America's Dairyland, no more

La Crosse County's Dairy Breakfast has been cancelled this year. Apparently nobody stepped forward to host the annual breakfast, which would ordinarily draw thousands of people out into the countryside to eat breakfast and tour a working dairy farm. The dairy breakfast's FB cancellation announcement is a muffled cry for help:

"We have lost a large number of dairy farms in the past few years, and especially in the last year alone. Those that remain are busy putting their efforts into getting through each week-- one day at a time." 

Wisconsin's license plate reads America's Dairyland. Yet nearly 20 percent of the state's dairy farms ceased operations in the last five years. Last year, a whopping 10 percent of those that remained did the same. There are now fewer than 8,000 dairy farms remaining, down from-- if you can believe it-- 100,000 operational dairy farms in the state of Wisconsin in 1960. Why? Because dairy farmers-- conventional farmers, at least-- are presently earning only three quarters of what it costs them to produce their milk. They haven't made enough to cover costs for five straight years now.

When I hear of the dairy breakfast being cancelled, when I see FB pictures of farmers loading their cows into auctioneers' trailers, when I read the poignant articles like the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal's from a few months back-- I can't help but detect a pervasive sense of helplessness. In the back of my mind is an interview with a land-grant university ag professor in the dairy farming episode of Neflix's series Rotten. He says something to the effect that the dairy industry is changing, and that farmers will just have to adapt.

It's more of an observation of fact than a prediction, at least for the conventional industry. It's not the dairy industry that's dying. Despite an overall decline in dairy consumption, dairy is still an $88 billion industry here in Wisconsin. It's just that the milk is being produced on fewer, and far larger, farms. The farms that are making it are doing so by getting big. The economy of scale permits them to negotiate better prices on everything from feed to veterinary medicine. Again, it's not so much the dairy farming is dying as it is that dairying is dying as a way of life for a significant number of Wisconsinites. Again, the professor's comment is mainly a statement of fact. Dairy farmers will adapt, at least those few who survive.

***

On the other side of town from us, the Plain-folk, as the Amish call themselves, have small, carefully tended garden plots and greenhouses. Many sell furniture, as well as maple syrup and fresh produce in season. Their signs always say, "No Sunday sales." Their children walk the side of the road barefoot, and there are so, so many buggies, especially on days when the Amish gather for worship, or the evenings when the young couples are courting.

Travel a little further down the road, however, and suddenly the idyllic, pastoral farms of the Plain-folk give way to a massive manure pit and several sprawling, industrial structures with massively-scaled fans constantly circulating the air. It's one of the largest mega-dairies in the region, the dairy supplier to a regional chain of filling stations. A few thousand cows spend their lives confined to these buildings, where they are milked in an 80-cow rotary parlor three times per day. A cow steps onto the platform every 7.8 seconds; 400 cows step on and off that platform every hour.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not contrasting the idyllic little farms of the Plain-folk with the local mega-dairy in order to condemn anybody. It's just such a glaring example of our changing countryside that it haunts me every time I pass by. To emphasize, the family that runs this mega-dairy is in at least their third generation farming the land. They're pillars in the local community. They've succeeded in a changing industry, and they're poised to survive. So I'm not trying to demonize them in any way.

Yet if dairies like theirs are the future (and again, the future is already largely here, since most milk nationwide is already produced in larger-to-mega sized dairies), the question becomes: What exactly are we sacrificing?

***

As far as the answer is concerned, I have lots of thoughts running through my head. There is a thoroughly depressing must-read piece over at The American Conservative focused mainly on Iowa's pork industry, which is now entirely industrialized. The result in Iowa has been the utter decimation of rural communities-- ghost towns, closed high schools, massive increases in rural poverty, crime, and drug addiction. Yet there's more, too. There's the economic divide between the urban and the rural, between the parts of the country that matter politically and the parts that are referred to derisively as "fly-over country." There are the massive-scale recalls, the inhumane treatment of animals, the pollution that results from stockpiling of manure, the total lack of understanding on the part of most folks of what food is and where it comes from, etc., etc.

There are so many reasons why we should want more farmers and smaller farms. It's not just about preserving a way of life for a small percentage of the population or "saving the family farm." Rather, more farmers means that rural communities are not drained by urban flight, and that everybody, whether they're farming or not, is closer to their food. I am firmly convinced the industrialization of farming is the source of many, many woes.

***

By the way, since the dairy farming is already so scaled up, the answer to stabilizing the number of Wisconsin dairy farms is not so simple as drinking more milk. Something drastic needs to change in the way milk is priced that will give preferential treatment to smaller farmers. There have been many proposals in recent years that have failed to gain traction. But the proposal of the NFO featured in this Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel article seems simple enough that it could be rallied around. It calls for a two-tiered system that would add $4 to the pay price per hundredweight of milk, up to one million pounds per month. That would give farms with up to 300 cows a competitive edge matching the competitive edge that mega-farms get due to the economy of scale.

More will follow on these matters, of course, in future posts.

Springtime, the Annunciation, and the 'dearest freshness deep down things'

Here in Wisconsin, the snow is nearly gone. Only fast-receding remnants of the banks along the driveway and stray patches on the shady, downhill corners of the hayfields are holding out. Every day I trek out to the far field, where we planted 12,000 cloves of garlic last fall. I pull back a little of the straw-mulch, jealous for my first glimpse at the tiny, green sprouts that will rise bravely to greet the warmth of the spring-time sun.

