In Memoriam, Rev. Stanley R. Rudcki

May 24th, 2013

My soul, give praise to the Lord;
I will praise the Lord all my days,
make music to my God while I live.
Psalm 146

As the conductor’s baton urged them briskly forward in a swift Allegro with the simple, direct movements learned from noted Chicago Grant Park Symphony founder Thomas Peck, a dozen or more professionals began Handel’s chorus in B flat major, His Yoke is Easy, and His Burden is Light.

First sopranos, then tenors, then altos, then bass squarely hit each others’ mark. Glances and smiles shot around the chorus as if to say, “This is great tempo, great rhythm, great pacing; I’ve never sung or heard Handel this way before; This conductor really knows his stuff; I’ve never had so much fun.” Each singer then took off–together–with confident abandon, and let the music dance and ripple, or if you prefer, rip. His yoke is indeed easy, they sang–and meant with all their hearts–and His burden indeed light. Despite having sung Messiah a hundred times before, each sang as if seeing the notes in first light.

The date was Sunday, May 22, 1994, at St. Michael’s Church in Orland Park, IL, the parish where the conductor began his first priestly assignment in 1953. And on May 22, 2013, nineteen years from the very date of that memorable concert of Messiah, in the sixtieth year of his Roman Catholic priesthood and in the eighty-sixth year of his life, Rev. Stanley R. Rudcki met the Lord he had served so faithfully and so creatively.

Rev. Stanley Rudcki, M.A., S.T.L., M.Mus. was a graduate of the Chicago Archdiocesan Seminaries and the Chicago Music Conservatory, with studies at the University of Chicago, DePaul (1958-60, in music), and Loyola (1960-61, in English) universities. Ordained in 1953, he served at St. Michael’s Church in Orland Park, Quigley Seminary (1957-1961), for a time as organist at Holy Name Cathedral and as a part-time faculty member at the Chicago Conservatory of Music, where completed his musical graduate studies (1960-65), and from 1961 until its campus closed in 1994-5, Niles College Seminary, then the Chicago archdiocesan college seminary, where he taught Music and English Literature.

In 1964 Fr. Rudcki organized the Niles College Seminary Concert Choir and the Niles Symphony, whose members were professional musicians drawn from the Lyric Opera Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony. Among the many works performed during the 1960s through the 1990s by the Chorus and Orchestra at a number of Chicago locations including Orchestra Hall and Holy Name Cathedral, St. Mary’s Riverside, St. John Cantius, St. Thecla, St. Andrew the Apostle, St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, were Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (Chicago Premier, 5/20/1968), John Rutter’s Requiem (U.S. full orchestra premier, 10/5/1986, St. Mary’s Church, Riverside, IL, with orchestrations sent personally to Fr. Rudcki by the publisher in close cooperation with the composer [John Rutter had reportedly completed the orchestration just a few days earlier; I've been told that the ink was still wet when the parts arrived in Chicago two days before the concert]), Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms (Chicago Symphony Hall Premier, 5/11/1967), Poulenc’s Gloria, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (May, 1972), Verdi’s Requiem (5/8/1966), a fully dramatized version of Honegger’s Joan at the Stake, Mozart’s Requiem, Berlioz Te Deum, Mahler’s Veni Creator Spiritus, and many other major choral symphonic works in dozens of performances. Rev. Rudcki directed the Hillenbrand Sacred Music Project for the former Hillenbrand Institute of Niles College at the time of the 1994 Messiah Concert, and conducted community concerts at St. Alexander Church in Palos Heights, IL (where he served as Associate Pastor in 1995 until his retirement from active ministry in 1997), and elsewhere in the Southwestern suburbs of Chicago, where his orchestra was named the Palos Symphony. He retired from conducting in June of 2011.

Stanley Robert Rudcki (6/13/1927-5/22/2013) was the son of the Polish and Bohemian owners, Stanley Martin Rudcki and Bessie nee Salak, of a past and noted South Side Chicago bowling alley, the Archer-Kedzie Bowl formerly at 4300 S. Kedzie, and grew up in a bungalow at 6501 S. Albany Avenue in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood. His gentle demeanor blended somehow with his absolute confidence in several arenas, including bowling, water polo, music, literature, and theology.

He began his musical studies in second grade at the former St. Agnes School (Pershing Road). His talent as a young pianist was so exceptional (playing Rachmaninoff by 8th grade) that, at the behest of his teacher Sister Jane Elizabeth, the very structured Quigley Seminary of his 1940′s high school days allowed him to walk downtown after school to Chicago Music Conservatory, where he studied with Dr. Edgar A. Brazelton and Dr. Bernard Dieter, anointing the young Rudcki thereby a “grandson” by tutelage of Franz Liszt.

Stanley Rudcki played Schumann’s A Minor Concerto to mark the end of his high school days (“Watch out for that third movement, kid,” a member of the Chicago Symphony had advised him). Rudcki’s father had promised him that if he could learn Chopin’s Heroique A flat major Polonaise his father would let him use his car to drive to Mexico as a graduation gift (the war had just ended), and young Rudcki memorized it in a week. At the major seminary, young Rudcki organized an orchestra of fellow students, and performed the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor in a school concert. Humble to a fault, Fr. Rudcki sometimes stated that Cardinal Edward Egan, a Chicago seminary near-contemporary ordained four years after Fr. Rudcki, was a better pianist.

