The United States of Generica

The scents of lilacs, fudge, and horse manure mingle to form the distinctive aroma of Mackinac Island in early June.  The tourist season is not yet in full swing; it starts in earnest with the Lilac Festival, the first day of which will be our final day on the island.  A mild winter and an early spring encouraged the lilacs to bloom early; two days before the festival opens, they are already slightly past their peak.  The scent of the fudge will peak about the time the scent of the horses does, in the hottest days of July and August.

When the Grand Hotel first opened its doors on July 10, 1887, July and August were the entire season.  During the summer, life in the cities, as Bob Tagatz, the resident historian, points out, was unbearable.  It wasn’t simply the lack of air conditioning, or a dearth of lilacs and fudge shops to mask the scent of the horses, but the smoke and the heat from the foundries and factories, and, in such railroad hubs as Chicago, the stench of blood and guts from the slaughterhouses.  The railroads had helped to make city life in the summer unpleasant, but they offered relief to those who could afford it.  The Grand Hotel, constructed and owned by the railroads, quickly became the premier destination for the children of the Gilded Age.  The sons and daughters of robber barons and rising Midwestern industrialists spent not two nights, but a full two months on Mackinac Island, the crown jewel of the Great Lakes.

The history of the Grand Hotel is fascinating, from its construction in 93 days through its years as a speakeasy during Prohibition, to 1951, the first year it ever turned a profit, down to today, as it enters its third generation as a family-owned business.  A few days each week, Bob Tagatz regales guests with tales of the past 125 years on one end of the famous porch of the Grand Hotel, the world’s longest at 660 feet.

My wife and I are on Mackinac Island to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary.  We have been to the island a number of times—we spent two nights at the Chippewa Hotel, down on the harbor, on our honeymoon—but this is only our second stay at the Grand Hotel.  As we had two years ago in September, when we were able to bring our entire family (“infants” 11 and under stay and eat free), we spent much of our three days on the island on the porch, enjoying the breeze and the conversation with each other and with our fellow guests.  When the weather is perfect (as it was every day we were there) the view across the Straits of Mackinac is breathtaking; when the storms roll in and the seas rise, it is even more so, at least for a boy who grew up on the shore of Lake Michigan and who still thrills at the sight of giant ore boats making their way through the darkened straits, guided by the beacons of lighthouses that are more than romantic relics of a distant past.

When I was a boy, summer lasted forever; now, it is over in the blink of an eye.  This is not simply a function of age; our three days at the Grand Hotel feel more like ten, and an entire summer season, back in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, must have seemed like a year in itself, to young and old alike.

The porch of the Grand Hotel has a civilizing effect on its guests.  The occasional cellphone or iPad makes its appearance, but laptops are few and far between, and newspapers and books are more than decoration for the tables placed between the rockers.  People who have built houses without porches will sit contentedly for hours, holding the kinds of conversations with strangers that their grandparents once held with their neighbors.

Bob Tagatz’s most amusing tales concern the activities that various social directors at the hotel dreamed up to keep their guests occupied, and the Grand still provides a full slate of activities.  But many are looking for what Amy and I have come here to find—not exactly peace and quiet, because a hotel this size is always brimming with life (and there is always live music playing somewhere in the Grand), but an atmosphere that acknowledges, contrary to what even Christian authors tell us today, that life isn’t all about the journey: The destination matters, too.

Much of Europe shuts down for the entire month of August; this, some Americans remark with scorn, is what separates us from our European cousins.  They are correct, but not in the way they think.  With all of our “labor-saving” technology, we work more hours than ever before, and we fill up what little leisure is left with premeasured entertainment that keeps us constantly aware of the passage of time.  When I was a boy, summer lasted forever; now, it is over in the blink of an eye.  This is not simply a function of age; our three days at the Grand Hotel feel more like ten, and an entire summer season, back in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, must have seemed like a year in itself, to young and old alike.

But back in what Bob Tagatz calls “the United States of Generica,” time rushes on.  And to what end?  To work all year, and to pile up debt, to fill our lives with Chinese-made contraptions that soon will clutter landfills, and our bodies with fast food that will preserve us in our early graves.  All of this seems self-evidently right to most Genericans today; yet to work all year to spend a month on Mackinac Island would be dismissed as the height of frivolity.

Such thoughts, however, belong to a different day.  For now, on the porch, time slows to a crawl.  

First published in the August 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.

America has lost one of her best novelists and writers of short stories, and perhaps the last chronicler of a world that can no longer be found: the early 20th-century Midwest, a world of small towns and small farms, of hot summer days and bitter winter nights, of swimming holes and traveling shows, of Main Streets and gas lights and front porches. Bits and pieces of that world remained in the smallest of small Midwestern towns for almost 50 years after Bradbury’s family left his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, for the last time, settling in Los Angeles, California, in 1934. But all that remains now is what Bradbury, and a few other writers like him, captured in such novels and collections of short stories as Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Farewell Summer.

