Port 80

This essay has been a long time in coming. I’ve posted hints of it before, but it is only in the past few months that I think I’ve gotten a good handle on what’s been bugging me about the stance of the “peace movement” within the Catholic Church. And it’s only yesterday that the entire picture crystallized for me, with a seemingly unrelated report: The French transported Yasser Arafat’s body out of the Paris hospital where he died with a full military honor guard.

Think about that for a second: This is Yasser Arafat we’re speaking of here. The man who insisted on addressing the UN Assembly while armed. This is the man who lead Fatah since its inception and presided over every act of terror committed in that group’s name. This is the man who built an empire by combining Palestinian terrorist groups into a unified organization. This is the man who either would not or could not stop Palestinian terrorism in the thirty-six years he was chairman of the PLO, who could not or would not transform the PLO into anything but a one-man dictatorship, and who could not or would not even establish a line of succession within that dictatorship.

This is the man who the French just gave an honor usually reserved for heads of state and soldiers killed in defense of the nation.

What we are seeing, in the actions of the French, in the fawning of the press, and in the lavish eulogies from world leaders, is nothing less than an inability to recognize or confront evil in the world today. Barbara Plett of the BBC wept at seeing the “frail old man” medevaced from his compound in Ramallah. Ms. Plett, and much of world, have managed to see only the harmless old man, and not the blood of innocents which coated his hands, or the stolen millions that bankrolled his wife’s Paris shopping sprees.

The reason that Yasser Arafat’s death is featured so prominently in what is ostensibly an essay about the Catholic Church is that it illustrates, in an example brilliantly illuminated by the world press, the exact sort of blindness to evil that has been gripping some segments of the Church today. The “social justice” segments of the Church today have a fundamental problem: They are unwilling to recognize true evil in the world, and are unwilling to confront it for what it is. Instead, the Church has often focused on minor issues which can be dealt with cleanly, rather than greater evils which are not so easily addressed.

Two anecdotes might serve to illustrate this problem. Both of these are taken from my college campus. The first of these occurred just today. Our local campus ministry, as well as a number of service-minded campus organizations, are building a “shantytown” in one of the major plazas on campus to illustrate their solidarity with the homeless. Tonight, representatives from those organizations will sleep in the shanties that they have constructed. After looking at those shanties this afternoon, and glancing at the forecast for tonight (lows in the upper 20s and clear), I can confidently state that some of these representatives will freeze this evening.

The problem is that these organizations view a shanty as a symbol of homelessness, and their main goal is to with this shantytown is to illustrate the plight of the homeless. Thus, any shanty will do for their purposes as long as it is clearly a shanty: in other words, constructed from cardboard boxes, packing skids, and plastic sheeting. However, they’re not looking at the shanty as an aid to survival. To someone practicing outdoor survival (which is what a homeless person is doing in the winter), a shelter is not “symbolic.” Rather, a shelter is a solution to the brutal thermodynamic realities imposed by the law of conservation of energy: E_in = E_out + ΔE_stored. In the winter, your personal E_in comes from whatever food you eat and metabolize. E_out represents the total loss of energy from your body, be that loss of heat to the air or energy spent in exercise. Lastly, ΔE_stored represents the change in the energy stored in your body as fat and internal temperature. This is the critical factor in survival: If this number is positive, you will gain weight. If it is negative, you will start living off of your internal reserves. If it stays slightly negative long enough, you will starve to death. If it becomes very negative for a shorter period of time, you will die of hypothermia.

In this light, a shelter is simply a tool to reduce E_out by cutting the body’s loss of heat to the environment. Shelters do this by two mechanisms: First, by eliminating wind and moisture, which can increase the rate at which heat is conducted from the body to the outside environment. Secondly, shelters can provide insulation in the form of a material that traps air near the body, such as piles of leaves, wadded newspapers, or sleeping bag filling. The goal is to use your body heat to warm a small region of air to near your body temperature, and to keep that air alongside you throughout the night, vastly reducing further losses of heat.

The ideal shelter would be well shielded from the wind and rain, very heavily insulated, and have a space for occupants only slightly larger than the reclining human body. Hence the common imagery of a homeless individual sleeping under a pile of newspapers - in the absence of wind or rain, this is a very effective solution to the problem of creating an insulated shelter.

