Karl Keating's Latest E-Letter...

June 8, 2004

TOPICS:

A T-SHIRT NO-NO
CHURCH-GOERS' VOTING HABITS
A CARDINAL ERROR
TRUTH IN ADVERTISING, BUT NOT THIS ELECTION
TRUTH ONLINE: AT THE CATHOLIC ANSWERS FORUMS

Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:

A quick reminder that our third annual apologetics cruise will take us around the Canadian maritime provinces. We depart Montreal on October 2 and arrive in Boston on October 9.

Joining me as speakers will be Jimmy Akin, Rosalind Moss, Tim Staples, Thomas Howard, and Bishop Colin Campbell of Antigonish, Nova Scotia. This year we will have, aside from the plenary talks, lots of small-group sessions with the speakers. There will be even more "face time" than before.

This will be a wonderful cruise, and I hope you will be able to join us. Bookings are running ahead of last year, so we're anticipating a fine turnout. For more information please go to http://catholicanswerscruise.com

SUSPENDED

Tyler Chase Harper, 16, was suspended from Poway (California) High School for wearing a T-shirt during the annual Day of Silence, an event held on high school and college campuses throughout the country "to recognize and protest discrimination and harassment against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender students," according to a report in the "San Diego Union/Tribune."

The problem wasn't that Harper's T-shirt endorsed the Day of Silence but that it opposed homosexuality. On the front the T-shirt read "I Will Not Accept What God Has Condemned," and on the back it read "Homosexuality is Shameful, Romans 1:27."

The administrators said Harper's T-shirt violated the school dress code, which provides that it is unacceptable to wear clothing that promotes "violence or hate behavior including derogatory connotations directed toward sexual identity." Harper was told his T-shirt would have to go; the assistant principal even told him to "leave your faith in the car." When he refused to remove the T-shirt, Harper was suspended.

A double standard is at play. Free speech is permitted to students whose T-shirts endorse the ideology behind the Day of Silence but not to those who oppose it. This meant Harper was out of luck--and out of school. Now he is suing the Poway Unified School District. (One of his attorneys is Charles LiMandri, a friend of Catholic Answers.)

Like Harper, I attended a public high school. Things were different back then. I had some instructors who were so good I was surprised they were teaching at a high school instead of at a prestigious college. We received a good education, and I was unaware of moral, ethical, or social problems at the school (not counting the "toughs" who, after school, used to gather across the street and smoke cigarettes).

That was then, and this is now. The public school system has declined nearly everywhere--and not just declined but plummeted. Poway is a well-off suburb of San Diego. Its public schools are well regarded, but that is only to say that they may be less badly off than schools elsewhere. Few parents, and apparently even fewer employees, have any sense how degraded public education now is--degraded intellectually and morally.

It seems to be an almost universal phenomenon: Ideology has gripped high schools (and even lower schools) the way it gripped colleges some years earlier. Ideology always is accompanied by a dilution of true education. Just as bad money drives out good, so slogans drive out true learning.

This explains, in part, why I always vote against school bonds. I think public schools are a lost cause and that they are so deeply corrupted that it no longer is possible to bring them back to health. Let me point to two indicators.

In the mid-nineteenth century the most popular school books were the "McGuffey's Readers," which are still available in facsimile editions. The reader used for sixth-grade students included selections from Shakespeare and Milton. Mind you, this is what twelve-year-olds were expected to know.

Nowadays, most public high school students have read neither Shakespeare nor Milton, and even many college students manage to reach their commencement ceremonies without having read a single play or poem from these masters. This is not what I would call intellectual advancement. Even in my high school days the intellectual fare was rich compared to what is offered in today's schools.

Back then, we kept our books and personal effects in hallway lockers. This was convenient, even though it meant crowded hallways and clanging locker doors between classes. Some years ago--I don't know just when--lockers seem to have disappeared almost everywhere.

Perhaps it was due to lobbying efforts by manufacturers of day packs, who must have realized a fortune when tens of millions of students stopped using lockers and started toting everything on their backs. More likely the change was a response to rampant crime in the schools plus judicially-imposed restrictions on administrators' access to lockers. The junking of the lockers was a sign of failure--a failure of the schools to inculcate even basic morality.

