The Joy of the Truth » Virtue

The Virtue of Hospitality

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:19:12 +0000

A Lost Art

You may have heard (perhaps even from me) that the family meal has become and endangered species, despite the fact that studies show very strongly that eating together as a family is an important way to keep children actively engaged in family life (and therefore away from risky behaviors). Along with the family meal, the virtue of hospitality is also disappearing. It only makes sense. After all, hospitality is simply extending the goodness and comfort of your home to other people. So, if the home ceases to be a place of family community, it also ceases to be a welcome place for others.

While both losses are something to lament concerning our culture, family meals and hospitality are more importantly values that we need to recapture in our own lives.

Evangelizing Through Hospitality

Hospitality can be a key element of Catholic evangelization. The goal of Catholic evangelization is to invite people into the Family of God. What better way to do this than to first invite them into your family?

The family is a sacramental sign of the Family of God. As a sacramental sign, family not only signifies God’s love, it brings that love into the world. The virtue of hospitality invites the “stranger” to partake in your family’s love. The family love that he or she experiences can act powerfully to dispose his or her heart to the love of God’s family.

Exercising the Virtue of Hospitality

So, how do we exercise the virtue of hospitality? There is no real formula. However, here are some general guidelines that you might find helpful:

The first step is to build up your own family. Make sure you’re spending time together, eating together, and growing in family love. Of course, every family can use some help growing stronger. I want to recommend a website that I had a hand in creating. It’s called The Parent’s Place. It has a ton of resources for parents at all stages of parenting.
Use your gifts. You don’t have to be an amazing entertainer to have a strong virtue of hospitality. The most important thing to share is your time and love. However, we all have individual talents that can boost our hospitality to others. Sharpen those talents. Do you like to cook? Sharpening your cooking skills is easy with resources like Rouxbe, an online cooking school for everyday cooks! Are you a decorator? Get some fresh ideas and beautify your home and your table. Faith and Family Magazine is a great resource for Catholic entertainment ideas.
Whatever you do, make it fun and keep it simple. Hospitality does require some level of sacrifice, but it should also be a labor of love. Love makes the work easier and enjoyable. Don’t make it more toil than it needs to be.
Take time. The next e-mail will be about giving the gift of “carefree timelessness.” We’ll talk more about the importance of time then. But, the Italians have the right idea. Their dinners can last for hours. Dining is an event for them, not a routine.
Remember that it’s all about relationship. The food, the setting, the entertainment is all backdrop for the main event — building relationship. Hospitality is all about invitation, spending time, and building relationship.

The Charism of Hospitality

God considers hospitality (relationships) so important, the Holy Spirit actually gives a special charism to some people for it! Some people have a Spirit-led talent for hospitality, and having people come and enjoy the fruits of their labor is a source of great fulfillment for them. The Church especially needs these people to discern their gift and to step up and evangelize. If you are somebody who really enjoys “entertaining’ guests and who often gets praised despite feeling like what you do is “nothing,” you just may have this special charism from the Holy Spirit. All charisms are for the purpose of serving the Church. How can you use your charism to serve the Family of God?

The Virtue of Hospitality is for Everyone — Just Do It!

Even if you dont’ have the charism – even if frozen pizza and beer is the extent of your cooking skill – we can all grow in the virtue of hospitality – the virtue of reaching out to other people and inviting them to share in the love of family and home. Taking advantage of the hospitality of a restaurant or other public place is fine once in a while, but the hospitality of the home is much more powerful in evangelization.

Who Is Really to Blame?

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:45:54 +0000

The virtue of prudence gives rise to the virtue of “memory” – the habit of learning from our mistakes. The media and our decidedly anti-catholic culture continue to try to place blame on Pope Benedict and the bishops for the sex scandals. People who look to place personal blame assume that the problem with the bishops was a sort of malicious negligence. In reality it’s more likely that the problem lay in accepting the same philosophy that had shaped our culture. What can we learn from our past mistakes?

This philosophy, born of the Enlightenment, said that the human power of science would solve all of the world’s problems. Before the hubris of this philosophy too over our way of thinking, bishops would have assumed the traditional understanding of human nature. According to this understanding sexual disorder is caused by a warped or twisted appetite. This twisted appetite is common to all human beings due to fallen human nature, though it affects each of us in different ways and to different degrees. Any sexuality that was not grounded in family love was considered disordered. While psychology and therapy can help us come to terms with our twisted desires and maybe even give us some tools to overcome them to some degree, the Church has always taught that only grace can truly bring healing to our disordered appetites. However, the Enlightenment-born philosophy of our culture at the time, promoted by the likes of Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers, claimed that people with disordered sexuality can be healed through scientific methods.