It's fascinating to observe how the mulch slows things down. A week ago, while the sun was radiating warmth, the mulch acted as an insulator for the soil below. All around the mulched garlic-field the ground was awash with mud. Yet underneath the mulch, the garlic was still asleep, still locked in the icy embrace of an especially hard winter. Every day I'd check again, and then finally, a few days ago, the sun's persistence proved irresistible. The winter soil had indeed loosened its grip; though icy-cold, the rich, deep-dark loam had softened. Now, ever-so gradually, the garlic will waken this coming week, rousing itself slowly from its wintertime slumber.

A brave shoot of garlic greeting the sun's warmth-- last year.
We're still a week or more away from the garlic waking up this spring!

The trees are awakening, too. Just yesterday I boiled down our second batch of maple syrup. With spring coming so late, it's a tough year for the sap. Nonetheless, yesterday's three quarts brings us up to nine quarts total. The sap trickles slowly, and then some days it suddenly flows. The trees sense that spring is here, and they're eager to waken, to send out their leaves, to soak up the sun's warmth-- to be alive.

It's truly a marvel to watch, each March, as winter's hard grip loosens. I loved living, in turn, in Texas and then in North Carolina. But these states don't have the same sharp delineation between the seasons. Only weeks ago, the ground here in Wisconsin was deeply blanketed in snow, and the potential for life was buried, frozen, existing only in hopeful memory and imagination. Today, the robins are hunting worms, the sap is flowing, and the green things of the earth are beginning to grow.

***

Tomorrow will mark exactly nine months to Christmas. It's natural that the Church should mark the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25th. After all, a full-term pregnancy is nine months, and the Annunciation celebrates the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary and his promise of the Holy Spirit's overshadowing presence. Feast-day celebrations, however, are oddities during Lent, as this preparatory season is one of prayerful sobriety. The Annunciation seemed especially out of place last year, if I am recalling correctly, since March 25th fell on Good Friday. Last year, the liturgical solution was to transfer the Annunciation to a new date after Holy Week. Yet this year, as is the case most years, the joyous celebration of the Annunciation remains, liturgically, an oddly jarring interruption of the ascetical practices of Lent.

This morning, however, I was thinking of these lines from "God's Grandeur," one of Gerard Manley Hopkins' finest poems:

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

 It occurred to me that there is actually something quite fitting about the Annunciation's placement during Lent. In just weeks, we will be commemorating Christ's passion, death, and resurrection. Yet it all began with the Annunciation. Christ took up residence in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary specifically so that he could redeem us through His passion and death on the cross.

***

Along similar lines, I am privileged right now to be re-reading T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral with some of my students. Eliot's play is about St. Thomas Becket, who was murdered by agents of King Henry II at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 A.D. The play's interlude has Becket preaching in the cathedral on Christmas morning, making the odd point that...

"... it is in these our Christian mysteries that we can rejoice and mourn for the same reasons."

Eliot's Becket is alluding, on a happy Christmas morning, to the mysterious intertwining of life and death. From new life comes death, and from death comes new life. On that Christmas morning, Becket knows that he, too, is soon to die. But he would die a martyr's death, in imitation of the Savior, in full confidence that on the last day he will rise together with all the saints in glory.

The first springtime in the Christian story was Christ's rising from death to new life, and many springtimes would follow, Becket's included. Everything about the spring-- and about Lent, which occurs in the spring-- evokes the impending freshness, to steal Hopkins' word, that is buried deep in the dark, loamy dirt, hidden somewhere amidst last year's dead growth. There is dearest freshness in Mary's womb-- and in the deep-down things of the earth, too.

Satan's icy grip-- and winter's, too-- are being loosed by the radiance of the risen Son.

In the meantime, we await the springtime resurrection with joyful expectation, and contemplate mournfully the passion and death of the Savior. The sweet sap of the maple trees is a foretaste of the sweetness of summer. And from under the straw-mulch, the garlic, warmed by the springtime sun, will bravely rise.

When did we become such ignoramuses?

There is a memorable scene in Conrad's most famous novella, Heart of Darkness. The main protagonist, Marlowe, is navigating the Congo aboard a steamer. He has brought on a crew of natives, including one whose job is to watch the ship's wood-fired boiler. Very soon, the native grasps that if the boiler isn't fed, the steamer stops moving. He also understands that if the needle on the gauge goes too high, the boiler will explode and everybody will die. Quickly, he becomes technically proficient at his task, feeding the boiler faithfully and watching the gauge's needle fearfully. And yet, Conrad's description has the native worshipping the steamer's boiler as a god, propitiating its fiery divinity with offerings of wood and constantly in awe of the boiler's wrathful potential.

***

My question is, how are we different today from that native? Embarrassingly, I'm counting myself

among the unwashed mass of ignoramuses, largely ignorant of much of the technology that we use. Think about it, here I sit, typing a blog post on a computer with very little idea of how it actually functions. Sure, I've read a little about computer code and programming, and I studied some of the principles of circuitry and power storage. I'm not exactly worshipping my computer, or my smart phone like Conrad's native worshipped the boiler. But I could not take these devices apart and put it back together again, much less build them from scratch.

Home-school scientific investigations around here these days involve doing fecal parasite egg counts for the goat herd.