When given the chance to formally study Gregorian chant in Rome, Fr. Rudcki chose instead to continue his musical studies in Chicago, and to master conducting and composition. Among other works, he crafted a Mass in Honor of Chardin (1966), and A Symphonic Fantasy on the Salve Regina (1993), and served from time to time as an arranger on other’s musical projects.

Along the way, he deepened his knowledge of literature, especially tragedy and comedy, Shakespeare, G.B. Shaw (Fr. Rudcki was a regular Niagara On the Lake, Ontario, Shaw Theater Festival attendee), Dostoyevsky, and G.K. Chesterton. As a Chestertonian, Fr. Rudcki suggested to his fellow scholars that the dozens of Chesterton’s Illustrated London News articles be hunted down and published (they were by Ignatius Press). Fr. Rudcki also penned a number of Chestertonian plays that were performed at the seminary. Few of his students will forget Fr. Rudcki’s stirring lecture on the Grand Inquisitor scene from the Brothers Karamazov, or his course on tragedy.

After Niles College affiliated with Loyola University, Fr. Rudcki was named Loyola faculty member of the year in 1969. In 1970, the Zoltan Koldaly Academy and Institute made him an honorary member in recognition of his promotion of the musical arts. In 1993, he was named a Distinguished Alumnus of Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary, as well as Professor Emeritus at Niles College.

Fr. Rudcki also taught music appreciation to Chicago seminarians, many of whom had no background in classical music whatsoever, and gave a few of them private lessons. (He also kindly gave my oldest daughter a few lessons, gratis, and she continues to teach others the ways of excellent music). The performance Fr. Rudcki mounted of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis to enthusiastic press reviews at Holy Name Cathedral in 1972, sung by dozens of seminarians, parishioners, and professionals along with members of the Chicago Symphony, was in many ways a high point of Catholic culture in Chicago. But such culture, according to Fr. Rudcki, was possible to experience within any Catholic parish church, where indeed Fr. Rudcki brought his musicians.

Fr. Rudcki’s view of art was bound to the Thomistic distinction between prudence as the recta ratio of acting (agibilium) or doing, and art as the recta ratio of making (factibilium). But Fr. Rudcki’s Thomism was living, dynamic, and poetic, witness his nuanced 1987 article in the journal Thought, entitled “The Loss of Art: A Cultural and Theological Perspective,” for the beauty of his written expression.

Fr. Rudcki’s Christmas music during the late Advent prayer service at Niles College was a memorable annual spiritual ascent that realized his vision of art in service to the Gospel. But it didn’t hurt that legendary Chicago Symphony trumpeter Adolph (Bud) Herseth rang out the Gabriellic downward run from high A in the Hallelujah Chorus. Fr. Rudcki combined community musicians with just the right spike of professional excellence. He knew that inspiring music required great composition and musicianship, not simply good intentions. He also had a discerning ear for new music, and very early on performed the works of John Rutter. Chicago soprano Sarah Beatty was a regular soloist at Fr. Rudcki’s concerts for a musical association of forty-one years.

Fr. Rudcki also humbly sweat the small stuff. He would plan his concerts for weeks, and personally lay out the music for each symphonic position. He worked closely with the Chicago Federation of Musicians and the Recording Trust Fund of the American Federation of Musicians which supported many of his concerts, and with Robert Rushford, who contracted his orchestras for a period of years. (Throughout his teaching career, the Chicago seminaries also provided support for Fr. Rudcki’s concerts.)

One day, Fr. Rudcki decided to give up smoking, cold turkey, after decades, and simply did. Another day, Fr. Rudcki asked how to lose weight, and then lost twenty pounds. He very much liked Robert M. Hutchins’s joke about lying down and resting whenever he had the urge to exercise.

And who could forget Fr. Rudcki’s wit, especially his irony? See his 1992 letter to the Chicago Tribune about a critic who tried to juxtapose the Murphy Brown TV show / Dan Quayle controversy with famous characters from Shakespeare.

Fr. Rudcki could not abide Wagner’s Parsifal (“Even Wagner’s religious music is profane,” he said, echoing Chesterton), nor could he stand it when the 1960′s seminarians sang “Rambling Boy” at Mass. For his own 50th priestly anniversary, he chose Mozart’s Coronation Mass, K. 317. The last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony Number 6 in B minor moved him so deeply he could barely listen to it.

It was Fr. Rudcki who proposed the name “Niles College” to end a faculty impasse on the question of the name of the new Chicago Archdiocesan Seminary in the early 1960s, a decision he later regretted. With his colleague Fr. Martin N. Winters, Fr. Rudcki taught at this college seminary at the time of its rise, and of its fall, of which he wrote in a 1995 New Oxford Review article, “The Tale of a Dead Seminary.” (See my earlier post on the bad old days of Niles College).

One friend and colleague described Fr. Stanley R. Rudcki as the last of the true liberals, meaning not a New York Times editorial page political true believer, as the word has come to mean, but liberal in the sense of a humanist educated in the liberal arts freeing the human spirit to hear the Divine and to fully realize the authentically human.

Chicago’s former Quigley Seminary had an expression, “Days of the Giants,” to describe a past era of manly, spiritual commitment and accomplishment. In Fr. Rudcki, quiet giant is who we’re talking about. He was a gentleman when the word meant something.

