You don’t have to like what those beliefs are, but if a religious group believes—for example—that unmarried cohabitation is immoral, then that religious group is under no obligation to provide its services (whatever they are) to an unmarried cohabiting couple. Cohabitation should not be criminalized, since government generally has no place legislating private morality…but neither should it be illegal for private religious organizations to refuse to endorse and support unmarried cohabitation. Each law would be just as wrong as the other, as they both take freedom away from the individuals to follow their conscience.

It’s the same when we talk about homosexuality. Even if you are the most pro-gay rights person in the world, you should find it appalling that governments think it’s acceptable to force religious organizations to, say, provide adoption services to gay couples when it runs counter to their beliefs. Homosexual activity should not be criminalized…but, once again, neither should it be illegal for private religious organizations to act in accordance with their beliefs. The gay-rights activists’ moral views on homosexuality have no more or less validity in the public sphere than devout Christians’ moral views on it, and government has no right to declare either view to be invalid.

If a religious group and its adherents believe homosexuality to be sinful, they have a fundamental right to refuse to provide services—like adoption—to gay couples. You don’t have to like that Catholic adoption agencies won’t adopt children to gay couples any more than a devout Catholic has to like governments legalizing gay marriage. If you don’t like it and don’t agree with it, you don’t have to use Catholic adoption services. You have no right, simply because you disagree with the Catholic position on the issue, to demand that Catholic organizations follow your moral beliefs instead of their own.

Laws that require religious groups to follow the state’s dictates on conscience are undeniably unjust and immoral, no matter how much you or I might agree with the ideas behind those dictates. We have a right to decide for ourselves what is morally acceptable and what isn’t. When the state starts to demand your adherence to their ideas of right and wrong—on whichever side—beyond the most basic fundamental civil liberties (like rights to life, liberty, and property; free speech; free press; right to keep and bear arms; etc.), then the state has become despotic and the people are no longer free.

With each passing year, our western societies move further and further down this path. How long before it becomes a crime even to think that something is morally wrong if the state has decided it isn’t?

I understand that retailers are hurting because of the economic downturn, but this is just…stupid. I can’t think of anything more intelligent than that. It’s stupid. Really, really, really stupid.

It’s insulting too. Christmas is supposed to be a serious, religious holiday. Christmas isn’t about the economy, or business, or profit, or presents. It’s about Our Lord Jesus Christ. If you don’t buy into the religious importance of the holiday, that’s fine. You can ignore it without making an all-year mockery of it.

We don’t think it wrong or abnormal for somebody to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…and then lie. We don’t blink an eye when somebody promises to stay with somebody until death…and then divorces them. We don’t fight when a company says it’s providing unlimited Internet access and then sets a maximum bandwidth limit. Our politicians and public servants swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and then blatantly disregard its provisions. Heck, they’ll even give you a new civil right—the ‘right’ to health care—and then demand that you take advantage of it. If it were really my ‘right,’ it would be my right to choose whether I want to take advantage of it…after all, my right to free speech does not require that I speak!

It seems like we’ve gotten to the point where nobody will make an unequivocal, honest, straightforward statement. Everything comes with diplomatic hedges, fine print, disclaimers, corrections, and exceptions. When a company says ‘unlimited Internet’ or a politician says ‘you have a right to [x],’ you have to research it and make sure that the fine print doesn’t say ‘unlimited isn’t really unlimited’ or ‘it’s not a right, it’s a compulsory mandate.’ We can’t trust hardly a word anybody tells us.

If a company tells you that a service is $45.99/month, you have to check to see what surcharges, fees, and taxes go on top of that. You also have to check what service you’re getting, since the description probably has an asterisk after it. You also have to check under what conditions the company can completely change the agreement and fees, and what notice (if any) they have to give you when they do so. You also have to check what information of yours they are collecting, and what they have declared they can do with it. This might be a reasonable expectation if companies started providing free legal representation to their potential customers to review and parse all the gibberish.