What will it look like when robots take over the world? Some sci-fi storylines would have it involving something akin to human consciousness and the subsequent rebellion of the robots against their human "overlords." Yet other storylines would have it being when so many things are done through technology and automation that we've become utterly dependent (aka, enslaved).

These things can be known, grasped, understood. Yet most of us don't bother. Should we be bothered by the fact that we don't know, or that we don't bother to remedy our lacunae? Are we like the frog in a gradually warming kettle of enslaving technological ignorance? Is there a connection, in other words, between our being human, our being free, and our grasp of how things work?

***

In the philosophical tradition, a distinction is often made between techne, or the practical, hands-on knowledge of a certain craft, or art, and the knowledge of first principles, or causes. Gun-smithing, computer-building, portrait-painting, and story-writing are all arts that the determined, hardworking person can master. First principles, on the other hand, answer what makes for a good computer, what makes one portrait better than another, what makes for a good story, etc., etc.

The point is, while the native in Conrad's story has mastered the techne of running the boiler, he has totally failed to grasp how the boiler functions within the parameters of the laws of physics, or what role the boiler plays in the forward motion, the speed, and the trajectory of the steamer. He is wholly incapable of judging whether the boiler is a good boiler or bad, or whether the use of a wood-fired boiler is the best means for accomplishing the intended travel from point a to point b, or even whether it's a good thing to retrieve the indomitable Mr. Kurz.

But what of us? What of we moderns who claim to understand the technology that drives our modern society?

***

One interesting result of having multiple children who've reached the age of reason is that I get lots and lots of questions about how things work. Why is the moon sometimes full and not other times? Why aren't we powering cars with nuclear reactors? Why can't I build a functioning boat out of this pile of scrap wood? Why can't I crush these double-a alkaline batteries, enclose them in a pvc tube, and ignite them? This is an actual sampling of questions I've fielded, or theories I've patiently had to quash, just in the past few days. It's an awful lot of fun, at least most of the time. It's also a humbling reminder of just how little I actually understand in terms of science, technology, and, basically, the way the world works.

Obviously our increasingly complex world makes it more impossible than ever to master all possible arts. If you are good with computers, the question will be whether you are also an accomplished painter. If you've mastered painting, then the question is whether you can disassemble and reassemble the engine of your car. or perhaps whether you can fabricate a hard-to-find replacement part. Whatever our embarrassment is, therefore, it shouldn't be at not having mastered all the arts. Yet the question arises-- Is it enough to be told that your computer doesn't operate by magical principles, or do you have to have acquired at least something of the techne of computer-building in order truly to grasp this?

I'm convinced, in fact, that this is the case-- That our hunger to understand is what makes us human, and free, and that the only way to understand something is to break it down, study its constituent parts, and try to put them together again. Even if we fail to master a particular techne, we've seen the parts, and we've related them to the whole, and that makes us, if not the masters of a thing, at least not its slaves. That is the priority of the first causes that philosophy teaches us. Yet understanding the whole at least begins with studying the parts.

How is a Catholic parent to respond to the sexual abuse crisis?

This is something I've been thinking about, and so I read the article published yesterday in The Atlantic online with deep interest. Obviously the answers of those interviewed varied widely. There are the parents who've elected to move on, and this comment particularly stood out to me:

“I don’t necessarily think anything would happen to him,” she says. “I mean, it could. But I’m just thinking, What would he think of us if we brought him to that church even after all of this had unfolded? … Let’s say he was raised Catholic, and then he learned about all of that—about the sex abuse worldwide that had been going on for decades and covered up—and then came to us and said, ‘How could you have raised me in that religion?’ I wouldn’t have an answer for him.”

The more I think about it the more occurs to me that this is exactly how a parent ought to respond-- at least, it's how a parent ought to respond if the organization were anything other than the Catholic Church. Think about it, if your child were signed up for a civic or sports activity and sexual abuse was exposed, it would be entirely proper to pull your child out. Otherwise, you'd be liable to his questions when he grows up-- "What were you thinking? Why would we want to be associated with that group?"

Yet the Catholic Church is different, and the parent who made the comment cited above has at least a tenuous grasp on this fact. She still understands the importance of raising her son in a faith tradition, as evidenced by their attendance at a Lutheran church. She acknowledges that she misses the rosary and other familiar practices, and she finds that she has to fight the instinctive urge to make the sign of the cross. Yet the fact of the matter is, she is depriving her son of so much more than the rosary and the comfortable traditions she grew up with. Far more importantly, she is depriving him of the grace of the sacraments, particularly a valid Eucharist. But again, if a parent's connection to the Catholic Church is simply that it's the faith tradition that she is most comfortable with because she grew up in it, then the move to a faith tradition with many of the familiar "smells and bells" but without the sex abuse scandal, makes perfect sense. So again, I understand where this parent was coming from. Yet I lament her choice, because it's emphatically the wrong choice.

Obviously I'm not going to be leaving the Catholic Church anytime soon. I was edified by the comment of another parent cited in the article, a blogging mother:

“If you believe that the Catholic Church is the one founded by Jesus Christ, there is nowhere else to go. Jesus asked Peter, ‘Are you going to leave me also?’ and Peter says, ‘To whom shall we go?’ This is how I feel.”

