Compromise and Compromised
Joan d'Arc.
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Eddie Mannix: Father?
FC: Yes, my son?
Mannix: May I ask you something, Father?
FC: Of course, my son.
Mannix: If there's something that's easy, is that wrong?
FC: Easy?
Mannix: Yeah, yeah. . . easy to do. An easy job. It's not a bad job, it's not bad. But there's this other job. It's not so easy. In fact, it's hard. So hard Father that sometimes I don't know if I can keep doing it. But it seems right. I don't know how to explain.
FC: God wants us to do what's right.
Mannix: Yeah. . . yeah, of course he does.
FC: The innervoice that tells you that, it comes from God.
Mannix: Yeah. I got it.
FC: That's his way of saying
Eddie Mannix: Yeah. Right, I get it.
Dialogue from Hail Caesar.1
Years ago, I knew a woman who was at that time recently out of the Marine Corps. She was a fallen away Catholic. Interestingly, unlike so many who fall away from a faith, she made no excuses for it. Indeed, in discussing the topic with her once, she stated that she'd become a Catholic in the first instance because, like the Marines, it didn't make compromises.
She was a very troubled soul, and plagued with problems. Her marriage was her second, and that may well have been the origin of her falling away. All in all, however, looking back, a lot of her problems were likely organic in nature, for which she'd bear no fault at all. Her cross was a heavy one, and she was definitely dragging it and dropping it, but she didn't make very many excuses for it, which is a rarity.
Her observation was a keen one.
She'd been a Marine, as they were a military service that didn't compromise. And when she'd become a Christian, she'd become a Catholic, as it was a faith that didn't compromise with the Gospel. They didn't compromise, and they were not, by extension, compromised.
That's a lesson that human beings seemingly have a really hard time learning. We live in the era of compromise, with some institutions, and people, being so compromised, they have little value. Some are so compromised that they've gone from having value, to little value, to negative value.
Compromise sneaks in by means of subtle ways at first, when it does. Something seems hard, can't we make it just a little bit easier? Something seems unfair, can't we make it just a little more fair? And the truth is, we often can. But doing it for its own sake often has very real dangers.
The small compromise works, quite often, towards a little larger one, that works towards an even grater one. Value erodes, and the then the attempt to address the erosion, by that point, usually turns towards even greater compromise. To reduce it to a bad analogy, we go from allowing a desert without finishing dinner, to asking if a difficult one would simply like to have dinner and skip all other meals in an effort to get them to eat.
We live in the age of compromise, and now many things are compromised.
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The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult and left untried.
G.K. Chesterton.
From the very onset of Christianity, there has been a struggle between those who would add to the Faith that the Lord entrusted to the Apostles and make it more difficult, and those who would subtract from it to make the narrow path urged by the Lord into a superhighway, if they could get their way. This has always been the case, and while distressing and bewildering to those who must live through any one era in which it occurs, it will always be the case.
Indeed, even during the lives of the Apostles themselves, this occurred. Fights broke out as to whether Gentile Christians, who at the very first were a minority with Jewish Christians the majority, were subject to Jewish dietary laws or, perhaps more daunting, laws requiring circumcision. It was rapidly determined that they were not and indeed right from the onset dietary laws were completely suspended, none of which has kept various Christian groups from adding new ones in, often with no particular basis, from time to time. Even as those things were going on, however, other Christians basically felt that if they showed up for the Sacrifice of the Mass, they were doing about everything required of them, causing St. Paul to list out a list of mortal sins that barred entry into Heaven, including grave sins against chastity such as fornication, male prostitution, and homosexual behavior as well as such sins as drunkenness. St. Paul pulled now punches whatsoever on this, condemning, in the full texts, men who affected a female appearance. So blunt is Paul in his letters that in our modern era people have taken to either ignoring, excusing or psychoanalyzing St. Paul in a fairly desperate effort to avoid his teachings.
Indeed, the easy out that people attempt to give themselves in this area is to try to limit and then minimize St. Paul, but pretty soon you have to do the same to Christ as well. Jesus notably criticized the Pharisees for making things difficult needlessly, but it was also Jesus who just flat out stated that getting divorced remarried was adultery. No exceptions. And while people like to claim that "well Christ didn't say. . ." this or that, it's pretty clear that 1) he might have, or 2) in areas of well accepted moral conduct there would have been no need to go back over some things, and 3) he actually did condemn certain immoral act either directly or indirectly with statements that are recorded. The Samaritan woman at the well, for example, was directly criticized for serial marriages and living with a man she was not married to, which again indicates that divorce was barred and sex outside of marriage was as well, none of which has kept, for some time, Protestant Christians from going to Church feeling they are perfectly okay if they're divorced and remarried, shacked up with someone, or living the hook-up culture.