I understand that the full terms of a complex service agreement can’t be covered in an advertising slogan or product title. The details will always be buried somewhere in the fine print. But can’t we at least demand that the titles and slogans in the foreground be accurate? The word ‘unlimited,’ for example, has a meaning in the English language. Shouldn’t companies be prohibited from using that word to describe something that is, by definition, not unlimited? Shouldn’t we expect and demand—either through law or through consumer action—that companies at least accurately describe their products in the big print too?

In politics, our elected officials swear an oath of office when they take their positions. Presidents swear to “…preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Congressmen similarly promise to “…support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” These people have taken a solemn oath to do what the Constitution tells them to do, and then the vast majority of them blithely ignore it.

The Constitution, after all, prohibits laws limiting speech—especially political speech—but that didn’t stop our government from passing the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The Constitution prohibits any infringing of the right to keep [own] and bear [carry] arms, yet our government has required background checks to purchase guns and prevented us from arming ourselves on federal property. The Constitution also specifically states that the federal government can only do things it’s specifically authorized to do (see the 10th Amendment), and yet the government does a million things without authorization—from health care mandates to buying General Motors to broadcast ‘decency’ regulations to automotive safety standards and more.

You know, some of these things aren’t bad—some of them, like car safety standards, are undeniably good—but if we want the government doing these things we have to write amendments to give them Constitutional authorization to do so, or we need to manage them at the state level like the 10th Amendment demands. An honorable politician who takes his oath of office seriously would never support any of these things, since they are direct violations of a promise he made to the American people.

Sadly, this dishonorable behavior of saying one thing and doing another extends to our private activity as well. If it didn’t, we would have a very low divorce rate—an honorable man or woman who swears to love, honor, and cherish another until death does them part would do what they promised they would do. I’m not condemning everybody who has been divorced; for example, a wife can’t be blamed for the end of her marriage if it ended because her husband slept around and then abandoned her. But, even in this example, we see dishonor on the man’s side. He promised faithfulness to his wife and broke that promise. Honorable people keep their promises; thus, if both husband and wife are honorable, they will never divorce.

We see dishonor in our professions of religious faith. While the actual means of profession differ between Christian denominations, when one makes a free will self-dedication to the Christian faith through adult Baptism and/or Confirmation they have—implicitly or explicitly—promised to at least try to live a Christian life. Far too many then proceed to not do so, rejecting the teaching of Scripture and Church to plot their own narcissistic moral path through life. People of free will, of course, have the right to plot their own moral path through life…but an honorable person would not profess their obedience to God only to then ignore the guides of Scripture and faith tradition. They would either make an effort to be obedient to the promise they made (and make corrections when they inevitably fall short), or never make that promise in the first place.

We find yet more dishonor in euphemistic, inaccurate, or ‘politically correct’ descriptions. We’re either too afraid to say what we really think in plain English or, at the opposite extreme, we oversimplify and mischaracterize the views of those we disagree with. Sometimes we do both at the same time. People call themselves ‘pro-choice’ or ‘pro-life’ instead of just saying they’re pro- or anti-abortion. People who oppose illegal immigration get branded ‘anti-immigration’ (or even ‘racists’) by people who refer to illegal immigrants as ‘undocumented residents’ or something equally obtuse. We come up with terms like ‘homophobic’ to lump a complex range of moral and political views about homosexuality into something that means, literally, ‘fear of homosexuals’—an accurate description for a small percentage of people to whom the term is applied, and an inaccurate exaggeration or lie about the rest. In each of these cases and in countless others, we are using language to mask the truth when we should be exposing it.