Really, there is no-place else to turn. The Catholic Church is the Bride of Christ. She has the seven sacraments and the apostolic authority granted to Peter and his successors. For years I've taught students the apocryphal line from Hilaire Belloc about the proof of the Church's divine origins being that "no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have survived a fortnight." Recently Pope Francis said that the Church has been "surprised in flagrant adultery." I know that many traditionally-minded folks are up in arms, claiming that the Holy Father is denying the indefectibility of the Church. And while Pope Francis is speaking imprecisely, as is, frustratingly, his wont, I think he simply means to acknowledge that the leadership of the Church has failed dramatically, something akin to Belloc's "knavish imbecility."

I guess this is my chance to live really what I've always taught students theoretically-- the heresies of Pope Honorius, orgies of Pope Benedict IX, the nefarious dealings and nepotism of the papacies of the Borgias. These historical scandals each led to great fallings-away among the faithful in turn, and so it is all over again in our own day. But to whom else shall we go? If the parent who left the Catholic Church for the Lutherans really thinks that she is leaving the sex abuse scandals behind, she is setting herself up to be scandalized all over again. Without excusing the Catholic Church in any way, it's worth noting the sex abuse scandals looming on the horizon for these Protestant churches, and for practically every civil youth organization of size-- the Boy Scouts, for example. 

Many other organizations that become corrupted ought to be abandoned. But the Church is surely different. Again, to whom else shall we go?

What makes for a good story? Reflections on the 2006 film Babel

This morning I'm contemplating what makes for a good story. Sometimes we say that we want our stories to be "real," but I'm not sure that we really mean it. Ordinarily a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There are some characters who are the "good guys," and other characters who are the villains. Usually the action climaxes, and the

conflict is brought to some sort of resolution. If it's for the good, then we have a happy ending. If the ending is more complicated but nevertheless fitting, then perhaps we have a sad-but-cathartic tragedy. At least, that's the way most stories work.

These thoughts arise from last night's viewing of the 2006 film Babel (starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, inter alia), which happens to be available on Netflix right now. It's a movie that, with its four loosely interrelated plot lines, is fascinating for its defiance of many of our common expectations.

In the first plot line, a goatherd in a remote, mountainous area of Morocco acquires a high-powered rifle for his two sons to shoot at coyotes with. But the boys play with the rifle while guarding the goats, taking pot shots at vehicles traversing the road a mile or more in the distance. In the second plot line, a husband and wife on vacation in Morocco are aboard a tour bus that happens to be on that very road, and, additionally, the wife happens to be in the path of one of the bullets that the goatherd's boys are discharging from that very high-powered rifle.

When the couple is delayed in returning to the States, the Mexican nanny in charge of their children decides to bring them across the border so that she can attend her son's wedding. But on their return trip, the nanny's driver is questioned by the border authorities and ends up panicking. So he floors it, and ends up leaving the nanny and the two children in the middle of the desert.

In the fourth and final plot line, a deaf-mute teen in Japan prevents the authorities from questioning her father, thinking that he is somehow in trouble for a serious crime and worrying that he will be sent to jail. In reality, they simply want to question him because a high-powered rifle registered in his name was used in the shooting of an American woman in Morocco. It turns out that he had gifted the rifle to his Moroccan guide following a successful hunting expedition. The guide, in turn, had sold it to the goatherd whose sons ended up accidentally shooting the American woman.

Babel is fascinating, first of all, because there are neither heroes nor villains. The couple's marriage is on the rocks, and they're not entirely likable. While the Mexican nanny may likable, she makes a series of eminently poor decisions. The Moroccan boys do something that is horribly, horribly irresponsible at the very beginning. There is catharsis in some of the tragedies that follow-- the nanny's frantic pleading with border control that they need to hunt for the children, for example, and the husband's frantic attempts to save his wife, and the goatherd's desperate attempt to flee with his boys as the authorities closed in. But no single character is central enough to gain "traction" in all four plot lines. There simply is no satisfactory resolution to the "whole."

Which is surely the whole point of the movie. Its title, after all, is Babel. It's a fitting title, first of all, because of the miscellany of languages that the various characters use. But it's also fitting because of the incoherent "babble" of the film's structureless narrative. The film merely "tells" what happens without seeking to interpret it. Really, the only interpretation in the film is the decision to present four narratives that happen to be loosely interrelated. Even then, they're not all related to each other except second, or even third-hand. The film is masterfully devoid of all overarching interpretation. There are no truly good guys, no truly bad guys. There is no single climax, and no fully satisfying resolution. Which is all true to real life.

So my thoughts today are about why it is that we expect more out of a story than we expect from real life. Why do we want there to be good guys and bad guys when the people in our own lives are generally more mixed-bags? Why do we want the satisfaction, as Aristotle so astutely noted, of a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if that end is tragic?

I think it has to do with human nature. We need patterns, and we desire to make sense of the data of our complicated lives. Why does something play out the way it did? What does it all mean? Tellers of tales help us to detect the patterns. The character traits they choose to highlight help us to choose the side of the good. Story-tellers share things from a perspective, so that we see things through the eyes of a certain character, or a certain side. The same thing happens in history, by the way. Right now I'm covering the Punic Wars in a class I'm teaching. I find it valuable to point out that Punic means Carthaginian, and using the term implies that the Carthaginians were the aggressors in the epic conflict between Carthage and Rome. I think that the Carthaginians, for their part, would have angrily retorted that they were the Roman Wars, not the Punic Wars.

