Lower thy nets first here to the left,
Tonight the fish are in hiding--
Carefully trawl the shallows first:
Why travel far from the land
If the fish swim near to the shore,
Why risk the deep and dark waters?
Haul the nets aboard and then
Inspect their contents for a catch;
There's naught but mud and a piece
Of driftwood coated in sandy silt;
To make things worse for the fishers,
The net has been severely torn.
Row back to the shores, row!
Two sturdy pairs of brothers pull
They strain at the boat's oars
As another stands fore and shouts
His commands to the two men who

It is a mistake commonly made today that the end of marriage is personal gratification, personal happiness. This mistake is not made merely along political nor even necessarily religious lines. Both the liberal who wishes to expand the meaning of marriage so that it includes two men, two women, or all four and the conservative who believes that marriage ought to be limited solely to the satisfaction of an otherwise sinful sexual urge are guilty in some way of treating marriage as a thing made for an individual’s pleasure. In the former case, marriage exists solely as a means to expand hedonism into a way of life so that pleasure and self-indulgence may be raised to a higher level of social approval. In the latter case, marriage serves no purpose save to limit hedonism for the salvation of each individual’s soul, or for the protection of civilizations.

In the Church today, the answer to this question of marriage is largely found in the Theology of the Body, as taught first and foremost by Pope John Paul the Great. The late pope and his followers taught a view of sexuality in which the marital act becomes an image of divine love. Marriage provides the context for sex, whose end is unitive: that is primarily procreative and secondarily the strengthening of intimacy between spouses. This teaching on sex and marriage has been a great boon to the Church, as it shows among other things that the Church’s reveres rather than rejects sex, holding it to be so holy that to engage in it outside of the bounds of marriage is more akin to blasphemy than to idolatry. That is to say, the Church under the leadership of Pope John Paul II rescued sex not only from the adulterers and fornicators, but also from the prudes and the Gnostics.

In seeing the immense contributions of Pope John Paull II with his Theology of the Body, it is often easy to overlook other writers and thinkers in the Church. As Christopher West noted in the introduction to his The Good News about Sex and Marriage: Answers to Your Honest Questions about Catholic Teaching, “John Paul’s contributions to the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage are so vast that over two-thirds of what the Catholic Church has ever said on the subject has come from his pontificate.” The late pope is not, however, the only great or even popular thinker within the Church to write on the subjects of sex and marriage—far from it, as much of his own writings were drawn and synthesized from the great mystic saints and holy philosophers of the Church: Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross, and even Augustine.

I previously wrote about the importance of works as the manifestation of faith.

Works matter, not because we earn our salvation through these, but because they are the exercise of our faith. They are what gives life to faith, and what makes it manifest. They also become yet another channel for grace, both for ourselves and for others: a grace which strengthens our faith. This is not by any means to our own credit: our good works are the response which faith, hope, and love require of us to be effective. These latter three virtues are granted to us by God—as are any graces. He has willed that salvation must be a cooperative venture: it is a gift to us, but one with which we must cooperate. It is by our works that we engage in this cooperation with Divine grace; God calls us, and we must respond, which we do through our works. Just as sin can be in the body or the spirit, so too must salvation be participated in by both body and spirit.

This is a statement with which the more orthodox and faithful of Catholics would agree. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “Divine providence works also through the actions of creatures. To human beings God grants the ability to cooperate freely with his plans” (see paragraph 323). The form which this cooperation takes is, on the one hand the theological virtues—faith, hope, and love—and on the other hand our works; the former are spiritual things which may be manifested in the latter, but the latter are often physical things which can strengthen the former.

For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, for it is the gift of God; Not of works, that no man may glory. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus in good works, which God hath prepared that we should walk in them. For which cause be mindful that you, being heretofore Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by that which is called circumcision in the flesh, made by hands; That you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the conversation of Israel, and strangers to the testament, having no hope of the promise, and without God in this world. But now in Christ Jesus, you, who some time were afar off, are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and breaking down the middle wall of partition, the enmities in his flesh: Making void the law of commandments contained in decrees; that he might make the two in himself into one new man, making peace (Ephesians 2:8-14).

The first sentence of this passage is often quoted by Protestants of every sect as “proof” that man is saved “through faith alone.” This is done in spite of the fact that the word “alone” appears nowhere in this or any other verse pertaining to salvation through faith by grace. An interesting point of my own personal experience with his passage is that I have never heard the whole passage quoted to me by any of my Protestant friends—to say nothing of those who would prefer to be outright opponents—only the first verse is ever quoted. Perhaps this is because it is easy to assume that the “core” of the message is contained in this first verse, and that the rest are just the details.