Fr. Rudcki will be waked at St. Alexander’s Catholic Church in Palos Heights, IL on the afternoon and evening of Wednesday, May 29, 2013, with a funeral at that same church at 10:30 AM, Thursday, May 30. Funeral announcements are here.

I understand that Fr. Rudcki’s friends are quickly working to assemble the musical forces to sing and pray Rutter’s Requiem at the funeral.

May Fr. Rudcki’s soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in the Lord’s peace.

I regret I will not be able to sing the Salve in person on May 30th, but I will be singing it in my heart. Later that day, I’ll play a Mazurka or two for Fr. Rudcki.

[At a priest's funeral in Chicago and in many places, at the very end of the service, the clergy gather at the side of the remains and lead all in singing the Salve Regina.]

[I wish to thank Mr. Paul A. Knez, a long-time supporter of Fr. Rudcki's efforts, for some of the fact-checking. Any errors are entirely my own.]

© Copyright 2013, Albert J. Schorsch, III
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The Politicization of the IRS

May 14th, 2013

There are few outrages that seriously undermine trust in a US presidential administration and in the US Government in general more than the use the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes.

The recent, very credible charge by the National Organization for Marriage that their donor list was leaked by the IRS to the Human Rights Campaign, a pro-LGBTQ organization, as mentioned among similar IRS violations by the Wall Street Journal here and here, complicated by the President’s close ties with the Human Rights Campaign as evidenced by his 2011 address to them, will harm more than the present administration. Similar reports about the IRS impeding the applications of pro-life organizations can be found here.

Violations of public trust by a tax bureaucracy travel wide and deep throughout society, and build momentum until their consequences are overwhelming.

No amount of spin, or pivoting, or political Teflon can withstand the outrage of citizens over their tax system becoming politicized and suborned by influential factions.

© Copyright 2013, Albert J. Schorsch, III
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An Appeal to President Obama and His Government for the Release of Two Abducted Orthodox Christian Archbishops in Syria

April 29th, 2013

Please consider signing this whitehouse.gov petition calling for a response to the abduction of two Syrian Orthodox bishops, apparently by rebel forces. Their driver, a deacon, was executed during the abduction, and a picture of his body was made a grisly display on the Internet.

Please share this petition widely:

http://wh.gov/teJU

© Copyright 2013, Albert J. Schorsch, III
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On Finally Finishing a Book from My Father Twenty-Five Years Later

April 28th, 2013

Our family has an established tradition of passing books around as loaners or gifts, and a related running joke about not reading them. Then dangerously, we sometimes do read them!

My late father had a saying that “If you learned one thing” from reading a certain book or attending a course or a certain workshop, it was probably worth it.

I remember, on my father’s side of the family, both my grandfather’s and my father’s enthusiasm about certain classic self-help books in positive mental attitude tradition that I eventually dutifully and substantially read. My grandfather especially liked stories in the Horatio Alger spirit of success after adversity, and also relished various guaranteed cures for arthritis (these I read in my pre-teen years, and have served me in good stead).

Grandpa used the expression, “Go Getter,” to express his approval of a person who took initiative, then with great ceremony, gave his grandchildren a quarter (because we had not as yet learned the proverbial “Value of a Dollar”). If one remained at Grandpa’s side long enough, he would tell his life story, while also explaining the Gold Standard. I recently found what I think was the book by Peter Bernard Kyne from the early 1920s that popularized this expression, Go Getter.

On my mother’s side, my Canadian great-grandmother gave me a book, The Incredible Journey, that she absolutely loved, and I never absolutely finished. Our kids did love the movie, which I watched over and again with them through various Disney movie remakes over several decades. Their great-great grandmother would be very pleased. I suspect our grandchildren will soon watch one of these movies, thereby honoring the memory of their great-great-great grandmother.

In fact, so many were the books passed on to me in my youth that my father presented me the summer gift when I was fourteen of attending an Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course. During this course, I completed Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger in five minutes. (It’s about a man who killed an Arab on a beach, and who thought a lot about the meaning of life, right?) At my peak I was blazing along at thousands of words a minute, although this capacity has faded with the years and with the eyes. But I do recall how sad it was to read an entire comic book in a few seconds. . .

I must admit I used this speed-reading technique from time to time on books my Dad gave to me. In doing so, I performed two “Dad” acts at the same time. Our family does try to kill several birds with one stone whenever possible.

(I’m also reminded that my high school students over thirty years ago referred to Albert Camus as Famous Camus, to rhyme with a notable maker of chocolate chip cookies.)

A few weeks ago, while still recuperating from surgery, I more closely studied a book that my Dad gave to me twenty-five years ago, and to which I gave a quick skim then. This book is the Ratzinger Report (1985), based upon a series of interviews of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger with journalist Vittorio Messori, the first in the now genre of Joseph Ratzinger interview books in English, which continued to currently number four, the latter three–Salt of the Earth (1997), God and the World (2000), and Light of the World (2010)–being with journalist Peter Seewald. A similar kind of record, although comprised of addresses and correspondence, can be found in Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, and Islam (2006), by Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera.

Joseph Ratzinger’s (Benedict XVI’s) interview books, while formal and not aphoristic in structure, provide something of a historic, theological, and cultural counterweight to Martin Luther’s informal and aphoristic Tischreden, or Table Talk, and now outnumber the corpus of Luther’s Tischreden by a page factor of almost four to one.

