Politically active Catholics who take the teachings of their Church seriously often turn to the body of papal and conciliar teachings known as Catholic Social Teaching (CST).  While conservatives often emphasize the principle of subsidiarity found in these teachings – the idea that the organization closest to a problem is usually best able to solve it – the principle of solidarity is crucial as well.

Solidarity can be defined as the virtue or habit of recognizing our duties to the common good and arranging our social and political institutions so that basic human needs can be met.

One obvious example of how the principle of solidarity affects community life is health care.

In their landmark 1993 statement on healthcare reform and Catholic Social Teaching, A Framework for Comprehensive Health Care Reform, the U.S. Catholic bishops insisted that the principle of solidarity in Catholic Social Teaching (CST) requires that quality healthcare be available to everyone regardless of ability to pay.

Basing their analysis on Jesus’ admonition to care for “the least of these (Matt 25:40),” the bishops insisted that “genuine health care reform must especially focus on the basic health needs of the poor…”  They even went so far as to say that the poor have a compelling claim to “first consideration” and access to “comprehensive benefits.”

These mandates do seem at least partially fulfilled by 2010 Obamacare system.

Yet others clearly are not.

Solidarity with our fellow humans also requires respect for life, the bishops said – and it was Obamacare’s provisions on abortion and birth control services that led the bishops to reluctantly refuse to endorse the system once it was finally passed.

Moreover, the mandate for serving the poor has to be balanced by other considerations of justice, the bishops said, including cost containment and controls and what they termed “equitable financing.”

“We have the best health care technology in the world,” the bishops observed, “but tens of millions have little or no access to it and the costs of the system are draining our nation, our economy, our families and our Church to the breaking point.”

Indeed.  In late January 2019, two weeks after the close of the Open Enrollment period for health care insurance, we received our dreaded annual notice from Anthem Blue Cross:  the monthly premiums for our family would increase 25% over the year before, from $1,445 per month to $1,800.

When the comically misnamed Affordable Care Act first went into effect in 2010, our premiums were $350 per month for a high-deductible policy ($5,000 per person) roughly equivalent to the Bronze Plan on most exchanges.

The new price of $1,800 per month represents a total increase of 414.2% — or about 22.7% per year over the past eight years.

This is a far cry from the $2,500 annual savings that President Obama promised.

Like thousands of others, my family is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place when it comes to health insurance:  we earn too much to qualify for Obamacare subsidies… yet the price of even the cheapest Obamacare plans are increasingly out of reach.

With five children and two in college, paying $1,800 per month means hard choices.

And we’re constantly told we’re actually lucky.

Were we to pay for one of the ADA-compliant policies on the exchanges, we’d be paying $2,500 per month in 2019 – or $30,000 per year.

That’s more than our mortgage.  And it’s a lot more than we pay in Social Security, State Income Taxes or even Federal Income Taxes.

Right now, health insurance is our single greatest expense outside of college tuition.

And to make matters worse, there is no escape:  in many blue states, such as California and Washington, the Democrat-controlled legislatures quickly outlawed the short-term and other co-called “catastrophe” plans that would allow families to access affordable coverage even temporarily.

This is a deliberate attempt to force everyone into a “one-size fits all” Obamacare system.

All this is further complicated by a healthcare delivery system built on outright greed:

The Democrats sold their healthcare plan to the insurance companies with the promise that it would mean billions in additional profits.

To pay for the uninsured poor, the Democrats promised a system that would force everyone to purchase the insurance companies’ products – with temporary cash infusions from the government until the insurance companies could raise premiums to a maximum level.

Since buying into the system was mandatory, the insurance companies had an artificial monopoly:  consumers could choose between two or three similar plans all equally expensive.

And the Democrats certainly delivered on their promises to the insurance companies:  Anthem’s Executive Chair, Former President and CEO Joseph Swedish, earned $18 million in 2017.

Long Beach, Calif.-based Molina Healthcare’s new CEO, Joseph Zubretsky, earned $19.7 million in total compensation the same year.

To be fair, Obamacare did result in extending healthcare coverage to roughly 20 million people who lacked coverage before – but at the cost of making healthcare insurance beyond the ability of many middle class families to pay.

Instead of funding coverage for the poor from general tax revenues, the Democrats created a new, regressive tax – a kind of second income tax — that specifically targets middle class families and allows the fraud, waste, overbilling and greed of the existing insurance system to remain in place.

Twenty-five years after the Catholic bishops outlined a statement of basic principles of healthcare reform based on Catholic Social Teaching, the cost of health care in the U.S. is still skyrocketing.

Worst of all, the burden of paying for health care increasingly falls disproportionately on middle class families who, increasingly, cannot afford it.

Many Americans now must deliberately reduce their work hours or incomes so they are eligible for Obamacare subsidies, making it difficult to save for retirement or send their children to college.

Even Americans who receive their health insurance through their employers often do so at the cost of stagnant or reduced wages and shortchanged retirement programs.

The lesson of the Obamacare disaster is that, if solidarity means anything, it means burdens must be shared equitably – not merely shifted from one group to another.

The post Skyrocketing Obamacare Premiums Forcing Many Middle Income Families to Make Difficult Choices first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

So if, as Albert Einstein insisted, Biblical religion was the necessary intellectual precondition for the gradual development of scientific method, how did the myth of the “scientific revolution” come about?

One reason: For the past 400 years, the partisans of irreligion-from the Marquis de Sade to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins-have deliberately misrepresented the way science actually developed in the West as part of their ideological crusade against Judaism and Christianity.

What’s worse, the partisans of atheism have been intellectually dishonest in the extreme: They have tried to take credit for the development of science when, in fact, they had little if anything to do with it.

Many of the most ideological and dogmatic of atheist crusaders, although continually referring to science, and seeking to use science to justify their own philosophical assumptions and declarations, were not scientists themselves.

In fact, many of the most famous anti-Christian polemicists of the last 200 years-who sought to use science to justify their unbelief-never themselves set foot in a laboratory or conducted a single field observation.

That includes the Marquis de Sade (a writer), Percy Bysshe Shelley (a poet), Friedrich Nietzsche (a philologist by training), Algernon Swinburne (a poet), Bertrand Russell (a philosopher), Karl Marx (a philosopher), Robert Ingersoll (a lecturer), George Bernard Shaw (a playwright), Vladimir Lenin (a communist revolutionary), Joseph Stalin (a communist dictator), H.L. Mencken (a newspaper columnist), Jean-Paul Sartre (a philosopher), Benito Mussolini (a fascist dictator), Luis Buñuel (Spanish filmmaker), Clarence Darrow (a lawyer), Ayn Rand (a novelist), Christopher Hitchens (a journalist), Larry Flynt (a pornographer), George Soros and Warren Buffett (investors), and Penn and Teller (magicians).