I try not to succumb to these dishonors (although I’m the first to admit that I’m imperfect and have done so from time to time). I try to characterize my own views, and the views of those I disagree with, in an accurate and dispassionate way on this web site and in conversation. I keep the promises I make—to family, to friends, to employers, to governments, to Church, and to God. If I have any reasonable expectation that I won’t be able to keep a promise, I won’t make it in the first place. If I ever do have to break a promise, I do so with full disclosure about why and I make an effort to make it right. In my professional life, I take responsibility for my mistakes and try to always make accurate estimates and reports (in fact, in a previous job, I found myself often having to stand on principle and correct inaccuracies and misrepresentations in our official documents…this did not endear me to some of my superiors).

I do not expect perfection, from myself or from others. I do, however, expect that people, governments, and companies to make an effort to be fair, accurate, and truthful. I expect honorable behavior and, except when absolutely necessary, I don’t do business with those who behave dishonorably. The problem is that dishonorable behavior is now so ingrained in our society that I have to do business with dishonorable companies and people. Every U.S. wireless company, for example, has branded a data plan as ‘unlimited’ when it isn’t. Every bank, telecom, ISP, and utility company has some legal fine print on their service agreements that allows them to unilaterally screw you over. Promises mean so little to people, even in things as serious as religious faith and marriage, that you stand a depressingly high chance of running into somebody who will behave dishonorably toward you even if you are honorable toward them.

That, however, is not a reason to give in and ‘fight fire with fire’ by behaving dishonorably yourself. I think the best thing we can do as individuals is hold ourselves to the highest moral standards, and behave honorably and respectfully toward others in all cases. It won’t necessarily work to our advantage—’nice guys finish last,’ and all that—but it does set a fine example for those around us and, more importantly, for our children. I think this is what my Christian faith demands and, indeed, I would think that even non-Christians and atheists would see the value in bringing honor back. The increasing narcissistic, relativistic attitudes that so many have today are clearly and objectively bad for our culture and our society, and it’s time to start reversing this destructive trend.

Direct YouTube Link

When my non-Catholic Christian friends ask why I became Catholic, my shortest and pithiest response is, “Because I finally actually read the Scripture.”

Years ago I sat down and read the entire Bible, beginning to end, Old Testament and New. It took about six months. I had a sneaking suspicion that I was in the wrong religious community, and hoped that reading the Scripture would help lead me where God really wanted me to go. It worked; though the path it led me down was one I’d have never expected before-hand. The church history recorded in the Book of Acts, more so than anything else in the Scripture, led me to the Catholic Church.

In the Methodist tradition I was part of at the time, denominational decisions are made by democratic conferences of lay and clergy. Some of the faith communities I’d been looking at with interest were ‘congregational’ in structure, where individual churches are essentially autonomous and there is no hierarchical authority of any kind (the Baptist churches are among the most prominent in this tradition). Acts, however, painted a very different picture of how God’s church is supposed to be structured.

At the Council of Jerusalem, recorded in Acts, the elders (Priests) and Apostles (Bishops) gathered in Jerusalem under the leadership of St. Peter (Pope) to figure out how to handle one of the earliest controversies in the church: Was Christianity a sub-set of Judaism, requiring adherence to both traditions, or was it something new that did not require adherence to Jewish practices like circumcision and the dietary laws?

The Council decided, under the guidance of the Holy Sprit, that Gentiles (non-Jews) would not be expected to follow the Jewish traditions to become Christians. The Council then informed all Christian churches that existed at the time of their decision via letters and personal visits, and all churches and all Christians in the world were expected to abide by the Council’s decision. A hierarchical Church as a spiritual authority to which all Christians must be obedient is not some mythical fiction made up by Catholics; it’s all recorded right there in the book of Acts!

I recommend reading Msgr. Pope’s blog entry, as it goes into much more detail than what I’ve covered here (complete with copious references back to the Book of Acts). God bless!

The first truth is this: there is no excuse for the sexual abuse of children. It’s among the most despicable crimes somebody can commit. This is as true for Catholic priests as it is for non-Catholic religious leaders, public school teachers, family, friends, and acquaintances. This is the only one of these truths I present today that you will hear about in media reports; the other truths that follow seems to get conveniently and consistently swept under the rug.

