Why I Do Not Support Trump's Wall

Phew, I'm back from the March for Life in Washington, D.C. It was a long day, especially with being on a charter bus full of rambunctious high school freshmen, but the trip was worth it in every respect. There was a special energy and purpose to the march this year, and the crowd was huge. The media coverage may have been grudging, partial, and condescending, but who cares? All it would take is a good Supreme Court nominee next week for me to retract my skepticism about President Trump's pro-life statements.

In a few political posts, however, I've let slip that I think Trump gets other issues related to human dignity dead wrong. Not that I won't stand behind Trump all the way in regard to overturning Roe v. Wade and restricting abortion in any other way, but these things do need to be said.

Which brings me to the border wall.

Yes, yes, reasonable people can disagree about prudential matters. But reasonable people also reason about prudential matters. So, please, hear me out.

Shantytown poverty on the outskirts of Lima, Peru.

Even Pope Francis, who implied during the campaign that Trump would not be a Christian if he built a border wall, has said elsewhere that "those who govern must also exercise prudence" with respect to controlling their borders. So, the pope's unfortunate hyperbole during the campaign aside, building a wall between the United States and Mexico is not per se un-Christian. To say that those who support the building of the wall are ipso facto not Christians is equally unhelpful.

There are many devout, serious Christians, including many whom I count as friends, who sincerely believe that the border wall is a necessary and prudent measure in order to protect integrity of the southern U.S. border. It is indisputable that millions of dollars worth of drugs and weapons pass over the border every year. Dangerous criminals cross back and forth over the Rio Grande with impunity. Human traffickers extort desperate people and regularly put them in harm's way.

But what effect would the border wall have? How would these matters change for the better if we were to build a wall stretching the length of the U.S.-Mexico border? A reasonable person needs to ask these questions before supporting the construction of a wall at the cost of billions of dollars. Given the drug-running tunnels that border agents regularly discover in populated areas, I would wager that a significant percentage of the illegal activity would continue unabated, no matter how many miles of wall were added to the border. Remember, these tunnels are usually constructed in highly populated areas, including, for example, the half-mile tunnel discovered last year extending from a modest house in Tijuana to an industrial park near San Diego.

Where there is cash, there is a way. Criminals, drugs, weapons--all these will continue to flow into the United States no matter how high a wall the Trump administration builds. Increased funding for border agents and patrols would certainly help, and yes, I know that's also part of the plan. A physical brick-and-mortar wall running the length of the border, though, not so much.

Again, reasonable people can disagree on prudential matters. That's what the pope was getting at in the second of the quotations that I provided. But reasonable people also discuss the facts on the ground in order to make prudential judgements, for example, whether to support the construction of a border wall or to oppose it. For myself, I am unconvinced that the facts on the ground related to drugs and terrorist activity support the construction of this wall.

The wall, however, might make it harder for innocent people to cross the Rio Grande in search of a better life in the United States. For all the hyperbole of Pope Francis' comment about Trump not being a Christian, for all the imprudence of his saying so during the election cycle, it makes sense in light of the thousands of African and Middle Eastern refugees who have fled from starvation or persecution only to drown in the Mediterranean or suffocate in the back of trucks in Austria and Turkey. The Holy Father sees Europe's reaction to the influx of Muslim immigrants as xenophobia, a repudiation of Christ, who said, "I was a stranger, and you welcomed me" (Matthew 25:35).

With the recent bombings in France and Germany, with the cold-blooded killing of Fr. Jacques Hamel in the midst of celebrating Mass, European Christians aren't universally receptive to the Holy Father's message. Despite Church leaders conflating these issues, I will leave the European crisis and Trump's executive order banning travel from Muslim-majority countries prone to terrorism for future posts. The facts on the ground are different in these different cases. Reasonable people disagree, and the Holy Father's impassioned comments aside, prudential decisions may differ.

With the U.S.-Mexico border, however, we are not talking about potential terrorists. Latinos have been crossing the border to the benefit of everybody for decades. They pick our produce, trim our Christmas trees, and clean our office buildings. They pay taxes, even if they crossed the border illegally and make use of a fake social security number. In the second generation, they are our classmates in high school and college, our colleagues at work. The particular irony for Catholics is that these strangers are, by and large, fellow Catholics. The stranger we refuse to to welcome is not a stranger at all, but family.