Prior to the early 1990′s, most people in the Church and in the culture at large were unaware or only beginning to come to grips with the prevalence of this horror and the high rate of recidivism among abusers. Accordingly, many leaders- and not just in the Church- felt that sex offenders could be treated pharmacologically or therapeutically and then returned to their former lives and occupations. Many bishops throughout the 1970′s and 1980′s sent priest abusers to treatment centers and received reports from therapists recommending that priests could be safely returned to ministry.

— Robert Barron from Real Catholic TV

You can still see the error of this purely scientific view of humanity in the way we approach alcoholism and drug addiction and other such obsessions. We tend to speak of alcoholism as a disease. This philosophy correctly identifies a biological element to alcoholism and that a person is not able to heal himself without professional help, however it also connotes that the problem is purely biological and does not include elements of the sinful choice or disorder caused by original sin.

The problem with this opinion is that human conditions are much too complicated to be purely biological. Sin and choice and fallenness always come into play. Environment, biology, choice, habits all interact in human behavior and even in addiction. That is why medicine and therapy alone are never enough heal someone.

So the mistake made at the time of the sexual abuses was to put too much trust into human ability to heal pedophilia. This was the mistake of an entire culture, not just the Catholic bishops. The same actions were taken by heads of secular schools and other institutions.

The irony is that while our culture blames Catholic Bishops, it still holds to the mistaken attitude that human beings have the power to cure human disorder through science. This attitude of the Enlightenment has been combined in a schizophrenic way with modernism. So, our culture assumes that anything without a biological cause is a free choice and therefore acceptable.

While we have not yet come to consider pedophilia normal, there are signs we are headed in that direction. Take the case of the famous movie director and screenwriter Roman Polanski. He was accused of drugging and committing sexual acts with with a 13 year old girl. He is now being brought to justice and Hollywood is up in arms in his defense. Whoopi Goldberg said on The View “It wasn’t rape-rape.”

Watch the video of Whoopi Goldberg statements and see for yourself. Notice how Whoopi Goldberg seem to think that statutory rape is not a crime, or at least not the same level of crime as “violent rape.” What’s going on here? This is an example of the effects that the philosophy of modernism is having on our culture. Modernism is leading us to accept even pedophilia as just another lifestyle choice. What would have happened if the scandals that we face today. Had happened today in the age of our current schizophrenic blend of Enlightenment and modernism? Our schizophrenic philosophy would make it even more probable that this could happen. We should not be placing personal blame on the bishops or on the Pope. Rather, we should be analyzing the very thought processes that our culture is being led by now.

Giving In To Senioritis – Extending Childhood Yet Again

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:08:16 +0000

May is the month for students to look forward to graduation and the approach of the end of the year. The classroom tends to take on an air of spring lightheartedness mixed with impatience for summer vacation. As a student I actually enjoyed this time of year – when homework could be done outside and the monotony of book work cold be broken by games of frisbee or volleyball, or even just a walk in the park or a bike ride.

However, as a teacher part of me dreaded this time of year. Students looking forward to summer vacation often wanted to begin their vocation a month early. Whining increased. Assignments arrived to my desk later. Bathroom breaks got longer. I felt a growing sense of frustration as my carefully crafted lessons fell onto deaf ears and daydreaming minds. I especially felt this sense of frustration as a teacher of seniors. I taught college level courses (Cooperative College Credit courses as well as Advanced Placement), and I saw my job as not only preparing these students for college but ushering them into a higher level of cognitive skill. I’m a bit of an idealist, so when seniors turn off and tune out, I find myself increasingly frustrated at their unwillingness to make the most of the time they have left in high school to grow in their ability to think and learn.

This frustration is nearly universal, and modern educational philosophy has begun listening to the whining of seniors as if it were the wisdom of the sages. Articles like USNews.com: More Calculus? Toss the Frisbee! appear periodically at this time of year expressing possible solutions to the problem of “senioritis.”

Other articles recommend giving in to senioritis by offering early graduation, work study programs (which are usually nothing more than time off of school to work part-time jobs, despite efforts to implement an actual curriculum), or “human interest” courses (read “blow-off class”).

The article from U.S. News & World Report brings up a great point, and the solutions it offers are actually pretty good: making the senior year a truly culminating education experience (senior papers or senior thesis presentations) and/or linking the senior year of high school to college by having colleges set standards for the senior year that must be met for college admission the following year.

Only 36 percent of seniors say they do six or more hours of homework a week. Only 1 in 3 seniors takes a science course, compared with two thirds of European students. (To be fair, more than half of American seniors spend at least three hours a day working, about three times the international average.) The result is that many of the 70 percent who now go on to college either have let their knowledge base decline senior year or never acquired the basic knowledge and study skills to succeed. At some universities, as many as two thirds of the freshmen must take remedial courses–and many never return for sophomore year.

