Voting

Is voting a right or a duty? Both? How does a full Catholic Christian vote? I challenge you to find information on the Catholic teaching about voting.

Josef Pieper in his work The Four Cardinal Virtues (my edition is Notre Dame Press) has some valuable things to say. Read this book and see what he writes in the section on "Distributive Justice"

Scranton Coal Mine Revisited

This year my son, Joseph, and I went to the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour. It was my second visit. I had gushed to my college-aged son and everybody else who would listen what a eye-opening experience this had been last year. (See article below)

I left very upset. No, not at the way people, especially children, had been treated by the "Christian" coal mine owners but the way the whole labor struggle had been eliminated from the Tour. A new little-orphan-Annie hard-knock-life film in the new yuppieized visitor center mentioned NOTHING about the mine workers fight for labor justice. The film sounded like labor unions never existed. In a retro faith-based initiative it mentioned that only "churches" and other local organizations were sources of help to the miners and their families. But I reassured my son that the tour guide would set things straight. Well, he turned out to be what I can only describe as a retired carnival barker. He gave a hurried mumbled tour that again avoided any reference to the labor union or the historical strike of 1902. What a disgrace!

Were the recent coal mine victims in Utah union members?

Archeologism

Taking past practices as inherently better than present practices is archeologism. When "liturgical reform" was prompted by the occasion of the Second Vatican Council, many rituals were picked artificially from different sources and times. They were imposed immediately in an authoritarian manner. Think of the rediscovery of Pompei as an example: works of art and sculpture were looted out of context and placed in various palaces. Pretty stuff but not living art.
Another example from a story my friend Dan told me. Dan is active on his parish council. In one recent meeting someone was talking about the "responsorial psalm" after the first Scripture reading. They wanted to get more "response" from the worshippers and reminded everyone that this responsorial was an ancient liturgical practice revived in the new liturgy. Dan simply responded (!), "Why do you think they dropped it?".

I Didn’t Know Washington D.C. Was This Isolated

January 6^th I mailed a formal first-class letter to the new Senator from Pennsylvania congratulating him on his election and urging him to show leadership in opposing killing newly conceived unborn babies to get their body parts (embryonic stem cells). I tried to remind him that “embryo” is simply a clinical term for a stage in our human lives just as “adolescent” or “adult”.

As of February 12^th I had received no reply so I emailed his Washington office. I had written early before Senator Casey even took the oath of office to allow time for the postal anti-anthrax scanning and the set-up of his new office. But I thought five weeks was enough. February 14^th I called directly to Washington. The office staff acted as if the first-class letter I had sent was a non-issue. The fact that they neither had the letter nor cared about answering it was something they expected me to think was understandable.

The administrative officer working for Senator Casey said that the Senator had released a statement on January 22^nd and it should be on his website. As we were both looking at the site she realized that it had not been posted. She assured me that she would email it.

As of the 22^rd of February the statement was not on the website so I called again. This time I got the press assistant. She seemed to understand my concern. She emailed the statement below. (The administrative officer had apparently emailed the document but my AOL spam filter must have dumped it.)

This statement was printed to be handed to the Right-to-Life marchers when they went to the Senator’s office. No press release was given to the press for the rest of the public.

Scranton Coal Mine

You know the song …

Sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter don’t you call me
Cause I can’t go –
I owe my soul to the company store.

A few months ago I went to the coal mine tour here in Scranton, PA, with my wife and my brother-in-law. Historically and morally it was an eye-opening experience. If you had said to me before this tour that coal miners and even children had been exploited by mine owners I would simply have nodded in agreement. This is an accepted assessment of a general historical situation. While after the tour I certainly appreciated the almost impossible situation of the coal miner’s family, I was truly astonished at the amount of unrelenting child abuse. Children were not only employed in the dangerous coal sorting work outside the mine but were constantly injured and killed down in the mine as part of the standard workforce. One job: lead the coal hauling mule through the tunnel. If the boy and mule died… the family would owe the company the price of the mule. These boys were often employed because their father had died working for the mine. That gets us back to the opening lyric.

A miner was required to excavate eighteen tons of coal in order to get any pay for that day. Yet nearly everything he need to work and live had to be purchased from the company store. Hence you always fell into debt. When a man died working for the mine a company lackey would bring his body to his home. The widow would then have three days to pay off his debt or give a son to the mine to prevent her family from being evicted from her company house.

Economic Zen - Neti, neti - Not capitalism not communism.

How are things different for us today compared to these mine workers? What does it really mean to be “employed” in our society? First, it means you do not have the means to support yourself – you do not have the independent business, trade or wealth to buy food, clothing, shelter, etc. for yourself or your family. You need to ask someone else for the work necessary to make a living. If someone cares to employ you for their business they know they have you at a disadvantage. Whether your pride admits to it or not, you have the status of a beggar. Do what your employer demands or lose the means to care for yourself and your dependents. But is it not fair? Did your employer force your parents to be poor or have no family farm or business or force you to have no trade? The employer is simply offering a fair exchange: work for food. Are there no homeless shelters? No welfare? Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?

