Fool for the Truth

In late February, in the midst of the uproar over Live Action’s exposé of Planned Parenthood, I wrote a piece about the controversy for the About.com Catholicism GuideSite. Entitled “Justified Deception or Lying? The Case of Live Action v. Planned Parenthood,” the piece argued that, whatever good intentions Lila Rose and her comrades at Live Action may have had, they stepped over the line, and their tactics could not be justified under Catholic moral theology.

But now, five or six weeks later, I’m beginning to have second thoughts. After all, the arguments of those who supported Live Action seem pretty persuasive. Not those, of course, that claimed that the end (undermining Planned Parenthood and thereby saving babies) justified the means; but those that argued that the means themselves were perfectly justifiable.

It all seems so clear now that, in retrospect, I cannot understand why I missed it. Perhaps it can be chalked up to my post-Vatican II idolization of popes, which led me into the error of believing that the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, released under Pope John Paul II and compiled under the direction of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, could be regarded as an authoritative document. These three paragraphs made it all seem so simple:

“A lie consists in speaking a falsehood with the intention of deceiving.” The Lord denounces lying as the work of the devil: “You are of your father the devil, . . . there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” [paragraph 2482].

Lying is the most direct offense against the truth. To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error. By injuring man’s relation to truth and to his neighbor, a lie offends against the fundamental relation of man and of his word to the Lord [paragraph 2483].

By its very nature, lying is to be condemned. It is a profanation of speech, whereas the purpose of speech is to communicate known truth to others. The deliberate intention of leading a neighbor into error by saying things contrary to the truth constitutes a failure in justice and charity [paragraph 2485].

Still, as the supporters of Live Action kept pointing out, even that postconciliar catechism noted that

No one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not have the right to know it [paragraph 2489].

True, as I responded, that statement comes in a section concerned with the sin of detraction—that is, revealing the sins of another person to a third party—and not with lying to a person in order to save babies, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered: Why can’t this principle be applied universally?

And that’s when I had my revelation. Had not Our Lord Himself said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set ye free”?

Think about it. What could truth mean in this context, other than moral truth? We know that abortion is wrong; we must act on that knowledge. To do otherwise is to fail to live up to our obligations as Christians.

But still—are there any limits on how we can act on that knowledge? Even the supporters of Live Action claimed that there are. Live Action’s ”lies” (as some of their supporters, such as Peter Kreeft, were willing to call them) or ”justified deception” (as most of their supporters preferred to refer to Lila Rose’s play-acting) were OK, but killing abortionists or even burning down a Planned Parenthood abortuary is not.

Now that I’ve seen the light, though, I think that they’re missing the boat. Remember—Our Lord said that “the truth shall set ye free.” But what does freedom mean, if not the right to do anything that we think is morally justified in order to advance the truth?

I’ll admit: I still have certain qualms when it comes to murder or even to property damage. But until I saw the light, I had similar qualms about lying, and as some of those who supported Live Action pointed out, those qualms were nothing more than ”scrupulosity.” I wouldn’t want to be accused of that again, so I’m scrupulously attempting to overcome my scrupulosity. In the meantime, though, I’ll make sure to refrain from criticizing anyone who murders an abortionist or burns down a Planned Parenthood office, because such criticism of those who are just trying to do the right thing is not helpful—indeed, it might even amount to detraction, as one supporter of Live Action warned those of us who had mistakenly criticized them. (Actually, since he saw nothing wrong with Live Action’s tactics—long before I came around—he really meant calumny, but, to quote the current occupant of the Oval Office, they’re all ”just words.”)

Granted, the idea that we should be free to do anything that we think is morally justified has been misused by others, even by those who support abortion. But since we know the truth—abortion is wrong—we don’t have to worry about whether any action taken on behalf of that truth might be wrong. We’ve been set free to act in whatever way we need to, in order to bring the scourge of abortion to an end.

And first and foremost among our actions, I’ve now become convinced, should be depriving those who have no right to the truth of that truth—even if we have to go out of our way to create opportunities to do it. Pro-lifers—no, even more broadly, Christians—have made a grave mistake. We have spent far too much time trying to convince others of the truth regarding abortion, not to mention the Truth of Christianity. And what has been their response? An obstinate refusal to acknowledge the truth!

Seriously—how many times can we be expected to try to convince the same person of the truth? Our Lord said we had to forgive our brother seventy times seven times; but He said nothing about the number of times that we have to expose our brother to the truth. That silence, as any Straussian knows, is significant. Clearly, it was Our Lord’s way of signaling to those of us who know the truth that we have no obligation to expose those in error to that truth. They have chosen to deny the truth; who are we to deny them their moral freedom?

