Vix Pervenit on usury

Pope Benedict XIV’s 1745 encyclical Vix Pervenit “On Usury and Other Dishonest Profits” states:

The nature of the sin called usury has its proper place and origin in a loan contract. This financial contract between consenting parties demands, by its very nature, that one return to another only as much as he has received. The sin rests on the fact that sometimes the creditor desires more than he has given. Therefore he contends some gain is owed him beyond that which he loaned, but any gain which exceeds the amount he gave is illicit and usurious.

Thus he says that, even if a contract is agreed upon by two consenting parties, the creditor is guilty of usury if the contract says that he is owed back more than he gave.

This applies even to loans which are to be used for productive or business ends, not just the more obviously nefarious consumer loans, for he says that the sin of usury cannot be condoned “even by arguing that the money borrowed is not left idle, but is spent usefully, either to increase one’s fortune, to purchase new estates, or to engage in business transactions.”

The modern mind will quickly say, “What then? Can no use be made of idle money by exchange and business? Is there to be no collaboration of resources, which produces wealth?” The pope clarifies:

[It is not] denied that it is very often possible for someone, by means of contracts differing entirely from loans, to spend and invest money legitimately either to provide oneself with an annual income or to engage in legitimate trade and business. From these types of contracts honest gain may be made.

And later in the letter he says that it is an “extreme” which is “evil” to judge the matter with such severity as to say that “any profit derived from money” is illegal and usurious.

So there is certainly some category of contracts that legitimately spend and invest of money with the goal of profit. Yet this sort of legitimate contract cannot, under any guise, involve the collection of interest, for he later writes:

Some will falsely and rashly persuade themselves…that together with loan contracts there are other legitimate titles or, excepting loan contracts, they might convince themselves that other just contracts exist, for which it is permissible to receive a moderate amount of interest.

But no such legitimate, interest-charging contract exists. Therefore, what must the man do who wishes to put his money to work?

Whoever therefore wishes to follow his conscience must first diligently inquire if, along with the loan, another category exists by means of which the gain he seeks may be lawfully attained.

What kinds of contract? He doesn’t say. As in many Catholic social teachings, the pope here leaves the nitty-gritty up for us to determine, but lays out the moral principle in ironclad terms. Perhaps a profit-sharing arrangement, where the partner who sails the merchant vessel and the partner who stays home share in both the risk and the reward? Perhaps something else.

But whatever contract you make, don’t charge interest.

The pope dispels the notion, nearly ubiquitous today, that the prosperity of the modern era has depended on such conventions as these for stimulating the economy.

Christian minds should not think that gainful commerce can flourish by usuries or other similar injustices. On the contrary We learn from divine Revelation that justice raises up nations; sin, however, makes nations miserable.

If that is true, then, judging by how much our current global economy is built on the charging of interest, we are headed for great misery indeed.

“Touch me not” and the other untouchable thing

I’ve wondered this Easter why Jesus says to Mary not to touch him, when he later tells Thomas to touch him.

I said to myself, obviously this was not an Ark of the Covenant situation, because Thomas is allowed to touch him later. So his resurrected body can’t be holy in this untouchable way.

However, maybe it is, in a way. If we believe that Thomas was also a recipient of Jesus’s breath, either because when Jesus appeared to them again he breathed on Thomas too, or because by virtue of his membership in the Twelve he benefitted from it the first time even in his absence, then Thomas was ordained, like the rest of the Twelve, as a priest.

And who was allowed to touch the Ark? Only the priests.

So perhaps, like the Ark, Jesus’s resurrected body had about it a holiness that only allowed those protected by anointing to touch it.

The Lord’s Prayer as chiasmus

Numerous texts in the Bible exhibit the rhetorical device known as “chiasmus,” based on the letter X, where the passage is a mirror image of itself turning on the middle phrase, with corresponding phrases at the beginning and end having some similarity or connection. The classic example is the opening of the Gospel of John.