What is at stake except a matter of basic human dignity? Take away terrorist threats and drug and weapon trafficking, as I think an examination of the facts on the ground will do, and what will be left except an un-Christian fear of the other?  Far be it from me to level the charge of xenophobia against my serious-minded friends who support the border wall, but I haven't seen any benefit to the border wall except making it harder for us to welcome the stranger. While reasonable people disagree on prudential matters and come to different conclusions, that doesn't make all conclusions equal.

Why I March

If I were to set up a strawman to attack the argument that pro-lifers like myself should not be so focused on abortion, I'd offer Elizabeth Hansen's much-discussed essay last November over at Crux. Hansen's argument, in short, is that the "old guard" of the pro-life movement "has lost its way" and "must now step aside."

At Raleigh's March for Life last Saturday

The problem is that Hansen sets up a strawman of her own to knock down in the person of Father Frank Pavone, who back in November livestreamed an endorsement of Trump with the naked body of an aborted child before him on an altar. I will not provide a link to that video here. Despite Father Pavone's sincere pro-life convictions, despite his right to endorse Trump, the video is indefensible on too many counts to enumerate here. Despite Father Pavone's association with the pro-life movement for so many years, making him the strawman-representative of the "old guard" is disingenuous.  

Hansen, though, is part of the self-styled New Pro-life Movement, a group of bloggers whose stated mission is to "reexamine what it means to be pro-life in the 21st century." The NPLM's "new" moniker aside, their position statement looks an awful lot like Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's 1980s-era "seamless garment," the notion that a "consistent ethic of life" focuses on ending the death penalty and human trafficking, on defending the the rights of workers, on improving access to healthcare, etc., not just on ending abortion.

With regard specifically to abortion, their goal is "lessening the demand rather than the supply" through "greater access to healthcare, pre and post-natal care, mandatory paid leave, job protection, equal wages, sexual education, and stronger comprehensive support systems." In short, they are rejecting the pro-life movement's focus on Roe v. Wade. Their idea is that if we're serious about lessening the number of babies who are being killed by abortion, we need to alleviate the conditions that lead women to consider the option in the first place.

It's not that "old-guard" pro-lifers like me--goodness, I hadn't considered myself old enough to be old-guard anything--aren't similarly concerned with "demand." Why do these things have to be either/or? Look around your parish, and many of the same people who are concerned about Roe v. Wade are also counseling women outside of abortion clinics, supporting adoption, working in soup kitchens, staffing free medical clinics, teaching English to farmworkers, etc. Democrats and Republicans all want a stronger economy so that women don't feel pressured to kill their unborn babies. Democrats and Republicans are equally convinced that their respective policy platforms are a means to this end.

Which brings me to the purpose of tomorrow's March for Life, with its origins dating back to an October 1973 gathering of 30 pro-life activists in the home of the late Nellie Gray to discuss how to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade court decision. Every year since Roe v. Wade, the march has been held on or around the date of the Jan. 22 decision. The march ends at the steps of the Supreme Court, and to this day the march's stated purpose is to "witness to the truth concerning the greatest human rights violation of our time, legalized abortion."

The March for Life is inextricably tied up with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, that is, with ending the "supply" of abortion. Again, we "old guard" pro-lifers, who attend these marches yearly in the hundreds of thousands, are very much about ending the "demand" as well, and if marching reinvigorates us in that regard, then all the better. Please, let's have it both ways.

Why in the world would we cease to concern ourselves with Roe v. Wade just as a president comes into office with the ability to nominate at least one pro-life justice to the high court, perhaps several? Why would we abandon the cause of overturning Roe v. Wade, or even lessen our focus on it, when we have the best chance to do so in decades?

I don't condone the reprehensible decision of Father Pavone to place the body of an aborted baby on an altar as a means to get pro-lifers to vote for Trump. Father Pavone certainly didn't convince me. I didn't believe that the formerly vigorously pro-choice television mogul meant much of what he said to placate pro-lifers during his campaign. Nonetheless, President Trump reinstated the "Mexico City" policy banning aid to foreign NGOs that support abortion in his second day in office. Tomorrow he is sending top advisor Kellyanne Conway as the first White House official ever to speak at the march in person.

There are so many "seamless garment" issues that Trump gets so tragically wrong. Need I mention his executive order yesterday to start construction on the border wall? But please, tomorrow let's show unity in marching for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I'll march with Elizabeth Hansen, I'll march with Father Pavone. Goodness, I would march with Donald Trump himself in order to bring an end to the tragedy of the legalized mass killing of the unborn.

