Enough is Enough

By Charlie Johnston

Five things I’m pondering…

Inversion of Church and State

A bizarre dispute has arisen between the State of Florida and Miami Catholic Archbishop Thomas Wenski over Catholic school vaccine mandates, which the State of Florida forbids schools to mandate. What is bizarre about it is that the state’s Attorney General, James Uthmeier, is taking the Catholic doctrinal position while Abp. Wenski is taking the secular leftist position. Wenski mandates vaccines for the Miami Archdiocese schools while the state requires that schools honor religious exemptions.

Here’s where we go down the rabbit hole: Abp. Wenski notes that the Catholic Church has ruled that vaccines are not intrinsically evil. True enough, but Church doctrine also demands they be voluntary. Wenski maintains that he can mandate them for Catholic schools, because attending a Catholic school is a voluntary choice – and he has the authority to determine what the standards are for eligibility, so long as it does not violate the law. Florida mandates that schools must honor religious exemptions, but does not mandate that they must honor conscience exemptions. Wenski maintains there is no Catholic religious exemption and that state law does not force him to honor conscience exemptions.

So, technically, Wenski is correct, if somewhat obtuse, in building an argument worthy of a sophist to justify mandating what the Church teaches must be voluntary. Uthmeier is correct in treating Wenski’s intransigence as an overly clever way of violating the spirit of the law. But the fact remains that Florida does not mandate conscience exemptions. So you have a standoff where the Bishop is pushing an actual political position and the Attorney General is pushing the actual Catholic doctrinal approach.

I’m not going to single Wenski out. He is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, he either is – or is one step away from – pushing for open borders. On the other, he has given the pro-life community in his Diocese steadfast support, much more than the thin lip service so many Bishops give. In fact, his support of the pro-life activists is bold enough that he is among the Bishops I pray for by name regularly.

For much of my life I have been the chief strategist and/or spokesman for a host of officials, candidates, and interest groups. When you must regularly speak publicly on contentious issues, you are bound to make some clumsy efforts and even bone-headed mistakes. It is often my job to frame things in a way to publicly take the heat off the client and give them room to correct course or disavow a bad position gracefully. That suits me. I have held to the principal of taking the “most innocent construction” of a statement or act for most of my life. People need a little room for grace, particularly when they are required to deal with all manner of public issues in a public way.

But if my ethos is that I will always publicly advocate vigorously for my client, the corollary is that privately I have a duty to speak candidly and bluntly to them and correct patterns of error. I have had more than a few private sessions where a client has raised Cain with me – and more than a few where I have privately raised Cain with them.  If I can’t live both those duties, I have to drop the client. Fortunately, that has been rare. On a few occasions, my private tirade has been largely, “Stop saying and doing stupid stuff!”

I have known a lot of very good Bishops who truly struggle to do the most right thing they can think of. I sat in one’s kitchen after he had made a thunderous pronouncement and he was misty, near tears, as he asked me if I thought he had done the right thing. Fortunately for both of us, I thought it was very right and very courageous. But there are a whole other set of Bishops who are peremptory, arrogant, and on a mad power trip. They think they can do no wrong and that if they say it, it must be true. I’m close with one Priest who is a high authority globally. Once, when we were at lunch, he told me he thought appointments to Cardinal should only be for 10-year terms. It startled me and I asked why. He said that these Bishops have everyone kissing their rear ends for their whole episcopacy and, unless they are unusually self-disciplined, they get sloppy and petulant and think everyone else has to get out of their way, that they badly lose touch with reality, even as they use the language of humility as the vehicle for their hubris. 

What I know is that I use my “most innocent construction” principle in defending the hierarchy as best I can and try to frame everything in the most charitable way I can. But the truth is, if I were in a private meeting with the USCCB, I would be sorely tempted to just holler, “Stop doing and saying stupid, offensive stuff!”

