How did it get to that? Well, I’m still not entirely sure. One of the gentlemen in the room is a graduate student at Wheaton who has apparently read too much Bradley Nassif. But as best as I can tell, the alignment of Evangelical Protestantism and Orthodoxy was supposed to be an “answer” to the concerns of the young “poet” in the video: He didn’t really “hate religion”; he just needed “the Church” to give his love of Jesus a home—and Orthodoxy can provide that. But Orthodoxy, as I understood this gentlemen’s views, didn’t need to interrupt this “poet’s” extremely loose “Christian” orientation; it formed a continuity with it. At that point, all I could do was express how thankful I was to have bailed on Orthodoxy before the ship went down; if Catholicism is the last religion on earth that is not “Evangelical,” then surely it is the one true Church of Jesus Christ.

I am sure I left some minor details out, but the entire “incident” ran like a mini-movie of my worst fears concerning the mentality of convert Orthodoxy in America. When I happened to mention that such views would receive no hearing in Greece or Russia, I was informed that that was “ok” since it’s a “good thing” that Orthodoxy has time to “grow” and “breathe” in America. The implication there being that “true Orthodoxy,” an Orthodoxy informed and shaped by the remnants of America’s Evangelical “culture,” will eventually appear and serve as a beacon for the rest of world Orthodoxy, mired in its silly ethnic prejudices and superstitions. (“Oh my gawd—did you just see that old baba prostrate in front of an icon? I mean, really, we ask Saints to pray for us like we ask our friends; we don’t worship them…”)

Because January 22 falls on a Sunday this year, tomorrow, January 23, is designated as the Day of Prayer and Penance Against Abortion for the United States. There are any number of suggestions out there for how faithful Catholics can observe this day, though the two which best recommend themselves based on the tradition of the Church are praying the Rosary for an appropriate intention and observing Monday as a day of abstinence and fasting. Additionally, a visit to the Blessed Sacrament is recommended for this day.

We pray, Thee O Almighty and Eternal God! Who through Jesus Christ hast revealed Thy glory to all nations, to preserve the works of Thy mercy, that Thy Church, being spread through the whole world, may continue with unchanging faith in the confession of Thy Name.

We pray Thee, who alone art good and holy, to endow with heavenly knowledge, sincere zeal, and sanctity of life, our chief bishop, Pope N., the Vicar of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the government of his Church; our own bishop, N., all other bishops, prelates, and pastors of the Church; and especially those who are appointed to exercise amongst us the functions of the holy ministry, and conduct Thy people into the ways of salvation.

We pray Thee O God of might, wisdom, and justice! Through whom authority is rightly administered, laws are enacted, and judgment decreed, assist with Thy Holy Spirit of counsel and fortitude the President of these United States, that his administration may be conducted in righteousness, and be eminently useful to Thy people over whom he presides; by encouraging due respect for virtue and religion; by a faithful execution of the laws in justice and mercy; and by restraining vice and immorality. Let the light of Thy divine wisdom direct the deliberations of Congress, and shine forth in all the proceedings and laws framed for our rule and government, so that they may tend to the preservation of peace, the promotion of national happiness, the increase of industry, sobriety, and useful knowledge; and may perpetuate to us the blessing of equal liberty.

We pray for his excellency, the governor of this state, for the members of the assembly, for all judges, magistrates, and other officers who are appointed to guard our political welfare, that they may be enabled, by Thy powerful protection, to discharge the duties of their respective stations with honesty and ability.

We recommend likewise, to Thy unbounded mercy, all our brethren and fellow citizens throughout the United States, that they may be blessed in the knowledge and sanctified in the observance of Thy most holy law; that they may be preserved in union, and in that peace which the world cannot give; and after enjoying the blessings of this life, be admitted to those which are eternal.

Finally, we pray to Thee, O Lord of mercy, to remember the souls of Thy servants departed who are gone before us with the sign of faith and repose in the sleep of peace; the souls of our parents, relatives, and friends; of those who, when living, were members of this congregation, and particularly of such as are lately deceased; of all benefactors who, by their donations or legacies to this Church, witnessed their zeal for the decency of divine worship and proved their claim to our grateful and charitable remembrance. To these, O Lord, and to all that rest in Christ, grant, we beseech Thee, a place of refreshment, light, and everlasting peace, through the same Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior. Amen.