Here is the second truth: Catholics believe that first truth just as strongly as everybody else. We—laity and religious alike—are heartbroken every time we hear that an adult in a position of trust has abused a child, most especially when it is one of our own trusted religious leaders committing such a horrific act. We are appalled when this happens, and we are even more appalled when we learn that some bishops chose to reassign or privately chastise those who committed these acts instead of dealing with them more harshly and reporting them to the appropriate authorities. We are also appalled to learn that, in her past, the Church did not always provide the loving, rehabilitative support she should have for victims of clergy sexual abuse. These are stains on the Church, and they must be corrected and washed clean.

The third truth is that people who want to sexually abuse children tend to be attracted to positions of authority and trust where they will have regular access to children. This includes the Catholic priesthood, but also includes the Protestant ministry, public school teachers, doctors, dentists, and more. Statistically, the rate of abuse in Catholicism is similar to the rate of abuse in many Protestant denominations, the rate of abuse in our public schools, the rate of abuse among doctors, etc.—a very small, but not-insignificant, percentage of the people in these honorable professions. This is not an excuse, and I say it merely to provide some much-needed perspective. Our fallen human society has a serious problem with the sexual abuse of children. This reprehensible behavior is not particularly endemic to any single group, county, belief, people, or profession. To turn this into an anti-Catholic witch-hunt, or an anti-celibacy campaign, for that matter, would be terribly misguided. Neither the tradition of priestly celibacy nor Catholicism itself caused this problem or made these people pedophiles, nor are these problems in any way unique to the Church.

The fourth truth is that the Catholic Church has not done as good a job of identifying and weeding out abusers as it should have and, in the past, some bishops handled cases of abuse improperly. The same can be said about other denominations, schools, etc. (though they so rarely get the same level of media attention). Once again, this is not an excuse. We can’t just say, ‘Oh, look, we’re no worse than anybody else.’ It may be true, but it’s not enough. The primary responsibility for this is at the diocesan (bishop) level, as it is the bishop of a diocese who has responsibility for the behavior of the priests who answer to him. People who blame Pope Benedict XVI for the Church’s handling of these cases apparently do not understand the structure of the Church (or willfully misrepresent it). The Vatican does not (and, in fact, could not) individually manage over 408,000 priests in over 2,700 dioceses around the world. If an abusing priest was reassigned to another parish after he was found out, the responsibility for that decision falls primarily to the bishop of that diocese. Those bishops should, indeed, be held legally and morally accountable for their decisions, most especially when the reassignment led to further abuse.

The fifth truth is that the Catholic Church has been doing much better in recent years, though she gets no credit for this in the media reporting. It is no coincidence that the vast majority of abuse cases circulating in the media today happened well over twenty years ago. Church policy today is, as it should be, much more strict toward priests found to be acting criminally—especially with regard to abuse of children. Is there more room for improvement? Of course. But it would be a terrible mistake—and a terrible slander to the overwhelming majority of our priests—to assume that clergy sex abuse is going on un-checked in your neighborhood Catholic church. Are there still abusers in the ranks? Sadly, I’m sure that there are…but they will be found out, and when that happens they won’t be silently reassigned to other parishes.

The sixth truth is that we cannot blindly apply today’s standards to things that happened in different times. With 20/20 hindsight, we can say without reservation that people who abuse children should be locked up and kept permanently away from children. This isn’t how things used to work. Of course things should have worked that way, but they didn’t. As recently as the early 1990′s, abuse in the home by family members was oft’ treated as a ‘private issue’ to be handled behind closed doors. Abuse in schools might have resulted in a teacher getting fired, but that teacher would then move somewhere else and repeat their crimes. Abuse in the Catholic Church, just like abuse in almost any other religious group, was similarly swept under the rug by the leadership because it was thought to be ‘something best handled internally.’ The norms have changed, thank God, and we recognize now the error in this kind of thinking…and I wish the Church had, as it has so many times in its history, stood against the ‘norm’ because the ‘norm’ was morally incorrect. The Church failed in this case.