(Speaking of Luther, I chanced upon a bon mot quoted by the great Luther scholar Jaroslav Pelikan in his book, Whose Bible Is It?: A Short History of the Scriptures, in which he quotes the saying, “The Reformation began, so the saying went, when there was a pope on the seven hills of Rome, but now there were seven popes on every dunghill in Germany.”)

I have spent many hours reading (not speed-reading) the writings of Joseph Ratzinger over the past several decades, and can definitely number many more than “one thing” I learned from him. His gentle demeanor belies the prayerful depth and clarity of his insights and summations.

One key insight contained in the Ratzinger Report is an interpretation of the Vatican II concept of “People of God,” which has been popular since the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, and which seems to have dominated the theology of the Church after the Council.

“That’s true [said then Cardinal Ratzinger]. There was and there still is this emphasis, which in the Council texts, however, is balanced with others that complete it, a balance that has been lost with many theologians. Yet, contrary to what the latter think, in this way there is a risk of moving backward rather than forward. Here indeed is even the danger of abandoning the New Testament in order to return to the Old.

‘People of God’ in Scripture, in fact, is a reference to Israel in its relationship of prayer and fidelity to the Lord. But to limit the definition of the Church to that expression [People of God] means not to give understanding to the New Testament understanding of the Church in its fullness. Here ‘People of God’ actually refers always to the Old Testament element of the Church, to her continuity with Israel.

But the Church receives her New Testament character more distinctively in the concept of the ‘Body of Christ’. One is Church and one is a member thereof, not through sociological adherence, but precisely through incorporation in this Body of the Lord through baptism and the Eucharist.

Behind the concept of the Church as the People of God, which has been so exclusively thrust into the foreground today, hide influences of ecclesiologies which de facto revert to the Old Testament; and perhaps also political, partisan, and collectivist influences. In reality, there is no truly New Testament, Catholic concept of Church without a direct and vital relation not only with sociology but first of all with christology. The Church does not exhaust herself in the ‘collective’ of believers: being the ‘Body of Christ’ she is much more than the simple sum of her members.”

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church, 1985, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, pp. 46-47. Paragraphing above mine.

Then Cardinal Ratzinger’s words on the limitations of the expression “People of God,” and his preference for the simultaneous use of the expression “Body of Christ” along with “People of God,” sum up the fundamental difference between those with a mere political interpretation of Vatican II, as opposed to an integration of the social and the sacramental. I agree with Joseph Ratzinger that the Church is definitely more than the sum of her members, and that using the phrase People of God exclusively without also invoking the Body of Christ is to rely substantially upon pre-Gospel traditions. The People of God and the Body of Christ belong together not only when describing the Church, but when witnessing to Christ as part of His Church. This theology of combining the social with the sacramental is very similar to that of Msgr. Reynold Hillenbrand, of whom I’ve written previously.

On a different note, one of the theological questions that has returned to me throughout my life is the question of the Fall and of the necessity for Redemption, in other words, What happened after Creation that was so bad that it required Christ to have to suffer, die, and rise to save us?

The question of the Fall is one that Joseph Ratzinger has expressed the wish to write about in retirement because of its critical importance. Here is his answer to a question about the Fall from 1985:

“The biblical narrative of the origins does not relate events in the sense of modern historiography, but rather, it speaks through images. It is a narrative that reveals and hides at the same time. But the underpinning elements are reasonable, and the reality of the dogma must at all events be safeguarded. The Christian would be remiss toward his brethren if he did not proclaim the Christ who first and foremost brings redemption from sin; if he did not proclaim the reality of the alienation (the ‘Fall’) and, at the same time, he did not proclaim that, in order to effect a restoration of our original nature, a help from outside is necessary; if he did not proclaim that the insistence upon self-realization, upon self-salvation does not lead to redemption, but to destruction; finally, if he did not proclaim that, in order to be saved, it is necessary to abandon oneself to Love.”

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church, 1985, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, pg 81.

The questions of the Fall (What was it?) and of Redemption (Why was Christ’s Death and Resurrection necessary?) remain challenging indeed. But I very much like Cardinal Ratzinger’s point that we must realize that we cannot save ourselves, and that to be saved we must abandon ourselves to Love.

So, although, it’s twenty-five years too late, I thank my late father again for the book (I did thank him back then as well). Had he not given it to me, I would not have encountered the holy wisdom imparted by Pope Emeritus Joseph Ratzinger.

That’s the nice thing about a book as a gift. It patiently waits for one to tolle, lege, to take and to read.

© Copyright 2013, Albert J. Schorsch, III
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Family Inequality in Search of Better Science

April 27th, 2013

One very perceptive critic of those social scientists who still dare to defend what has come to be called “traditional marriage” is Professor Philip N. Cohen, sociologist of the University of Maryland, College Park.

Prof. Cohen’s blog, familyinequality.wordpress.com, is entertaining, current, and thought-provoking. He does a good job of pointing out the scientific lapses of those with whom he disagrees. Having a nemesis like Prof. Cohen challenges the level of performance of those with a differing point of view. Unfortunately, a number of thinkers who disagree with Prof. Cohen do not possess the level of mastery necessary to do so effectively.

Then again, Prof. Cohen appears to be a better critic than he is himself a scientific master–not that that will matter in terms of his academic success or current reputation, since today’s academic success gravitates toward the politically correct.