UPDATE (1/26, 12 p.m.): Minutes after publishing this post, I learned that Vice President Pence will also address marchers in person. 

Trump Is Not My President

The phrase 'Not my president' is trending on social media. A Facebook group called "Donald Trump is not my President" has 152,000 members. So let me jump on the bandwagon and state for the record that Donald Trump is not my president either.

Rather, Donald Trump is the duly elected, properly sworn-in president of the United States of America. On inauguration day he doesn't belong to you or to me, he doesn't belong to Republicans or to Democrats. Whether you voted for him, whether you virulently opposed him, whether, like me, you couldn't in good conscience bring yourself to vote for him, whatever the case, he is the president.

Earlier in the campaign, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan had accused Trump of representing a "virulent strain" of American nativism. Nonetheless, he was there to deliver the first invocation. His choice of King Solomon's prayer for the gift of wisdom hints pretty clearly at what he thinks our president most needs, and perhaps what he most lacks. But again, the good cardinal was there.

President Obama was there. Vice President Joe Biden was there. Tradition and protocol may have demanded their presence, but Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were also there. People on both sides of the isle were at the inauguration, bitter political rivals all, because they recognized, and they were ready to affirm publicly, the smooth transition of power that makes American democracy the great institution that it is.

What of the dozens of Democratic lawmakers who chose to skip the inauguration? What, particularly, of Georgia Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights hero, who said he couldn't attend because he didn't believe that Trump was a "legitimate" president? How can these lawmakers conflate their political and ideological differences with the legitimacy of a transfer of political office from one holder to the next?

Believe me, I've already enumerated elsewhere the ways that I think Trump was a dangerous choice for president. But now he is the president, and any discussion, any protest, needs to start with this fact.

*****

There will be a time to protest. Not today, but as soon as tomorrow, I suppose, for the Women's March on Washington. It's too bad that that the Women's March organizers chose to conflate their legitimate concerns regarding Trump's misogyny and his anti-immigrant stance with an ill-advised call for greater access to abortion. There will be a local version of the Women's March tomorrow in downtown Raleigh. I'll be downtown tomorrow, but for the other march occurring downtown, the local version of the March for Life. I'd put money on the Raleigh News & Observer granting front-page coverage to the former march, while pretending that the latter never happened.

I will also be traveling to the national March for Life in Washington, D.C., next Friday together with the entire student body of the school where I teach. No doubt the national media will give plenty of attention to tomorrow's Women's March but pretend that the hundreds of thousands who come on Friday for the March for Life were never there.

But maybe somebody is listening. Top White House advisors don't have speaking engagements without the president knowing about it. But after eight years of the White House pretending that the March for Life didn't exist, Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump advisor, a faithful practicing Catholic, and a former marcher herself, will address the crowd, together with Cardinal Dolan.

That's the Cardinal Dolan who prayed for the gift of wisdom for our legitimately elected, properly sworn in president.

I'll join the good cardinal in his prayers.

*****

UPDATE (1/21, 10 p.m.): To their credit, the News & Observer did end up sending a reporter, who wrote a solid article on Raleigh's March for Life despite the far larger march also occurring downtown. I'd easily put the number of marchers at about 2,400 on a dreary, misty day, but otherwise, credit where credit is due. 

'Red light' cameras, and laws that aren't laws

Adam MacLeod, a Faulkner University law professor, has an interesting essay over at Public Discourse. Unlike most people who get caught by a traffic camera, MacLeod chose to pursue his case all the way to its eventual dismissal by a county-level judge. His saga is fascinating to read for the glimpse it offers of the convoluted legal system that one would have to navigate to fight a ticket of this sort. But it also got me thinking about why any sort of automated policing is harmful to the social contract.

I mainly understand the role of government in the limited sense in which Locke describes it, as the result of a contract entered into by free and equal individuals for the preservation of their God-given rights to life, liberty, and property. To be clear, I am not against the idea of laws in general, or of traffic laws in particular. It's pretty easy to see how speed limits and traffic signals help to preserve the fundamental rights of all members of the society, even if they constrain us from doing whatever we want, and even if doing what we want in a particular instance is not per se a violation of the natural moral law. Rather, I am against the elimination of a human element in the enforcement of the law.