In dramatic contrast, most of the true giants of empirical science-the people who founded entire scientific disciplines or who made landmark scientific discoveries-were primarily devout Christians who believed that their scientific studies, far from being in conflict with their religious faith, ultimately was dependent upon it.

In his book, The God Delusion, atheist crusader Richard Dawkins once again tries to reclaim Einstein for atheism, citing quotations at length in which Einstein denied belief in a personal God, but the truth is that Einstein was struggling to enunciate a middle position between atheism and classic theism and couldn’t seem to make up his mind how to describe it. “There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like `God is subtle but he is not malicious’ or `He does not play dice’ or `Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic,” Dawkins writes. “`God does not play dice’ should be translated as `Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.’ `Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ means `Could the universe have begun in any other way?’ Einstein was using `God’ in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense.”

Perhaps. Yet when Einstein was explicitly asked whether he believed in “Spinoza’s God”-meaning an impersonal Deistic God-this is what he said:

“I can’t answer with a simple yes or no. I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”

Not an orthodox Jew, certainly, but hardly a snide atheist ideologue along the lines of Dawkins, Chistopher Hitchens, or Sam Harris, either.

To sum up: We have two rival claims.

On the one hand, we have scientific (let’s be charitable) amateurs-from Nietzsche and Ingersoll to Chrisopher Hitchens and Sam Harris-insisting that science and Biblical religion are fundamentally incompatible.

On the other hand, you have the greatest minds in the history of science, the people who actually made most of the discoveries that created modern science to begin with-folks like Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Max Planck, Louis Pasteur, Werner Heisenberg, and even Albert Einstein-who insist that, not only is religion not at odds with science, but Biblical religion is what made science possible in the first place.

Whom should we believe?

Should we believe the attorney Clarence Darrow, who said “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose” … or should we believe Albert Einstein who said, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind”?

Frankly, in the great debate over religion and science, faithful Christians and Jews stand with the more enlightened half – those who make the actual discoveries in science.

The post Atheists Take Credit for Science When They Had Nothing to Do with It first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Second Vatican Council, I read John O’Malley’s magisterial history, What Happened at Vatican II.  It’s a fascinating chronicle of the great theological earthquake that shook the Church to its foundations, throwing open doors to let fresh air into dusty mausoleums but also, at the same time, knocking down priceless works of art that had taken centuries to create.

Like most ordinary Catholics over the age of fifty, I lived through it all on the street level, up close and personal:  the myriad changes to the Mass… the nuns casting off their dignified old habits and dressing like school marms… the questioning of virtually everything… the rediscovery of the Church’s mission to the poor and re-commitment to peace… the counter-reformation… the culture wars… all the battles over contraception and divorce and abortion.

I can honestly say that it was a wonderful time to live through.  My generation had a taste of the old and lived through the rebuilding of the new.  We started out in Catholic parochial school saying the Mass prayers in Latin and ended it saying them in Swahili (Kumbaya, My Lord, Kumbaya!).

With the exception of the unexpected catastrophe of the sexual abuse crisis, all of these upheavals have created, I believe, a Catholic Church that is now stronger, more intellectually coherent, more faithful to the Gospel and more capable of enduring the 21^st century than what existed before.

Of course, we were all just getting back on our feet again in the 1980s and ‘90s, with a new confidence and energy, when the sexual abuse crisis hit like a cancer diagnosis.  Like cancer, it is life-threatening, terrifying and will leave us weaker than we would have been otherwise… but ultimately, with luck and a lot of chemo, we will survive even this.  (Or maybe not.  You never know with cancer!)

At first, I was on the side of the crazy liberals in the Church.  When I was thirteen or fourteen, I thought like liberals did and liked everything new and radical and distrusted anything that smacked of the “old” Church.  The Jesuits in my Catholic high school were stuffing us all full of liberal theology (watered down, of course) from the likes of Karl Rahner, Bernard Haring and Hans Küng.  We played guitar at the high school midnight Mass on Saturdays, hearing tales of the Berrigan brothers and Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (still heroes of mine).  Everything was experimental, a work in progress.  My high school religion teacher practiced Transcendental Meditation and was into the Charismatic Renewal, even speaking in tongues.  I remember being greatly affected by the writing of a (now ex-) priest, Anthony Padavano, and by the strange Jesuit mystic and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

But by the time many of us got to college, in the mid-1970s, we were already becoming a little skeptical of the whole “scorched earth” liberal agenda.  Many of us began to notice some of the destruction the post-conciliar wrecking ball had left in its wake.  We would walk by (metaphorically speaking) the ruins of old cathedrals and see discarded statutes by the likes of Michelangelo and Donatello lying face down in the dirt – and would ask, Gee, did we have to throw these away, too?

The truth is, Vatican II was a little like the French Revolution – freeing (seven) prisoners in the Bastille but also setting up a guillotine in every square.   When things settled down in the 1980s, my generation began to question the questioners, to assess what was gained and what was lost in the revolution.   We read books by the Catholic counter-revolutionaries, such as James Hitchcock’s The Rise and Fall of Radical Catholicism, Garry Wills’ Bare Ruined Choirs and Anne Roche Muggeridge’s The Desolate City.  Some of my friends became more critical of the post-conciliar Church and more open to at least listening to what traditional Catholicism had to say.  Around that time, in the late 1970s, I penned a series of articles about what was lost in what we called then the New Mass, even daring to suggest that the Jesuit liturgies in the “liturgical center” were so informal and irreverent they seemed more like a cocktail party than an act of worship.

Yet, most people I knew could never bring themselves to join the conservative wing of the Church – represented by, say, The Wanderer newspaper or Catholics United for the Faith (CUF).  Intellectually, we remained unregenerate “liberals” on basic principles:  We instinctively knew that fundamentalism of any sort (either Biblical or theological) was untenable and that science and historical scholarship would strengthen, not weaken, Christian faith.  But we were becoming, I suppose, aesthetic conservatives, people who found the modern efforts at liturgy and church architecture to be decidedly inferior to what was found in the past.  I guess this made us Anglicans, people with radical theology but a preference for tradition and good taste.

Pope John Paul II says mass at the Maastricht airport during his official visit to The Netherlands.