Prof. Cohen has chosen a very safe niche within academia, serving as a critic of the traditional, and does not yet appear ready to challenge the fundamental assumptions of both the traditional and the progressive. Were he to do so, he might become a great scientist whose works would be read for centuries. He certainly appears to have the fundamental talent.

But Prof. Cohen also appears to currently have a number of deficiencies as a rigorous thinker. I’ve chanced upon what appear to be recurrent fallacies in this analysis, including the genetic, misplaced concreteness, petitio principii, just to name a few. These subtle parlor tricks are academic stock in trade, and may dazzle the students, and unfortunately, some peers, but they don’t get us closer to truth. Prof. Cohen’s knowledge of the philosophic pitfalls of the social sciences does not appear magisterial by any means. His arguments are sometimes one-sided, not taking both sides of the ledger of costs and benefits into account, but flipping from one to another depending on the argument. He also does not appear to have mastered systemic, supply chain, or input-output analysis. Prof. Cohen informs, but does not yet enlighten.

I’ve just read about a recently-deceased judge who made it a practice to have her clerks draft findings both for and against plaintiffs. It was only after reflection upon such a rigorous inquiry that the judge rendered the final decision (easier for the judge to delegate than the judge to do!). This approach is similar, of course, to that of St. Thomas Aquinas, who regularly made better arguments for the opposition than the opposition did in his own pursuit of the truth.

Were a scientist like Prof. Cohen to equally divide his or her time for say, a year, between rigorously (and publicly) criticizing scientific papers on the family that were funded by both traditional and progressive foundations, not only would I admire him for his bravery and integrity, but he might help raise the bar across the social sciences, which, no matter who is funding, is still set pretty low.

It is one thing to publicly criticize research funded by family-focused foundations, it is another to publicly–not simply in anonymous peer review–criticize research funded by the very foundations that might fund you yourself. A great scientist eventually achieves the independence to do both.

For a clever critic like Prof. Cohen, finding social scientific lapses is like shooting fish in a barrel, since scientific lapses abound. But he still appears to lack the philosophic mastery to advance the science of the family as science. And I’m not sure which social scientist would dare bite the hand that feeds him or her just for the sake of mere science or mere truth.

Our civilization, such as it is, does desperately need to have an independent scientific community disengaged from political factions. But it is easier these days to be an advocate. These academic cheering sections get funded all the time by different camps of the culture wars. I hope Prof. Cohen, and those of equal or greater talent, become great scientists instead.

© Copyright 2013, Albert J. Schorsch, III
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A Riddle, and a Prayer

April 23rd, 2013

Young and a few old people are about to give something special away–

– of which they do not know how much has already been lost,

– of which, once so readily now given away, they will never be able in their entire life’s efforts, not matter how deep their regret, to regain. A hundred years will pass before even part of what is about to be lost will be regained.

Each night on the news, people are killed, because they never had one to stop them from killing.

The young who are about to give this away follow an older one who never really had one, and are swayed by a younger one who doesn’t now, and will never have one.

The young and some old are giving away this something special because they think what is given can easily be retained in their case, or because they fear to lose a friend, or because they wish to be polite or to be fair, or even to be loving, or they think that many ways of loving don’t really need one.

They have been taught, over and over again in their lives, that they don’t really need one, that no one really needs one, thinking one is nice to have, but one can get along quite well without one.

Kin, however, have a great gap and emptiness without one.

One of these ones will wake up from a dream at any hour, change one’s whole life on a moment’s notice, take the entrusted ones to safety, and keep them safe.

Only when those who are about to give this away have given this away, and many are very lost, and each night on TV the killing continues beyond the time of their children and grandchildren, and they can’t find God–

– will they cry out the words that Jesus taught them.

Those who are about to give this away don’t realize that they are about to give away God, because–

– God is one.

© Copyright 2013, Albert J. Schorsch, III
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Smell as Truth’s Revenge

April 21st, 2013

Upon the liberation of the Nazi death camps in WWII, Allied forces compelled nearby citizens in Weimar and other areas adjacent the camps to walk through them, and to confront the brutal reality of Nazi genocide, as documented in this film. Please notice, when viewing the film clip, the German townspeople shielding their noses.

The Allies were familiar with the recurrent human capacity for committed self-deception, and wanted to definitively break the Nazi propaganda-hold on the populace. One way to counter this self-deception, and it is still not a 100% guaranteed way, is to do what the Allies did: to force citizens to come to view–and to smell–first-hand the terrible results of their own political choices.

The expression, “rub their noses in it” remains to this day one of the firmest expressions of disproof and refutation. Smell triggers memory, and rarely can ever be forgotten.

History is filled with recumbent and attractive myths built upon self-deception, sometimes bolstered by outright cynical lies by political and intellectual leaders. Holocaust deniers, be they Neo-Nazi punks or heads of state like the current leader of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, provide but a few examples. The dead, now buried, cannot readily be smelled without significant spadework. So new liars and deceivers arise with each new demographic cohort.

American (both North and South) and European intellectuals, revolutionaries, and radical labor activists for generations have clung to the false promises of Marxist-Leninist government, despite the voluminous documents and criminal evidence released to the world after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the Russian Gulags, of Robert Conquest on the Stalinist genocide and politicide in the Ukraine, of former French communists in their Black Book of Communism, the relentless and thorough vivisection of Marxism by philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, and the complete moral and historic discrediting of the late New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, who to his and to that newspaper’s everlasting shame, knowingly hid the deaths of millions caused by Stalin in the Ukraine in the 1930s.