In the 1990s, several conservative bigwigs and organizations recoiled in horror from the suggestion in First Things that the U.S. had lost its moral authority and that the time for civil disobedience had come in the wake of the Supreme Court’s horrendous plurality opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Since thing, FT has cooled its rhetoric a bit, choosing instead to become red-blooded, blind-eyed patriots during the Bush II years. With Neuhaus in the tomb and its old allies apparently gone, what stance will FT and other “conservative Catholic” publications take? Will they ask again if we’ve seen the “end of democracy” or, more aptly, the “end of the First Amendment” which, by my last read of the history, meant something other than the right to cover a Nativity scene in feces and stick it on one’s front lawn in order to “make a statement.”

I fear that the Catholic Church will be going it alone on this one. With the exception of a handful of Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish organizations — few of which are likely to be affected due to their size — , most Christian confessions in the U.S. and the organizations which they run have accepted contraception as, at “worst,” a morally neutral option for its members (and employees) to avail themselves of. Some may still be concerned with the abortifacient possibility of some forms of chemical contraception, though there is enough mixed literature out there to provide these groups with plausible cover for genuflecting before the decrees of the Bar Kokhba of Hyde Park.

H/T to “La Russa,” the man who directs me to the finest dens of scum and villainy online.

In a rather strange move, the Society of St. Pius X has jumped all over the opinion for its alleged conflation of libertas ecclesiae (freedom of the church) and libertas religionis (freedom of religion); in short, the former is “good” and the latter is “bad.” Shame on the Court for, apparently, not understanding the difference.

But if one reads the opinion closely, they’ll find that the two concepts, though distinct, can be conflated for the limited purpose of affirming a longstanding (Anglo?) principle of keeping the government (however constituted) out of internal religious affairs. When that principle was violated, bad things happened (or so the Court asserts). That this “no interference” principle at one time meant keeping the government out of a single constituted religious body (the Catholic Church) is undeniable; but we’re not in pre-Reformation England anymore. Moreover, staying within the orbit of American history for a moment, there never was a time when any religious body — Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or otherwise — held primacy of place (except, of course, in a handful of colonies for a relatively brief period of time). Had England remained true to, and had the U.S. adopted, the Catholic Faith, then an opinion like Hosanna-Tabor would appear queer indeed, speaking of “freedom of religion” when really all there is is “freedom of the church.” But that’s not American history and for the SSPX to actually dedicate webspace to whine as if it were strikes me as exceedingly silly and childish. Why don’t they post a lengthy diatribe on the fact that the Tridentine Mass isn’t celebrated daily in the National Cathedral while they’re at it?

In the end, I suspect the Society took the opinion as an opportunity to soapbox on “religious liberty,” forgetting of course that a supermajority of its membership in the United States couldn’t care less about now-dead Continental hangups over the sinking of quasi-restorationist movements in the early part of the 20th C. Whatever the “tragedy” of the Church’s “failure” to back-up religious-nationalist movements in Europe is not germane to American life — public or private. While I might wish, for approximately 2.3 seconds every other month when I afford myself the luxury of extravagant daydreaming, that the U.S. was a “Catholic Nation” with confessional uniformity (albeit with the kindness and decency to let the Orthodox self-govern Alaska and a small partition of upstate New York), I might as well wish I could still beat Contra using only three lives.

Intention: The union of all Christians in the one true faith and in the Church

Full prayers for the day are available here.

Update: After doing a bit of perusing, it appears that several groups, including the Institute of Christ the King, celebrate a votive Mass to the Chair of St. Peter on this day.  So, while the universal feast is technically suppressed (or, rather, consolidated with the Feast of St. Peter’s Chair at Antioch on February 22), it can still be commemorated in individual parishes due to the absence of a conflicting feast on January 18.