When John Paul II arrived on the scene, however, all that changed.  He was and remains the greatest hero of my generation of Catholics.  We were lucky to live during an age of living saints, John Paul the Great and Mother Teresa.  JP II represented everything my friends and I thought the Church should be – intellectually daring, open to new ideas, fluent in many languages, willing to talk to and even pray with representatives of all the major religions, yet mindful of Church tradition and a guardian of the deposit of Faith passed on for millennia.

Nutty liberals attacked John Paul as an “arch-conservative,” because he wouldn’t change ancient Church teaching on women priests, homosexuality and abortion, but in fact John Paul was the closest thing to a centrist the Church has ever seen.  As I was writing for Catholic magazines and raising a family, I was definitely a “John Paul II Catholic” – which meant I was fully supportive of Vatican II and opposed efforts to return to a “1950s Catholicism” or a Latin Mass traditionalism (although I sometimes went to Tridentine liturgies to see what they were like).

Like many people in those years, my friends and I were all enthralled by the “new movements” in European Catholicism, groups like Comunione e Liberazione, precisely because they seemed to chart a middle course between the dour fundamentalism of conservatives (represented by The Wanderer) and the “anything goes” liberalism of left-wing “cafeteria” Catholics (represented by the National Catholic Reporter).  We were also greatly influenced by Catholic neo-conservatives (neo-conservative not in a political but religious sense) such as Michael Novak, George Weigel and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, and their journals, Crisis and First Things.

That still represents more or less where I situate myself today:  pretty much smack dab in the middle theologically and politically.  I am a thorough “liberal” when it comes to Biblical studies and scientific issues like evolution and cosmology; yet I remain “conservative” in that I don’t think the Church can or should change its moral teachings on divorce, homosexuality or abortion.  The older I get, the more I prefer Gregorian Chant to rock guitar music; yet I remain as opposed to a fundamentalist perspective on the Bible and Church teaching as ever.

I suppose the main way my friends and I are different today than when we were younger is that we are a little more battered by life and therefore less righteous, a little more aware of the price paid for tradition — and not by us!  In this, we are like a lot of older priests I know.  They are world weary, a bit exhausted, but do their best to be kind.  For example, while I don’t think the Church should change its teaching on the indissolubility of authentic sacramental marriages – Jesus’s “exception” was not for “adultery” as most English translations have it but for porneia, meaning informal common law marriages or people “shacking up” – I have friends and family members, not to mention my own parents, who are divorced.  As a result, we have to find ways to help divorced people live within the arms of the Church with dignity and grace.  The same thing is true for gay people.  I’m not sure how we do that – and I remain opposed to gay marriage – but do it we must.

In the end, I am grateful for the creative whirlwind that was the Second Vatican Council, despite some of the wreckage that came in its wake… and grateful for the millions of faithful Catholics who cheerfully live with its contradictions and internal tensions to this day.  We’re all just muddling through, doing our best to separate the wheat from the chaff, trying to discern what is an authentic development of doctrine and what is a dead-end.  Bishops and theologians argue about these matters, but we laity vote with our feet.  It’s been a wild ride these past fifty years and I can’t wait to see what the next fifty years brings.

The post Vatican II: The View From the Pew first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

I would like to briefly examine the claim, made by advocates of Neo-Darwinism and others, that advances in contemporary systems theory now give a rational explanation for the development of highly complex structures in the universe without recourse to the hypothesis of a Divine Creator.

Further, I will show that such claims, while purporting to be based on the evidence of empirical science, are, as certain postmodern philosophers of science have shown, metaphysical assertions. I will offer a few brief remarks on how advances in the mathematics of complex systems (illustrated by cybernetics and so-called chaos theory) actually can be reconciled with a theory of theistic evolution. Finally, I will discuss how the “critical realist” philosophy of the Canadian Jesuit cognitional theorist and theologian, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, offers a coherent response to the dogmatic scientism of the neo-Darwinists, on the one hand, and the simplistic “pseudo-science, relativism and nihilism” of postmodern philosophy on the other. You do not have to throw out the baby of logical coherence and rationality with the bath water (rightly critiqued by postmodern theorists) of metaphysical naturalism and scientism.

The Blind Watchmaker

Many contemporary Christians, especially those without training in mathematics, the metatheory of logic or the philosophy of science, are under the impression that the teleological argument for the existence of God has been definitively refuted by new developments in cybernetic systems theory, fractal geometry and evolutionary biology. This refutation is symbolized, in popular culture, by the widely influential book, The Blind Watchmaker, written in 1986 by the British zoologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins purports, and is purported by many others, to have delivered an analytical coup de grâce to the classic “argument from design” as formulated, for example, by the 18th century theologian William Paley. Paley argued that, just as a watch is far too complex and functional to have simply sprung into existence by chance, and so provides indubitable evidence of the existence of an intelligent watchmaker, so, too, the universe’s far greater complexity and functionality are proof of purposeful design by a Divine Watchmaker.

Au contraire, says Dawkins. The complexity and apparent functionality of the universe only give the illusion of design and planning. In reality, the intricate complexity inherent in the universe’s systems is merely the result of blind, unconscious natural forces. “There may be good reasons for belief in God, but the argument from design is not one of them,” he writes.

“Despite all appearances to the contrary, there is no watchmaker in nature beyond the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”

Advanced Systems Theory and Evolution

Dawkins’s assertion, that random mutations alone explain what he calls “cumulative selection” – the gradual evolution of more and more complex biological structures – has seemingly been buttressed in recent years by rapid developments in systems theory, aided, of course, by the analytical tools used in creating new supercomputers . For our purposes, systems theory actually has two relevant components.

(1) Chaos theory, pioneered by such scientists as Edward Lorenz, is the scientific study of simple, nonlinear, dynamic systems that give the appearance of random activity but which are actually the result of simple deterministic forces. A practical example of chaos theory is fractal geometry and the study of snowflakes, which show how simple processes can give rise to apparently random variations of immense complexity.

(2) Cybernetics, developed by the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann (d. 1957) and further developed by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine at the University of Brussels, is the scientific study of what are called “self-organizing systems.” Self-organizing systems are complex assemblies that generate simple emergent behaviors. Practical applications of self-organizing systems studies can be found in the study of cellular automata (self-reproducing systems), neural networks (artificial learning), genetic algorithms (evolution), artificial life (agent behavior), fractals (mathematical art) and physics (spin glasses).