A frequent homework or test question presented to physicists-in-training is to derive the final relationship between objects, forces, or concepts from “first principles.” The idea for the physicist is to see where such a relationship comes from, beginning with “basic physics” principles—Newton’s Laws or Maxwell’s Equations, for example. Such first principles are generally well-established and ubiquitously accepted within the physics community, and are sometimes thought of as the most basic concepts in physics, from which all the other laws of physics can be derived.

Philosophical arguments and political discourse rely on similar “first principles,” as outlined by Aristotle (among others) in his Rhetoric. This is to say nothing of theological discussions, legal cases, and even the act of teaching (or learning): all must begin with a basic set of principles (or other assumptions), which must be true if the rest of the argument is to hold merit: the first principles are the base upon which rests the conclusion, and it cannot stand of these principles are in error.

A long time ago and in a land far away,
Yet so near and seen afresh in faith each day,
Set first in the intersection of the great cultures,
Where civilizations meet and trade and merge,
In that rebellious backwater territory of old Rome,
Surrounded by crowds yet so abandoned and alone
There died a Man nailed upon a wooded board,
Mocked and torture by that ancient horde.
When Roman military power seemed near its peak,
And Greek philosophy had nothing left to seek,
When Old Law was not enough to prevent death,
An oppressed people waited with baited breath,

The Setting

There are lies, there are damned lies, and then there’s the kind of thing reported by the mainstream media. I am referring here to three cases of sexual abuse, in neither of which is implicated the Holy Father, but both of which are constantly mentioning said Supreme Pontiff. The first is the case of the priest—Fr Peter Hullerman, sometimes referred to as “priest H.”—who sexually abused minors while serving in the Archdiocese of Munich. At the time, the archbishop of that diocese was Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI). The second is the so-called Murphy Case, involving s priest in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, involving Fr Lawrence Murphy, who was accused (though never formally convicted) of molesting up to 200 children. The third and final case is a lawsuit one launched in Kentucky which “seeks to have the pope deposed over claims that the Holy See was negligent in failing to report abuse claims.”

It is of the utmost interest that justice be done in regards to all of the child abuse cases. People of good conscience can agree on that point in good faith, and can agree that the people who are directly involved can and should be prosecuted. The scandals themselves are widespread geographically (though everywhere involved only a very small number of the clergy—about 4% in the US by one account, and as small as 0.3% by another), and some occurred as recently as 20 years ago. Because of the sensitive nature of these cases, they ought to be dealt with both fairly and justly, being careful to separate those guilty of abuse from those not guilty, and those who actually harbored these molesters from those members of the hierarchy who were not involved in any cover-ups.

Unfortunately, this is not the approach taken by the mainstream media. These are much more interested in forming a witch-hunt, both against the Church writ large and against the Pope himself. Unfortunately, the negative effects of this media frenzy are already being felt here in the states, as people’s favorability of the Holy Father is dropping. The Holy Father, for his part, is scarcely implicated in these despicable deeds.

A perfect wife- who can find her?
She plans beyond and co-signs a prenuptial.

Her husband has confidence in her,
from her he will derive no little profit

Earnings and not children she brings him
all the days of her life.

She is always busy with e-mail and with fax,
she does her work with eager hands.

She is like an armored car
protecting her assets day after day

She gets up while it is still dark
giving her stockbroker a call
giving orders to hurry up and buy

She sets her mind on a company, then she buys it
with what her hands have earned she plans to reinvest

Marching orders are handed down,
Each troop is given a uniform--
Standard issue with an ID number--
Every name is replaced with a barcode.

Each is a soldier of an unusual sort,
They're no mean army of men,
They fight in a war without skirmishes,
Their weapons are not meant to kill.

Winter's cold and frosty hand,
Long hast lingered on the land--
Ere a prophet comes at long last,
A prisoner was he to men, alas!
A prisoner to set them free
To follow the man upon a tree.

Soon would come the thaw of spring,
The land once bleak with cold's sting,
Would bloom and blossom and awake,
And old night would be slip away!
From sin's stain the land would be clean,
As colors changed from gray to green.

In the summer's heat and longer days,
Saint Patrick's teaching spreads and stays,
The Church's banner soon would stand,
Where pagan Roman feet never did land!