When researching this article I read about indentured servants in colonial America. I had thought there might be a useful comparison. There was a comparison but not the one you might suspect. Many indentured servants were far better off than most modern American employees. When their period of indenture was completed, these individuals were often able to buy their own farm or business. What is the percentage of American workers who can work for an employer for seven to ten years and then be given the means to buy their own business? A much, much lower percentage than among indentured servants it seems.
We are longer-lived coal miners.

The story of how we became coal miners is the history of the industrial revolution. But it is not the history of mass production but of the ownership of the means of mass production. Researchers in the past decade discovered an interesting historical anomaly – Henry VIII of England in his zeal to attack the Catholic Church destroyed a monastery where the monks had developed mass produced modern steel for their tools. Imagine (better than yoko-onoized John Lennon) a world where the means of mass production was owned not by wealthy individuals or phony corporations but by villages, monasteries, neighborhoods, families? We would not need to be exploited as assets by private capital but struggle to work together as neighbors and family.

Private capital should remain private. When a private individual or “corporation” can virtually buy the whole life of another human being (laborers, clerical workers, coal miners, slaves), private capital by definition has exceeded its rightful place and encroached on the res publica. This usurpation damages our shared community. This is political – in the Aristotelian sense of the right ordering of society. No one should be able put a mortgage on themselves or another.

While private capitalism engorged on the power of modern mass production is abusive, the anti-matter solution of State ownership proposed by Marxism is simply changing the bosses and not the real status of the worker. The difficult road to journey is to promote anything that returns ownership to natural human communities where that community cannot shirk its responsibilities to its members. Profit and enterprise are still very necessary - not the profit intended to expand individual riches but the profit necessary to maintain a natural growth in family, village, etc.

We look at the enormous needs of our family or friends or the world and it is easy to become discouraged. At the risk of being “preachy”, remember the multiplication of the loaves. Start doing some determined good and let God worry about the rest.

How To Crash The Party In Heaven

Comes Judgement Day I have a suggestion about how to sneak into heaven. Have you noticed that when people go to church the right side tends to fill in first? I think this has something to do with our predominate righthandedness. Now imagine the great plain on Judgement Day: people are running in to fill up the best spots, mostly on their right. But when our Lord Jesus comes to face the crowd in judgement those on the right will be on his left. The gospel says that Jesus will separate those on his right and left; the charitable on his right going to heaven and the selfish on his left going to hell. In other words those who depended on their own right will be on the left.

Well, our Lord’s standard of loving service may be too high for someone like me. Here’s my two part plan to get by. First I am going to try my best to practice humility in this life. Why? I don’t think there is any guarantee that the intellectual concept “I must remember to go to the left, Jesus’ right” will survive the experience of death and judgement. I want to be so practiced in humility that I will automatically let everyone in ahead of me and be forced to go to the few places left on the left. (This “automatic” tendency of the will is a virtue.) The second part is this: I want to pray to Jesus’ mother Mary as much as possible. After several billion people have filed past our Lord and I am close to the Gate, I want to wave at Mary the Queen Mother and say “Hail, Mary!”. I hope she will then recognize my voice and give me at least a faint smile. Jesus will see this and think anyone who’s a friend of his mother is alright with him and let me pass.

Global Smoking

My natural tendency is to doubt popular analysis of public issues. The popular misconceptions about “population explosion”, abortion “rights”, two-party “democracy”, etc., etc., shows the public is easily misled by whoever owns the media. So when the popular media chants together about the dangers of global warming I am on my guard. I listen very carefully to any voice raised in disagreement. My caution is re-enforced when proponents of the idea of human activity increasing global average temperature engage in alarmist rhetoric. Heidi Cullen of the Weather Channel originally seemed to suggest that anyone who disagreed with the above idea should have their credentials revoked. Later she said that she would listen to others – once – and then move on. A recent episode of her show was promoted with the blurb that the Florida Everglades were “on the brink of extinction”. The phrase “on the brink” in a promo does not imply that forty or fifty years from now the Everglades will vanish, it seems to warn of their disappearance in four or five years. The Everglades, just like the Mississippi delta, have been severely damaged by mistaken water management. They are not going to disappear tomorrow if corrective action is taken.

Yet despite my misgivings I sense the issue of global warming is historically comparable to the issue of tobacco smoking. If you ceaselessly pump toxic smoke into your lungs and bloodstream you can expect negative consequences. If we ceaselessly pump pollutants and greenhouse gases you can expect negative consequences. Those who oppose this general concept of cleaning the environment remind me of those scientists and businessmen who downplayed the dangers of smoking to health. Doing things to make our energy production and consumption less damaging to the environment is the same as quitting smoking.