Toxic Femininity

A few years back, I was sharing a ride with a prominent Priest, a man not generally given to mystical contemplations. He was very worried about the massive and growing dysfunction that was happening with a significant cohort of women in this country. “I find myself wondering if the spirit of Jezebel has been unleashed upon the land, Charlie. Do you think that might explain it?” he asked. (One of the things I have found is that a lot of clerics will talk to me about mystical things who otherwise steer clear of it. They seem downright relieved to find someone who claims to be a mystic who is not gloomily obsessive and does not mind being challenged – even kind of enjoys it.) We did not come to a conclusion except to agree that it is difficult when many of a society’s men go bad, but is absolutely horrifying when the women go bad.

I think of the weird absurdities of the Women’s National Basketball League (WNBA) these days. Basically, when you cut through all the shouting, you have most of the league trying to destroy the two players who have drawn eyes and crowds to the league, when you would think they would be marketing and protecting them so as to make the league self-sufficient and viable. But this doesn’t shock me. When a failing institution is run by mediocrities, those mediocrities fight like rabid badgers against any improvements, for fear that building a successful organization would topple them from their perches. Shoot, some of St. Joan of Arc’s most bitter critics were straight from the Dauphin’s court, terrified that if she actually DID save France, it would end their influence and control over things. The WNBA is run, primarily, by a bunch of minority women of dubious sexuality. The last thing they want is for a couple of white, heterosexual women to make it into a real marketable and competitive organization. All they really want is a league of their own, however mundane and inept it might be.

Of far greater concern is the case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who sent her husband out on an errand and then murdered her three young children. Horrifying as that is, even more horrifying is the substantial outpouring of women who not only publicly support her, but are treating her as an heroic champion. We have truly moved into Charlie Manson or Clockwork Orange territory across a wide swath of our culture. Post-partum depression is a real thing, but it is NOT a justification for raw homicide. 

Long ago I started calling abortion the “satanic sacrament.” It eats at our culture in four primary ways: 1) the obvious, mortal injury it does to the child, 2) The constant and growing division it foments in our public discourse, 3) the quiet despair or unhinged fanaticism it sparks in women who have had abortions and, 4) the deadening of conscience it creates in otherwise decent people to justify the proposition that some people have a “right” to arbitrarily execute living people – who both science and religion agree are fully human at a very early stage of development.

I think there is a fifth consequence that is larger than all the rest. Developing this mindset is the portal through which Jezebel enters as a destroyer of society, itself. With the marketing and mass production techniques advocates of abortion have brought to bear, we have made child sacrifice a gigantic industry that makes the old Aztec culture of mass child sacrifice look like a roadside vegetable stand by comparison. I tremble when I think of the wrath of the Almighty God over this. In his second Inaugural Address a hundred and sixty-one years ago, Abraham Lincoln said, about the social consequences of slavery, that, “…if God wills that it (the war) continue…until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’.” I tremble at the bill we shall have to pay for this.

But for now, I lower my head and wonder if the next battle we will have to fight could be toxic feminism’s demand for the right to both pre-natal and post-natal abortion. Oh, dystopia!

She’s Gonna Blow!

I do not underestimate the Trump administration. Even with a corrupted, activist judiciary that seeks constantly to usurp executive authority and an unhinged opposition party that has been reduced to opposing anything Trump is for as its only platform, the president may have assembled the most effective, focused cabinet and administration in American history. They have accomplished things I did not think I would live to see. In so doing they have also revealed the colossus that our dysfunction has become.

I have long worried about the insanely growing national debt. The last time I thought the debt could be tamed with sustained and determined austerity and discipline was early in the George W. Bush administration. Like always, we punted. I have since thought it was just too big to be able to overcome without a massive society-changing convulsion to our system. If the national debt was half as big as it is, we would have the two biggest national debts in world history.