What if we read the Lord’s Prayer that way? It would produce an interesting effect. Using each phrase, or “line” as it is typically divided, the pairings would go as follows, beginning with the first and last, and ending with the culminating center:

Our Father who art it heaven, deliver us from evil

Hallowed be thy name; lead us not into temptation

Thy kingdom come, as we forgive those who trespass against us

Thy will be done, and forgive us our trespasses

On earth as it is in heaven, give us this day our daily bread

This reading unites in the center of the chiasmus the two most eucharistic and incarnational lines, to reveal the reality of the Real Presence of Christ as heaven on earth (here’s to you Scott Hahn), and the central object of Christian prayer and faith. It also, interestingly, pairs the Fatherhood of God with that ultimate, fearful deliverance from evil, it pairs his holy name with our preservation from temptation, the coming of his kingdom with our forgiveness of those who wrong us, and the working out of God’s will in the earth as the forgiving of our trespasses.

May the Lord hear our prayer, and give us his Son, that we might become people in whom heaven and earth are brought together in sacred mystery.

The unique unity with Christ available in the Eucharist

I was asked by a friend whether I really believe that my feelings about the validity of the Eucharist go beyond academics and affect my daily walk with Christ. Yes, I do. And here’s why.

I believe that the Eucharist brings me closer to Jesus, really and truly unites me with him in a way that nothing else does. I do not believe that this happens because when I take the Eucharist I enter a state of transcendence or contemplation or exhilaration in the Spirit which nothing else can cause (although I do incidentally believe that it will lead me, and has led the saints, into deeper contemplation of Jesus than anything else). Rather, I believe that taking the Eucharist causes the reality of my union with Jesus to happen even apart from my mental awareness of it.

This is of great practical advantage to my soul: even on days when I am “not feeling it” at church, we can be united. Can you relate to how exhausting it is to need to have a powerful emotional or charismatic experience in order to be near to Jesus? I have grown hungry for something more constant than that.

But on what basis do I say that the Eucharist unites me to Jesus in a way that nothing else can, even apart from any way it helps me to pray and contemplate or enter his presence in spirit? It can be nothing but that it unites me to Jesus bodily—our bodies are joined, and we become one flesh.

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. (Ephesians 5:31-32)

I do not want to be crass, but, in deep mystery, it is true that, as the literal bodily union of a man and woman is the consummation of their unity, so too the bodily joining of us and Jesus is the consummation—the pinnacle, the essence, the climax, the fullness—of our unity with him.

Jesus said this when he said it is necessary to take his body and blood into us to have his life, and that, if we do, then we have his life, and not only do we abide in Christ, in that sense of resting and hoping in him, but he (mystery of mysteries) abides in us!

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. (John 6:53-56)

But those who do not eat do not have life in them. So then, I desire to be really and truly united with Jesus in the Eucharist, because I desire eternal life, and because I desire to abide in Jesus, and for him to abide in me, and because I desire that our love be consummated, as a man and woman desire to consummate their marriage bond through the union of their bodies. Thus I do really believe that partaking of the Eucharist will have a profound effect upon my soul.

It is a great mystery to think that by the act of eating a piece of bread, Jesus would be more near to me than I can bring him with the highest aspirations of my thoughts. But that smacks of the Incarnation itself, when Jesus became flesh, because we, in the futility of our minds, could never ascend to him. Perhaps we should have always expected that the greatest mystery would be worked out through such an earthly means, for “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Corinthians 1:27-29), and so that the meaning of Paul’s words would not be tainted in any way by human merit or ambition when he says in the next sentence, “And because of him you are in Christ Jesus.”

On saying “I am gay”

Can those of us who are orthodox Christians and who are attracted to the same sex say to ourselves or to others, “I am gay”?

If I am a Christian who has admitted that my desires are real, but chosen to renounce them and not act on them, then why do I describe myself by what I have renounced? Like a cheating businessperson who has renounced his ways of cunning greed and quit the business world for a humbler job, I have renounced the way of homosexuality and disowned it.