Interestingly enough, systems theory is not really the stalwart alley that advocates of a blind, random universe believe it to be. And in fact, many Neo-Darwinist theoreticians now recognize this. The inability of Darwinist and Neo-Darwinist theories to convincingly explain the origin of life from non-life is part of the reason why “self-organizing systems” are among the hottest topics in the philosophy of science. Further, analysts who study self-organizing systems often insist that they resist reductionist explanations, indeed that the properties that emerge are not explicable from a purely reductionist viewpoint. This is why systems theory has been so enthusiastically embraced by advocates of process theology, because it provides for both a scientific study of the complex processes of nature and yet does not reject the existence of a Divine Intelligence that set these processes in motion in the first place.

In other words, systems theory, like any branch of science, can be viewed as merely the rigorous, mathematically-based description of actual processes that exist in nature. It describes precisely how these processes work themselves out in practice – simple forces giving rise to seemingly random, complex structures (chaos theory) and complex systems giving rise to simple behaviors (self-organizing systems). Neo-Darwinists want to pretend that these bare empirical descriptions alone constitute a rational explanation for the complexity of the universe, but of course that goes far beyond the scope of systems theory as an empirical, descriptive discipline.

The Philosophical Temptation

That is why, when all is said and done, Dawkins, like many scientists before him, can’t resist abandoning science for philosophy. The crux of Dawkins’ argument in favor of a blind, random universe is not, as he imagines, scientific analysis but a metaphysical assertion.

Dawkins’ rejection of theism is actually the old objection that recourse to an original “first cause” is essentially a circular argument. After hundreds of pages in which he attempts to show how the complex structures of nature are the result of natural selection and random mutation, he must, in the end, resort to a philosophical argument. “To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer,” he says. “You have to say something like, ‘God was always there,’ and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say, ‘DNA was always there,’ or ‘Life was always there,’ and be done with it.”

But Dawkins, like many scientists before him, is making a fundamental epistemological error here. The inability to explain one reality (e.g., God) does not, in and of itself, free one from the necessity of explaining other realities. If that were the case, then one should abandon science altogether. Advocates for the argument from design assert that it is illogical, and contrary to all observable phenomena, to assert that something can happen without a cause. That human beings cannot, at this stage, explain what caused God does not logically mean that we can rationally assert that things happen without a cause. If Dawkins can prove that a sophisticated robot factory exists that can produce, blindly, a perfectly made watch – and scientists and engineers can describe in detail the complex processes by which the robot factory produces these watches – that does not answer the obvious question of who or what made the robot factory. It merely begs the original question.

If anything, chaos theory and its related disciplines are only further strengthening this fundamental metaphysical axiom that all things must have a cause, showing how the apparent randomness of certain natural processes are not, in fact, random at all – but only appear to be random. Chaotic systems appear disorderly, perhaps random, but are not. Underneath their random behavior lies an order and a pattern that, with the aid of new supercomputers, can now be for the first time actually tracked mathematically. It was Lorenz’s discovery that, as his famous metaphor put it, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Ecuador may affect weather patterns in Alaska. The Alaskan weather patterns may appear random, and without cause, but that is only because of the inability of human minds to know all of the deterministic processes involved.

Theistic Evolution

Advocates of Neo-Darwinism and so-called creation science rarely agree on anything, but they are often united in their contempt for what is called theistic evolution. Dawkins asserts that any attempt to bring God into the scientific picture is “transparently feeble” because “science” can show how organized complexity arises spontaneously. As we have seen, science does no such thing: It merely describes the processes by which complex systems arise, without explaining what set these processes in motion in the first place. Creationists, for their part, object that theistic evolution is, in effect, incoherent, an ungodly pact with the devil in which Christians compromise their fundamental belief in divine providence. Typically, theistic evolution is described as evolution guided by God. But, creationists argue, this is a contradiction in terms: If it is evolution, then it is a theory of change in which natural processes are governed by random chance. If it is theistic, then change occurs through divine guidance.

But this presents a false dichotomy. As some of the early “fundamentalist” theoreticians saw (A.C. Dizon, Louis Meyer, R.A. Torrey), there is nothing inherently anti-theistic in a theory of Creation by which God created the universe using evolutionary processes. Christians have long accepted the notion, in physics and chemistry, that there exist observable, seemingly deterministic laws of nature. What is the essential difference between laws which govern atomic particles and, say, the complex DNA encoding by which a single cell develops into a newborn child?

Moreover, it is not even clear, from a logical standpoint, why a theistic worldview could not accommodate elements of randomness as part of the universe’s physical processes – why, contrary to Einstein’s famous assertion, God could not play dice.

Purpose, design and planning do not, in and of themselves, rule out an element of randomness. Indeed, randomness can be part of a design and purpose. College officials may plan and organize a football game – to be played according to fixed, unvarying rules – and yet require, as part of their plan, that the first kick-off be determined by a random flip of a coin. God, for His part, could conceivably create a universe in which randomness can and does occur – not least in the free choices of spiritual beings not entirely bound by deterministic forces. In other words, even if Quantum Theory (to take one example) is somehow able to prove the existence of irreducibly probabilistic laws – in which random events simply occur apparently without a cause – that could still be seen within the boundaries of natural laws established by a Divine Creator.

This is what the Canadian Jesuit theologian Bernard J.F. Lonergan set out to show in his classic work Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Lonergan thought through the implications of a shift from a classical to a statistical worldview, from a mechanistic cosmology to one in which universal order is constituted by emergent probability. Lonergan argued that a world process, governed by schemes of recurrence best described by the laws of probability, is still a world of design and purpose. Intelligence can both discern, and, ultimately, create, an underlying purpose in an aggregate of systems – a system of systems – that operate seemingly independently.

Systems theory and chaos theory have, in fact, proven Lonergan’s basic point: Systems are fundamentally “schemes of recurrence” that, while often appearing to be random, and which are best described by statistical probability, nevertheless exhibit patterns of cumulative complexity.

In the end, therefore, we begin where we started. Popularizing scientists such as Dawkins are justly proud of their new analytical tools. As a methodological starting point, science can and should proceed according to naturalistic presuppositions – lest every scientific mystery be explained away as “God does it.” The purpose of science is to describe the mechanisms discoverable in nature, to discern the patterns observable in what appears to be, to unaided human eyes, random or disorganized events. Chaos theory… and Ilya Prigogine’s self-organizing systems… have demonstrated just how unfathomably complex the processes of nature actually are.

