Unapologetic Catholic

I saw Jesus and didn't know what to do.

I saw Jesus today. I must see Jesus ever day but I often don't notice or take the time to really think, "I just saw Jesus!" Sort of like the Samariatan woman at the well, who, to her surprise, ran into the Messiah.

Thoughts on Clergy Sex Abuse

I’ve been in somewhat of a pensive mood during Lent. Lent is the time for reflections on the Stations of the Cross. Our church has an out door Stations of the Cross layout in an enclosed sunken garden area. It’s peaceful, secluded, yet the outdoors location with birds chirping and distant traffic reminds me of how connected we all are, how we are all members of the Body of Christ, and damage to His Body damages all of us as well.  The Stations mean a lot to me, perhaps since I might be the only adult Catholic who has not seen Mel Gibson’s Passion.  If you can’t find a nice church during Lent, don’t pass up the opportunity to do the Stations online. I’ve been reflecting on the damage to the Body of Christ I’ve witnessed over the past few years. It hurts.

There’s an interesting discussion at Open Book on the clergy sex abuse crisis.  For the most part comments are thoughtful, often very deep and painful.  It helps me to hear what a lot of my fellow Catholics have to say about the crisis as I struggle to make sense of this.

I do believe there are some common held beliefs that are not accurate. Here’s some:

1. The sex abuse crisis is a result of Vatican II or any 20^th century event.
2. The worst is behind us as we have eliminated those heterodox priests ordained in the 1970’s
3. The clergy sex abuse crisis is mostly about the homosexual abuse of boys.
4. We get the bishops we deserve because the abuse arises out of the American loosening of sexual mores in 1the 1960’s and 1970’s.

I thin that history shows that clergy sex abuse has been ongoing throughout Church history, for at least the last 1000 years. For some reason, it’s either been accepted as routine or simply ignored as a social phenomenon.  I don’t know why.  It’s widespread as well, in Africa, Asia and Europe.  It is deeply rooted in all aspects of the Catholic priesthood.

The John Jay report, showing 80% of the victims were boys, was specifically limited to sexual abuse of children. There was no clergy wide survey of adult sexual abuse. That would, I predict, show 80% female victims and it appears to be widepsread. The point is, I shouldn’t have to guess.  If the Church was clearly interested in solving this problem it already would have done the homework, and it hasn’t done so.

I don’t make any kind of blanket condemnation of bishops. I think many are trying to do a good job, as they understand it. I do think some confused their own identity with that of the Church.  That’s a human failing that, institutionally, the Church doesn’t seem to do much to prevent. As their recent report indicates, they still aren’t collectively capable of addressing the issues. I do single out Bishop Bruskewitz for failing to participate in the Survey and Report. He owes it to his flock and to all Catholics.

Interestingly there was also a number of comments about the Pope’s responsibility. I don’t believe the Pope has handled things well for a number of reasons. I’m not saying I’d be a better Pope, but I would have handled this issue better. I think, ultimately, that what puzzles most catholic parents. The Church’s handling of this issue is simply bizarre-- beyond explanation.

Here’s what I’d like to see:

1. A church wide inventory of all sex abuse claims
2. A church wide survey of all religious to determine the extent that celibacy is observed
3. Make a decision whether celibacy is to be a norm or an ideal
4. Make a decision whether celibacy is worth the costs

Evagelization by example: Book review

I enjoy reading blogs that are “slices of life,” talking about day-to-day events in real people’s lives.  This gives me the opportunity to see Christ through other people’s eyes.  A lot of the blogs I’ve linked to have this kind of beautiful discussion. You can get a clue from titles of blogs likely to have this flavor.  Words like “Holiness,  “Martha Martha” and Latin words for “flower” often predominate in introspective blogs. References to literature work to and you can't go wrong with blogs written by somebody who is called Enbrethiliel or self characterizes as a bad catholic. Here’s an entry that's one of my recent favorites.   I can usually pass on Catholic websites whose titles evoke images of battle, warriors, defenders, etc., for example. That seems to be a sure sign that I will get deep into the type of apologetics that I object to.