Someone will say, “You have renounced it, but you must nevertheless face that it is a struggle that defines you. You must accept it as a perpetual, characteristic weakness, and admit the ways that the continual burden of that has shaped who you are.” Very well, but what defines me is not the thing I struggle with in itself, but my struggle against it. I am not free of my struggle with it, but, by the grace of God which is efficacious through my struggle, I am free of it, now in part, and in the resurrection, fully, if I do not give up.

Does living with a constant temptation make it any more a part of my identity than if I had acted on it before and then later begun to deny it? Is the Lord any less my savior? For he who pulls us out of the pit when we fall into it is also he who “is able to keep you from stumbling” into the pit at all. Even if I cannot say, “That was my identity, and now it is not,” I can still say, “That would be my identity, but it is not.” We pray to our Father not only that he will forgive us our sins, but also that he will “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

But to let a congenital orientation to sin itself slip so deeply into my sense of self that it becomes simply part of who I am is to give up my struggle. When I begin to identify myself with the sin that “is crouching at my door, and desires to have me,” I risk losing my grip on the hope that I will be free of it one day.

And here’s the crux of it: language that speaks of identity, that simply says, “I am that,” without speaking of the struggle–without relentlessly bringing it up as a caveat and a reminder that holds the identity in check–is to allow the thing itself to eclipse my struggle with it, in my speech. The dark thing itself, spoken alone, will block out the light of hope afforded to us by our struggle.

And whatever I speak will become what I think, and the reality to which I eventually acquiesce.

Congenital orientations toward sin are immense opportunities to question the goodness of God. “Why have you made me this way, God?” That is why, whenever we admit them, we must also proclaim our struggle with them, for only in doing so can we preserve our faith in the triumph of Christ in us, and avoid despondency. In the Jesus Prayer we admit that we are sinners, yet in the same breath cry out for Jesus’s mercy on us. In naming our struggle is our hope, and if we cease to remember it, the clouds of despair are waiting to close in around us.

And that is why it is better for me to describe myself as experiencing same-sex attraction, or better yet, struggling with it, than it is for me to say “I am gay.”

For the record, it’s about the verb “am,” not the adjective “gay.” Or, in fancier grammar-speak, it’s about the fact that it’s an adjectival predicate describing a perpetual characteristic, rather than a verb that expresses action toward and against the object. A “be” verb doesn’t allow any room for struggle, because it doesn’t allow movement. It just “is.” So what I mean is that “gay” vs. “same-sex attracted” is not the issue. It would be fine to say, “I struggle with gayness.” But I doubt that will catch on.

Intersex people, CCSDs, and the sex binary

Transgenderism presents intersex people, that is, people with CCSDs (congenital conditions of sexual development), as evidence that there is no absolute male/female binary. If it’s really true that there is (or was) even a single human who does not fit the binary, then the absolute is shattered.

Abigale Favale’s book The Genesis of Gender does a good job of pointing out that research suggesting that 1.7% of people are intersex is disingenuous. However, even with a more medically precise definition, it’s true that some 0.02% of people have both male and female sexual characteristics, such that their sex is not easily assignable at birth. Even this 0.02% is more than enough to achieve transgenderism’s goal, because all they’re looking for is one individual.

But Favale goes deeper on pages 127-129 of her book:

In the remaining [0.02%] outlying cases, the reality of sex is still present but must be more carefully discerned—not for curiosity’s sake, but in order to support the person’s physical health. This is not because those individuals are neither male nor female, but rather because their developmental pathways of becoming male or female took some unexpected turns.

Discerning sex in these individuals entails looking at multiple factors taken together: karyotype (chromosomes); phenotype (genitalia); gonads (ovaries or testes); internal structures that support gamete production; and hormones… Sexual ambiguity occurs when the phenotype is not readily classifiable as male or female, or when the karyotype is not consistent with the phenotype. Overly broad use of the term “intersex” tends to privilege karyotype and phenotype , while overlooking gamete production and the structure of the body as a whole…[but] gamete production is the foundation of biological sex.