But science, by its very nature, must recognize that its descriptive theories do not, ultimately, explain the origin of the universe. They only describe how the universe works, not how it came into existence or for what purpose. It is the task of the philosophy of religion, and systematic theology, to learn from new disciplines such as chaos theory and propose a new rational synthesis that takes into account the discoveries of these new disciplines and integrate them into classical Christian affirmations about creation. It is by no means clear that we live in a random universe, but if we do, Christian theology can show how the Creator can work His purposes through the “schemes of recurrence” of emergent probability just as He could under the old laws of classic Newtonian mechanics.

Relevance for Apologetics

Ultimately, Christian apologetics must face up to the intellectual challenges posed to it by the culture in which it is operating – and that culture, in the West at least, is dominated by increasingly sophisticated computer technologies and disciplines that call into question both the simple-minded determinism of 19th century modernist science and the “head in the sand” anti-science attitudes of postmodern “critics.” Young people, born with Nokia cell phones in their hands, and struggling with the challenges of mastering ever-more-complex technologies, know that postmodern philosophers are not serious when they deny the existence of objective facts.

Just as there are no atheists in fox holes, so, too, they are no sincere postmodern theoreticians in the cancer ward. When the postmodern theologian is sitting on the examination table, and her physician is explaining that she could have (a) a brain tumor requiring immediate surgery to save her life; or (b) a headache, requiring an aspirin, it’s a good bet that this postmodern theologian will NOT explain to the doctor that, in fact, she rejects the “foundationalist” premises of his science “practices,” that reality is really a social construct and that just because a tumor is “true for him,” it doesn’t follow that it is necessarily true for her. Instead, she will probably demand more tests – thus proving to everyone, including her students, that when push comes to shove she very much believes in objective reality over and above what she thinks about it. She even believes in absolute truth – because, if she takes an aspirin rather than undergoing surgery – and makes the WRONG choice – she will probably die. In her case, at least, the truth matters. Her life depends upon it.

In a similar way, a Christian apologetics that does not display at least as much conviction will not persuade anyone. That is why it is important that theologians today meet the challenges posed by contemporary science and not flee from them into a postmodern humanist ghetto. As I have attempted to argue in this paper, such flight is unnecessary. We have the intellectual resources to meet the challenges posed by contemporary systems theory, evolutionary biology and quantum physics. We do not have to accept either a simplistic naturalism, advocated by proponents of neo-modernism, nor a simplistic postmodern relativism and skepticism. While critiquing the excesses of 19th century modernist science, we do not have throw out the baby of truth with the bath water of scientism and naturalism.

The post How Chaos Theory Refutes the Blind Watchmaker of Richard Dawkins first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

To say that the Bible is patriarchal is like saying that Tai Chi is Chinese: It is such a bewildering statement of the obvious that only an academic or reporter would think it a profound revelation.

Yet in the 1970s and ‘80s, literally millions of feminists opened the Bible (some for the first time, some for the millionth time) and were shocked — shocked! –– at what they found.

Not only was the Divinity addressed as “He” – as He had been, both in the original scriptural languages and in vernacular translations, for 2,000 years — but the entire book was riddled with masculine prerogatives and male-oriented language.

The people of Israel are routinely referred to as bnei Israel, literally the “sons of Israel.”

God creates the male human being (the adam) first.

Under the Mosaic Law, men can divorce women at will… but women cannot divorce men.

All of the Twelve Apostles are men. Jesus is a man. St. Paul, the first Christian theologian, is a man.

And on and on it goes: male chauvinism everywhere you turn.

In an era when radical feminists were trying on such linguistic novelties as referring to “seminars” as “ovulars,” the frank “patriarchy” of the Bible drove many feminists to distraction.

That is the only way to understand the phenomenon of Mary Daly, the ex-Catholic nun turned lesbian isolationist who banned all men from her classes at the Jesuit-run Boston College and, in such classics of feminist rage as Gyn/Ecology, Pure Lust and Outercourse, proclaimed that “a woman’s asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person’s demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.”

Of course, many feminists were content to remain within the broad confines of Christianity and Judaism and sought moderate corrections to what they saw as the sexism inherent in western religion — such as the creation of politically-correct “inclusive language” Bibles and so on.

Others, however, were driven to reject western religion altogether as irredeemably sexist — and sought, like Daly, to “discover” (actually create) a new religion known as “feminist spirituality.”

“The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Yahveh,” explained Naomi Goldenberg in her entertaining book, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions “The psychology of the Jewish and Christian religions depends on the masculine image that these religions have of their God.  Feminists change the major psychological impact of Judaism and Christianity when they recognize women as religious leaders and as images of divinity.”

Drawing upon the writings of neo-pagan writers such as “Starhawk” (née Miriam Simos), author of the fascinating chronicle The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, these new feminist theologians asserted that prehistoric peoples all worshipped variations on the Great Mother Goddess – sometimes in conjunction with the “horned god” who died and was resurrected each year.

For tens of thousands of years, they said, primitive societies were matriarchal, ecologically in balance, egalitarian, peaceful, civilized, in touch with their own sexuality and bodies. (Priestesses presided “skyclad” or naked, “embodying the fertility of the Goddess,” explained Starhawk – a far cry from the staid, less tantalizing services found in your average Methodist congregation or Reform synagogue.)

But into this matriarchal utopia disaster struck: Indo-European invaders swept across the European continent, their veins surging with testosterone, bringing with them weapons of killing, patriarchy and (male) hunter gods.

When Christianity arrived on the scene, full of the myriad repressions and patriarchal traditions of Judaism, the Old Religion of the Great Goddess was forced to go underground – in the form of the various goddess-worship Gnostic sects that the early church persecuted and which figured so prominently in The Da Vinci Code.

But the “Old Religion” lived on, secretly practiced by old women (crones) and “witches,” until the “Burning Times” arrived in the Middle Ages – when, according to Starhawk and Mary Daly, some 9 million witches were burned at the stake.

An entire generation of “gender feminists” — now in their 60s and ‘70s — accepted this new mythology hook, line and sinker.

It is still routinely cited by prominent feminist theologians, writers and theoreticians within the Christian churches and, increasingly, within liberal branches of Judaism as well.

There is only one problem with it: It has about as much basis in history as the volcano-dwelling Thetans of Scientology.

Virtually everything taught about the Great Goddess in “feminist spirituality” and Women’s Studies classes – from Berkeley to Boston — is a hoax.