There are aspects of Ferrara’s critique that I find intriguing, though he suffers—as so many traditionalist Catholics do—from a tendency to overstate the “evils” which lie at the heart of the United States. For instance, it’s nothing new for a trad to disparage the American Founding on the basis that folks like Jefferson and Franklin were deists (or, depending on who you ask, quasi-atheists) or that George Washington was a Mason (or not); the harder task is proving that the private views of these and other non-Catholic “Founding Fathers” informed the establishment of the U.S. and, more specifically, the U.S. Constitution in such a way that the end result is a country which is, at its core, antithetical to the Catholic Faith. I’m skeptical that this is true. Setting aside the superficial criticism that the U.S. is neither a monarchy nor a confessional state, even a cursory reading of the Constitution reveals very little which clashes with Catholic belief. There is no mandate that citizens renounce their belief in God or adherence to the Church. Nothing in the Constitution speaks about a “wall of separation” between Church and State and the fundamental rights which are enshrined in the Bill of Rights are ones which could, in theory, find support in pre-modern (including Catholic) thought. Traditionalist seem to be at pains to prove that the U.S. Constitution, and thus the Republic itself, is the product of purely modern thinking; they want it to be seen as a document of deism, rationalism, and humanism and not, rather, a document of political compromise which affords broad, but reasonable, protections to individuals in a country which lacked, due to historical circumstances rather than intentional design, a confessional foundation. Perhaps some individual states could have been confessional states (an accurate reading of the First Amendment presupposes this), but certainly not the whole body. And at the end of the day the individual states thought it more prudent to withhold making a confessional commitment lest doing so give rise to strife.

None of this is to say that the U.S. Constitution, as the foundational document of the American Republic (assuming, as I typically do, that the Declaration of Independence lacks this status), is “good” in some substantive sense. That is, it’s not immediately clear that it is “good” in a traditional Catholic sense; however, if that’s the standard to be applied, let me suggest the Constitution will never measure up. But at some point even traditional Catholics need to admit that we live in the world of “second best” and that regardless of their wildest dreams of monarchic restoration abroad, the U.S. was never founded as one. The more pertinent question then is whether traditional Catholics can find anything in the U.S. which is laudable and defensible from a traditional Catholic perspective. And this is where their thinking falls painfully short. For instead of taking a hard look at the Constitutional text and the sort of republic it envisioned, they prefer instead to rest their case on some quips from Jefferson or on the unfortunate and dismal state of our present affairs. There is almost a perverse embrace of the manner in which the Supreme Court has marred the text through the development of a dubious common-law constitutionalism in order to “demonstrate” beyond a reasonable doubt that the flaws of America, as represented by our current legal malaise, is intrinsic to the Constitution itself.

What of the actual Constitution, the so-called “lost Constitution” that legal scholars like Randy Barnett have expended so much intellectual energy trying to recover? Without necessarily embracing Barnett’s libertarian interpretation of the “original meaning” of the Constitution and its various amendments, I do believe that he was on to something when he pointed out all of the ways in which critical passages of the text had been slashed out by the Supreme Court, thus leaving us with a very incoherent document that no amount of misguided jurisprudence can restore. Others have taken up Barnett’s project in various ways, albeit with less libertarian/contractualist readings of the text. Some, like John McGinnis, have argued that an “originalist” reading of the Constitution reveals the “good Constitution,” namely one with a supermajoritarian element that ensures “good” (not “optimal”) provisions. Joined to these accounts are various other “originalist” and “originalist-esque” interpretations which yield everything from a Constitution which is thickly democratic to one which is thickly republic to another which almost certainly contemplates the social-welfare state to one which thoroughly rejects such notions by implicitly upholding an absolutist right to freedom of contract and property, etc. Apparently Kurland and Lerner’s five-volume opus, The Founder’s Constitution, hasn’t settled much.

Maybe all of this is beside the point since, when we’re discussing the traditionalist critique of America, what we’re largely looking at is a band of moderately informed miscreants who have decided to trade in their apparently awful status as American citizens for pathetic longings for a time which probably never existed. Nay, I take (part of) that back. The funny thing is that they haven’t traded in their status as American citizens because no matter how much they might want to tell you otherwise, they enjoy ye olde iPad as much as the next guy with usuriously-generated disposable income. And once you put that in perspective, their “critique” starts to take on an unmistakable appearance of silliness, if not childishness. Like their estranged brethren in the (American) Orthodox Church who hyper-venerate their icons of the Royal Martyrs and yammer on about “Holy Russia” and “Christian Byzantium, what they’re really doing is escaping into a fairy-tale realm which provides them with the sort of thin comfort politically impotent individuals (to say nothing of groups) need to roll out of bed each morning and not despair. It would be too much a shock to their consciences to confront the actual world in which they live or to understand, in a manner which demands far more than superficial critiques and old-hat lamentations about “modernity,” that even in a world beset by the harsh reality of “second best” (to say nothing of ontologically distorting falls), things can be made better than they currently are.