I once had a "red light" ticket experience of my own, and I regret to say that I didn't have MacLeod's stubborn force of will. When I was living in Texas, I was notified of my infraction by post, together with a link to a video clearly showing me slowing but not coming to a complete stop as I turned right at an intersection somewhere in Fort Worth. The evidence was incontrovertible: The law says that drivers must come to a complete stop at a red light, and I had not come to a complete stop. Unlike MacLeod, who was not the one driving his car, I in fact had been the guilty party. And while I had philosophical misgivings about "red light" tickets even back then, I simply didn't have the time to contest the matter. Grudgingly, I wrote a check and mailed it off.

These misgivings are due to my understanding of the social contract. Laws are only laws insofar as they are in accord with reason. If I were to start asking people, I would bet that pretty much everybody has rolled through a stop sign at some point, if not in broad daylight, then at night with a clear view in both directions and not a car in sight. If not at night, then maybe while transporting one's laboring wife to the hospital in order to give birth. If not a rolling stop, then perhaps traveling 5 miles per hour over the speed limit in order to "go with the flow" of traffic. Surely I'm not the only one who tends to follow the "spirit" rather than the "letter" of traffic laws.

Yet it's not a matter that I take to the confessional, for laws are for man, not man for laws. There are instances when God-given reason leads us to violate the letter of the law because the law simply doesn't apply. To give another example: A few miles from our new farm in Wisconsin, County Road H merges into County Road X at a curve in the latter road. These two roads are only used by the few people who live on them, and the area is very rural. Sometimes an hour or more will go by without any traffic at all. Nonetheless, there is a stop sign for those on County Road H, so that a driver merging onto X is legally obligated to come to a full stop before proceeding onto X, even if he is turning left, which, practically speaking, means continuing straight on.

The stop sign makes perfect sense in the summer, since the corn gets more than 5 feet high, and drivers can't see oncoming traffic coming from the right on X until they've nearly arrived at the stop sign. But stopping makes no sense at all when the fields are bare, because drivers can see for a few hundred of meters in both directions. To stop or not to stop: That, I suppose, is the question for a driver like myself. Again, laws are made for man, not man for laws. I feel perfectly capable, through the exercise of my reason, of knowing when to obey a stop sign, and when to take a careful look and zip right through.

Am I a law-breaker in doing so? Not that Monroe County is about to post cameras on all its stop signs, but if they were, then I'd technically be just as guilty as I had been back on Fort Worth's more congested streets. The evidence would be incontrovertible.

This, in short, is why there needs to be a human element to law enforcement. The police officer who trails behind the car transporting the laboring woman to the hospital with his lights flashing is probably not going to write a ticket once he's apprised of the situation. The Monroe County sheriff doesn't bother to police the junction of those two county roads because people generally take care of themselves without any sort of oversight. You can generally cruise right by a police cruiser on the interstate going 72 miles per hour because that's generally how fast the flow of traffic is, regardless of the posted speed limit.

In all these instances, the police officer is a human representative of the other individuals who have entered into the contract simply by living in a particular society. The roads benefit everybody and foster everybody's right to life, liberty, and property. We give up our right to drive as fast as we want on the roads because we may be trampling on somebody else's rights by doing so. The police officer, however, as a rational human being, has the discretion to judge whether a particular individual's violation of the letter of agreed-upon laws also violates the spirit of those laws. It may be that there are mitigating circumstances, like those I've described above. It may be that, clearly, nobody's rights are being trampled on in a particular violation of the letter of the law.

If the police officer doesn't have that discretion, then the judge certainly does, and if not in regard to guilt or innocence, then certainly in waiving the heaviness of the punishment. That's what left me frustrated a few years ago when I was considering whether to challenge my own "red light" ticket. First of all, there was no police officer to talk to, let alone a police officer to decide whether, given how empty the roadway was, and how near I came to stopping, it would be worth pulling me over. My frustration was compounded by the fact that the byzantine appeals system seemed designed to prevent challenges. MacLeod's account of his own saga makes me grateful that I didn't bother. I wouldn't have had the time, or the legal know-how, to make it happen.

Which simply shouldn't be the case in a healthy democracy.

The Folly of the Maltese Bishops

The only Maltese whom I have ever known is Dominican Fr. Joseph Agius, my professor for Old Testament and, later, for second-semester Hebrew at the Angelicum. He was friendly, outgoing, and genial. And extremely busy, especially during that semester of Hebrew, when he was named the Angelicum's rettore magnifico. Yes, the Italians really know how to do titles. I still remember waiting in utter nervousness in Fr. Agius' messy, book-lined office as he paged through Second Samuel for a passage for sight translation. That oral exam could easily have gone south if he were less encouraging, but with his help I carried the day.