The question is whether traditional story-telling is truer to real life in limiting the perspective and exaggerating traits to highlight the patterns, or whether doing so is a betrayal of the truth. I'd tentatively argue that if a story-teller is true to his art, it's the former; if he's not, then it's propaganda. But in either case, story-telling is more like painting a picture than snapping a photograph. It is by its very nature interpretation, and while it may necessarily betray some of the facts through the selectivity of what is included and what is omitted, that very selectivity leads to a finished product clear enough to expose the patterns hidden below the surface of our lives.

I have no idea whether the makers of this film were thinking theologically. But obviously the title Babel evokes the Tower of Babel. I think that more was at stake at Babel than a mere "confusion of speech," as Genesis puts it. Rather, it is God's deliberate confusion of a false narrative. The only true narrative is the overarching narrative of Christ's redemptive sacrifice, which gives meaning and purpose to our lives. Yet, when a human story-teller tells his story and captures something of the triumph of good over evil, I think that he participates in that overarching narrative.

So you can call me a traditionalist. I like a good story, and in my mind this includes having a beginning, a middle, and an end, as well as heroes who, though imperfect, are clearly good. Which isn't to say that I don't appreciate attempts to be different. Babel is a strange movie. But it's also fascinating!

Hurray for Dr. Hibbs! Hurray for UD!

I rejoiced today when I saw the news that Dr. Thomas Hibbs has been selected as the new president of the University of Dallas. Dr. Hibbs earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at UD before completing his studies at the University of Notre Dame. These past several years he's served as the inaugural dean of Baylor University's rigorous, 1,300-student Honors College. He is a scholar's scholar and a shrewd leader, and I'm convinced that he "gets" UD.

***

I've sadly observed the turmoil at UD this past year, beginning with the abrupt dismissal of president Thomas Keefe. Not that I disagree with that dismissal. I remember, when I was doing my graduate work at UD, thinking of him as a brash institution-builder without a thinker's bone in his body, the consummate, no-holds-barred type of businessman who doesn't stop until he's accomplished what he set out to accomplish. I wrote for the Diocese of Dallas' Texas Catholic on-and-off during my time in Dallas, and every time Keefe sat with me for an interview and expressed his vision for the school, I remember thinking how odd a duck he was for a place like UD.

Those who aren't familiar with the University of Dallas may not realize how unique an institution it is. The school's legacy is the work and vision of the late Donald and Louis Cowan, the latter of whom I had the blessed opportunity to know just a little during my time in Dallas. Joining the faculty at the school's founding, the Cowans took a college that the Diocese of Dallas had conceived of in the cookie-cutter mold of Catholic institutions of higher learning in the '50s and reinvented it as a one-of-a-kind bastion of the liberal arts. To this day, undergraduates are all required to follow a rigorous core curriculum (simply, the "Core") before choosing a major. And unlike other admirable liberal arts institutions like, say, Thomas Aquinas College in California, UD is a true university, with a wide array of majors and disciplines, as well as the healthy intellectual environment of the robust liberal arts graduate program that I myself am proud to have studied in.

I don't know whether to credit UD's faithfulness to its mission mainly to the enduring presence of Louise Cowan, or the sizeable donations that the Cowans attracted in the early years, or the like-minded, devoted faculty that they brought to Dallas. But the sad state of things by the time I arrived in Dallas nearly a decade ago was that the administration was seeking significant change while, largely, the faculty and the type of students the school attracted put up a spirited resistence. This exhibited itself in silly little things, like the replacement of the university's traditional seal with the so-called "cupcake" branding image. But it exhibited itself in bigger things, too, like, just before my arrival, the proposed establishment of a pharmacy school wholly unrelated to the university's core liberal arts mission, and, under Keefe, the proposed establishment of a dumbed-down, fast-track version of the bachelor's degree for students transferring in from the local community colleges. 

These sorts of boondoggles were what other institutions of higher learning were embarking on in order to survive in an increasingly competitive higher education marketplace, and for years UD presidents from Msgr. Milam Joseph, to Dr. Frank Lazaruz, to Thomas Keefe hammered away in like manner. All the while, the faculty resisted, and the alumni raised an outcry. Aspersions were cast that the board no longer understood the school's mission, and alumni, for their part, largely withheld their donations. UD's endowment shrank by tens of millions of dollars, and the throbbing intellectual heart of the university, when I was studying there, existed in the looming shadow of an administration whose intention seemed to be bringing out about stability mainly by destabilizing everything that the school stood for.  

***

One of the brightest moments in my years at UD, though, was a very fine lecture on Catholic education given by a certain Dr. Hibbs, who was visiting from Baylor University. I recall clearly that he spoke about Cardinal Newman's Idea of a University and reviewed the history of Catholic higher education, highlighting in particular UD's unique role in the revival of the liberal arts. In fact, the first thing I thought of when I read the news this morning was that lecture nearly a decade ago. I don't know much else of Hibbs. But what I do know is that he has a far better shot of saving UD than pretty much anybody else the board could have selected.

Hurray for their choice! Hurray for Hibbs! Hurray for UD!

Missing Sunday Mass is a mortal sin. The reason why is probably not what you think.