The seventh and final truth is that, as terrible as this scandal is, it does not discredit the Church as an institution. The Church was established by God, but for nearly 2,000 years it has been run by fallible men. Most of those men, from parish priests all the way up to Popes, have been honorable, righteous men who have tried to lead her correctly and well. A fair number of them, also from parish priests all the way up to Popes, have been something else entirely. Just because the Church has had poor leaders at times in her history, and has had (and still has) a percentage of immoral criminals in her ranks, does not mean the Church itself is invalid or her moral teachings are wrong. It simply means the Church is an organization that, like all others, must constantly struggle against a fallen, sinful human nature. In some ways she does this very well, and in others she needs to make improvements. We must keep the whole thing in a proper perspective.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

Today, most of the Christian world celebrates Easter—a commemoration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. In His death, celebrated on Good Friday, Jesus gained us pardon from sin. In His resurrection and triumph over death, He restored us to eternal life.

This is the most joyous day in the Christian calendar, and ends the forty days of Lenten prayer and penitence. Liturgically, in Roman Catholic tradition, the joyous ‘Gloria’ and ‘Alleluia’ are sung for the first time in Sunday Mass since Lent began. Our sorrowful focus on our own fallen nature and sinfulness turns, joyously, to a celebration of our forgiveness and eternal life in Jesus Christ. Our forty days of penitence turn to fifty days of Easter celebration.

Personally, Easter also marks our one-year anniversary as Catholics. We entered the church at the Easter Vigil in 2009, which is the evening mass on Saturday and the first (and most solemn, and most joyous) Easter mass. It’s on Saturday because Jewish tradition marks time by sunsets, so the ‘third day’ in scripture actually began at Saturday’s sunset. According to scripture, Jesus rose some time after Saturday’s sunset and before Sunday’s sunrise, because the women came to the tomb to find it empty while it was still dark on Sunday morning.

I wish you all a happy, joyous Easter season. God bless you!

The pain He endured for us is more than any of us will ever have to experience. Crucifixion on its own was a sadistic Roman method of institutional murder that put its victims through incredible pain and suffering, but even before his execution Jesus suffered humiliation, beatings, and insults. They even mocked Him on the cross, as if the cross itself were not enough.

This is the part of the story we ponder today. This is, indeed, the whole point of the story. Jesus—the Son of God—condescended to humiliation, suffering, and death so that you, me, and all the other undeserving sinners might have eternal life.

The Anima Christi (‘Soul of Christ’)
14th Century, Author Unknown

It is still an interesting thing to consider though. What did Jesus look like?

Msgr. Charles Pope writes on the Archdiocese of Washington blog about this and, while he comes to no definitive conclusion (nor should he), he does present some food for thought. Jesus was a Jewish man, likely of Semitic origin. Hair styles at the time are believed to be shorter than the traditional depiction, and Semitic hair tends to be coarser and darker. Semitic men tended to have larger noses.

The image at right is a forensic reconstruction based on the skull of a Semitic man from the 1st century. He probably looks a lot more like the real Jesus than the traditional, European depiction.

During the Ash Wednesday Mass, the faithful are marked with an ashen cross. The cross is placed on our forehead as a sign that we are dust, and to dust we shall return (Genesis 3:19).

Lent is a season in which Christians reflect on their sins and shortcomings and, more importantly, work toward repentance and correction. Christians everywhere should take this opportunity to self-examine through prayer and sacrifice. The most important single element of Christianity is that—because of Jesus’s sacrifice—salvation is open to us all. We, however, have to accept it by striving to live a Christian life.

Lent allows us, through our own small sacrifices, an opportunity to remind ourselves of this and begin moving in the right direction.