No one blames the students. “I’d act the same way,” says Kirst, who sees slacking off as the natural response to the confusing cues sent by colleges and school officials. By admitting students on the basis of their junior-year grades, for example, colleges send the message that senior year doesn’t really count. The trend toward early admissions only exacerbates the urge to kick back.

However, even this article may be missing the point. The underlying assumption is that the main purpose of high school is to prepare students for college, which students need in order to get a successful job. This underlying educational philosophy has (in my opinion as an educator) eviscerated the power of schools to offer a true education. Traditional Catholic education philosophy tells us that the purpose of true education is to teach us how to think so that we can discover the truth.

Instead of following the way that students actually learn, modern educational philosophy turns it on its head. Elementary teachers who see memorization as restrictive attempt to gain students’ interest through activities and arts, when in fact elementary students are primed for memorization. Meanwhile, goaded by reports about how little graduating seniors “know” about history and science, high school teachers attempt to cram facts into their students’ heads, focusing on memorization rather than forming students’ growing ability to analyze and to think critically.

Is it any wonder that by senior year most students see education as irrelevant? High school students who start their freshman year complaining, “When will we ever use this stuff?” in the face of memorizing dates, names and events are by their senior year driven to distraction by even more requirements to memorize “useless facts.” In truth, they should have already learned these facts, and should by now be engaged in real thinking about their subjects.

Of course, anyone who knows adolescents and young adults realize that even changing educational philosophy and practice won’t get rid of senioritis. Fallen human nature pretty much guarantees that students will seek luxury and fun over the true good of learning how to think. However, even this struggle can be a good thing if it teaches the self-discipline of putting off what we think we want for the sake of a higher good. One thing is certain – giving in to senioritis is not what is good for our young adults. It does nothing more than keep them children when they should be embracing adulthood.

The Choice Between Cultural Indoctrination and Critical Thinking

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:33:33 +0000

Fairytales and children’s books are often the targets of criticism by those who fear indoctrination from the Right or from the Left. The essay Children of the Left, Unite by Caleb Crain is a case in point. While Crain attacks such claims from the Right, he at the same time levels the same attacks on children’s books from the Left.

What caught my attention wasn’t the tired debate about literature, but the underlying worldview of the entire indoctrination debate that is shared by both sides. As we abandon intellectual skills of reasoning and critical thinking as a culture in favor of more practical educational outcomes of fact memorization and job skills, our culture has simplified, polarized and politicized every aspect of social life.

Marxist principles have been dripping steadily into the minds of American youth for more than a century. This isn’t altogether surprising. After all, most parents want their children to be far left in their early years — to share toys, to eschew the torture of siblings, to leave a clean environment behind them, to refrain from causing the extinction of the dog, to rise above coveting and hoarding, and to view the blandishments of corporate America through a lens of harsh skepticism. But fewer parents wish for their children to carry all these virtues into adulthood. It is one thing to convince your child that no individual owns the sandbox and that it is better for all children that it is so. It is another to hope that when he grows up he will donate the family home to a workers’ collective.

Simple virtues such as sharing, respect, taking care of your surroundings, etc. have somehow become Marxist principles that are the sole possession of the Left. Teaching your child to share the sandbox will lead to that child embracing Socialism or Communism and fighting for the universal ownership of all goods.

The best way to make sure our children are not indoctrinated is to teach them to reason things out and to think critically. For example, thinking through the virtues listed above would help us to realize that virtue is always about balance. Sharing is a good thing as it engenders generosity and thoughtfulness of others, drawing us out of ourselves and making us aware the needs of others. However, the extreme abolition of all private property does not have these benefits. In fact, removing private property removes the option of generosity by forcing what should be freely chosen. Sharing is a balance between selfishness and extreme ideology. In fact, all virtue is a balance between extremes. Reasoning can help us see that. Politicizing cannot.

I am increasingly concerned with the division of our culture between Left and Right. If you are a conservative, you cannot care about the environment or promote generosity in immigration policy. If you are a liberal, you better promote universal health care and you can never admit to the benefits of the free market system. We are becoming indoctrinated – not by children’s books, but by our inability to think things through in a critical and reasonable way and by our tendency to accept ideas as all or nothing propositions.

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What Makes a Society Healthy?

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:58:56 +0000

Since the writings of Aristotle (and probably before), humankind has assumed that human nature was an objective reality, and that certain things were good for us as human beings and other things were not good for us. This assumption extended to human society.

In Plato’s Republic Aristotle argues that society exists for higher purposes than mutual protection. Society exists so that we can help each other reach human fulfillment, and because we find human fulfillment in helping each other. Social life is inherent to human nature.