In fact, wicca in general and feminist spirituality in particular were largely the creations of one man…

The post Bible, Patriarchy & Wicca first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

It’s an amazing story, one only now being told. More than 1,300 years ago, a Persian Christian monk named Aleben traveled 3,000 miles along the ancient caravan route known as the Silk Road all the way to China, carrying precious copies of the New Testament writings (probably in Syriac). Aleben and his fellow Christian monks stopped in the Chinese city of Chang-au (Xian), where, under the protection of the Tang Dynasty Emperor Taizong, he founded a CHristian monastery and began the arduous task of translating the Christian texts into Chinese. It was the year A.D. 635. When the Italian explorer Marco Polo arrived in China nearly 600 years later, he was astonished to discover that a tiny Christian community had existed there for centuries.

We know about this amazing Christian evangelist and his genial Chinese hosts because in 1623 graver diggers working outside of Xian dug up a stele weighing two tons and carved with 2,000 Chinese characters. Now known as the Monument Stele and residing in a museum in Xian, It was created in A.D. 781 and tells the tale Aleben and what the Chinese writers called “the Luminous Religion” because it taught of light. Here is what the Stele proclaimed:

The Emperor Taizong was a champion of culture. He created prosperity and encouraged illustrious sages to bestow their wisdom on the people. There was a saint of great virtue named Aleben, who came from the Qin Empire carrying the true scriptures. He had read the azure clouds and divined that he should journey to the East. Along the way, Aleben avoided danger and calamity by observing the rhythm of the wind.

In the ninth year of the Zhenguan reign [A.D. 635], Aleben reaching Chang-an [Zian]. The Emperor sent his minister, Duke Xuanling, together with a contingent of the palace guard, to the western outskirts to accompany Aleben to the palace.

The translation work on his scriptures took place in the Imperial Library and the Emperor studied them in his Private Chambers. After the Emperor became familiar with the True Teachings, he issued a decree and ordered that it be propagated…

… the Emperor issued a proclamation, saying:

“We have studied these scriptures and found them otherworldly, profound and full of mystery.

We found their words lucid and direct.

We have contemplated the birth and growth of the tradition from which these teachings sprang.

These teachings will save all creatures and benefit mankind, and it is on ly proper that they be practiced throughout the world.”

Following the Emperor’s orders, the Greater Qin Monastery was built in the I-ning section of the Capital. Twenty-one ordained monks of the Luminous Religion were allowed to live there…

The Emperor Gaozong [A.D. 650-683] reverently continued the tradition of his ancestor and enhanced the Luminous Religion by building temples in every province. He bestowed honors upon Aleben, declarin ghim the Great Dharma Lord of the Empire. The Luminous Religion spread throughout all ten provinces, the Empire prospered and peace prevailed. Temples were built in 100 cities and countless families received the blessings of the Luminous Religion.

Christianity flourished in China for at least two hundred years. But then, around A.D. 850, Chinese leaders began a purge of foreign religions, including Buddhism. Buddhist temples were destroyed and, according to one source, more than 3,000 monks of the “Luminious Religion” were ordered to return to lay life.

For more than 1,300 years, scholars and missionaries have searched for the lost scriptures that Aleben translated into Chinese — and for his monastery. A breakthrough finally occurred in the late 1880s when a lonely Taoist monk named Wang Yuanlu discovered 50,000 lost Chinese manuscripts hidden away in more than 500 caves in Dunhuang. Amazingly enough, it wasn’t until about a decade ago, in 1998, that the full story was told. The Dunhuang manuscripts are sort of the Dead Sea Scrolls of ancient China, a cache of long-buried treasures that reveal a tremendous amount about life in ancient China — including the strange story of how the “Luminous Religion” took root there and blended with Taoist and Confucian elements to create a uniquely Chinese form of Christianity. The discovery of these ancient Chinese texts by western scholars — and their dissemination to museums in France and Britain — along with the many decades it took to get them translated and published — very much resembles the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Of the 50,000 manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang, only eight comprise what are now known as the Jesus Sutras. Nevertheless, they clearly show Christian influence. They paraphrase passages from the New Testament and thus provide direct evidence that the ancient Chinese writers of these texts clearly knew the Gospel accounts:

“Do not pile up treasures on the ground where they will rot or be stolen. Treasures must be stored in Heaven where they will not decay or rot.”

“Always tell the truth. Do not give pearls to swine; they will trample and destroy them. You will only be blamed by them for your actions and incur their anger. Why don’t you realize this yourself.”

“Knock on the door and it will be opened for you. Whatever you seek, you will obtain from the One Spirit. Know on the door and it will be opened for you.”

“Look at the birds in the air. They don’t plant or harvest, they have no barns or cellars. In the wilderness the One Spirit provided for the people and will also provide for you. You are more important than the birds and should not worry.”

The Jesus Sutra texts clearly are attempting to translate Christian ideas and ideals into an idiom that the Chinese people — steeped in Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian concepts — can understand. Thus, the Jesus Sutras speak of the “Higher Dharma” that leads to Peace and Joy. “It is the Sutras of the Luminous Religion that enable us to cross the sea of birth and death to the other shore, a land fragrant with the treasured aroma of Peace and Joy,” the Sutras proclaim. “The Sutras are like a great fire burning upon a high mountain. The light from that fire shines upon all.”

Here is how the Jesus Sutras relate the story of Jesus:

The Lord of Heaven sent the Cool Wind to a girl named Mo Yen. It entered her womb and at the moment she conceived. The Lord of Heaven did this to show that conception could take place without a husband. He knew there was no man near her and that people who saw it would say, “How great is the power of the Lord of Heaven.”…

… Mo Yen became pregnant and gave birth to a son named Jesus, whose father is the Cool Wind.

… When Jesus Messiah was born, the world saw clear signs in heaven and earth. A new star that could be seen everywhere appeared in heaven above. The star was as big as a cart wheel and shown brightly. At about that time, the One was born in the country of Ephrath in the city of Jerusalem. He was born the Messiah and after five years he began to preach the dharma.

… From the time the Messiah was 12 until he was 32 years old, he sought out people with bad karma and directed them to turn around and create good karma by following a wholesome path. After the Messiah had gathered 12 disciples, he concerned himself with the suffering of others. Those who had died were made to live. The blind were made to see. The deformed were healed and the sick were cured.

… For the sake of all living beings and to show us that a human life is as frail as a candle flame, the Messiah gave his body to these people of unwholesome karma. For the sake of the living in this world, he gave up his life.

… After the Messiah had accepted death, his enemies seized the Messiah and took him to a secluded spot, washed his hair and climbed to “the place of skulls,” which was called golgotha. They bound him to a pole and placed two highway robbers to the right and left of him. They bound the Messiah to the pole at the time of the fifth watch of the sixth day of fasting. They bound him at dawn and when the sun set in the west the sky became black in all four directions, the earth quaked and the hills trembled. tombs all over the world opened and the dead came to life. What person can see such a thing and not have faith in the teaching of the scriptures? To give one’s life like the Messiah is a mark of great faith.