It's not because going to church is important, or because it's the unbroken practice of Christians for two thousand years, or even because the third commandment is to keep the Lord's Day holy. Although these things are certainly at the heart of weekly attendance at church, none of them establishes an absolute requirement that we assist at Mass every single Sunday without exception. The real reason missing Sunday Mass is a mortal sin is, simply, because the Church says so.

A little precision is in order. First of all, there are obviously exceptions. As the Catechism notes, illness, the care of an infant, or even a dispensation granted by one's pastor can excuse a person from the obligation of attending Mass on a particular Sunday. Also, it's important to note that the Catechism describes willfully missing Mass on a Sunday or Holyday of Obligation as a "grave sin," not a "mortal sin." A grave sin only constitutes a radical turning of one's heart away from God when it is committed with "full knowledge" and "deliberate consent," and clearly there are times when the failure to attend Mass does not meet one or both of these criteria. Perhaps, for example, a person forgot yesterday to reset the clock for daylight saving time!

But if a person really does willfully miss Mass, fully knowing and deliberately consenting to what he is doing, he commits a mortal sin. And again, this is because the Church has so decreed. Specifically, it's the first of the precepts of the Church, which are "positive" laws, meaning that they have been established by the human authority of the Church, not by God Himself. The other precepts include yearly confession and reception of Holy Communion, observation of days of fasting and abstinence, and provision for the material needs of the Church. As the Catechism puts it, these precepts have been established "to guarantee to the faithful the indispensable minimum" they must put into "growth in love of God and neighbor."

Why am I making such a big deal out of our Sunday obligation being a man-made law? Because I think it's at the root of the rebellion of many people against it. We moderns find it hard to countenance that the power of "binding and loosing" has been granted to mere human beings. Who does the Church think she is to tell me that I have to keep the Lord's Day holy in the particular way they want, especially when they--that is, the cardinals, bishops, and priests--are caught up in sex abuse scandals? It's the same rebellion that afflicts so many Catholics with regard to the Church's sexual teachings, or her requirement that we confess our sins to a priest. Who are you to hear my sins? Who are you to tell me what is licit in my sex life?

Perhaps the greatest mystery of the Church's foundation is that Christ granted His own authority to weak human beings, including the grant of apostolic primacy to the very man who would fail in courage and deny Him three times. It's entirely, indisputably biblical, by the way. Christ told Peter that  he is the "rock" upon whom He would establish His Church, and that "whatsoever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven..." (Matthew 16:18-19).

But why? Why ascend into heaven and leave the likes of the Borgias and McCarricks in charge of things? Why establish a stumbling block, something that folks can point to when they'd rather do things their own way and say, as Ghandi supposedly did, "If it weren't for the Christians, I'd be a Christian." Whatever the answer, it has something to do with the capital sin of pride and Christ's example of humility, and something to do with removing the beam in my own eye before casting the mote out from the eye of my neighbor.

These days it takes a great deal of humility to be Catholic. Pray God that we all grow in that virtue. Attendance at Mass on Sundays, at a minimum, is a great place to start!

Worshipping in the wreckage

I felt yet another pang of sadness earlier today as I watched a video clip from the demolition of a decommissioned Catholic school not too far away from here, in Marshfield, Wis. It's the same pang I felt a few months ago after learning that the near-empty convent down the street from where I grew up not too far away in Stevens Point, a structure for which a team of horses owned by my own great-grandfather helped to haul the bricks, was to be sold off to developers, with the few remaining elderly sisters moving to a facility in Illinois. The magnificent, towering parish church from which that order of teaching sisters was born, my home parish, still holds three weekend services. But on the Sundays when I visit, the music echos strangely in the near-empty pews. I read that a north side alderman moved recently to silence the Angelus bells.

On the far side of the Diocese of La Crosse where my wife grew up, and where we've inherited her parents' farm, we attend Mass at a magnificent ridge-top church built by German immigrant-farmers more than a century-and-a-quarter ago. These near-penniless newcomers mortgaged their farms and provided virtually all the labor in order to raise a church with a soaring steeple, which is today visible for miles around in the rugged, wind-swept countryside. Everything from the hand-hewn, hand-laid masonry on the outside to the beautiful, hand-wrought woodwork on inside bespeaks their pride, their sacrifice, and their devotion. Recently I came across an article I had written back in my journalist days about the closure of this exact-same parish's school a decade ago, one of the oldest schools in the state, a decision that made perfect sense given there were fewer than a dozen students in grades K-through-eight.

What is this pang, which I feel nearly every Sunday as I listen to my devoted pastor, who juggles the administration of this parish with two others, deliver his homily to dozens in a church built for hundreds? I know, I know, part of it is that demographics have changed; there simply aren't the families to draw on. There are too many churches in this diocese, where the push a century ago, in the era of horses and buggies, was to construct a church within seven miles of any geographic point, no matter how rural.

But let's not fool ourselves by blaming it on demographics. These structures were full just two generations ago, my grandparents' generation. While nearly everybody in my parents' generation was baptized and received the sacraments, something went awry, and only a percentage in my own generation received the sacraments. And if I had to tally up how many from my own Catholic high school class are today practicing their faith, I'd have to guess that I'd be able to count the number on my fingers.