But despite its resounding historical failures and crimes, Marxism-Leninism is alive and well as a recurrent fantasy in academia, in journalism, in arts, letters, and film, in labor (despite the role of US Big Labor in supporting Solidarnosc), and among trendy theologians. To these true believers, the Gulags and famines, the Maoist democides of the Cultural Revolution, and the Cambodian killing fields were but mere aberrations in theory and practice, not the true Marxism-Leninism of which they themselves are surely capable. Undoubtedly the failures of Stalin and Mao must have been due to the Russian and Chinese culture or character, these true believers assume, not their own pristine theory.

Latin America, to its misfortune, remains the legacy Marxist-Leninist’s own sandbox of choice for post-fascist fantasy football, more so for some their intellectual playground for “praxis,” translate please as high-minded meddling and social engineering. From the capitalist experimentation by US drug companies with Puerto Rican women to test the dosage levels of newly generated birth-control pills (some reportedly died) in the early 1960s, to the more recent moral and cultural support given to the late dictator Hugo Chavez by Bill Ayers, Sean Penn, and Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., misguided beneficent “praxis” on Latin America’s behalf abounds.

It is thus in the opening of graves–and in the smelling of them– that some of history’s most uncomfortable truths, and some of humankind’s most significant hopes, can be found.

Neither is it accident that some of the most determined anti-abortion activists are among those close enough to aborted babies to have smelled them, be they those who have encountered dumpsters of abortion debris, or the nurses who have been faced with the dilemma of an aborted baby surviving, and then forced to be neglected to death (a public policy earlier supported by Barack Obama about which, to use a polite euphemism, he has been less than forthcoming), or worse, intentionally terminated.

Pro-life, anti-abortion activists have for decades tried to force images of abortion into the general consciousness. But only until recently, with the Kermit Gosnell trial, has the stench of abortion as well reached the public. This trial has led prominent pro-choice writers, like veteran journalist Roger Simon, to rethink their positions on abortion.

While the smell of death rarely loses its repugnance (a term recalled recently again by physician and ethicist Leon Kass), the force of smell declines with repeated exposure. It is thus possible for a physician to deliver babies in the morning and abort them in the afternoon, a situation described by the late Bernard N. Nathanson, MD, who only stopped aborting after thousands of cases, upon quiet and persistent reflection after viewing a sonogram of an abortion.

While the English word “odious” is often associated with repugnance as if to a bad smell, it comes from the Latin word for hate.

One of the most olfactory of writers, and the person who coined (with some help from the brilliant translator Maria Boulding, OSB) the term “truth’s revenge,” in citing the memorable line of Publius Terentius Afer, “Veritas odium parit,” or “truth engenders hatred,” was St. Augustine of Hippo, who wrote:

cur autem veritas parit odium et inimicus eis factus est homo tuus verum praedicans, cum ametur beata vita, quae non est nisi gaudium de veritate, nisi quia sic amatur veritas ut, quicumque aliud amant, hoc quod amant velint esse veritatem, et quia falli nollent, nolunt convinci quod falsi sint? itaque propter eam rem oderunt veritatem, quam pro veritate amant. amant eam lucentem, oderunt eam redarguentem. quia enim falli nolunt et fallere volunt, amant eam cum se ipsa indicat, et oderunt eam cum eos ipsos indicat. inde retribuet eis ut, qui se ab ea manifestari nolunt, et eos nolentes manifestet et eis ipsa non sit manifesta. sic, sic, etiam sic animus humanus, etiam sic caecus et languidus, turpis atque indecens latere vult, se autem ut lateat aliquid non vult. contra illi redditur, ut ipse non lateat veritatem, ipsum autem veritas lateat. tamen etiam sic, dum miser est, veris mavult gaudere quam falsis. beatus ergo erit, si nulla interpellante molestia de ipsa, per quam vera sunt omnia, sola veritate gaudebit.

Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, 10.23.34, from http://www.stoa.org/hippo/text10.html, accessed 4/21/13

I’ve posted Augustine’s Latin above so his extensive word-play can be seen even by those readers not conversant with his Latin.

Here is the late Dame Maria Boulding, OSB’s translucent rendering of the passage above, which I’ve paragraphed for easier apprehension:

Why, though, does “truth engender hatred,” why does a servant of yours who preaches the truth make himself an enemy to his hearers (John 8:40; Galatians 4:16), if the life of happiness, which consists in rejoicing over the truth, is what they love?

It must be because people love truth in such a way that those who love something else wish to regard what they love as truth and, since they would not want to be deceived, are unwilling to be convinced that they are wrong.

They are thus led into hatred of truth for the sake of that very thing which they love under the guise of truth.

They love the truth when it enlightens them, but hate it when it accuses them (John 3:20; 5:35).

In this attitude of reluctance to be deceived and intent to deceive others they love truth when it reveals itself but hate it when it reveals them.

Truth will therefore take its revenge: when people refuse to be shown up by it, truth will show them up willy-nilly and yet elude them.

Yes, this is our condition, this is the lot of the human soul, this is its case, as blind and feeble, disreputable and shabby, it attempts to hide, while at the same time not wishing anything to be hidden from it.

It is paid back in a coin which is the opposite to what it desires, for while the soul cannot hide from truth, truth hides from the soul.