Moreover, it is at best naive to think that exposing inveterate sinners to the truth would make any difference. That’s the fundamental difference between them and us, after all. We know the truth and act on it; they know untruth and act on it. Thus the best way to stop them is to play along with them, to respond to their untruth with untruth, so that they will continue to persist in their untruth, and we can then expose them to the world (or at least to those who know the truth).

If that seems a little close to detraction, then we simply need to look at detraction in a new light. While detraction is revealing the truth to someone who has no right to know it, those of us who know the truth by definition have a right to the truth. Simple, really—the truth has set us free to reveal the hidden truth about others to everyone who, like us, has a right to the truth. And we shouldn’t worry that those committed to untruth might decide to do the same to us; after all, we have no hidden truths that we wouldn’t want revealed.

There’s only one thing that still bothers me—well, two things.

The first is that pesky line from Saint Paul—Romans 3:23, to be exact: ”For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” I’m not sure why, but every time I read it, I begin to wonder whether anyone, including those who do know the truth, has the right to know it. Surely, either Saint Paul was wrong, or Christ came to reveal the truth to a world filled with sinners who had no right to it, and that would have pretty radical implications for how we as Christians should act toward those who do not yet know the truth, or even toward those who have rejected it.

I’m pretty sure, though, that Saint Paul must have been wrong. After all, I’ve never sinned, much less obstinately persisted in doing something I knew was wrong, and if you’ve read this far without closing this webpage, I’m sure you haven’t, either.

The second thing that bothers me is that word, lying. Unlike Peter Kreeft, I just cannot bring myself to embrace it. Nor, for that matter, do I find deception (even when modified with the adjective justified) much better. The Oxford American Dictionary says that to deceive is to ”cause (someone) to believe something that is not true, typically in order to gain some personal advantage.”

That sounds too self-serving to me. When I sign on with Live Action and, God willing, get the chance to record a video in a Planned Parenthood office with Lila Rose, I won’t be doing it for personal advantage. Instead, I will be encouraging those committed to untruth to remain committed to untruth, all in the name of the truth.

So, after much thought, I have finally settled on the perfect word: fool. Yes, some dictionaries insist that it is a synonym for deceive, but in ordinary usage, it has a lightheartedness about it. Who gets upset when someone reveals that he was ”just fooling you”?

It all seems so clear to me now, and I regret having wasted five or six weeks before coming around. Worse yet, I have so far blown the opportunity to fulfill my obligation to engage in almsgiving this Lent, by going out and committing acts of charity by fooling some Planned Parenthood employees.

But I’m not one to despair. Yesterday may have been the midpoint of Lent, but from Laetare Sunday to Easter 2011, there still three weeks left to go. And today is the first of a new month.

So let us not waste another minute. This April, fool for the truth. It’s the best way you could spend the rest of this Lent. You can trust me on that—would I fool you?

First published on ChroniclesMagazine.org on April 1, 2011.

Remembering Joe

For many Catholics of a certain age, Joseph Sobran will forever be remembered as one of the greatest literary defenders of the Catholic Church’s teaching on life over the past 40 years. From contraception to abortion, from euthanasia to just-war doctrine, Joe was an eloquent voice in the popular press for the teachings of the Catholic Church, and, in fighting for the truth, he wore himself out a few decades too early, dying at 3 P.M. on Thursday, September 30, 2010, at the age of 64.

For other Catholics, somewhat younger, Joe Sobran will be remembered, if at all, as the chief villain (along with Pat Buchanan) of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s 1991 National Review article “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” The attack of his boss, mentor, friend, and virtual foster father left Joe a broken (and worse for the country at large, virtually ignored) man, and the last 17 years of his life (from the time of his firing from National Review) were not nearly as happy as the previous 21 (from the time of his hiring at National Review). But they were equally productive, in the pages of his newsletter, Sobran’s, the national Catholic weekly The Wanderer, and, of course, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Much of Joe’s best writing on life issues appeared in Human Life Review. Indeed, one might say that, for almost two decades, Joe Sobran was Human Life Review. As J.P. McFadden, the founding editor of HLR, wrote in his Introduction to Single Issues, a 1983 collection of Joe’s best essays from the Review, “we never dreamed how much he would have to say, or that he would become our most faithful contributor: his sharply-honed essays would have appeared in every issue over the past eight years [from the Review’s founding in 1975 until 1982, when McFadden was writing], but for a few missed deadlines.”

Joe’s status as the preeminent literary defender of life in the latter half of the 20th century did not arise simply from what Joe had to say, or the number of words he wrote, but how he said it. For Joe, the most beautiful prose flowed from his fingers with incredible ease. McFadden was not exaggerating when he wrote that Sobran’s name “on anything whatever—article, review, commentary—was the guarantee of fine writing, sharp wit, and a most distinctive style which . . . made one think of nobody else so much as G.K. Chesterton.”