This reflects a common error: reducing biological sex to secondary sex characteristics—seeing sex as merely about genital appearance or breast development. The gender paradigm fundamentally misunderstands what sex is, confusing cause with effect. Secondary sex characteristics develop as a consequence of sex; they are the effect, rather than the cause.

…When faced with ambiguity at the level of phenotype and karyotype, the best response is not to shrug and embrace the spectrum, but to continue the discernment of sex by looking at the anatomical structures that support either large gamete production or small gamete production. Although the term “hermaphrodite” used to be applied to cases of sexual ambiguity, this is a dehumanizing misnomer. Hermaphrodites are species that do not have separate sexes, such as snails and slugs; instead, each member of the species has the ability to produce both large and small gametes and can thus take on either the “male” or “female” role in reproduction. For this kind of species, hermaphroditic reproduction is the norm. Human biology, on the other hand, does not support this model of reproduction. In the rarest CCSD, an individual can develop both ovarian and testicular tissue, but even in this case, he or she will produce one gamete or the other, not both. There have been only about five hundred documented cases of an ovotesticular CCSD in medical history, and there is no direct evidence in the literature of a hermaphroditic human being, someone able to produce both small and large gametes. [Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6737443/]

When all the dimensions of sex are taken into account, sex can be discerned in each human being. To conclude otherwise is to exclude some individuals from a reality in which we all participate.

Thus, Favale argues that a person’s sex must include consideration of whether they produce large gametes (eggs) or small gametes (sperm). This is crucial for her understanding of sexuality. She later defines men as people whose bodies are organized around the ability to be the reproductive donors, and women as people whose bodies are organized around the ability to be the reproductive hosts. A person’s maleness or femaleness involves the totality of biological factors related to one or the other of these reproductive roles (even if they are infertile).

With this definition, Favale is able to defend the male/female binary by claiming that “there is no direct evidence in the literature of a human being who is able to produce both small and large gametes”; even the 500 people (ever!) who have had both ovarian and testicular tissue will produce only one or the other. It remains either/or.

Every human is either male or female. No human is neither. No human is both. There is no third option.

As an addendum, I’d like to point out that it’s important to include “no human is both.” I know of a teacher who, being probably unaware of how Favale successfully defended the inner keep on this issue, has attempted to resolve the question of the 0.02% by denying “a third sex,” but offering instead that we are either “male, female, or both.” But if someone can be both sides of a binary, then it’s not a real binary—not an either/or, not a mutually exclusive dual categorization. If people can be both, then transgenderism still wins, because that premise can be extrapolated to almost all their other conclusions. If the circuit is on, or off, or both on and off, then we do not have something we can build a circuitboard with. If you are male, or female, or both male and female, then we do not have something we can build a Genesis view of sexuality with.

An eternal church service

“An unholy man would not like heaven in the same way he would not like church.” – Cardinal St. John Henry Newman

In trying to imagine myself enjoying an eternal worship service, I think I get glimpses of how it would truly be joyful when I think how there will be no real either-or between our hopes and dreams and our worship of God. We want a beautiful house and a garden. We want a complete freedom from fear of the future and provision for our needs. We want to write the book that has struggled to come out of us. In that heavenly church, all those needs will be met. “In my father’s house are many rooms.” We will meet the fulfillment of every good desire there, in the kindness of God, and he will reveal how it was his plan all along, showing all the “hidden plot elements” of our life story, now finally consummated. God will not only show himself good, but will show the whole world made good. Now that is something for which I think I will never tire of praising him.

Can we say “The Church did evil”?

An Anglican priest’s recent sermon said, “We must listen while secular people talk about how we’ve been the aggressor, while we were in power. We were the people who enslaved people in the south. The Church did that.”

Is it right to speak thus of the Church doing such evils?

I take comfort in the fact that the Catholic church never did endorse slavery, even while the American Protestant churches did. However, I want to take a different tack, to argue why it is wrong for any church with an incarnational ecclesiology to speak like that.