Vice-President J.D. Vance was recently criticized for remarks he made about the downside of having the world’s default currency. He noted that, without discipline and restraint, it can cultivate a mentality of profligacy that can ultimately destroy a society. All the harpies immediately accused him of wanting to dethrone the dollar as the world’s default currency. I knew immediately what he was getting at. When you hold the default currency, you can print your way out of troubles that other countries must actually pay their way out of. Unless you have deeply honorable and disciplined people overseeing it, it can eat away at your substance.

I think it was a terrible mistake to allow the federal government to pay any entitlements at all. Once people find they can vote themselves money, there becomes a determined constituency for every program – and little for thrift and restraint. It should have been handled the way it was when our country was founded: the powers of the state are few and specific, only geared to common necessities. All other spending must be handled by “voluntary associations,” for it is not the government’s business – and when the government tries, it grows by leaps and bounds and is quickly taken over by fraudsters and other rent-seekers.

Now that our national debt is at $40 trillion and growing vigorously, the annual interest payment alone is well over a trillion dollars. If we devoted $500 billion a year solely to debt retirement, that would cover less than half the interest alone…and the debt would keep spiraling upwards. We have never even approached disciplining ourselves to that level.

Many Republicans sanguinely say we can grow our way out of it. I don’t think so this time. We would have to spark a sort of robust and energetic economic growth that has never been seen in world history. And I’m not sure even that would be enough to even keep us afloat, much less retire the debt. Democrats claim it is illusory because we owe it to ourselves so, no worries. The “modern monetary theory” the left was hyping a few years ago was just the old practice of printing as much money as we want and calling it by a modern sounding name. It is a practice that always and everywhere has resulted in catastrophic collapse. The left’s “Don’t worry, be happy,” strategy is based on us holding the world’s default currency. If that changed, we would immediately be plunged into a depression that would make the Great Depression look like a Saturday Morning Cartoon. If the right often struggles with economic literacy, the left has never gotten beyond caveman literacy.

Ernest Hemingway had one of his characters describe how he went bankrupt: “First, very slowly and then, all at once.” If any administration could pull off an economic and finance miracle of this magnitude, it would be Trump’s. But this is not the equivalent of making a lady in a box disappear; it is more akin to making the entire Manhattan skyline appear in the middle of Kansas. That’s something that even Harry Houdini would not attempt.

I don’t discount the possibility of a miracle, but we are barreling at breakneck speed towards “all at once.” It gets much closer each day.

Invisible Reality

Rarely does a person or group intentionally blind themselves, but we did it with materialist philosophy and, particularly, with the materialist philosophy of science some 300 years ago – a peculiar consequence of Enlightenment Philosophy. The materialist school, which holds sway over the scientific community like the Red Death did over Prince Prospero, posits that all things can be explained by concrete means through observation. It leaves no room for any sort of spiritual dimension or reality. If something cannot be explained by concrete observational methods it is, at best, an illusion.

This ignores how terribly constrained our poor mortal powers of perception are – and flies in the face of all other manner of observational phenomenon. We can only see less than one percent of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is what light is. Some animals can see a very slightly expanded spectrum, venturing into infrared hues that are entirely invisible to humans. Scientists easily accept that, though we cannot perceive most light, it is nonetheless there. Human hearing falls between the ranges of 20 hz up to 20,000 hz – and declines, particularly in the upper ranges, with age (beginning to decline, astonishingly, at eight years old). Cats can hear sounds up to 79 kHz, almost four times as sensitive as the most sensitive human ears. Bats can hear up to 200 kHz, an incredible ten times as sensitive as the most sensitive human ears. In just these two areas, anyone who argued light that we cannot see and sound we cannot hear does not exist would be a complete idiot.

We do not intentionally blind ourselves to most phenomenon that we cannot perceive by the pitiable range of our senses. Yet we did exactly that in our philosophy of science about 300 years ago. The scientific method started as a means of elucidating the wonders of God’s works. Then it took an abrupt turn towards insisting that we are the only gods that exist, contrary to the experience of all other facets of life.