I believe that a life lived holy and gracefully is the best form of apologetics and evangelism. When I see holiness, i say, "I want soem of that!" In my critical comment below, Steven Riddle and Elena both observed that they were brought (back) to the Church because of the work of apologetics.  I don’t doubt that. A lot of our outlook on life is based on our experiences. I was born Catholic in a very Catholic home. I never had any great crisis of faith, never left the Church, so I can’t really appreciate the power of apologetics to bring people (back) to the Church and I'm glad they both took the time to point out how apologetics helped them.  The continued attractiveness of the church to me is in observing the daily lives of those whose religion transforms them, even for mere moments, into persons of holiness--persons to emulate during that moment. That can happen to anybody at any time, fortunately. And, from what I can tell, the form of apologetics that most people describe favorably are “conversion” or coming home” stories, essentially grace in action in people's lives. That’s different than heated debates on the validity of the Novus Ordo. I don’t know too many people who chose the Church on intellectual grounds, but surely there are some.

This was a long background explanation for a book review.  The book can be read on several levels, but much of the book is a tender and compassionate description on the day-to-day interaction between a very Catholic father and a holy daughter and it is this aspect of the book that moved me. The daughter was a 17^th century Poor Clare cloistered nun who carried on a detailed correspondence with her obviously doting father for most of her life. Amazingly, 124 of her letters beautifully hand scripted letters are intact today. None of his to her survive, unfortunately, so the story is told through her eyes. The immediate thing that strikes today’s reader is how thoroughly religion unselfconsciously infused all day-to-day events in 17^th century Italy.  Instead of the numerical calendar, Saint’s feast days are often used to refer to events. Also, the extreme poverty that was the lot of nuns is casually treated as normal and something to offer up. Sister Marie Celeste, in spite of her cloistered poverty, makes her father potions to ward off the plague, sews new collars for him, makes sure his stored wines are decanted properly and the lemons are picked from the lemon tree.  Her love for him, for her Church and for God is palpable in day to day routine events in her life. It radiates off the pages of the book.

Her letters usually begin,   “Most Illustrious and Beloved Lord father”

and end “Most Affectionate Daughter.” Wouldn’t we all love to get letters like this from our grown children?

She asks little of him, some money to buy a small private cell instead of sleeping communally on the floor, as poor nuns did in those days. She also makes a request of her father to use his influence to have a decent (i.e. sober) priest assigned to say Mass for the nuns. It appears that many priests in those days were not really very holy at all and would easily curdle milk with their breath, put fear into the barnyard animals and scandalize the nuns. I would feel honored to have a daughter like Sister Marie Celeste and it’s pretty clear her father felt that way, too.

But, as this story of filial love and devotion is told in the foreground, historic events occur in the larger world stage, including the "trial of the century", the OJ Simpson trial of that century. The verdict in that trial was rendered:

            We say, pronounce, sentence and declare that you Galileo, by reason of the matters which have been detailed in the trial and by which you have confessed already have rendered yourself in the judgment of this Hoy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believe, that which is false and contrary to scripture, that the sun is the center of the world and does not move east to west and that the earth moves and is not the center of the world…

Sister Marie Celeste’s father knelt down and replied:

I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei, Florentine…swear that I have always believed, I believe now, and with God’s help I will in the future believe all that is held preached and taught by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immoveable and that the earth is not the center of the same and that it moves…

In addition to the sentence of confinement he was also required to recite the seven psalms weekly.  His daughter, Sister Marie Celeste took this obligation upon herself to perform this penance on his behalf, because, as she said, “With great zest, first because I believe that prayer accompanied by the claim of obedience to Holy Church is effective, and then, too, to relieve you of this care.”