A man may sin in two ways: (1) because his body is not in complete obedience to his spirit; part of him who rebels against his essence. “I did not do as I am.” Such people are deserving of mercy. They struggle. (2) because his spirit wills what is bad. In this sense, a disobedience of the body against the spirit is the only saving grace, for obedience to it is the perfection of sin. Such people, inasmuch as they are not blessed with incontinence, are deserving of wrath, for they do not struggle against evil, but actively will it, and are thus agents of the devil.

Now the spirit of the world is the spirit of Satan, and the grace of the world is that it as yet does not fully obey this spirit with its body, for it yet bears the residual graces of its maker, and the memory of good still lingers.

But the spirit of the Church is the spirit of Christ, and its struggle is to bring its body into conformity with its willing spirit, to act as it aspires to. “For the Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Therefore, it is perfectly right to accuse the Church of incontinence, because that is to accuse the sinful men that are its Body. But to accuse the Church, as such, of bad intention—of a bad heart, a bad spirit, and wrong aims and purposes, is wrong, because that is to accuse Christ, who is its Mind. Christ’s Bride fails often to act according to His intention, but Christ never intends for the Church to do evil.

Therefore it is wrong to speak of the Church as committing sins of intention, of believing wrong and affirming what is false, because these sins are proper to the Mind, not the Body.

Now, when we speak of someone doing an act which is by nature an intentional act, it implies the cooperation of both mind and body, unless we specify otherwise. Thus when we say, “He ran away from home,” it implies that he intended to do so, unless we clarify that he was delirious or insane or disoriented, or any other way which the body may run away from home without the mind intending to.

Therefore it is not right to speak of the Church doing evil, unless we clarify that it was only the Body of the Church, not the Whole Church, body and soul, who did evil. Otherwise, how can we avoid accusing Christ of doing evil by means of the Church?

The intolerable intolerance of Anglican ambiguity

An Anglican priest recently affirmed that both believer’s baptism and infant baptism are acceptable, and that both going to a gay wedding and not going to it are acceptable. He compared the two issues, saying they “mapped perfectly onto each other” as examples of where it is appropriate to have ambiguity of position, to hold different approaches together. In either case, they affirm both options as within the pale of judicious Christian practice, and the choice between them as merely “a secondary issue.” Have your baby baptized or wait until they reach the “age of reason”—either way, they’ll get baptized eventually, and that’s all that matters, because, after all, God doesn’t really look on baptized children and unbaptized children any differently. Go to the wedding or don’t go—neither choice necessarily cooperates in the transgression of a line that God draws.

But in making these claims of tolerance, this Anglican position cannot but become intolerant of those who hold to either side exclusively. What these pastors reject as unacceptable is the assertion that either option is definitely wrong. Someone who claims “It is wrong to withhold baptism from one’s baby” or “It is wrong to attend a gay wedding” are only speaking their personal opinion, most likely out of an ill-advised spirit of contentiousness and a lack of Christlike sensitivity; the claims are not and cannot be objectively true.

But what if God does look on baptized children differently than unbaptized ones? What if baptism is not just a symbol, but a sacrament that makes a person, no matter their age, part of God’s family, part of his Body?

And what if going to a gay wedding does in fact transgress a line that God draws, because the act of attending a ceremony inherently endorses its validity, and God denies its validity?

The terrible thing is not just that these two things are true. It is that many Anglican clergy, by their academic rigor, their excellent knowledge of Scripture, their claim to conformity with the precedent and heritage of the historical Church, do very well know them to be true, and yet tolerate their contradictions, in the interest of civility and some sort of generous or mere orthodoxy that does not ruffle the feathers of the urban center.