Nevertheless, even while in this miserable state it would rather rejoice in truth than in a sham; and so it will be happy when it comes to rejoice without interruption or hindrance in the very truth, upon which depends whatever else it true.

The Confessions of Augustine, translated by Dame Maria Boulding, OSB, 1997, Hyde Park, NY, New City Press, pg. 201; now also available in a second edition with Bibliography, and a critical edition from ignatius.com

It is no accident that early in the development of the field of psychology that scientists claimed Augustine as one of their own. For in his description of the reluctant human apprehension of truth, Augustine went beyond the theory of cognitive dissonance to a theory of self-deception based upon a paradoxical fear of truth as truth unfolds. It is our very selves that must change when we learn the truth. And as long as we hide from the truth, truth also hides from us.

It is thus very useful to truth to open the mass graves of the persecuted and even of the aborted, and not only to look, but to smell, to remember, and to speak. As Augustine noted, speaking truly of such things brings hate. We should not fear to continue this speech of truth, and to conquer this hate.

Christ, who wept outside the grave of Lazarus, about to be raised, was then warned of the smell, but stepped forward to show us that there is more than the smell of death that meets us when we seek for and speak the truth.

© Copyright 2013, Albert J. Schorsch, III
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Aphorism LXII

April 20th, 2013

Talent and Kafkaesque bureaucracy are deeply incompatible.

© Copyright 2013, Albert J. Schorsch, III
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Aphorism LXI

April 20th, 2013

Reading the descriptions of the relatively peaceful high school years of the alleged second Boston Marathon Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I’m reminded once again that a given 19 year old male can be shaped into loyal marine, a holy monk, a heartless storm trooper, a dissociated prostitute, or a suicide bomber in just a few intense weeks.

Their heroic urge, their willingness to risk, and their lack of fear are often their undoing.

Nineteen year old men fight the wars of the world. Would that they could quickly pass through this critical year without injuring others, or their own souls!

Old men cry the wet tears of regret which lay dry within the eyes of the men of nineteen.

© Copyright 2013, Albert J. Schorsch, III
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Prelude to a Just and Merciful Society

April 7th, 2013

The problem of sustaining not only the continuing existence of human society but also of a just human society has challenged both dreamers and those who consider themselves realists.

This second group, so-called and sometimes self-appointed realists, is comprised to a great degree also of dreamers who happen to be unaware about essential skills and knowledge they themselves and society in general do not possess which may apply to the very problems they propose to solve.

The present paradox of achieving social justice involves theoreticians and political actors who think political power can directly achieve justice, when power, exerted over time to sustain continuous human systems instead more likely forms institutions and therefore bureaucracies which, sometimes very usefully, slow the effects of power and sometimes stop power dead in its tracks, for the principal reason that the power-wielders very often lack the foresight, knowledge, and skills to properly construct and lead the institutions and bureaucracies. This is another manifestation of what I (not originally) call the political illusion, an illusion that assumes that political power can in an of itself solve human problems over the long term.

Political power, since it must be sustained in one way or another–even in a dictatorship–by the consent of at least an elite in the population, tends to turn long-term capital assets, principally buildings, infrastructure, and institutions, into short-term political assets, and thus to exhaust the potential of these assets to sustain a just society.

Political power-seeking is thus the very enemy of sustainabilty, because sustainability properly treats long-term assets as long term assets, while political action generally doesn’t.

The phenomenon of the serial ribbon-cutting politician who immediately loots a new project for the next round of supposed innovations elsewhere in an endless and decaying series of unsustainable promises is only but one example. In general, few public projects are established with the supply chain of resources to sustain themselves over time, since politicians tap cash from all sources for their next series of promises or for their next inevitable crisis.

Political infrastructure thus differs from real infrastructure the way a Wild West movie set, composed of facades, differs from a real town. Self-styled political realists to a great degree dwell in the Wild West movie set version of reality, which is useful for media photo-ops but not for when it rains.

To build an unsustained, unsustainable public institution may one day be considered a crime. Some day, we will view unsustained public housing, public hospitals, public schools, and public infrastructure as public acts of injustice.

Community and political movements nevertheless often try to build institutions that may outlast themselves, schools and places of employment being a common example.

But theorists, writers, and activists too often, if not always, lack the practical skills of institutional organization, know little of what Peter Drucker called the liberal art of management, and know even less of the practices of continuous organizational improvement, many of these based upon science and engineering, so their institutional innovations become like many others, mired in their own bureaucratic processes and procedures. This predicament leads to diminishing returns and to an endless series of unrealized bright ideas, and eventually, inertia or cataclysm.

Of the many challenges facing our global society in its history, one foundational challenge remains: how to feed, clothe, shelter, heal, and transport each other within a variable natural system subject to weather, accident, and disaster.

Upon this shifting foundation, the even more shifting patterns of human demography manifest themselves. And if there are not enough healthy people, questions of economic growth and social progress become moot.

While this outline may seem elementary, political activists often forget that a community is built upon a population that in the end depends on nature, and that the effective distribution of resources within this sphere depends as much, if not more, upon accumulated knowledge of science and engineering, as especially applied in contemporary agriculture, as it does upon politics. Informed, competent action thus comes into play.

Political power can, for a time, seem to defy the forces of natural, demographic, or economic “weather” or “gravity,” but inevitably these fundamental forces break through, and negate the effects of political power, because political power cannot direct weather or the force of gravity.