This is also why some service-minded college students are going to freeze this evening. They have constructed relatively spacious shanties, with nearly three-and-a-half foot ceilings and little insulation in the interior. In some cases, these shanties are sealed at the top to keep the rain off, but not on the sides. I personally suspect that these students have been looking at photographs of shanty towns in Africa and Central/South America, which show this sort of construction. Unfortunately for them, those shanty towns are constructed in tropical climates, which is not a term frequently used to describe the Midwest.

The fundamental problem the students face is that, although they are attempting to construct visible symbols of homelessness, they have not looked below the surface appearances of the homeless and considered the deeper problems they face. Although many of them probably care little for thermodynamics, in truth the thermodynamics of survival are deeply connected to the homelessness issue. There’s a reason that the continental United States doesn’t have the homelessness rate of, say, Brazil: In much of the United States, being homeless during the winter is a fatal condition. (By way of contrast, consider Hawaii. There, a combination of warm climate, publicly accessible beach property, and high housing costs make “living on the beach” a relatively common condition for the working poor.) At its core, the need of the homeless for shelter isn’t an issue of stability or social acceptance - it’s an issue of personal survival.

Instead of focusing on this core issue, Campus Ministry has focused on the “easy” solutions to homelessness — such as serving food at soup kitchens and “raising awareness” of the plight of the homeless. However, a few days of service in November and an increased sympathy for the homeless will do little to prevent hypothermia among the homeless when Dayton gets truly cold this January.

Of course, wanting the “quick fix” to a problem is human nature. (Exhibit A is the commercial success of Bow-Flex and Corti-Slim.) However, the purpose of a religious organization is to tackle the deep problems of life, not simply to throw a band-aid over the symptoms of the issues confronting society. Succumbing to the desire for the “quick fix” is relatively harmless in the case of the shantytown that’s being constructed tonight. The campus ministers will be cold, but they’ll live - and the homeless already know how to construct effective shelters during the winter. When dealing with weightier moral issues, however, the consequences of going for the “quick fix” are more problematic.

This latter point is what I hope to illustrate with my second anecdote of “social justice” activists on campus. This incident happened in March 2003, during the lead-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was seated in a religion class, listening to a professor (who was also an ordained priest) discuss the morality of the upcoming war. He was going over the usual issues pertaining to the war, when he paused and issued a statement that I will do my best to cite verbatim: “One of the main reasons that the Pope is against the war is because, under Saddam, Christians in Iraq have freedom to worship. If there’s a war and an Islamist government takes over, Christians might not be able to worship in Iraq any more.”

Stop and think about that statement for a second. Whether or not you are for or against the war, that statement should shock you. A dictator who slaughtered his own people by the thousands, who used chemical weapons against minorities in northern Iraq, who launched two wars of aggression, and who systematically executed his political opponents during his rise to power was being supported by a Catholic priest because he allowed Iraqi Christians to worship freely.

At the time, I was simply dumbfounded (and enraged) by the sheer lack of moral perspective in the statement. In retrospect, however, the statement makes a certain perverted degree of sense, if you assume that it was an attempt to look for the “quick fix” to the problems facing Iraq. Acknowledging that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator leads to the realization that there are no “quick fixes:” If Saddam’s behavior was morally unacceptable, then either Saddam’s behavior had to be reformed, or he had to be removed from authority in Iraq. If however, the problem is not the dictator in charge of Iraq, but rather the issues present under his reign, then one has more leeway. The slaughter of civilians happened mostly in the past, didn’t it - a terrible shame, but what can be done now? The same goes for the executions of his opponents. Saddam’s support of Palestinian terrorists is distasteful, but that can be solved with a little negotiation. Likewise, sanctions seem to more or less have that WMD proliferation problem deal with, don’t they? At least the UN is looking into it, so there’s really nothing to worry about. Look on the bright side - at least Saddam allows Christians the freedom to worship!

We have all long since come to expect this sort of rationalization and a search for the “quick fix” from political entities. The reason that the French, the media, and much of Europe treated Yasser Arafat with such reverence is that he embodied the “quick fix” to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: He might have been a terrorist before, but he’s publicly renounced violence! He’s negotiated! Perhaps, if we negotiate just a little more, we’ll find some common ground! As such, hopes that Arafat was a reasonable negotiating partner were kept alive far longer than they should have been: The alternatives were simply too hard and messy to deal with.