It is not like Christ, who said “let the little children come unto me,” to withhold a blessing from a child. Nor is it like him to give a false and misleading blessing in the interest of love. It is no favor to anyone to pander to the spirit of the age, or to speak out of both sides of your mouth. “I would rather that you were hot or cold…”

Anglicanism has survived for hundreds of years by occupying a contradictory via media between mutually exclusive propositions, by adept use of the technique of not following things through to their logical ends. But as the world approaches the coming of the Lord, the bad will get worse, and the good will get better. The watersheds of ideology will be made plainer—Satan and his Minions against Christ and his Church Militant. Against all those who quibble in the middle, insisting upon lukewarmness, the nausea of the Spirit will grow and reach its inevitable consummation.

What’s wrong with critical race theory?

Critical race theory (CRT) is a body of thought that could be roughly summarized as follows: history is to be primarily understood as a power struggle between racial groups, and the way to happiness as a society is to restore the balance by reacting aggressively against the racial groups with dominant power. CRT is a decentralized movement, so it’s hard to codify its ideology, but its fundamentally Marxist view of power as the fundamental truth of social reality can be seen in how it is defined by some of its most prominent theorists and proponents. (I’ve selected the following phrases from various reputable sources quoted on Wikipedia’s main page on CRT):

CRT is used to “explain social, political, and legal structures and power distribution through a ‘lens’ focusing on the concept of race, and experiences of racism”; in other words, it’s a “way of thinking about the world, especially the social norms…that govern society” that sees race as as something “used to oppress and exploit people of color,” and consequently seeks to “examine and challenge the ways race and racism implicitly and explicitly impact on social structures, practices and discourses”, with the ultimate goal of “transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.”

It is hard to fault critical race theory for most of its criticisms of traditional liberalism and the historical treatment of ethnic minorities. I am not particularly interested in defending the actions that Europeans have done under the influence of the Enlightenment, whether it be slavery or segregation or any of their vestiges today. I agree that greed and power have gone unnamed in the development (shall we say conquest) of the modern world by capitalists. With the kernel of good within the American Dream there has been also the potential for hubris and excess and exploitation, both of the Earth and of her Children. The roots, I think, are fundamentally economic, but, plainly, the oppression has gone largely according to skin tone. I have no bones to pick with any of that.

The worst and most harmful philosophies are not those that are baldly, laughably wrong, but those that are mostly right—they rightly critique some other wrong—and yet twist the truth at some key point, to the subtle distortion of the whole. I think this is the case with critical race theory. The twisting of the truth, I think, is that people are their race; that their race is the dominant and most determinative trait of a person, or a society. Feminists and modern gender theorists at least have more ammunition on this point, because sexuality does run deep in the human soul, so deep that it goes back to the very beginning, when God created us “male and female.” But race comes later, and, if there is any undeniable cry of those seeking racial justice, it is “People should not be judged by the color of their skin!” But this is precisely what critical race theory does. It places value on all people and all their ideas based on whether they are white or black or indigenous, whether they were (whether or not they knew it) an oppressor or an oppressed person, due to the color of their skin. In short, I believe critical race theory is wrong and harmful because it is racist.

It is one of the ironies of postmodern philosophies that, in attempting to rectify wrongs without the power of The Deliverer, they inadvertently perpetuate the very wrongs they sought to right. Communism, in its opposition to capitalism’s centralization of power into the hands of a few, solves this problem only by centralizing it further into the hands of the One, the State. And critical race theory, in attempting to rectify the wrongs of racism, only makes everything, and everyone, more racist.

I do believe that history matters. The solution is not to pretend that everyone in our society has equal opportunity. But the way that critical race theory seeks to give people equal opportunity is “an eye for an eye,” and we know what quality of collective sight that leads to. If history is any indication, critical race theory will only make things worse.The solution, instead, is something more like the teachings of Nelson Mandela. We must love and forgive. We must believe there is good in our neighbors. We must treat people as individuals— humans like us, with all the same basic wishes and desires and fears—not as mere members of a class of evil oppressors. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood.”

Over the past eight years or so, I have often supposed that I saw glimpses of a false god, ruling both oppressor and oppressed from behind the smokescreen of racial ire that he has stirred up to conceal his movements: Mammon, one of the great Principalities of our nation. Perhaps, if we came together, we could make war instead on him.