The initial economy, literally the translation of the original word, is the human household, predominantly composed as the family when a male and a female bond for life. From natural resources and human demography grow culture (religion, folkways, arts and letters, leisure, etc.) and economic activity, upon culture and economy grow institutions and organizations with their accompanying communications, science and engineering, public health, law, and politics.

None of these cumulative societal actions could exist without continuous human mastery of the necessary skills and knowledge leading to effective action, be that action successfully producing a crop, a road, an automobile, or a classroom of literate students.

None of these cumulative forms of organization could endure without the various methods that society has learned to hedge and to insure, and therefore immunize itself, against natural disasters and failures of crops, production, supply, and of public health.

And none of these activities could continue without the establishment of basic forms of trust throughout society, which ensures communication, continuity, and freedom of innovation. Religion, the arts, leisure activities, and other manifestations of culture play a key binding role in the establishment of common human references, and thereby trust.

Human mercy plays an even more critical role in sustaining human trust. The mercy of a U.S. Grant, inspired by Lincoln’s “with malice toward none,” on a Robert E. Lee and his soldiers spared a nation from guerrilla warfare, and thereby saved it.

The integration and advancement of human society in all of these fields of endeavor could also not exist without the accumulating and exchanging nature of the city, and its meeting places and crossroads of transformation and regeneration, whether these be houses of worship, theaters, studios, or ultimately universities, which bring together and sustain science, engineering, agriculture, arts and letters, law, medicine, and all the other disciplines of human mastery that fan out and populate families, businesses, schools, hospitals, labs, farms, mines, and all forms of active human enterprise.

Human society is thus composed of many interacting and composite goods, but it is fundamentally grounded upon natural resources subject to variability manifested by growth, decay, change, and disaster.

These processes of variability and especially decay echo throughout every human system, and must be thoroughly understood and mastered within each human context for a just and sustainable society to thrive. The mastery of the processes of variability and of decay is fundamental to human competence.

The political illusion lives as if nature or demography or economy would never break through and undermine societal stability, but inevitably they do. The political illusion is not so much devoted to progress as to the self-perpetuating of a given elite, in coalition with trailing elites. The political illusion claims to be about the many, but in the end, it is almost always about the few.

The principal political and economic theories of the past two hundred years, be they Marxist or capitalist, have represented wishfully dangerous and destructive short-cuts to human progress by promising their own particular leap over the practical challenges inherent in managing land, labor, and capital resources in putatively just and fair ways.

These short-cuts, framed as political ideologies, have subsumed art, religion, science, and culture into their domain as mere cheering sections, and have thereby weakened and corrupted these as independent, useful, and also transcendent societal assets. These political ideologies have killed millions upon millions of human beings, and in the end, have merely established flawed institutions and bureaucracies that to this day remain un-mastered, uninformed, inefficient, and ineffective.

Bureaucracy, in spite of itself, plays a useful role, as well. Bureaucracy manages critical information and resources, and accumulates, implements, and moderates law and regulation. Bureaucracy is therefore necessary for human survival, and is a principal pattern seen in mediating institutions.

But bureaucracy is also where everyone’s pet idea for reform goes to die. Politicians continue to give bureaucracy its (usually unfunded) mandate, and then they, who often manufactured bureaucracy in the first place, are reduced to haphazardly bullying it since nothing else, from their perspective, appears to work.

The problem of the 21st century is therefore, pace W.E.B. DuBois, not so much the color line, but un-mastered bureaucracy, and in general, lack of mastery of our own work and professional activities. Or to put it bluntly, the problem of the 21st century is our own incompetence.

It is therefore not progressives and not capitalists, but incompetent progressives and incompetent capitalists, who are the enemies of human progress.

None of us, from the digger of ditches to the President of the United States, really comes to their job well prepared to do it. We have met the incompetents, and they are we.

To build a just society, I therefore propose that we do not carry the discussion forward at this point from the point of view solely of political economy, which can come later, but to begin considering the dignity and capability of each human person, which for a Catholic like myself is usually the starting point.

Not only must each human person have the capacity to be good (meaning, morally good) for society to be good, as the mythical traveler Raphael Hythloday stated in Thomas More’s Utopia, but each human person must be informed and skilled enough to effectively do good.

Yet another virtue is needed. Each of these good and competent persons must have what Alexandr Solzhenitsyn called “civic courage,” the willingness to speak out when something wasn’t right. Without civic courage, our knowledge of what could be improved would be lost, and our society would also not be free.

Recently, when Cuban human rights blogger Yoani Sánchez was challenged by someone who pointed to the availability of food, shelter, and health care in Cuba, she didn’t stop to blink. Ms. Sánchez stated that a bird in a cage has such things. Civic courage makes such a discussion, but also a free society, possible.

Finally, each good person must be not only morally good and just, but merciful. The relationship of mercy with justice, one of the most profound contributions of Blessed John Paul II, is often the most overlooked aspect of a just society. [I write these words on 4/7/13, Divine Mercy Sunday. Here's a reference to Pope Francis's homily for the day.]

It is to the topics of moral goodness, competence, civic courage, and mercy in a free and just society that I will turn when I next have the chance to continue this essay.

© Copyright 2013, Albert J. Schorsch, III
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Posted in Arts and Letters, Catholic Studies, Economic Development, Faith and Work, Human Freedom, Human Rights, Ideology, Law and Economics, Management, Public Policy, Religious Freedom, State Government reform | No Comments »

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