We are one generation away from a radically smaller church, and it's apathy, plain and simple. Even out here in the rural countryside, my wife can point to farm after farm and say, that's the so-and-so family, and they used to be in church on Sundays. Many people have moved away, but many people are still here. And they're just not interested. The exuse is it's this or that priest, it's this or that scandal, it's this or that out-moded teaching. I understand, and yet I don't. Where is the faith that led families to mortgage their farms, their very livelihoods? Can it really evaporate just like that?

My personal take is that a lot of it had to do with lack of community. I don't know whether the same sort of intentional community that inspired these churches and schools is possible anymore. Our lives no longer revolve around our parishes. We have too many other geographically disparate identities-- work, schools, social groups, children's activities. Even the thriving North Carolina suburban parish we attended during our time there struggles to keep its school afloat, despite having thousands of parishioners. We have so many different identities, and even the most thriving of parishes only feed part of who we are. To be clear, I'm not blaming parishes, or priests, or, really, anybody at all. I have friends who are priests or who work in parishes who are doing heroic work. But it's just the modern reality that our allegiances are ephemeral.

Obviously these matters are too big for a blog post. There's more, theologically speaking, to church than weekly attendance at services. Really, there needs to be more, and that's why the church is dying. We aren't made to be bifurcated between our spiritual and social bonds, as our modern reality forces us to be.

So again, I don't have any answers today, only a peculiar strain of sadness that I wanted to express as the soaring structures of the past, shadows of their former selves, continue to crumble into dust.

Who knows, maybe we'll be born a smaller, purer church. In the meantime, I'll worship in the wreckage.

On this Carnevale, the extravagance of meat

This morning we fried up bacon for breakfast. Not thin-sliced "bacon-product" from the grocery store, mind you, but extra-thick, home-grown, home-smoked bacon. And why not? It's Mardi Gras today, French for "Fat Tuesday," and in the more challenging times of yore the final chance to eat food fried in animal fat before the beginning of the Lenten fast from all meat whatsoever, including meat by-products like lard, stock, and broth. That's where the Polish tradition of the deep-fried pączki comes from. Carne-vale, in Latin, is literally, "Farewell, meat."

Lenten practices have softened, because these days we Roman-Rite Catholics are permitted to eat meat all through Lent with the exception of Ash Wednesday and Lenten Fridays. And even on those days of abstinence, food prepared in rendered animal fat, like pączki, has been permitted for more than a century. It's indisputable that we've gone soft. But my reflection this morning, as I savored every bite of that home-grown bacon, is that, as a culture, we've lost any real sense of the natural extravagance of meat.

The extravagance of meat was one of the first big lessons of homesteading. Put simply, meat costs a lot to raise. I remember that the first time we raised pigs back in North Carolina we had another family that wanted to go "in" on half a hog. They offered to help with processing and split the feed costs down the middle. Now, 50-lb. bags of hog feed are expensive, and while I did my best to supplement with garbage bags full of expired bread from a discount bakery, the cost per pound ended up being significantly more than the average price per pound that you'd pay for conventional pork in the grocery store. I think it caught the other family by surprise. In any case, it was the last time they suggested going "in" on raising hogs.

These days we've gotten a lot better on the cost front. Since we're now farming on a larger scale, our Wisconsin pigs are fattened mainly on bales of our own hay, apples from our own orchard, and unsaleable squash from our own fields. But money is only part of the story. The pigs still need to be watered twice a day, and processing is a multi-day affair. Consider what went into that bacon even after the trouble of raising and processing the pigs. The bellies needed to be soaked in brine for a week or more, and then they hung for two full days in my home-made smoking box while I watchfully tend to a small fire in the attached pot-bellied stove day-and-night.

Of course, going to the store and buying plastic-wrapped Hormel bacon would have been vastly easier. And considering the value of my time, it may very well be cheaper option as well. But that's exactly my point. As a culture, we simply don't understand how extravagant meat is. Or thought of another way, contra naturam, perhaps meat is not extravagant anymore because it's so prevalent and so, so cheap. Why not eat meat with every meal when a pound of chicken breasts can be had for a dollar, and a pound of ground beef for two dollars?

I'll save for another day my reflections on the inhumane, environmentally deleterious practices that are needed to lower the price point of meat so dramatically. There are strongly held philosophical reasons behind my wife's and my choice to raise all of our own meat. For today, I'll state that meat, naturally speaking, is extravagant. Animals eat plant-based products and exert vast amounts of energy converting them into edible protein, which we then harvest. Even with intensive factory-farming practices, it still takes several pounds of feed to produce a pound of chicken, and nearly a dozen pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef,

***

The other day I had to process one of our older breeding does from the goat herd. She's given us twins each year for three straight years, a buckling and a doeling each time. We've sold a few, we've eaten a few, and we have two of her beautiful young does in our herd. But she was having a very difficult time recovering from her last pregnancy. Her labor was induced early, and her milk never fully came in. She had resisted our natural parasite prevention regime last summer and showed all the signs of battling a heavy parasite load. She's an older doe, one of the originals we brought with us from North Carolina. She just wasn't thriving.

I led her out from the barnyard and put the muzzle of the .22 behind her ear while she ate a little hay. She dropped instantly, and she bled out quickly after I slit her throat. Since she's an older goat, I boned her out and pressure-canned the meat in quart jars. But I also left plenty of meat on the bones, which, together with her organs, will feed the livestock guardian dogs for weeks to come. 

