Christianity

Actor Shia LaBeouf is known for being pretty…let’s call it outlandish. The “controversies” section on his Wikipedia page is hefty. He comes off in interviews as intense, impulsive, and potentially explosive (he once reportedly made a fan cry because she asked for his autograph). He’s being sued by his ex-girlfriend over abuse allegations and just welcomed a child with his on-again-off-again wife. Then there’s his full-torso tattoo. Now, LaBeouf is back in the headlines, but for once it isn’t for anything “scandalous” (despite what Slate might claim).

The culture war is suddenly going well for conservatives. Ron DeSantis stripped Disney of some of the woke corporation’s privileges in Florida. Elon Musk is taking over Twitter. Roe v. Wade appears doomed. And a backlash against Critical Race Theory in schools and transsexuals in women’s sports looks set to benefit Republicans mightily in November’s midterm elections. These are crucial battles. But they are not the war. The war is between race and sexuality on one side and traditional religion on the other. At any rate, those are the great causes with which the cultural left and right tend to identify. The progress of the war is seen in the retreat of Christianity and the advance of racial and sexual agendas on all fronts.

As the pro-life movement in the United States looks with optimism to the very possible overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court later this year, the tide seems to be flowing in a different direction down south. First came Argentina, where the Senate passed a highly contested bill in early 2021 legalizing abortion in the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy. The vote was preceded by months of protests, debate, and even a series of personal pleas from the world’s most famous Argentinean, Pope Francis. In September, Mexico’s Supreme Court struck down abortion bans in two states, effectively paving the way for decriminalization nationwide. Most recently, Colombia effectively legalized abortion in the first twenty-four weeks of pregnancy.

Well, Donald Trump doesn’t seem so bad now, does he? I don’t say that because Joe Biden has turned out to be as competent or less, but because at his press conference in reaction to the fall of Kabul, he sounded Trumpian. By which I mean, honest. Honest that staying in Afghanistan so long was a mistake, that their government was corrupt, that if its army wasn't prepared to defend itself then we shouldn't do it for them, and that this is what a withdrawal looks like: horribly, brutally honest. The endgame was a disaster because America’s intel was wrong, so the US had less time to get out than it thought, and because Biden lacks the acuity to respond to changing conditions. Biden looks like Brezhnev after heart-attack number seven.

Pop sensation and slave-4-her-father Britney Spears sent papists into a frenzy on Thursday night by mentioning her Catholic faith to her nearly 33 million Instagram followers in a photo caption. 'I just got back from mass...I’m Catholic now...let us pray,' the 39-year-old star wrote. 'huge draft get,' tweeted the Atlantic's Elizabeth Bruenig. Cockburn thinks the signs have been there all along. Not only did Britney grow up in Louisiana, where Catholicism is far more widespread than elsewhere in the South due to its former status as a French colony, she's been dropping subtle hints in her art. Take the music video for her breakout single '...Baby One More Time'. How different the schoolgirl chic she adopted looks in the light of her newly announced faith.

A meeting in June of America’s Catholic Bishops could unravel threads that were sown decades ago in an untidy rapprochement among the Catholic Church, its member politicians and many of the laity who accept abortion as a matter of public law but reject it privately. On June 17, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops approved the drafting of a document that would teach ‘Eucharistic coherence’. According to Bishop Thomas Olmstead of Phoenix, Arizona, this ‘means that our “Amen” at Holy Communion includes not only the recognition of the Real Presence but also a communion bound together by embracing and living Christ’s entire teaching handed down to us through the Church’.

Here, in 50 words, is the reason President Biden may find himself denied Holy Communion following a vote this month at the US Catholic bishops' conference. The Church has always regarded abortion as uniquely evil. Biden plans to make infanticidal late-term abortions widely available. In the eyes of the Church, this means he's committing a grave mortal sin and can't receive Communion until he confesses it. He won't, so he could be barred from the sacrament. That's the essence of it. It's why 73 percent of the 290 US bishops voted to prepare a document that will clarify teaching that, in fact, was already set in stone. It will apply to all US Catholics, not just the President or public figures.

In an article in The Spectator on February 25 Damian Thompson, with his characteristic vigor, raised objections to a book written by Fr Thomas Crean O.P. and myself and recently published by Editiones Scholasticae entitled Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy. His central objection is that the work is antiquated in its ideals and presentation and that it harms the cause of religion by burdening it with objectives which are unattainable, repellent to non-Catholics (and many Catholics) and anyway undesirable. Why, dear reader, am I troubling you with this arcane intramural dispute among Papists? Indulge me and I will explain. The word ‘integralism’ is a term of art to describe the opposite of liberalism.