesus as the equal of that love is an easy way out of the more difficult parts of faith. The moral requirements, the challenges to the ego, the reliance on God, and perhaps most importantly the awareness of one’s flaws– all these are easily set aside when faith is reduced to “being a good person,” which is an effect, not the source.

And yet practicioners of this meatless faith will claim that those who go beyond the broth are polemical because, having had the better portion, they will not surrender it or compromise its potency.

At the risk of adding even more to my various food metaphors, I will offer one last though, which is a challenge to everyone, myself included. As much as I wish it were otherwise, I’m often a vegetarian when it comes to faith. But I have found a useful reminder in the wedding feast at Cana: a lot of times we settle for the cheap wine. But if we will wait, and plead for help, and follow Mary’s injunction to “do whatever he tells you,” we will get the better wine. Our task then is to discern what are the hearty things we leave in the bowl, what is the cheap wine we’re settling for.

Thanks for bearing with my long absence and any lack of cohesion due to writing this on the small screen of an iTouch.

Best,
-Rosy

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the complaint in federal court in Boston against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The suit claims HHS, which distributes funds to help trafficking victims, has allowed the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to limit the services its subcontractors provide. The ACLU claims the bishops’ conference is misusing taxpayer money and attempting to impose its religious beliefs on trafficking victims. …

“The whole goal of this program is to provide the full range of services, and the concern is that because of a main contractor’s religious beliefs, it will be much more difficult for women to get these services,” said Brigitte Amiri, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

Here is the whole article from The Boston Herald.

I know there are a lot of people with strong opinions on the ACLU as an organisation.  It doesn’t help their cause that the cases that get the most press are generally the most controversial ones.  In a sense, I can appreciate their dedication to taking on cases that oftentimes aren’t going to win them any fans, and defending clients who are otherwise reprehensible people (but aren’t necessarily legally responsible).  On the other hand, I have a sense that they like to create a ruckus atleast as much as they like to help people.

I have a couple big objections to this, one a bit of a legal squabble, and one culture/morality.

Legally, I think they chose to file suit in Boston because it is the most likely place it’ll be given any weight.  From the limited information, it seems like the ACLU contends that by funding the USCCB services, the HHS is violating equal protection for those who do not subscribe to the same beliefs or prohibitions.  They rest this claim on the assumption that denying certain services because they are in violation of religious doctrines constitutes imposition of religious beliefs.  Now, I don’t have all the answers, and I’m not a lawyer, but since I’m applying to law schools next year, I might as well try to start training my mind.  If any real lawyers stop by, maybe they can help me out here.

First, let’s tackle equal protection.  If the Department of Health and Human Services exclusively grants public funds to help victims of human trafficking to organisations like the USCCB that refuse to fund contraceptives, abortion/abortifacients, etc., they might have a case.  (A sidenote here:  the USCCB subcontracts with these funds, basically to dioceses.)  But I find that extremely unlikely.  I don’t have time to go tracking down HHS spending, but estimates on human trafficking are in the millions.  One organisation, even the USCCB sending the money on down to individual dioceses, can’t possibly be handling every victim of trafficking,  because they don’t have unlimited staff, either.  There is also nothing preventing victims of trafficking from seeking those refused services elsewhere;  there are other trafficking agencies, and entire groups devoted to offering abortion on demand.  The Catholic Church isn’t in the habit of holding people hostage, honestly.

Another thing is the idea of imposition of religious beliefs.  If the Catholic Church were the only organisation that opposed abortion and contraception it would still not prove imposition of religious beliefs.  Aside from making the wrongful assumption that there is no non-religious argument against abortion et al., I don’t think they can claim that anyone was forced to adopt the Catholic religion in whole or part.  They simply were not assisted in those particular ways.  