Such beauty flowed not only from his fingers but rode the waves of his splendid baritone voice. There are few people that one does not at least begin to tire of hearing after an hour or two, but those of us who had the pleasure of knowing Joe never wanted him to quit talking. Shakespeare was his academic major and his lifelong obsession; if he did not know every line of Shakespeare by heart (and I am not certain that he did not), then he had at least committed more of them to memory than any man alive today. He had a similar command of the writings of P.G. Wodehouse, whose easy humor shaped Joe’s, as well as of much of the writings of G.K. Chesterton. One could tape a Sobran soliloquy, transcribe it verbatim, and publish it without editing, and it would still be better than the best work of most writers today.

In the pages of Human Life Review and elsewhere, Joe was one of the first, and by far the best, critics of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin’s “seamless garment” approach to Catholic social teaching. Yet Joe, better than any other Catholic conservative, argued forcefully for a truly consistent ethic of life, regarding the Church quite properly as Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher). He believed the Church’s just-war theory to be as important as Her teaching on abortion, but rather than using that belief to minimize the horror of abortion, he opposed the Reagan-era military actions, the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the same passion and eloquence that he devoted to arguing on behalf of the unborn. In this, he followed the example of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, men he gladly accepted as his shepherds.

In his final years, Joe provided an example of Christian fortitude that should be an inspiration to us all. His health failing from complications from diabetes, a stroke, and finally kidney failure, Joe publicly admitted that he occasionally had doubts and fears. Yet he always turned his eyes toward Christ, and found in his Savior the comforts of faith and of hope.

As I type these words, there are so many passages in Joe Sobran’s work that come to mind that would give readers some measure of the man. But the piece that rises to the top is “Jesus’ Simple Message,” the January 2008 installment of his Chronicles column, The Bare Bodkin.

Halfway through, the column switches from a general meditation to a very personal one:

The loveliest argument I know against unbelief was made by a woman whose name I have forgotten, quoted by the theologian John Baillie in Our Knowledge of God; it boils down to this: “If there is no God, whom do we thank?”

The force of this hit me on a mild November evening when I was oppressed by woes; I prayed for a little relief and tried counting my blessings instead of my grievances. I’ve long known that a great secret of happiness is gratitude, but that didn’t prepare me for what happened next.

Joe writes that, “as I munched a cheeseburger,” “I could hardly think of anything in my life that couldn’t be seen as a gift from God”:

As one of the characters in Lear tells his father: “Thy life’s a miracle.” Of whom is that not true?

The more we reflect on the sheer oddity of our very existence and, in addition, of our eligibility for salvation, the deeper our gratitude must be. Amazing grace indeed! To call it astounding is to express the matter feebly. Why me? How on earth could I ever have deserved this, the promise of eternal joy?

And given all this, in comparison with which winning the greatest lottery in the world is just a minor fluke, how can I dare to sin again, or to be anything less than a saint for the rest of my life?

And yet the true measure of Joe’s faith, and the lesson his life offers us all, lies not in those words, but in the lines that end the piece. If only we could all be so frank about how far short we have fallen of the glory of God, there might be hope for us:

Yet I know that my own horrible spiritual habits will keep drawing me downward every hour. Like most men, or maybe more than most, I am my own worst enemy, constantly tempted to repay my Savior with my self-centered ingratitude. When I think of my sins, the debt of thanksgiving itself seems far too heavy to pay. No wonder He commands us to rejoice. It’s by no means the easiest of our duties.

Rest in peace, Joe.

(A version of this article first appeared on About Catholicism on October 4, 2010.)

His Final Lesson

A friend of mine has expressed the devout hope that, upon his death, his wife and children will have the good sense to burn his papers. While his main desire is to prevent unfinished thoughts from seeing the light of day, there are other, equally important, concerns. Posthumously published works allow enemies to attack without fear of reprisal; even worse, they encourage excessive—and uncritical—adulation from friends. The Sword of Imagination has provoked both responses.

By the time of his death in 1994, Russell Kirk had generated an impressive body of work that included over 30 books and hundreds of articles and reviews. Departing from this vale of tears, he left behind his completed but unpublished memoirs, which appeared a year later as the current volume. In the preface. Kirk notes his peculiar (but for him characteristic) stylistic choice: “Emulating Julius Caesar, Henry Esmond, and Henry Adams, I express my memoirs, throughout the following chapters, in the third person—that mode being less embarrassing to authors who set at defiance the ravenous ego. Besides, when the man within . . . regards critically the life of the outer man, it may be possible to attain some degree of objectivity—using that word in its signification of detachment from strong emotion or personal prejudice.” Curiously, Kirk was too much of a Romantic not to know that “objectivity,” especially regarding oneself, is a fiction. Indeed, the pretense of objectivity often serves as cover for “the ravenous ego,” rather than setting it at defiance. Some readers, especially if they did not know Kirk, may suspect that to be true in this case.