The Book is Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel, subtitled “a historical memoir of science faith and love.” I cried reading the description of the re-burial of Galileo in 1737, ninety years after his death. I hope what was described there is true.

Intelligent Design: pious fraud?

I object to Intelligent Design because it's bad science and very bad theology. I think that it wrecks our evangelization efforts and it damages the Faith to link evangelization to a demonstrably weak idea with intellectually dishonest proponents. Fortunately, many scientists and theologians agree here here and here.

To demonstrate the problems,  I will set out an accurate description of Intelligent Design theory.  Intelligent Design has two proponents who have published books putting forth its scientific basis--Michael Behe and William Dembski.

The first is Michael Behe's 1996 book, Darwin's Black Box. (reviewed) Let's carefully note that Behe fully accepts evolution 's main points. First, he acknowledges that evolution occurs through natural selection.  Next, he does not dispute that all life on earth probably descended from a  common ancestor. He does not make the silly arguments often heard that "evolution is just a theory," the fossil record is "incomplete" or that there are "no transitional fossils." These arguments are the ones made by uneducated fundamentalist creationists (and many ID proponents as well).  However, not all creationists are uneducated.  Answers in Genesis, for example, is an intellectually honest young earth creationist ( Earth created less than 10,000 years ago) organization which acknowledges these arguments are poor and should not be made.

Behe, however, notes that, although evolution is almost always the explanation, once in awhile, at the molecular level, some biological systems are "irreducibly complex" and could not have evolved. The system therefore must have been created "all in one piece." Here is his definition: "An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, since any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition nonfunctional."

In his book, Behe identifies a few such systems, including the blood clotting mechanism and bacterial flagella, for example.  Since his 1996 book, however, science has continued and has demonstrated that his proposed systems are not irreducibly complex and identified evolutionary pathways for those systems.  Since 1996 he has not proposed any new irreducibly complex systems and has admitted that irreducible complexity as a definition has analytical problems. In a 2001 Biology and Philosophy article,  Behe noted that “there is an asymmetry between my current definition of irreducible complexity and the task facing natural selection. I hope to repair that in future work.” Since then, he has published four articles, none relating to design critiques of evolution or addressing irreducible complexity. He now admits that irreducibly complex structures can evolve and the irreducibility is a matter of degree. That renders the concept pretty useless as a scientific design detection method. No further word on when he might identify any other systems or perform he promised repair work.  At this stage his work qualifies as an interesting idea--with no real world examples he is still willing to propose. There is substantial literature pointing out that his irreducibly complex ideas are neither new or valid.

Dembski is the second proponent. His books can be found here. Dembski constructed an "Explanatory Filter" to analyze whether a particular event is “designed.” This is a three step process eliminating various options at each step:

(1) An event that occurs frequently is the result of a natural law, or “regularity” to use Dembski’s phrase.  Planets, for example, are observed to orbit the sun in precisely controlled paths of very high predictability.  This appearance of design is a regularity governed by Newton's laws of motion.

(2) If the event does not very often, it may be governed by chance. A bug hitting a windshield is a matter of chance. Bad luck for the bug in question, but most bugs will fly around without running into windshields.

(3) However, some matters are so rare, that something other than chance may be operating.  Here Dembski introduces three concepts: “complex”  “information” and “specified.” Dembski needs to introduce the concept of complex specified information because it is a truism that very rare events occur and these events are clearly not the result of design. Somebody will win the lottery no matter how many people enter.

Dembski does a probability calculation suggesting that when the probabilities are so remote, we can reasonably eliminate chance. Therefore, design is all that's left.  There are two problems with Dembski's filter. First he concedes it doesn't eliminate 'false negatives."  In short , this means his filter will not always identify design where it clearly exists.  That's not a fatal problem because Dembski assures us that his filter will never have a false positive. If it detects design he claims it's always right. But he's wrong. He never apples his efforts to any real world system, it's all theoretical.  The reason for this is that he rejects what he calls "side information" in determining design. Side information is information relating tot he nature of the designer, the intended sue of the object, etc.

here are four pictures to demonstrate the difficulty:

Some of these were designed and some were not. Dembski's explanatory filter would result in astronomical odds of some of these objects an dconclude they were intelligently designed--false positives.  Others can be shown to be designed only by the use of "side information," which Dembski says is not needed.