Fascinating stuff, no? To see this early form of Christianity — delivered by means of a Nestorian monk in the 6th century — through the eyes of the poetic, Taoist-influenced Chinese translators and scribes is to go back in time. It is yet another reminder of the universality of the Gospel message, how it transcends all culture and language and philosophical concepts. Christian yogis, above all, who seek wisdom from the East as well as from our own traditions, should appreciate this.

As the Apostle Peter tells the righteous Roman centurian Cornelius, following his vision: “I see clearly now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears Him and does what is right is welcome to Him (Acts 10: 34-5).” We Christians who seek wisdom from the East.

If you’re interested in this topic, you can discover more in The Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks, edited by Ray Riegert and Thomas Moore (Berkeley: Seastone, 2003). A much more scholarly work, and without the frequently anti-Christian tone of Riegert and Moore, is Martin Palmer’s The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity (Wellspring/Ballantine, 2001).

The post Jesus in Ancient China first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

According to rabbinic tradition, the first commandment God gives Adam and Eve in the Garden is to have sex: Pru vehravu, “be fruitful and multiply.”

It’s little wonder, then, that Christian theology has pondered for centuries the place that human sexuality and bodily existence have in God’s plan for the universe.

On the one hand, anyone familiar with the Jewish testament knows that sexual attraction (and sexual sin) permeate virtually every book. What’s more, two centuries of crusading secularism has exaggerated Christian pruddery in the early centuries of Christianity and in the Middle Ages.

On the other hand, it’s also true that the monastic movement that led to so many cultural and educational achievements in the West did tend to emphasize the negative aspects of human sexuality and bodily existence — if only because vowed celibate monks and nuns inevitably saw sexual feelings as temptations to be avoided at all costs.

Into this tangled history stepped the late pope John Paul II.

Raised by his widowed father in Poland during the nightmare of World War II, Karol Wotylwa was a working man, athlete and actor before he became a Catholic priest and a philosopher.

His experience with young married couples during his early years as a pastor — combined with his in-depth study of early 20th century phenomenologists — allowed the young priest to see the sexual embrace and life in the body in an entirely new way: as quite literally a way to God.

When he was elected pope, John Paul delivered a remarkable series of 129 lectures during his Wednesday audiences on what has become known as the Theology of the Body (TOTB) — a very traditional, very radical teaching on human embodiment and sexual attraction that papal biographer George Weigel has described as “a kind of theological time bomb” that will have dramatic consequences …perhaps in the twenty-first century” (Witness to Hope, 343).

John Paul’s argument, in essence, is that both secular libertines and Christian pruddery have missed the point. Human beings are radically, essentially physical. Human beings are not “ghosts in a machine,” as Descartes described it.

In a dramatic way, the entire Christian understanding of the incarnation means that Christians are and must be “pro-sex” and must celebrate the body generally. I would even say that Christians take the body at least as seriously as the devotees of most religions, including even Hinduism. The doctrine of the bodily resurrection reflects the Christian belief that we are our bodies — that if we are to survive death then it must be a physical survival. A disembodied spirit would not be a human being.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna the exact opposite of the Christian view of our essentially bodily natures:

As a man discards his threadbare robes and puts on new, so the Spirit throws off its worn-out bodies and puts on new ones… The Spirit in man is imperishable.

While Christianity agrees with the Gita (and with yoga!) that there is an imperishable, immortal essence of the human being, which, for lack of a better word, the west has traditionally called the “soul,” it does not agree that the physical body is merely incidental to that essence — something that can be “thrown off” for a new one.

Rather, in the Christian view, we are embodied spirits or spiritual bodies — and thus it is our bodies themselves that are (or will be) immortal. Thus, the Christian hope is even more absurdly optimistic than people give us credit for: We actually believe that we will live forever… in glorified “resurrection” bodies, not as disembodied spirits. I’ve never been the least scandalized by Taoists who claim that yoga can lead to physical immortality of a sort or at least extreme longevity: it seems perfectly plausible to me given the Christian revelation.

That is why St. Paul tells the (male) Corinthians that they should take good care of their bodies and not defile themselves with prostitutes — and why Christian practitioners of yoga celebrate the body and do what they can to maintain good health. That is also why Pope John Paul II, in his teachings on the Theology of the Body, emphasized how incarnate human beings come to God in and through their bodies — and that sex, far from being inherently sinful, is actually a way to God.

In John Paul’s teaching, sex (for non-celibate “householders”) is a sacrament (a “sign”) of divine presence because it is the preeminent example of that spiritual intimacy that is the birthright of all human beings.

The post Sex and John Paul II’s Theology of the Body first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

The break-up of Al and Tipper Gore’s 40-year marriage is sparking a soul-searching among many long-time married couples. The Wall Street Journal today had an interesting article about the shifting marriage patterns among couples who have been married 30, 40 years or more. It turns out the Gores are typical of the baby boom generation:

Whatever the Gores’ issues—he’s 62, she’s 61—they are part of a new normal that began with their generation, according to Census statistics. Of the 8.1 million women who were married between 1970 and 1974, just over half made it to their 30th wedding anniversary, compared with about 60% for women married between 1960 and 1964.

That is likely the biggest generational jump in divorce rates ever seen, says Pamela Smock, a research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. From more women in the work force to the gradual acceptance of unmarried couples living together, the Gores’ generation “saw a sea change in how people thought about what they were supposed to do with their lives, including their family lives,” she says.

My wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary last year. I don’t think we were too smug about it, though. More like combat veterans sitting around after a battle, happy to be alive but a bit dazed and exhausted. With five wild kids and our own business, we’re just glad to be in one piece. Plus, we’ve seen our share of divorces in our circle of friends. The Gores’ breakup, like the divorces of of friends, both unnerve us and make us more determined.

The Wall Street Journal article argues that greater longevity dooms marriage. “People are living longer, and they’re less willing to spend their last decades with someone who leaves them unfulfilled,” the author writes. “The anthropologist Margaret Mead believed marriage was designed for a time when people died in their 40s and 50s, after raising children together. The concept of decades-long, empty-nest marriages was never considered.”