UNSURPRISED

"USA Today" last week ran a cover story titled "Churchgoing Closely Tied to Voting Patterns." A chart showed that, in the 2000 election, people who attended church once a week favored George Bush over Al Gore by 58% to 42%, while those who seldom attended church favored Gore over Bush 61% to 39%. No surprise, really.

Referring to this year's presidential campaign, the newspaper said that "Bush, a Methodist, has the support of most Catholics who attend Mass every week. [John] Kerry is ahead among those who don't." Bush is even more strongly backed by Evangelicals.

His campaign sent out an e-mail to supporters in Pennsylvania, asking them to "identify 1,600 'friendly congregations' where voters friendly to President Bush might gather on a regular basis." Fair enough, I suppose, since for years Democratic candidates have been speaking and gathering at churches friendly to them.

But Barry Lynn, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (I mentioned him in last week's E-Letter), cried foul. He called the e-mail "a breathtakingly bad merger of religion and politics." I don't remember him using such language when Jesse Jackson and other Democrats spoke and raised funds at churches, but maybe Lynn has tightened his standards since the 2000 campaign.

Whatever you think of the candidates for president, you have to admit that religion is taking a role it hasn't taken at least since 1960 (when John F. Kennedy ran) and probably since 1928 (when Al Smith ran).

(No matter who wins in November, some wag will note that the streak continues: 1928, 1960, and 2004 show that a solid Catholic can't be elected president.)

CLARIFIED

Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles has said that a bishop or priest cannot deny Holy Communion to a pro-abortion politician who has not yet been excommunicated, placed under interdict, or put under a formal sanction.

Not so, says canon lawyer Edward N. Peters (who formerly worked for the Diocese of San Diego). He notes that canon 915 says that those who "obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion." That canon does not say that the person must be under a formal sanction, and it certainly is the case that "chronically supporting abortion is a grave sin."

Cardinal Mahony has said that, when someone presents himself for Communion, one is to presume that he is in the state of grace. Peters replies that that is only partly true because "the presumption of one's eligibility to receive the Eucharist" can be countered by contrary evidence.

Peters discusses the issue at http://mywebpages.comcast.net/enpeters/blog.htm

PREDICTED

Syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, a convert to the Catholic faith, wrote that the indecisive actions of certain prelates, such as Theodore Cardinal McCarrick of Washington, D.C., has given the first-round victory to "pro-choice" politicians.

"But one priest familiar with how the Church operates told me that more and more American bishops, influenced by Pope John Paul II, will deny Communions and 'finally "out" liberal Catholics for what they are at heart, Protestants.' This priest sees the day when 'pro-abortion politicians will stop calling themselves Catholics or repent of their sins.' That surely will not happen before the 2004 election."

Agreed. It's not going to happen this year, and it may not happen in the next election cycle either. It won't happen so long as only five or ten bishops take a hardline stance, but it will happen if a hundred bishops do.

Finally, let me make a small adjustment to the unnamed priest's comment: I would put "liberal" or "mainline" before "Protestants," because the religion espoused by pro-abortion Catholic politicians is quite different from the Protestantism held by Evangelicals.

ZOOMING

Although they went live barely three weeks ago, the Catholic Answers discussion forums already are a big success. As of this afternoon 4,300 people are registered, and our forums are now the most popular places for Catholics to gather on the Internet.

What traffic we have! Yesterday 1,492 new messages were added to the forums. Now there are 23,000 covering 1,700 different topics: doctrines, morals, liturgy, history, family life, politics, and so much more.

Who's doing all this? Folks like you. Many of our members are first-time forums users, while others have been on forums for years. They pose questions and comments, reply to one another, even give great counsel. Of course, Catholic Answers' staff apologists are there too, fielding hundreds of queries each week.

If you haven't yet visited our forums, I invite you to do so today. Just go to http://www.catholic.com and click the big button in the upper right-hand corner of the main page.

Until next time,
Karl
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The content of this E-Letter is copyright 2004 by Karl Keating.