To those today who still remember his name, Ray Bradbury was, as the New York Times declared in a lackluster obituary, “a master of science fiction whose imaginative and lyrical evocations of the future reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America.” But while Bradbury worked in a variety of genres—horror, fantasy, and crime stories among them, as well as science fiction—what bound all of his writing together, as his friend Russell Kirk well understood, was the moral imagination. The best elements of his most famous work, The Martian Chronicles, had nothing to do with the future and technology, and everything to do with memory—imagination operating historically. (Bradbury insisted that The Martian Chronicles was not science fiction but fantasy, something that ”couldn’t happen,” while Fahrenheit 451 was science fiction because it could—and, indeed, he believed it had happened, before 1960.)

Bradbury’s moral imagination was born, as was Kirk’s, in a particular time and a particular place. For almost 70 years, his imagination ran free in the hot Midwestern summer of 1934. Like meter in poetry, the constraints of his past allowed Bradbury to transcend the increasingly chaotic and immoral present.

The Waukegan, Illinois, of 1934 is gone, never to return; yet all is not lost. There are many forces competing for the imagination of a new generation, and most of them look like Mr. Dark. But there was a reason Ray Bradbury had Charles Halloway work in a library, and if you don’t know what I am talking about, you need to get a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes and read it to your children, before it is too late.

First published on ChroniclesMagazine.org on June 9, 2012.

A Good and Faithful Servant

Pete MacKay. (Photo by Scott P. Richert)

“MacKay.”  I struggled for some time with how to render those six letters, in a vain attempt to convey some sense of what it was like to hear Pete pick up the other end of the phone line.  I could never do justice to the experience.  Somehow, Pete managed to stretch the two short syllables of his last name out over several seconds and to turn them into a summary of his whole being: from the low and humble muh to the crescendoing kAY, following by the falling Ay, which the person making the phone call might have mistaken for a syllable in itself, had he not known better.

His was a voice so deep and rich and, outside of the Winnebago County Board meeting room and other political venues, so soft-spoken that it was sometimes hard for me to make out what Pete was saying over the phone.  But I never had any trouble understanding his name.  If a man’s word is his bond, Pete’s family name was his honor.

Peter M. MacKay passed into eternal life on December 13, 2011, at the age of 78.  He was among the last of a certain generation of public servants—no politician, Pete—who were born early enough to remember the hardships of the Great Depression and the sacrifices of World War II, but late enough to come of age during the middle of the “American Century.”  Those experiences helped make him the man that he was: Frugal and patriotic were among the words that always sprang to mind when Pete’s name was mentioned.

There were other words as well: principled and loyal chief among them.  At Pete’s funeral on December 17 at Saint Edward’s Catholic Church in southeast Rockford, Frank Manzullo, one of Pete’s two oldest friends and brother of longtime U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo, read a letter that he had written to Pete during the final hours of Pete’s life.  (He wrote the last sentences after learning that Pete had passed away.)  In it, Frank recalled Pete’s first heart attack, on a day when Frank and Don were supposed to have dinner with then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.  Instead, Frank was there at the hospital when Pete arrived by ambulance, because, he said, “You taught me the value of loyalty.”

Pete was the kind of man who inspired loyalty, because he was so loyal himself.  First elected to the Winnebago County Board in 1978, he served his district until 2009, with only one interruption.  The voters of his district—even those who didn’t entirely agree with him—trusted Pete because they knew where he stood.  Too often politicians convince themselves that they need guile in order to advance their principles, and eventually end up full of guile and devoid of principle; but there was no guile in Pete MacKay.  He knew what he believed; he told the voters what he believed; and he voted his conscience, every single time.

Pete still believed in the Old America, and no amount of fancy talk could convince him that the country he knew and loved, at least as he knew and loved her, was gone for good.

With his handlebar mustache and his increasingly white beard, Pete looked like a man out of time—and, in a sense, he was.  He still believed in the Old America, and no amount of fancy talk could convince him that the country he knew and loved, at least as he knew and loved her, was gone for good.  For Pete, the Constitution didn’t require interpretation; it was perfectly clear, and anyone who couldn’t see that didn’t want to see it.  Not without reason was Pete occasionally called Winnebago County’s Ron Paul, and, indeed, Ron Paul was the public servant he admired the most (followed closely by Ronald Reagan).

But if he was a man out of time, Pete was never a man out of place.  He was born in Rockford and lived here all of his life, with the exception of a stint in the Army (where he rose to the rank of drill sergeant) and a few years as a police officer in Chicago.  Other local elected officials (especially Pete’s bête noire Kris Cohn) saw their offices as stepping stones to something greater.  But Pete was happy right where he was.  For him, politics wasn’t about promoting Pete MacKay; it was about advancing policies in the best interests of his constituents.