Perhaps the ultimate example of the search for the “quick fix” comes from the last days before the Second World War, when Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier desperately searched for the “quick fix” to deal with Adolph Hitler. When Hitler had retaken the Rhineland in 1936 with a token military force, the French declined to respond - after all, this was just a minor matter that could be dealt with diplomatically. Certainly, it was nothing to go to war over. Likewise, when Hitler took Austria, it was a matter for no more than diplomatic concern. At Munich, when Hitler demanded Czechoslovakia, Britain and France worked to negotiate a solution to what they thought was a simple territorial dispute. Even when panzers rolled into Poland, the French elected not to strike Hitler in the west, where he was vastly outnumbered by French forces. It was not until the invasion of France that the French and British managed to stop looking for the “quick fix.”

Unfortunately for the French and British, there was no “quick fix” to Adolph Hitler. The problem with Hitler was not German territorial claims, it was not the reunification of ethnic groups, it was not a desire to merely increase Germany’s status in the world. The problem with Adolph Hitler was Adolph Hitler. If the French had recognized this in 1936 and repelled the German attempt to retake the Rhineland, Hitler may have fallen to domestic political pressures. If the French and English had attacked in 1939, when Hitler was busy in Poland, the Second World War might have ended in a matter of months. But instead, by searching for the “quick fix” until German armor began rolling across the low countries, they doomed Europe to six years of bloody war.

To put not too fine a point on it, Chamberlain and Daladier - unlike Churchill - failed to recognize that Adolph Hitler was fundamentally evil. Or, rather, if they recognized it, they did not have the courage to confront the implications of this fact. In the same manner, Europe and the mass media have not had the courage to recognize that Yasser Arafat was fundamentally evil, and to confront the implications of that fact fully.

In theory, it is for this reason that we have philosophy and religion. These institutions are supposed to aid us in coming to grips with the existence of evil, and to further aid us in summoning the courage to confront this evil. If a theology admits the existence of God and free will, it must necessarily admit the existence of the human capacity to disobey God, to sin, and to do evil. As a Catholic, I believe that organized religion, in the form of the Church, has a fundamental role in this process. The Church is supposed to be a community of believers, who are supposed to work together to help bring themselves, and eventually all of mankind, into a “right relationship” with God. This necessarily means the the Church as a community and an institution must be ready and willing to confront evil wherever it finds it.

This is why is scares the living daylights out of me when I see priests and Cardinals who don’t have the courage to admit that a genocidal dictator the likes of Saddam Hussein is evil. In the Church, the clergy is supposed to act as guiding shepherds helping to keep the laity from the wolves. Unfortunately, it seems that some of these shepherds would rather simply make their lives easier, and act as if the wolves weren’t there. We’ve seen this pattern in the Church’s response to terrorism and in the Church’s response to dictators around the world. In the United States, we’ve seen archbishops and cardinals who had the audacity to sweep the abuses of the clergy under the rug, but who did not have the moral courage to confront the evil committed by the leaders of the Church.

As a whole, the Church has a problem to face: It needs to be willing to get its hands dirty, to dig into the problems facing it, and not to blame those problems on convenient “structures of sin,” but rather to confront the acts of individual human evil that bring suffering into the world. Political leaders will usually take the path of least resistance when faced with evil. Economic leaders will look for the cheapest possible solution. The Church, and the community of the religious in general, is the only group that has a clearly defined duty to confront evil head-on. If they do not fulfill this role, who will?

The thousands of Catholic social justice groups around the world would do well to realize that sometimes, evil is not a problem that can be merely protested away, or which will vanish with “increased awareness”. The bishops and archbishops in the United States would do well to realize that evil cannot simply be dismissed as a troublesome inconvenience or swept under the rug. If the Church wishes to work for justice, it should recall the classical image of Justice personified.

In her traditional representation, Justice carries a balance in her left hand with which to separate the righteous from the wicked, and wears a blindfold to ensure fairness in her decisions. Her right hand, however, does not carry a protest sign, a petition, a leaflet, or a reassignment from one parish to another.

In her strong right hand, Lady Justice carries a sword.

Do you wish to have no fear of authority? Then do what is good and you will receive approval from it, for it is a servant of God for your good. But if you do evil, be afraid, for it does not bear the sword without purpose; it is the servant of God to inflict wrath on the evildoer. — St. Paul, Romans 13:3-4