It is an easy matter, Olav, to be a good Christian so long as God asks no more of you than to hear sweet singing in church, and to yield Him obedience while He caresses you with the hand of a father. But a man's faith is put to the test on the day God's will is not his.
Sigrid Undset, The Axe.
Truer words were never spoken.
Certain German Catholic Bishops, now edging on open rebellion against the Church, assuming that they haven't raced into schism, should take a break, study some actually history and then reconvene. Indeed, their betrayal of the faith is so great, they ought to resign.
And while I'm straining not to join those Catholics who now recoil every time they hear of Pope Francis, it is becoming a struggle.
And a lot of this is that, should St. Paul appear in Frankfurt today, he'd be none too happy with the German bishops who are really busy saying that sexual sins aren't that, and are going to take the well trod Protestant path of excusing and then blessing sin, something that took Protestant's decades to do but which the Catholic Church in Germany, seemingly ignorant of history, is doing at rocket speed. Indeed, if Christ appeared on the streets of Frankfurt today and counselled against divorce, based on the ongoing conduct of the same Bishops, they'd seemingly inform him that while he may be the Son of God they've taken a vote and that's just too tough, so God must abrogate the rule. Likewise, if St. Paul were to walk into the Kaiserdom Sankt Bartholomäus in Frankfurt and step up to the ambo to warn the congregants of their conduct, he might be interrupted by a Bishop to be informed that while St. Paul feels that homosexual sex is wrong, in Frankfurt they want to bless it.
No matter how a person attempted to address this, it's an example of secular compromise leading to irrelevance. It's goes down a well-worn Protestant path that has pretty much lead the congregants out the door.
This history is well established, and not just in Christianity. Starting with the Christian example first, however, the pathway is pretty beaten down.
Most of the Protestant religions, indeed maybe all of them, were originally extremely stringent in their doctrine. Indeed, it's an irony of this history that their original rebellion against the Church was fueled, in part, by the late Medieval Catholic Church having become slack in behavior. Clerics ignored their oaths of chastity and married or took paramours, Bishops often occupied their positions for political reasons, Priests had become uneducated. In short, the monumental effort of a fighting faith seemed to have been accomplished and a retreat into "well. . . ." had occurred. Protestant reformers, often with a poor understanding of the Faith themselves, sought to burn down the edifice of the Church which didn't seem to match the message of the foundation of the Gospel.
Faced with that, the Church cleaned up its act and by Trent was heading back into correction, but that was too late to address the creation of numerous dissenting Christian bodies that had gone from schism, in some cases, to outright separation. As noted, lots of those bodies were extremely rigorous at first, although this wasn't really the case for the followers of dissenter Martin Luther, who really showed what the future was going to be like. Luther was an ordained Priest who rebelled against what he felt to be abuse and then caused his followers, mostly due to German princes wanting to separate themselves from Rome for their own greedy reasons, to completely separate. Over time, Luther, found, as is so often the case, that Christianity was inconvenient to his sex drive, and found an excuse to violate his vow of chastity, taking a wife who had been a nun and who likewise violated hers. Nobody can know the state of their minds or souls at that time or that of their death, but from the outside, it looks a lot like Luther found a way to rationalize his bedroom desires at the expense of his Faith at that point.
In so doing, he blazed a particularly noteworthy path. The entire Church of England came about due to King Henry VIII wanting an entire series of women who were willing to compromise their morals for a chance at queenly status. Eventually the Church of England came to the conclusion that it was an Apostolic Church in the Catholic mold with all the same holdings, for the most part, but for being under the Bishop of Rome, including barring divorce. Theoretically it still bars divorce, but in reality, mid 20th Century, it turned a blind eye to it, and then determined that St. Paul didn't mean what he said about homosexual sex. In doing that, it reflects the path that, to varying degrees, almost every Protestant denomination has. Finding a Protestant denomination that takes seriously Christ's prohibition on divorce is pretty much impossible, and even the Orthodox have strayed in this area, in spite of their insistant claims to have not interjected "innovation". Not all Protestant faiths have cut St. Paul's letters out of the New Testament, but a lot of them have. Some have pretty much reduced their theology to "its nice to be nice to the nice", which challenges nobody.