Furthermore, Aristotle argues that society is objectively made healthy when its members practice interdependence. I will grant that his prudential choice of a government system does not all for human freedom, but this does not affect his general argument that there are objective criteria for a healthy human society, and that interdependence is an important one.

Social and academic “liberals” tend to take the path of Marxism, which cast into doubt all traditional criteria for social health. They join Marx in his suspicion that the criterion discovered by philosophers and theologians throughout the centuries are nothing more than pillars of power for a tyrannical capitalistic society. However, the truth is that these criterion have been embraced by the Catholic Church from the beginning of the Church’s social teachings, and the Church does not specifically endorse any one economic or government system.

Recently I read an article by Robert P. George called “Making Business Moral.”¹ While this article was mostly about the necessity of business to transcend its current “grotesque obsession with maximizing shareholder value over increasingly brief spans,” he grounds his commentary on business in three criteria for a healthy society. Each of these criteria have been under attack, especially in the academic world.

The first “pillar of a healthy society” is respect for individual human beings and their dignity. George points out that a society that does not respect the human person “will generally treat human beings as “cogs in a larger social wheel.” One need not look very hard in United States history to see examples of where American culture got this wrong: black slavery, the (second) industrial revolution, our treatment of the “new immigrants.” Whether a culture uses the weaker natural law position for human dignity or the immeasurably greater definition of human dignity rooted in the Judeo-Christian belief that we are made to love and be loved by God, it must grant human dignity to all human beings. As soon as a culture arbitrarily chooses one group of humans to which to deny dignity of personhood, all claims to human dignity are endangered. The idea of human dignity has very recently been under attack, as I noted in previous blog posts analyzing the article, “The Stupidity of Human Dignity.” Human history defeats such attacks. Respect for the dignity of every human person leads to health in society. Marginalization or wholesale denial of human dignity leads to sickness, suffering and death.

The second pillar of a healthy society George points out in his essay is the institution of the family as the foundational structure of society. Robert P. George calls the family, “the original and best department of health, education, and welfare.” The family is the most efficient and effective structure for the nurturing and education of children. As a society, do we want our children to grow up to learn service, selflessness, honesty, and work ethic? No institution can teach these virtues better than the family. Yet, the family has been under philosophical attack since Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, which decried the family a tool of the capitalist system to control social structures and to promote commerce. The attack continues today, especially through the modernist homosexuality movement, which attacks the natural purpose of marriage by promoting “gay marriage” and by posing such displays as nativity scene with two marys and two josephs in order to offer “a “wink” at heterosexual assumptions.” Of course, there are many more philosophical attacks on the family (radical feminism, materialism, hedonism, etc.) as well as many practical attacks (no-fault divorce, premarital sex, contraception, “new birth technologies”). When the Church says that the family is the foundational unit of society, it is not just saying that the family is most important. It is saying that society is created by families working together interdependently to provide for their needs. If the “traditional family” is damaged or destroyed, society will suffer or perhaps even disappear altogether. If families (and therefore “traditional” marriages) are strengthened, society becomes stronger. Want proof? Just look at our overflowing prisons – filled mostly young men who get into trouble due to restlessness and a lack of meaning of purpose in life. In fact, the second pillar (family) is a pre-condition of the first pillar (respect for human dignity). Respect for human dignity is taught and learned primarily within the family.

The third pillar of a healthy society that George points out is a “fair and effective system of law and government.” Law and government have always been viewed with suspicion bordering on paranoia in America. Even before the Revolutionary War, the popular “Real Whig” philosophy taught that governments could not be trusted and would always be corrupt. Yet, government and law exists to coordinate “human behavior for the sake of achieving common goals – the common good,” and to guide us toward authentic goods that we would not choose for ourselves due to sin or ignorance. Government and laws are not only responses to sin. They are an integral part of human interdependence. Government and law are under attack from a number of fronts. Whig philosophy still abounds in America, putting all authority in a dark light. Cultural liberals overextend the role of authority and government from fostering interdependence to fostering dependence. Cultural conservatives sometimes limit government so much that interdependence and the common good are sacrificed for the sake of keeping the market forces “free and deregulated.” If government and law could be properly balanced, it would actually become a tool of authentic human freedom rather than a tyrant.

Robert P. George’s article presents an extremely important concept that should be at the forefront of Catholic public discourse. These three pillars are only three of the important elements of a healthy society. You can read more about what makes a healthy society in the Library. His context of this discussion on society is extolling business to support these three pillars of society – for its own good. We would all do well to follow suit.

End Notes

₁George, Robert P. “Making Business Moral.” First Things Magazine. October, 2008. 17-19.