Pete wasn’t just the first winner of The Rockford Institute’s Good and Faithful Servant Award; he was the man for whom we created it.  The event caused a bit of a stir, because between the time that we had notified Pete of our desire to honor him with the award and the public announcement of the same, Pete had decided to jump into the Republican primary for Winnebago County Board chairman, in an attempt to unseat the incumbent Republican holder of the office, Kris Cohn.  A number of local dignitaries declined to attend the award ceremony, or even to send a note of congratulations to be read, ostensibly because they thought The Rockford Institute was trying to influence the race.  The chain of events was proof enough that we weren’t, though after Pete’s announcement, Aaron Wolf and I (in a personal capacity) worked hard on his campaign.  Though Pete lost (and by a fairly large margin), I never had so much fun working on an election.  Pete was a signmaker by trade (he took over his father’s business), and the one minor transgression of the law that he was willing to tolerate concerned the placement of campaign signs.  The night that a few shadowy figures nailed a four-foot by eight-foot MacKay yard sign to the wooden fence of a restaurant frequented by Kris Cohn and her cronies has become the stuff of legend.  The sign stayed up almost until the day of the primary, because Cohn and the other professional politicians approached the restaurant from the north—the side closest to the county administration building—while the sign was on a fence to the south side of the restaurant, a direction from which only normal people would approach.

The night that a few shadowy figures nailed a four-foot by eight-foot MacKay yard sign to the wooden fence of a restaurant frequented by Kris Cohn and her cronies has become the stuff of legend.

During his campaign for county-board chairman, Pete trusted me to write the text of his radio commercials, and a small band of happy warriors who have appeared in this column over the years, including Aaron Wolf, Mark Dahlgren, Mary Hitchcock, Ward Sterett, and Art Johnson, recorded them.  Pete insisted, though, on ending each with his own tagline: “I’m Pete MacKay, and when I’m elected county board chairman, I’ll drive my own car.”

Writers’ memories aren’t always the most reliable, because over time we tend to remake events as they should have been rather than exactly as they were, a tendency exaggerated when writing about Pete because his personality lent itself so easily to mythmaking.  Still, if Pete didn’t flub one of the takes of that tagline by saying, “ . . . I’ll drive my own damn car,” he should have.  The fact that the county provided Chairman Cohn with a tricked-out SUV was, for Pete, the perfect symbol of the corruption that had led to the creation of a separate elected county-board chairmanship to begin with.  (Most other county boards in Illinois elect their chairman from among the members of the board.)

Many years before, when the position was first created, Pete gave the voters of Winnebago County one last chance to undo the damage, by running for county-board chairman on a platform of abolishing the office as soon as he was sworn in.  Alas, after Pete lost that race, everything he predicted came true: County government (and, consequently, county taxes) increased dramatically under the elected county-board chairman, and the residents of Winnebago County lost a number of their freedoms—and too many lost their property, as the county (especially in the Kris Cohn years) aggressively used an especially virulent form of eminent domain known as “Quick Take” to pursue unnecessary public projects.

Pete was a man of few regrets.  The stupidity and mendacity of local politicians angered him, and he was disappointed when the voters rejected his attempts to do what he knew to be right on their behalf, but as much as he liked to recount the stories of past defeats (and occasional victories) Pete saw no sense in complaining about things that could not be undone.  He focused instead on what he could do, which led him, in the last phase of his public life, to combine his service on the county board with two terms as Rockford Township Highway Commissioner, where he lowered the road tax levy for four years straight, while providing the same level of service.

That Pete endorsed candidates he believed in regardless of party affiliation had always annoyed many local Republicans; that they supported a Democrat they did not believe in just to defeat Pete tells you everything you need to know about their commitment to principle and party loyalty.

Pete’s example of efficient local government was not appreciated by other local politicians, especially his fellow Republicans, who, in January 2009, while Pete’s beloved wife Rosie lay dying of cancer, held a caucus rather than a primary in order to try to deprive him of the Republican nomination for highway commissioner.  Even though Pete wasn’t at the caucus, his old friend Frank Manzullo placed his name in nomination, and Pete emerged victorious, on the saddest day of his life: Rosie had passed away while the caucus was taking place.

Foiled briefly, those same Republicans quietly threw their support behind the Democratic candidate in the general election, and Pete suffered his final defeat.  That Pete endorsed candidates he believed in regardless of party affiliation had always annoyed many local Republicans; that they supported a Democrat they did not believe in just to defeat Pete tells you everything you need to know about their commitment to principle and party loyalty.

The few things Pete did regret were those over which he had had some control.  He and Rosie had dated in the 1960’s, but they drifted apart only to reconnect in 1978 and get married in 1980.  They had two daughters, Margo and Meredith, in rapid succession (13 months apart), but age prevented them from expanding their family further.  Every time we spoke, no matter how recently we had previously talked, Pete asked about my children, and told me how blessed Amy and I were to have had such a large brood.  Similarly, when he finally entered Rosie’s Catholic Church in the last years of her life and they had their marriage blessed, his only regret was that he had waited so long.  He embraced the Faith with a joy reminiscent of St. John Chrysostom’s Easter Homily: “For the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept the last even as the first.  He giveth rest unto him who cometh at the eleventh hour, even as unto him who hath wrought from the first hour.”

Well done, Pete, thou good and faithful servant.  May God grant you eternal rest. 

First published in the February 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

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.)