Perhaps. But the article also had hope for those of us committed to seeing marriage through til death do us part. The second half of marriage, now that the kids are semi-launched, can be a time of re-focusing on the relationship that set the family yacht sailing the seven seas in the first place. It’s a time when the husband and wife tell the kids, “See ya! We’re off to Tahiti!” Well, if not Tahiti, at least down the street.

My wife and I now run every morning on the beach near our home. It’s partly for our health, of course — we’re committed Younger Next Year folks — but it’s also a time when we can reconnect. We often sit on the beach before we start running, quietly listening to the waves, sipping coffee, reading the Wall Street Journal and just talking. It’s like daily marriage therapy. The kids have to fend for themselves for breakfast. At this point in our lives, we come first. Ha!

Like most combat veterans, my wife and I have seen too much to be flip about the next battle. We’re not overconfident… but not pessimistic, either. A stray bullet could take you out. But we’re determined and hopeful. Another day, another run together.

The post Thriving Long-Term Marriages first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

I took my whole family to Rome this year for Easter… and, as usual, it was an invigorating, life-affirming, faith-building experience for everyone. Rome has a way of doing that to people. I’ve been to many of the great cities of the world – from New York, London and Paris to Berlin, Athens, Cairo and Jerusalem – and none has the mystical quality to it as Rome does.

My wife agrees. Paris is beautiful… Berlin is majestic… but Rome is truly magical. Perhaps it’s the warm, spring weather, the bright blue sky that lights up the white travertine of the Colosseum. More probably, it’s the way that all of western civilization… all of our political, historical, philosophical, religious understanding… is somehow condensed, like a diamond, in the 2,000-year-old buildings that still dot the Roman landscape. You can almost hear voices from the past as you walk through the old Roman neighborhoods of Trastevere and through the city center. Even jaded, bored teenagers gawk in astonishment as they walk through the portals of Rome’s great temples, from St. Peter’s Basilica to the Pantheon. When you combine that with the intoxicating energy that flows through the Eternal City like a live wire – the youthful exuberance of a hundred different nationalities – it’s easy to see how Rome can totally change your outlook on life. I feel more alive in Rome, a lot freer. God still speaks to people in Rome. Sometimes they even hear him.

The thing is, in Rome Christianity is not a religion. It’s not even a way of life. It’s history. Family history. The good, the bad and the ugly. And all of it happened, as far as Romans are concerned, only yesterday.

The post The Eternal City first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Friends often ask me why, after all these years, we still go through the weekly ordeal of getting our large, rambunctious family off to Mass.

I’ll be the first to admit it’s an ordeal. We usually attend the 9:00 a.m. Mass because of First Communion classes taught then (our five kids range in age from 7 to 18). That means getting up early on a Sunday morning… dragging recalcitrant, barely-conscious teenagers out of bed, usually kicking and screaming… hurriedly getting dressed… searching for shoes and dresses and lost hair ribbons for the girls… nagging and kvetching and pleading and threatening… driving 10 miles to our parish church… then scurrying in, often late, to squeeze into a pew. Yet we do it… week after week, month after month, year after year. We haven’t “broken the spell,” in the words of atheist writer Daniel Dennett’s telling phrase.

In many ways, we’re lucky. We belong to a very affluent, involved parish in a nearby seaside town. The church sits on the bluff overlooking the town harbor. It’s a very modern (too modern!) church in the “theatre in the round” style with a second-story balcony that even has movie-theatre style seats usually only found in Protestant churches (and which make you feel like you’re watching an opera, not worshiping God). The pastor is a gregarious, barrel-chested man in his mid-50s who is funny and engaging, occasionally profound, and who usually keeps even the teenagers’ attention during his sermon. Assisting him are three other priests – all of them likable and smart.

I hear the stories all the time about empty Catholic churches with the proverbial little old ladies and their rosary beads, but I have to say: the masses at our parish are usually packed. Business people, surfer dudes, moms and kids, they’re all there, mingling after Mass, chatting with the priests, scarfing down donuts. They, too, somehow make the effort to get up every Sunday morning and show up.

The Catholic Mass is quite unlike a typical evangelical church service. For one thing, the sermon is rarely as polished or as long as in a Protestant church, and not given nearly as much emphasis. The music, too, can be perfunctory, although in our parish it’s actually very good and performed by dedicated professional musicians. Most obviously, the entire focus of the Catholic service is on the actual ritual of the Mass itself – an ancient series of gestures and prayers that, in its basic outline, goes back to the Last Supper and the dawn of Christianity.

In our parish church, as in most Catholic churches, the entire building focuses on two elements that draw your eyes to them: A large altar, often made of stone (conspicuously not a table!)… and, above it, an enormous crucifix (not a bare cross) with a typically gruesome and lifelike representation of Jesus dying on it. At our church, the silver crucifix above the altar is truly a work of art, enormous and lifelike, suspended directly above the altar with wires and a large steel bar connected to the ceiling.

Thus, the architecture and design of Catholic churches themselves testify to what is going on in the Catholic Mass: It is a ritualized memorial of the death of Jesus Christ on Calvary. That is the entire focus and purpose of the Catholic Mass. Everything else is secondary – the scripture readings, the sermon, the extra prayers. The entire point of this ancient ritual is to memorialize, re-present and offer to God the act of self-sacrifice that Christians believe Jesus performed on the Cross. The priest reenacts the Last Supper – repeating the Words of Institution found in the scriptural accounts – but his purpose in doing so is to dramatize, as an act of worship, how Jesus consciously and willingly went to his own death.

For Catholics, in other words, the medium really is the message. The Gospel is proclaimed, not with words, but with deeds. As the apostle Paul told the Corinthians, “Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.”(1 Cor. 11:25).

Catholics perform this ritual, not weekly, but daily – in hundreds of thousands of churches around the world, in abbeys and convents, hospitals and schools, universities and orphanages. A Mass is celebrated before, during or after virtually every significant event whenever Catholics are involved. At a wedding or funeral. At the start of a school year. At the beginning of a new legislative session.

In a sense, evangelical and atheist critics are correct: The Mass is the sole surviving example of magic in a faithless, machine-dominated world. It’s a moment of enchantment when hard-nosed businessmen and sex-obsessed teenagers alike encounter the awesome mystery of God “really present” on earth.

Whether brainwashed as Daniel Dennett says, or merely faithful to the ancient command of Christ to “do this in memory of me,” Catholic saints and sinners, skeptics and pious believers, continue to gather for this ancient rite. It is as Jesus said it would be: a way of remembering. And whatever else we do, every Sunday morning, we drag ourselves out of bed, meet with others like us, in an unbroken chain that stretches back 2,000 years in time, and remember.

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