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Anti-bullying Law a Sign of Failure

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:18:41 +0000

Bullying has become an issue that is growing in the public eye. I was bullied as a child – from elementary school all the way through high school. While in my experience I would have to say that news reports about the “damage” caused by bullying are a bit exaggerated, I cannot say that it did no damage. I suffer from a bit of a social phobia – a fear when meeting new people that I will not measure up to some imagined standard. Certainly as Catholics we want our children to learn to love each other. Bullying is the acceptance of power rather than love as the center of life (wouldn’t Nietzsche be proud?).

There is little doubt that bullying is a real problem in our public and private schools. However, to accept that there is a real problem is not to accept the proposed solution. According to the editors of our local newspaper, the solution includes a state law against bullying. Wisconsin is apparently only one of 14 states that has not already passed one. A state law against bullying would

. . .give every child in the state the same protection against intimidation and establish a procedure for complaints to be filed and cases investigated.

It also would mean that bullying outside of the school setting would be banned.

A state law against bullying seems so reasonable. I have to ask, though, why is a state law against bullying necessary? While a state law would give authorities leverage to investigate cases of bullying, I doubt that it would actually do much to protect children against intimidation. A law will definitely not teach a child to become lovers of peace and justice rather than tyrants. The only thing a law will do is provide a penalty for those who are caught – after they have already become bullies. Such penalties do little to actually stop negative behavior.

The very fact that a state law against bullying seems reasonable to us shows the failure of our society to embrace the family as the first school of love. Our culture has grown dependent on social institutions, form daycare to the school system, to raise our children for us. A school system does not have the power of a family to teach our children virtue.

Our social systems are doing their best to address the problem

In recent years, school districts across Wisconsin have adopted policies against bullying and many have backed this up with in-service programs for teachers and programs in the classrooms.

We applaud all of these efforts to put an end to something that can have both a serious and damaging impact on children.

In addition, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has developed “Bullying Prevention Curriculum” guides that have been sent to all school districts.

The guides contain instructional units targeted to students in grades three to five and six to eight. The guides also include bullying prevention policy guidelines that describe elements schools and districts should consider in developing a policy related to the prevention of and response to bullying behaviors.

That’s a pretty standard school system response to negative student behavior – policies, inservices and curricula. Such interventions do not compare to the power of a family’s daily personal interaction with the individual child.

The problem of bullying will not be completely solved this side of the Kingdom. It is a result of our sinful nature. However, our sinful nature can be overcome in each individual through the power of Divine Grace and by learning to cooperate with that grace to turn our hearts away from evil and toward authentic goodness. We learn to cooperate with grace – to live lives of faith and virtue – within and from our family.

A call for a state law against bullying is a sign of failure. It means that we have given up on forming lives of virtue and have resorted only to doling out penalties. I am not necessarily against such a law. It is possibly within the interest of public safety. On the other hand, we need to ask if it is an overreaching attempt to legislate morality that is best learned in the family. Our culture has come to see parenthood as a temporary interruption in “real life.” We expect parenting to be as little an inconvenience as possible. Falling for the allure of educational experts claiming to make our children more productive and successful if they can get them into school as early as possible, we have abrogated our responsibililty for raising our own children, expecting the State or the Church to do it for us. But social institutions that treat children in the plural are largely incapable of instilling virtue in the individual. The family is the school of love. The only real solution to bullying is to rethink the way we are raising and educating our children. The solution starts in the home.

End Note

“Anti-bullying law long overdue.” Marshfield News Herald 10 November 2008. Gannett Press. 6A.

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How Our Country Has Changed

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:09:35 +0000

Every presidential election has stirred this thought in me, but perhaps none more than the race that led to President Bill Clinton’s first term in office. I remember watching the debates and the “town hall meetings” hosted by MTV in which question after question started with the phrase, “As president, what would you do about . . .?” How times have changed.

As our country slowly solidified from individual and independent colonies into a united nation after the forging of the Constitution, the main political model in the United States was “Republican Virtue.” This beautifully idealistic philosophy had a number of tenets that you just don’t find in American politics today.