Perhaps the most colossal false positive was the discovery by Percival Lowell of canals on Mars. Percival Lowell saw that many Martian canals meet at each of several points. The odds of this happening by chance, he calculated, are less than 1 in 1.6 x 10^*260

This is well above Dembski's  upper limit for design of 1 x 10 to the 150th power. Dembski himself admits the possibility of error . He says:

Now it can happen that we may not know enough to determine all the relevant chance hypotheses. Alternatively, we might think we know the relevant chance hypotheses, but later discover that we missed a crucial one. In the one case a design inference could not even get going; in the other, it would be mistaken. But these are the risks of empirical inquiry, which of its nature is fallible.

Dembski is conceding that we can never reliably calculate the odds indicating design because, as Lowell did, we overlook a crucial component. That's why Dembski refuses to ever apply his calculations to real world objects like those depicted above. False positives would be quickly identified. Criticisms of Dembski's mathematical work abound and Dembski apparently now has decided to teach theology full time.

This is the foundation for Intelligent design--that there are some natural organic systems which could not have not evolved but which had to be specially created.  Created by who?  Well, we don't know. All we know is that we humans didn't do it. The key to understanding Intelligent Design is that it teaches that evolution is not the answer to the biological diversity we see around us.  That diversity only came out by the occurrence of miracles.  Intelligent Design boldly promises that we can reliably detect miracles--supernatural interventions in everyday life.

But is it science?  What research is currently being conducted to identify irreducibly complex biological structures? None.  What research is being done to calculate the probabilities of various real world objects using Dembski's explanatory filter?  None.  Any government grants? No. Any university research grants for basic scientific research into these fields? No.  Does the Discovery Institute fund a laboratory program for Intelligent Design?  No, but its public relations program is well funded!

ID is a form of natural theology prominent among protestant evangelists such as William Paley in the late 1700's and early 1800's and since pretty much rejected.  It's not Catholic theology. I'm really wondering if that explains why most of the Catholic proponents of Intelligent Design are former protestants.  There is an Immanence in the genuine Catholic theology of creation, CCC 300, 301 and 302, that is simply absent in Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design theory is nothing other than an attempt to convince people to believe in God by some scientific evidence of natural objects. This is an old and ineffective argument--a theology of magic. You want magical proof of God? go buy a tortilla. This method is scientifically indistinguishable from ID, and that's why apologists invoking ID make Christians in general and Catholics in particular look foolish. Don't make my religion look foolish.

The remainder of the Discovery Institute ID proponents are simply engaged in intellectual dishonesty. I've already linked Phillip. E. Johnson's conspiracy theories, where he is claiming that all of science is involved in a conspiracy to conceal evolution's weaknesses and the cause of AIDS, as well. I have no time or patience for conspiracy theorists.

Update: Neither does John Derbyshire at The Corner here and here.

I couldn't agree more

Catholic educators need to do a better job of teaching evolution to correct an anti-evolutionary bias from the general society.

More quotes:

Dialogue also helps evangelization because of U.S. society's strong belief "that science offers an accurate, if limited, account of the way things are," he said.

Many Catholics question whether their religion is as in touch with reality as science is, he said.

"Dialogue between religion and science can help assuage their doubts, clearing away obstacles to a vital faith," he said.

"It can also make that faith more reasonable for those who may be considering joining the church," he said.

Yes. Mr. Shea and Mr. Cork ,please consider this. Touchstone, in particular, does no service to Catholics in this regard.

I will say it again:  Intelligent Design is bad apologetics.