I have always liked Fr. Agius, and by extension I have always liked Malta, even if I've never visited the remote Mediterranean outpost. Although I will always have my fond memories of Fr. Agius, I'm afraid that as of a few days ago I think a lot less of Malta.

Rosemary and I praying after our wedding rehearsal not so many years ago.

By way of explanation: The Maltese bishops published a pastoral document a few days ago permitting Catholics living in second marriages without the benefit an annulment to receive Holy Communion if they "are at peace with God." The bishops go so far as to claim that living as "brother and sister"--the challenge of St. John Paul II's Familiaris Consortio and the teaching of the Church through the centuries--may sometimes "become humanly impossible." 

People with a great deal of canonical and theological expertise have already eviscerated the Maltese document, including Edward Peters, who calls it "disastrous." Peters has many objections, but his first, as I understand it, is that the bishops are wholly abdicating from their roles both as administrators of the sacrament and as pastors of souls. Without their role in safeguarding the Eucharist from profanation, pastors become mere dispensaries of the sacrament on demand with no regard for Canon 915.

Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, one of the other signatories to the dubia besides Cardinal Burke, gave an interview to Il Foglio earlier this week. He told of a priest who wrote to him about a man living in a common-law marriage with a divorced woman. The priest challenged this man to continence before approaching the sacrament, only to have the man tell him that Pope Francis says it's no longer necessary. 

Those who understand marriage as Christ Himself understood it are praying that Pope Francis didn't really say this. But we don't know because the Holy Father has refused to clarify the now-infamous Footnote 351 of Amoris Laetitia. Instead, what we get is the Vatican's newspaper,  L'Osservatore Romano, republishing the Maltese bishops' document this week, implying that their interpretation is the right one.

I feel, therefore, for my priest-friends who still bravely challenge Catholics in adulterous second marriages to repentance with Christ's own words: 

"Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery" (Mark 10:11-12). 

I feel for my priest-friends, but why does this ongoing disaster concern me, a lay Catholic, so much? In one way the question may be above my paygrade, but in another, as someone called to the marital vocation, I feel that I have something worth saying.

My first thought is a prick to the conscience: Shouldn't I be rejoicing that the grace of the Eucharist is available to more people? Isn't the Eucharist, as Pope Francis stated in that infamous footnote, "powerful medicine" for sinners? Perhaps I am like the elder brother of the prodigal son, who refuses to celebrate when his younger brother returns, and their father kills the fatted calf. 

"He said to his father in reply, 'Look, all these years I have served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends. But when your son returns who swallowed up your property with prostitutes, for him you slaughter the fatted calf.'" (Luke 15:29-30).

Perhaps I am a Pharisee irritated that I've worked hard to keep my marriage together in order to be worthy of the Eucharistic table, only to have a sinner kneel next to me and receives the Lord with truer devotion. 

"Two people went up to the temple area to pray; one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector. The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, 'O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity--greedy, dishonest, adulterous--or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.' But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed. 'O God, be merciful to me a sinner.'" (Luke 18:10-13)

I am certainly not above having pharisaical tendencies, but the man whom Cardinal Caffarra describes in his Il Foglio interview proudly living more uxorio differs vastly from the prodigal son and the tax collector. 

The difference is in terms of repentance. St. John Chrysosotom puts the issue this way:

"I too raise my voice, I beseech, beg and implore that no one draw near to this sacred table with a sullied and corrupt conscience. Such an act, in fact, can never be called 'communion,' not even were we to touch the Lord's body a thousand times over, but 'condemnation,' 'torment,' and 'increase of punishment.'" 

Without repentance, what would be medicine instead becomes poison, and my fear is that the poison of validated adultery is fast-spreading through the institution of Christian marriage as a whole. What will become of the Church's witness to Christ's teachings in regard to marriage? What will become of a Church that conforms to sin rather than demanding that sinners conform to her? 

The case of the Maltese bishops is not so much heresy as it is an abdication from pastoral responsibility.  It is pusillanimity in the face of the strong cultural forces that have reshaped marriage into something other than a partnership of a man and woman for the whole of life ordered toward their good and the procreation and education of children. 