There is a quiet revolution going on in the sciences right now, a revolution that is most unsettling to many scientists. It has been picking up speed consistently over the last 35 years, and almost every new discovery makes it more compelling.

If you are 30 or under, you will live to see, in your normal lifetime, the greatest revolution in science in the last half millennium. It will become accepted wisdom that the most likely origin of our universe and all in it is intelligent design. It has already become compelling, but the humanist supremacists are desperately trying to smother it with far more vigor than the public health establishment did to effective treatments for Covid.  It will probably burst forth, like a beach ball held beneath the waves, far sooner than that.

We are not the titans.

The Great Pageant

I look at human history like I do a kaleidoscope, random patterns in an ever-changing configuration in which the same elements keep popping up. Yes, there is some real progress, but we keep doing so many of the same dumb things over and over, rarely learning much of anything from one generation to another. In his seminal work, Leviathan, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that, “life is solitary, poor, brutish, nasty, and short.” Certainly, he had plenty of evidence to back him up.

Maddeningly, the people who work the hardest to make it nastier and more brutish fancy themselves intellectuals. Many of them are at work trying to improve upon the liberty and opportunity that Western Civilization so painstakingly, by fits and starts, bequeathed us. These passionate “intellectuals” are not even aware that if you took the entire number of men who have lived with freedom and opportunity, it would amount to about the comparative size of a postage stamp on a football field. They are too busy assuring us that they will make the most murderous, brutish system in history – socialism – work this time.

When I contemplate it for too long, it gets very depressing. Like Ecclesiastes, all I can think of is, “Vanity of vanities.” I think sometimes that it must be very frustrating to God to see the same old vanities tormenting every age of man. But then I think, what is the purpose of this great, usually unruly pageant?

Mankind, alone, was formed in God’s own image. For that to be true, we must have moral agency, the ability to choose the good or the evil. Here we are frail, made of perishable materials constantly under the attack of the infection of the satan. Even when we do our dead level best, we do not always choose the good. As St. Paul says in Romans 7:15, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do.” God knows our frailty, but we must truly seek the good, commensurate with our capacity and station in life. Whatever our outward failings or virtues, God knows our hearts – and judges us accordingly. We have all received such an abundance of mercy from God. It baffles me – and wounds me a bit – that so many who have received such abundant mercy are so miserly in giving it out themselves. And others posture, offering only death in the name of compassion while withholding what brings life – both from themselves and those they encounter. Vanity of vanities!

We were not made for this world, but we are made to act primarily in this world. I have come to think it is our audition for eternity. God will let no one who truly seeks the good, no matter how flawed and stumbling his efforts, to perish to eternity. In the end, I cannot control results. I can only control what I do – and often my control of that, like St. Paul, is notably shaky. If I devote myself to a noble purpose, whether I succeed in it or become a stepping-stone for someone after me to build on, matters little. The nobility of the purpose, honestly strived for and energetically pursued, is never lost in God’s economy.

One of my most consoling visitations (you may have heard it) came once, long before I said anything publicly. I was agonizing, doing my frequent routine of asking God, “Why me?” What good could a weak, obscure, sinful man like me do to justify Him sending me to speak of Him? Why me? To my astonishment, the Lord appeared next to me, with a stick in His hand. Beside Him was a small, fat-bellied, little, sandy-colored puppy. The Lord threw the stick and the puppy went eagerly tearing after it. It was comical. The poor puppy was a clumsy young thing. It tripped and got tied up in its own legs. Once it bonked its head against a tree, but it kept after the stick and returned it with great joy and eagerness to the Lord. As he took the stick, the Lord patted the pup, looked directly at me, and said, “You’re a game little fella.” Not that I was elegant or competent, just that I was a game little fella. I think it was one of the greatest compliments I ever got. So, I keep eagerly chasing that stick, determined to offer it up on Judgment Day. We can all do that.

And the Divine Pageant rolls on.

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

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