The role of the government was to protect the common good, but to leave as much freedom as possible to the states (of course, this was in conflict between the federalists and the anti-federalists, but even the federalists believed in subsidiarity).
The country as a whole struggled to balance liberty with order.
Citizens were encouraged to freely sacrifice their own good for the good of the country – to put others first
Virtue was seen as an indispensable requirement for the exercise of freedom
Family was the core of citizenship – mothers had an esteemed role of educating children in the ways of virtue and citizenship
Politicians were citizens who were elected to office primarily because of their proven character. They were people that the citizens trusted. Elected public officials, including United States senators, congressmen and presidents, served their term and then returned to their home and their normal occupation. There was not such thing as a professional politician

I do not mean to imply that America was perfect during this time of Republican Virtue. Negative campaigning, mud slinging, and corruption have always been part of politics (we are always fallen human beings). However, our country at least had an ideal to live up to. When did things change? Historians probably differ on this opinion, but I put the blame on the presidential campaign of President Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s campaign of “New Democracy” changed the public focus from Republican Virtue to competing self-interest. His message was the empowerment of the common man. Who could argue with that as a worthy goal? But “empowerment” meant that government exists to serve the individual citizen rather than that government exists due to the selfless service of citizens for the protection of the common good.

In my opinion, we are now bearing the fruits of the “New Democracy.” We have become a country of entitlement. We tend to see government as a great goodies box that exists to make my life easier. The principle of subsidiarity has been lost by both major political parties. Republican Virtue is viewed with suspicion and even contempt. The concepts of the common good and universal human rights have been replaced by universal private health care and the right to “privacy.” Idealism is scoffed and individualism is idealized.

We now have a Democrat government. Democrats have taken the House, Senate and the presidency. The Democrats tend to embrace the “New Democracy” much more wholeheartedly than Republicans. I think the next four years are going to show us the folly and the danger of such a public mindset. I am happy that we have finally elected an African-American president. However, I fear what free reign of “New Democracy” will do to our country.

We do still hang on to the shreds of what once made our country great. Let’s just hope that some day we can piece it back together and come to realize that responsibility for our neighbor’s welfare rests in our lap, not with the government.
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Thinking and Intelligence aren’t the Same as Wisdom

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:14:57 +0000

I was talking to my mom about politics yesterday. We were sharing our frustration with all of the negative ads that seem to be hitting a crescendo in the last week before the election. We were also sharing our incredulity at the number of Catholics and non-Catholic Christians who seem to be defending their vote for the pro-choice Barak Obama, even though he has promised to sign the “Freedom of Choice Act” into law as his first act as president. I shared with my mother one example of my frustration.

A recent editorial in our local newspaper made the following claim:

It really makes me sad and I can’t see how anyone with a Christian conscience can vote McCain-Palin ticket. Vote for McCain, vote for the alcohol industry. Oh, they are against abortion but apparently not against liquor and they neglect to mention that the McCains are making a killing, in more ways than one, on the alcohol industry. I guess you aren’t as dead when you have been killed by a drunken driver. Try telling that to the family of the mother and 10-year-old daughter who were killed by a former surgeon after his third drunken driving offense.

I don’t want to see anyone killed but I think it would be poetic justice if it was your family and not mine killed or maimed by alcohol which is the industry McCains make a living from. How can you be this blind.

Apparently McCain has family members who are high up in the management of some major businesses in the alcohol industry. Therefore, a vote for McCain is a vote in favor of drunk driving and alcoholism. Therefore, the writer of this letter concludes that a vote for McCain is just as pro-death as a vote for Obama. Q.E.D.

If I need to explain to you how ridiculous this argument is, I’ll buy you a pizza and a beer some time and we can talk.

My expression of frustration was, “People just don’t think.”

My mom replied, “Oh, people are thinking. That doesn’t mean they’re thinking right.”

Ah, the wisdom of my mother. That must be where I get it from, eh?

My mom’s statement hit me because I had just been reading about the supernatural virtue of temperance in the book Divine Pity by Fr. Gerald Vann. This is the book on which I have been meditating during Eucharistic adoration each week. What struck me was a small paragraph on intellectual intemperance.

Fr. Vann said that there are two kinds of intemperance of the mind

to use the truth simply as a means of profit & pleasure
to twist the truth and pervert it

Both of these errors sacrifice reverence for the truth, which is an expression of Truth Himself.

It occurred to me that the problem with American culture is not that we don’t think at all (which might be considered the sin of intellectual insensibility), but that we use our intelligence to rationalize evil. Rationalizing evil actually commits both aspects of intellectual intemperance. When we rationalize, we use parts of the truth to explain away an evil for our own profit and pleasure, and we have to twist and pervert the truth in order to make it fit our desires.

The American culture has become very good at rationalizing evil. Moreover, doing so has become a firmly entrenched habit. The problem is not that America is less intellectual than it should be, or that people do not think. The problem is that American does not know how to correctly handle truth. We think, and we are proud of our “enlightened thinking,” but we do not think rightly.

Way to go, Mom. You put your finger right on it.

The Divine Pity by Fr. Gerald Vann.