The Maltese bishops' document is a wrong-headed attempt to keep as many people within the "big tent" of Catholicism as possible. The problem is that the more Catholicism's tent is stretched, the more the fabric rips and tears. How can anybody who knows that Catholic marriages have declined by two thirds  in the last four decades say that we need to rip apart the fabric of the faith just a little more if we want the tent to hold together? Whatever happened to "be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48)? Whatever happened to Tertullian's statement that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church"?

Accommodation is not the answer if we want to revitalize the Church. Faithfulness to Christ's teachings is.

My responsibility as a married man is to bear witness to the fact that Christian marriage is still possible, and I certainly have my hands full with that. Pray God that I can live up to my responsibilities. Pray God that priests and bishops, and especially the bishops of Malta, can live up to theirs.

Anything less than that is pure folly. 

A new farm website

Alas, despite the snow days, all my writing efforts went into our new farm website, and I don't have a mid-week post prepared for the blog. For those who don't already know, we will be moving back to Wisconsin in the spring to begin a new adventure as full time farmers. Feel free to check out the new site at location. Enjoy.

Till the weekend!

The Failings of a Sunday Epiphany

Everybody knows the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas," and most everybody also knows that after the 12th day there follows the Epiphany, the visit of the Magi to the newborn baby Jesus in Bethlehem. Simple math makes the 12th day after Christmas the 5th of January and Epiphany, therefore, the 6th. So why is it that we will be commemorating the Epiphany tomorrow, Sunday, Jan. 8?

Liturgical rebels, the whole lot of us: Here we illicitly commemorate the Epiphany with compline the night of Jan. 6.

The short answer is that after the Second Vatican Council the U.S. bishops decided to transfer the Epiphany from Jan. 6 to the Sunday falling between Jan. 2-8. It's a change that local bishops' conferences are permitted to make, and one that our own bishops have also made with respect to the Solemnities of the Ascension and Corpus Christi, both of which feasts we commemorate the Sunday after their traditional Thursday dates.

Although that's the answer in one way, it leaves the question unanswered in another: Why were the bishops so keen to move the feasts in the first place? After all, it puts us out of sync with the rest of Christianity, including the Vatican itself, where Pope Francis celebrated the Epiphany on Friday. Yes, I'm aware that the Orthodox, using the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian, celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7, and Epiphany on Jan. 19, but at least in the West the date of Epiphany has been the 6th for many centuries. For its part, the Ascension is necessarily on the Thursday of the sixth week of Easter, because Christ ascended into heaven 40 days after His resurrection. So, why move these feasts? Why make things so complicated and ahistorical?

The most charitable answer I can think of is that the bishops feel that our secular culture does not permit us to commemorate these feasts properly during the work week. Yes, the culture begrudges us Christmas day, even as it coopts Christmas it for its own secular purposes, but Epiphany is one disruption too many. Mary, Mother of God, the Ascension, Corpus Christi, the Assumption, All Saints, the Immaculate Conception--these holy days of obligation would multiply the disruption exponentially.

Charitable answer aside, I think the bishops are dead wrong. Look around you in the pews tomorrow at Mass. People may be filling the pews at the same rate as they would any other Sunday, but I'll bet that if you started asking them, less than half came to church even aware that it was the Epiphany. I'll bet that less than a quarter of them have any plans to mark the feast other than spend a little time with family, something that they would have done on Sunday anyway. In short, therefore, the bishops have taken away the Epiphany, the Ascension, and Corpus Christi, and replaced these important feastdays with... nothing.

Whatever good intentions the bishops may have had, the experiment of transferring obligatory feasts to Sunday (or of eliminating the obligation altogether in the case of Mary, Mother of God, the Assumption, and All Saints, when they happen to fall on Saturdays or Mondays), has been an utter failure. The same can be said of the U.S. bishops' elimination of obligatory Friday abstinence from meat outside of Lent. Has this truly led to an increase in works of penance and charity? I was shocked, earlier this year, when I mentioned in class that Catholics are obliged to make a sacrifice of some kind if they choose to eat meat on Fridays, only to be met by a roomful of blank stares. Not a single student at the faithful Catholic school where I teach had ever heard of this before.

The blogger Fr. Zuhlsdorf has written about the tendency since the Second Vatican Council to soften requirements, to make things easier, as a subtle form of clericalism. Is it any wonder, if our pastors feel that we're incapable of making it to church for a holy day of obligation during the week, or that we can't refrain from eating meat one day a week, that now we're discussing whether it's too much to expect Catholics who have contracted second marriages without obtaining an annulment to live as brother and sister? These matters are not wholly unconnected.