It's beautiful, and it's the cycle of life. But it's also an example of a costly farming choice, and one that is illustrative of the extravagance of meat. Could she have recovered and given us more babies in future breeding seasons? Was it the right time to cull her? Honestly, it's the sort of decision that would have been entirely alien to me earlier in life. But it's exactly the sort of decision that, naturally speaking, is supposed to be associated with the consumption of meat. There's no saving seeds for next year as an investment. Harvesting an animal means, so to speak, "cashing in" the final check on an expensive, labor-intensive, resource-heavy investment. 

***

By the way, taste is only one aspect of the full savoring of a product. Another part is acquiring an appreciation for the rarity and expense of the thing. It is along these lines that I'll be savoring my goat meat, which the pressure canning will tenderize nicely. And this Mardi Gras, I have also savored my bacon because, while I did, I pondered every step of the long process of raising and processing and preparing it. To think, there are only 20-odd pound-and-a-half packages more downstairs in the deep freeze. 

Familiarity breeds contempt, and Hormel, plastic-wrapped packs of bacon and endless, 39-cent chicken wings have left us, sadly, in contempt of meat.

Complementarity, not equality

The Catholic Church teaches that men and woman are equal in terms of their human dignity. But people in general, regardless of gender, are not equal in terms of much else. People differ wildly in terms of their physical strength, their mental acuity, their emotional resilience, etc., etc. In other words, human beings are vastly unequal. And unless you're Larry Summers, it's perfectly reasonable to point out that, on average, men have distinct natural advantages over women in many fields of work.

This reflection follows my recent posts arguing that marriage and family life can benefit hugely from husbands and wives collaborating on significant, financially remunerative work ("A woman's place is in the home, and a man's too" here, and "The danger of the double income" here). My argument is the

making of money is that without which a family cannot exist, and unless a woman is part of it, her contribution to the family will often be secondary to her husband's. It's a situation only amplified in modern times for women who choose to be homemakers because so many of the formerly essential tasks of the housewife -- the raising and preservation of food, the clothing of the family, etc. -- have been vastly streamlined or rendered wholly unnecessary by advances in modern technology.

In response to my earlier posts, however, a friend observed that the inequality that exists between men and women is inherent to our human nature, and that it would therefore be present even within the sort of shared work that I proposed. Even there, in other words, the husband and wife will not contribute equally due to "inherent inequalities," up to and including, in his words, the "brute facts of pregnancy."

Now, my wife Rosemary is no slouch For proof, see the above picture of her spreading hay over our newly planted garlic a few Novembers ago, mere weeks from her due date! But within our own shared, home-based enterprise -- namely, the small family farm -- the distinct natural advantages of the man are glaringly obvious. It's not just the 'brute facts of pregnancy," either. Since I can't nurse the baby at night, you can imagine who's regularly tired in the mornings and, alternately, who's refreshed and ready to go out to the fields. If we total up the man-hours, it's indisputable that I'm the one who hoes more rows of squash in the field, stacks more bales of hay in the barn, and carries more buckets of water down to the animals.

At first glance, therefore, my friend is right. All the home-based enterprise has accomplished is bringing the inequalities directly into the home. At least, that's the way it seems on the family farm, where the physical demands are so clearly better suited to the physique of a man.

My response, however, is that this view doesn't fully take into account the complex web of shared duties and responsibilities that can only exist when the wife, to whatever degree circumstances permit, is wholly invested in the project that provides the family with income. One reason I don't think I've ever tallied up my hours in the field versus Rosemary's is because on a daily basis I'm close enough to her own struggles with the children in the house that I have at least an inkling as to how difficult they are. Similarly, she's close enough to the fields to see me working. There's a mutual appreciation, first of all, simply due to the proximity in which the husband and wife work in a home-based business. Contrast that with the husband who comes home from work, finds the house a mess, and wonders what his wife has been up to all day. When the husband and wife both work from the home, and when they're forced to step into each other's shoes temporarily on a regular basis, they're more likely to grasp the importance of each other's unique contributions.

That's not even taking into account the wife's contributions to the business, which are over and above her contributions to the family as a homemaker. Even in farming, not every task is physically demanding and better suited to the physique of a man. I think that our own enterprise with goats provides a great example of how we've come to work together. While I may be stacking the hay bales and hauling the water, I've come to marvel at the way that Rosemary can "read" a goat's health. Really, she can look at a goat and say there's a deficiency that needs to be addressed, or that the goat is bred, or that she'll be in labor within the day. She's the one with the confidence--and the hands small enough--to pull the babies and clear the lungs. When it comes to sales, I may be the one who writes the advertisements, but when folks call and start asking the tough questions about breeding stock, I hand the phone to the expert, who consistently makes a sale.

The point is, when a husband and wife go into business together, they learn by dint of necessity how their skills and abilities complement each other. It's not a matter merely of tallying up the hours or the calories burned, either. There are certain things that I yield on because trial and error has shown clearly that Rosemary is better in that area. Added to this is the fact that I'm close enough to the work that she does in the house to be reminded constantly of the toll of the "brute facts of pregnancy" and mothering that keep her in the house more than she'd like. Our contribution may not match up in terms of the dollars it brings in farming-wise. But because our daily labor is within the home, it encompasses the total reality of family life, not just the parts that bring in the cash. Rather, it includes the homemaking and the education and rearing of the children, in addition to the hoeing and haymaking. It is perfectly clear to both of us that we are equally, so to speak, "all in."