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The Peace of Supernatural Fortitude

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:00:17 +0000

Natural fortitude is the firm habit of sustaining all dangers and difficulties in pursuit of what is good. Supernatural fortitude is the confidence that God instills into the soul that is in relationship with Him that all dangers and difficulties will be overcome by His help. In Divine Pity, Dr. Vann describes the beauty of being fortified with God’s peace:

So it is the gift of fortitude that you see in the joy and gaiety of the martyrs, who have confidence that their torments will not cause them to falter, and rob them of eternal life, but, on the contrary, will take them, through the power of the Spirit, straight to the arms of God. And we can see the same sort of confidence and quiet joy in all the works of the saints: what they build, they build steadfastly and in tranquility, and neither apparent failures during their lives nor the advent of death can dismay them or cause them to lose their confidence in the final outcome; for all their building is in the hand of God, and in Him they trust, with all the child’s unquestioning trust that what the father has begun he will see to its conclusion. So, to hear what the Spirit says, to accept His guidance, is to work with all one’s strength in the present, but to leave the future in quiet and humble confidence to Him. it is to be zealous, to have the strength of will of the man, but it is also to be filled, through the power of the Spirit, with the freshness and spontaneity, the zest and the enthusiasm, of the child.

While the steadfastness of the martyrs is always beautiful, I was especially drawn in meditation to the peaceful steadfastness of the saints. As Fr. Vann is fond of saying, the saints “care but do not care.” They are passionate about the work that God called them to do, but they rest in the assurance that they do God’s work, and that God’s work will carry on with or without them. Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s statement, “God does not call me to be successful. He only calls me to be faithful,” is sometimes misinterpreted as a statement of diligence in the midst of futility – as if success isn’t possible, and isn’t really important. Mother Teresa’s statement is actually the utmost confidence that if she is faithful to what God calls her to do, God will bring about the success.

This is exactly the quality that I crave in my present state of conversion. I get impatient that my apostolate isn’t growing as quickly as I want it to, that not enough visitors come to the website, that I’m not even sure if my work is doing any good. Yet, I know that the work God has called me to has touched lives. I need to cooperate with the assurance that God wants to give me that He will bring about the success that He wants for my work. I need only be faithful in doing the work as well as I am able. Peace — tranquility — quiet confidence — just three more reasons to live the moral life and to seek the Joy of the Truth.

The Divine Pity by Fr. Gerald Vann.

Father Vann uses the beatitudes as a springboard for a discussion on living the Divine Life as fully as possible. He identifies the subtle ways that Christians fail to fully live out the beatitudes, the virtues and the life of love. The social implications of the Beatitudes (the subtitle of the book) comes in with Father Vann’s persistent theme that we do not exercise the Christian life in a vacuum, but within a family.

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Cheaters Never Prosper

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:37:00 +0000

Ok, “cheaters never prosper” is a cliche. But so is “every law was meant to be broken,” yet we hear this saying much more often – in word or idea. Our country is currently suffering from the greedy cheating of people associated with the Annie Mae and Freddie Mac companies. In 2002 we heard about a number of scholars who had plagiarized or otherwise misrepresented themselves and their scholarly work. At that time, U.S. News and World Report carried the article, “Our Cheating Hearts.”

The article begins:

The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal once claimed that “mutual cheating is the foundation of society.” For as long as there have been rules, it seems, there have been cheaters.

I would like to know the context of Pascal’s statement. He was, after all, a Catholic scholar and I find it difficult to believe that he was so defeatist. This statement, like “every law was meant to be broken,” indicates (with a wink and a smirk) that cheating is natural to human beings.

When we are faced with human depravity, we tend to defend our sensibilities in two ways. First, we try to shrug it off by convincing ourselves that it is inevitable or normal or inevitable. Second, we try to find a psychological explanation.

What’s going on here? Doesn’t anyone play by the rules? On Wall Street, the one-two punch of greed and competition is to blame, says journalist James Stewart. His coverage of the 1987 stock crash and insider-trading scandals earned him a Pulitzer and became the foundation of his bestseller Den of Thieves. All that money sloshing around, he says, “can drive people into a frenzy. . . . You’re thrown in that competitive situation at a very early age and exhorted to win at all costs.” And that win-at-all-costs ethic, critics say, is the foundation of the cheating culture.

In Hollywood, “you can get away with your embezzlements and your lies, and your murders, but you can never get away with failing,” according to Dominick Dunne, celebrated chronicler of the powerful and notorious. The pressure to succeed–and the fear of failure–Dunne says, is the perfect prescription for cheating. It may also be the root of widespread cheating among students. Consider: Seventy-four percent of high school students admitted to “serious test cheating” last year. That’s more than double the number who admitted this in 1969.

Certainly an overemphasis on success leads to cheating. I see this in high school students and their parents, or example. Sometimes we even get parents defending or even abetting the cheating by their children and offering the excuse, “Well, she has to get into college and she can’t do that without a good grade in this class.”