I'm just an ordinary lay Catholic appealing to bishops, priests, pastors: Please, do not water down the faith for us. We need you to share Christ's teachings with us whole and entire as you minister to us in His name and, sacramentally, in His very person.

A few years ago the bishops of England and Wales finally came to their senses, at least with respect to Friday abstinence, making it obligatory again for Catholics in their jurisdiction. Comments from New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan hint that our own bishops are also considering reinstituting obligatory, year-round abstinence from meat. Although I doubt that the issue of transferred feastdays is on the agenda at this point, it really should be.

A blessed Feast of the Epiphany to you all, in any case, whenever you celebrate it!

A running book recommendation

The Animal Keepers, by Donn Behnke (KCI Sports Publishing, 264 pages, $22.95)

There's a natural sort of rivalry that exists between high schools located in the same town. Not that tiny little Pacelli could hold a candle to Stevens Point Area Senior High, one of the largest public high schools in the state of Wisconsin. But surely this reviewer, a former Pacelli athlete playing the part of David, can be forgiven for his ambivalence towards the Goliath-like sports teams of SPASH.

Natural hometown rivalries aside, no one who grew up in Stevens Point can feel anything but respect and admiration for SPASH's longtime cross country and track coach, Donn Behnke. His Panther boys cross country team has appeared in more than three dozen state meets and has won the state title 10 times. Coach Behnke has coached both future NCAA Division I champions, including former American 10,000-meter record holder Chris Solinsky, and a veritable plethora of ordinary, gangly, unathletic kids who had no idea what they were capable of until they flourished under his careful hand.

Sports books are generally formulaic, feel-good chronicles of cookie-cutter triumphs in the face of adversity. Not that Coach Behnke's Animal Keepers  has nothing to do with trials and triumph--I don't want to spoil too much of it for you--but suffice it to say that the story he tells is real and raw. There is nothing cookie-cutter about SPASH's 1985 cross country season.

The story centers on Scott Longley, a special needs student temporarily housed at a Plover group home who somehow found himself on the SPASH track team in the spring of 1985. Despite his learning disabilities and other oddities, Scott was enthusiastic about running and willing to work hard. Coach Behnke's initial annoyance at Scott's presence gradually gave way to appreciation when his distance crew coalesced around their peculiar new teammate. He became "The Animal" to the other runners, who may have begun by poking fun at him but soon adopted him as one of their own.

Although a regrettable incident that spring led to the Plover group home pulling Scott from the track team--a total bureaucratic overreaction that left SPASH's coach frustrated--Scott was allowed to rejoin his teammates for cross country in the fall. Coach Behnke saw the 1985 season as a rebuilding season, but Scott and his teammates had other ideas. They showed consistent improvement all season and overcame a great deal of adversity, not the least of which came at the end when Scott was abruptly scheduled to be transferred to a new group home in a different part of the state. It took a direct appeal to the Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Health and Human Services to delay Scott's move a week and a half so that he could run for SPASH at the state meet. With Scott joining his teammates, it came down to the upstart team from SPASH dueling it out at state with number one-ranked Manitowoc in the driving snow in weather conditions that are legend to this day.

Again, I won't spoil the story for you because it's worth reading for yourself. Coach Behnke's book is not high literature. He could have used a better copy editor--"compliment" and "complement" are not the same word, for example, and dangling modifiers are rampant throughout. He uses practically the same language five or six times to describe how lengthy tempo runs are SPASH's trademark workout. The ending is drawn out way too long. But as Coach Behnke himself says, he's never tried to write anything longer than a grocery list, and I'm fairly certain that if ever I tried to write anything longer than a blog post, my annoying grammatical quirks would be pretty easy to point out too.

So, let me just say that I am grateful that Coach Behnke took the effort to share the story of Scott Longley and the legendary 1985 Panther cross country team. What this coach and his team were able to accomplish that season says a lot about how camaraderie is at the heart of what high school athletics are about. As a former high school runner, I saw glimpses of what I remember of all the miles I put in with my own Pacelli teammates--all the easier because our team ran the same narrow country roads that SPASH's coach describes in this book. As a current high school coach at a small private school in North Carolina, I haven't yet seen the likes of Scott, but I'm sure that the stories will come with time.