The decision to write in the third person may be at once the book's strongest point and its weakest. It allows Kirk to put into writing emotions that he could never express in the first person, especially about his family life. On the other hand, portions of The Sword of Imagination (for instance, where the author discusses the importance of his own work, or its influence) read like the work of a biographer, even a hagiographer, rather than an autobiography. While he may have seen himself in the third person (and some who were close to him often suspected he did). Kirk might better have left an appraisal of his own work to others.

Forty years after the publication of a book is probably too soon to be able to gauge its long-term significance. Yet Kirk attributes the rightward drift of American politics in recent decades in no small part to the influence of The Conservative Mind: “So it was that The Conservative Mind—working through a kind of intellectual osmosis and popularized through newspapers and mass-audience magazines, radio and even television commentators, and other media of opinion—gradually helped to alter the climate of political and moral opinion. A generation later. Kirk's works would be cited and quoted by the president and the vice president of the United States.” Whether, a century from now, historians will draw such a connection is anybody's guess; but even if they should do so, what would it mean? Ronald Reagan quoted more often from Tom Paine, the intellectual enemy of Kirk's hero, Edmund Burke, than from any other political figure; and in his eight years in office, he enshrined as the centerpiece of conservatism those “dreams of avarice” that Kirk wanted to get beyond. Though Kirk writes of President Eisenhower that he “and his people did retard the advance of the welfare state in America but did little to give flesh to the conservative imagination,” Reagan and his people merely fed that imagination a steady diet of Hollywood-style celluloid, (Kirk admits as much: “Mr. Reagan was endowed with a certain power of imagination; successful actors almost necessarily have a talent for image-making.”) As for the Vice President who quoted from Kirk's works, when he ascended to the presidency Kirk found him “worse than unimaginative—merely silly, often,” and “would come to detest Bush for his carpet-bombing of the Cradle of Civilization with its taking of a quarter of a million lives in Iraq.” And “so in 1992 Kirk became general chairman of Patrick Buchanan's campaign in the Michigan primary.” If The Conservative Mind really led to Reagan and Bush, even Kirk might question the value of that accomplishment.

In an age of abstractions, in which “Efficiency and Progress and Equality” are seen as more real than “all those fascinating and lovable peculiarities of human nature and human society that are the products of prescription and tradition,” Kirk cultivated a sense of mystery and awe and wonder.

Unlike Eisenhower and Reagan, Kirk did help to “give flesh to the conservative imagination,” and the number of conservative luminaries who claim that his works played a role in their political and intellectual development is legion. But today, with the conservative movement in a shambles and the Republican Party headed for self-immolation in November, perhaps we can learn a final lesson from Russell Kirk. For unlike those who have succumbed to the siren song of Washington, D.C., Kirk realized that the lasting accomplishments of his life were not political, nor even intellectual. Rather, they surrounded him every day, and he presents them here in loving detail: a devoted wife, who still works tirelessly to keep his memory alive; four gracious daughters, who will raise their children well, as they were raised; a congeries of assistants, who planted trees and took long walks with Kirk, and came to see the woods and fields that surround Mecosta, and even the little village itself, through the lens of his Romantic imagination.

In an age of abstractions, in which “Efficiency and Progress and Equality” are seen as more real than “all those fascinating and lovable peculiarities of human nature and human society that are the products of prescription and tradition,” Kirk cultivated a sense of mystery and awe and wonder. To his eyes, Mecosta, shunned and despised by the commissars of big government, big business, and big culture, was a Brigadoon. As a business partner of Kirk's once remarked, “Russell, you are the last of the Romantics, and probably the greatest: for nobody else could make tales out of that God-forsaken Mecosta County.”

That Romantic imagination is Kirk's greatest legacy. If his influence should continue on into the next century, it will be because those who knew him had their imagination awakened to possibilities greater than those dreamed of in Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles. Those possibilities are what make life worth living, and they—more so than Kirk's discussions of politics, or his portraits of famous acquaintances—are what make The Sword of Imagination worth reading.

[The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict, by Russell Kirk (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company) 497 pp., $35.00]

First published in the November 1996 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

An Oasis in an Arid Desert →

The seeds of postwar conservatism’s destruction were present in its inception. (A review of Paul Gottfried’s The Conservative Movement: Revised Edition.)

First published in Humanitas, Volume VII, No. 1, 1994.