Now, some may argue that that is an imposition of some sort, so I’d like to create a parallel case.  Let’s say that the HHS was funding the Jainist equivalent of the USCCB.  Jainism as a religion considers vegetarianism part of its overall philosophy.  So, any help that anyone received would not involve animal products.  In clothing them, there would be nothing of leather (such as gloves in wintertime), in sheltering them they would use nothing that involved products taken from dead animals, and stocking up their refrigerator would not include meat, eggs, etc., even though the clients may be meat-eaters.  If the Jainists were to extract some promise of vegetarianism from clients, or to prohibit them from procuring meat on their own (neither of which would likely happen), then I think there would be a case for them imposing their religion on clients.  Well, the USCCB has done in effect the same thing:  they have not included in their aid things which they believe violate life.  The difference is political, not religious or philosophical.  I doubt any reasonable person would expect the ACLU to take on this hypothetical Jainist organisation.

I actually interned at a diocesan office that was responsible for diocesan efforts in helping immigrants and refugees, and probably would be the one to take care of trafficking victims that the USCCB took on.  The staff itself was not all-Catholic, it may not even have been half-comprised of Catholics (and this was a relatively large group).  And as an intern helping clients, I didn’t actually work with any clients who were Catholic.  I worked with Jewish and Muslim refugees from the former Soviet Union.  The faith I saw was that for some staff it was the reason they wanted to help people;  nobody was denied services based on it, nor did anyone proselytise.  So the entire imposition argument simply rests on refusal to provide some (few!) services that are against Catholic moral teaching.  The place I worked, and I imagine most others, tried to get people on their feet as quickly as possible – housing, jobs, money, English lessons and English translation.  In other words, if they want a condom, they can get one from the doctor they will most assuredly visit very easily, and probably can even manage to procure an abortion.  (I know Planned Parenthood takes donations (towards middle of article) to cover the costs of abortions for low-income women in crisis pregnancies.)

And now to the culture/morality issue..

This one really ticks me off.  The ACLU may be able to make a case, and I hope it comes right back to them, but really, it’s the cultural double-standard that bugs me more.  In our society, we have this idea than whatever an individual’s conscience says is okay for them – a moral system of “whatever floats your boat” in which a person decides for himself what right and wrong are, and no one can judge.  But people do judge all the time.  Many people have decided that abortion is wrong;  others have decided that it is right, or allowable, or more wrong to legislate their personal beliefs.  Of these two groups, pro-life and pro-choice (I call people as they prefer to be called), one’s beliefs are an imposition, and one’s aren’t, yet both get taxpayer money, and they don’t both get sued.  

So, is conscience okay or not?  I don’t really like the fact that public funds support abortion, something with a 100% casualty rate (as a bumper sticker put it: “Abortion: 1 dead, 1 wounded”).  And people who support it are apparently miffed that public funds go to groups that don’t support it, and yet they won’t even call it even.  My conscience and many others’ say thay abortion kills human beings, and really hurts the women who have them, and my Church (and other churches and groups are/)is willing to back that belief up with a lot of crisis pregnancy funding and help, with adoption agencies, and also with post-abortive counselling and support groups (which are desperately needed and have many clients, and which, according to pro-choice groups, there is no need for).

I guess I’m just frustrated that in our culture, we can bandy about phrases like conscience and liberty but when push comes to shove, certain groups want to exclude other groups.  I’d never tell Planned Parenthood they can’t have a seat at the table, despite the fact that they think we should be “beyond” my conscientious objections to murdering millions and turning the womb is designed to foster life into a place of death.  Where’s equal protection for our consciences?  I guess that doesn’t really fit the ACLU’s rubric for things worth defending.

For more depressing news, check out the plight of doctors in Wisconsin (hat tip to Matthew at CMR).  These are not isolated incidents;  they are coordinated assualts.

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New to Hobbit Sense?  Me too!  Consider subscribing to my RSS feed!  I’m intending to focus largely on faith/spirituality, culture/society, and arts (a lot of lit and theatre, and hopefully some “art” art (paintings, etc.)), and anything else that comes to mind.  Currently working on:  ”SciFi and Fantasy:  Chicken Soup for the Contemporary Soul?”

thanks for reading!

-the Rosy Gardener

Editing to add a link to a post by my friend the Raving Theist posted at Dawn Eden’s site from 2006 about the ACLU “supporting” free speech by opposing “Choose Life” license plates:  “License to Kill” by the Raving Theist.