Obsession with success and the willingness to sacrifice integrity show a degradation of priorities and a false sense of happiness – a willingness to sacrifice transcendent goods such as honesty, truth and integrity for the sake of temporal, imperfect, and insecure goods such as money and success. Obsession with success brings constant dissatisfaction and cheating does nothing to alleviate the unhappiness caused by a disordered life.

Of course, there are other reasons for cheating as well:

But pressure to succeed isn’t a complete explanation. Undeniably, there is an almost romantic appeal to “beating the system”–particularly if the system, whether it’s the speed limit or the stock market, is perceived as rigged or unfair. Take the tax code, for instance. Nearly everyone thinks he or she pays too much or that others don’t pay enough. So Americans cheat to the tune of $195 billion a year, according to the Internal Revenue Service. That amounts to a whopping $1,600 per taxpayer.

While the first cause of cheating is a false sense of true happiness, the second is a false idea of the purpose of authority. “Sticking it to the man” has been in vogue since the 1960′s. Actually, it has been part of the American culture since the American Revolution when True Whigs held a philosophy that held all authority suspect. Americans hold that individuals need to grab all they can for themselves while authority attempts to keep them from it.

However, the truth is that authority is intended to lead us to authentic goodness, especially when our own weaknesses or ignorance would make attaining that goodness more difficult if not impossible. Often our attempt to “stick it to the man” or to “beat the system” are like my two-and-a-half-year-old’s stubborn refusal to wear pants.

And think about the reasons people give for cheating. We steal cable because “the prices are a rip-off.” We fudge insurance claims because “the rates are sky high.” We pocket office supplies because “the company can afford it.” All these rationalizations suggest people are perversely cheating to restore fairness. Is this tolerable?

Yes, sometimes the explanation of why we cheat is just that we’re selfish and whiny. We tend to think we are never getting enough because we are never satisfied with what we have.

So, whether we are revealing our messed-up priorities, our hubris, or our selfishness, we sacrifice much when we cheat. Cheaters destroy their personal integrity – the virtue of being who you were created to be. What’s more, since human beings are created to receive Truth, cheaters do great harm to justice between them and others, therefore isolating them from the bond of trust that creates a society. And what do we gain? A stapler? A few hundred dollars that we’ll spend foolishly anyway? A good grade that won’t even be remembered ten years from now? Even those people who rise to positions of power and prestige by cheating live with the constant fear that they will be found the fraud.

Furthermore, all sin does harm to society

No wonder many are now asking if there’s been a major shift in cultural standards–whether cheating and deceit have become accepted tools of the trade in the never-ending quest for success.

We have an innate sense that cheating is evil. U.S. News & World Report, the consummate supporter of bad science, explains:

Yet there is tension here as well. As great as the urge to cheat may be, we also have an almost hard-wired hatred of cheaters and a deep-seated urge to punish them. In fact, studies have shown people will go to great lengths to ferret out and punish cheaters, even when doing so is costly and offers no material gain. According to sociologists, this instinct to punish rule-breakers may date to hunter-gatherer societies, which were highly egalitarian–there were no hierarchical leaders. So when it came to sharing food, for instance, these minisocieties had to work as a group to punish any freeloaders.

It amazes me that everything can be traced back to the “hunter-gatherer” era of human history, as if this era (inexplicably) forever defined human nature. Truth be told, every time the “hunter-gatherer” era is used as an explanation for modern human behavior, the connection is based on a total guess. There is no evidence. This pseudo-scientific explanation is a “socially acceptable” alternative to the acceptance of natural law. We know that cheating is bad because human beings were created for Truth.

As Catholics, we know through Divine Revelation that human beings once knew the perfect life, but that Original Sin damaged our intellect and our will. Therefore we are tempted toward sin and deceit, yet we still hold goodness as our ideal. Cheaters never prosper – not because they are never successful but because they sacrifice the reality of who they are meant to be for the myth of what they wish they had.

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The Joy of the Truth » Virtue

The Virtue of Hospitality

A Lost Art

Evangelizing Through Hospitality

Exercising the Virtue of Hospitality

The Charism of Hospitality

The Virtue of Hospitality is for Everyone — Just Do It!

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Giving In To Senioritis – Extending Childhood Yet Again

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The Choice Between Cultural Indoctrination and Critical Thinking

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What Makes a Society Healthy?

End Notes

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Anti-bullying Law a Sign of Failure

End Note

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How Our Country Has Changed

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Thinking and Intelligence aren’t the Same as Wisdom

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The Peace of Supernatural Fortitude

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Cheaters Never Prosper

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