The Church of England started to die off as early as the 18th Century. Increasingly weak tea in its theology, the English, a devoutly Catholic people before Henry VIII, came to more or less ignore it. Now they're pretty much fully ignoring it. Culturally Christian, the Church of England survives because of the state in the United Kingdom. In the US and Canada, it survives as it was once the church of wealth, and it retains it. All over, Protestant faiths are simply dying, save for example of those which buck the trend and strongly retain fairly strict interpretations of the New Testament in various areas, which itself has caused silent schisms within them. There are, now, two Lutheran churches everywhere. There are, now, two Anglican Communion churches everywhere.
The German Bishops have determined to get on the wrecked train of the Church of England. It's just so hard, basically, that well, we'll ignore things, even if they don't put it that way.
What it boils down to, in the end, is that carrying your cross, particularly if you have money in your pocket, is hard, as we're really lazy and spoiled. So maybe, the logic goes, the Church ought to just say it's okay.
Now someone approached him and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?"
He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good.* If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”
He asked him, “Which ones?” And Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother’; and ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
The young man said to him, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”
Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect,go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Mathew, Chapter 19.
We, in the West, and I mean 100% all of us in European nations, are the rich man. We've collectively gone to God, asked what we need to do, and found it, well, if not hard, but seriously inconvenient.
We want to have sex with whomever, and at this point whatever, without consequence, and we want, in this modern era, God and Man's approval of it. In other words, St. Paul may have warned his flock that men shacking up with men locked the gate to Heaven, but right now the German Bishops want to basically say, "hey, that's okay", I'll open them back up for you and bless it, it'll all be okay.
It won't be.
Indeed, we darned near want to be gods ourselves, recreating ourselves in our own imaginary image, rather than what we actually are.
Why had church attendance dropped off in Europe, and elsewhere, following the mid 20th Century? It's hard to say, but money is a lot of it, even if we don't recognize it. When the wolves were closer to the door, we were closer to the wolves as well, and less inclined to think that we can make ourselves into something we aren't. Now, however, pretty much ever culture in the Western World is at the point where people are told making money is the point of their existence and that they should entertain themselves with sex and games. The Catholic Church has been the only thing, really, saying no, in the West.
Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it."
Luke, Chapter 9.
Christ's quote, as recorded by Luke, is the antithesis of what the German Bishops propose. No Cross, no Crown, maybe the old quote, but they'll not have it. They'll convey the crown cheaply, they imply. But it'll have no value in this world, and the opposite value in the next.
No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.
William Penn
Ironically, but seemingly unnoticed, the Catholic Church as weathered the storm of sexualized consumerism a lot better than other Christian faiths. It's suffered no doubt everywhere, as people decided that it was more fun to play with themselves without consequence than worry about the natural result of everything, as long as drugs could sterilize the results. Free of the worry of war, and free of the responsibility of their own actions, and free of poverty, it was pretty much life in the Playboy Club all the time, save for the guilt of it. The guilt is still there, but the German Church, worried about empty pews, seeks to do away with that. In doing that, its missing that there's a fairly large core of Faithful who never left. They may be weakened, but they haven't gone. And beyond that there's a large crowd of Catholics near the door who want in, but who can't quite break way, yet, from the circus. They've also missed the point that wherever parishes, sometimes by diocesan design, and sometimes by parish action, raised, rather than lowered, the bar, people came back in, in numbers. Indeed, an entire young Church, with clerics who aren't party of an effeminate subset tolerated in the 70s, and who are orthodox , is doing well.
What will ultimately happen here, we don't know. We can hope that Pope Francis will act, although in much of the Orthodox centers in the Western World, there's not much hope pinned on Pope Francis at this point. And we might hop;e that the large, poorly funded, massively growing Catholic Church in Africa says enough. The German Church is rich, due to the Church tax, but it isn't vibrant. The African one is poor, and vibrant. History may oddly repeat itself in some ways, as Catholicism came originally out of Africa and wasn't very shy when it did.
Or the German Church may go into schism in some fashion, openly or without acknowledgement, and evaporate, leaving those who want real standards, which in the end turns out to be everyone, wanting.
And it might leave quite a few souls imperiled, including those who are gathered in Frankfurt.
Not everyone was cut out to be a soldier. If you aren't, it doesn't mean you are a bad person.
SSgt. Ronald E. Adams, Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, May 1982.*
I have, and have not yet published, a long item on women in combat roles in the military. I also have a shorter one I forgot about, inspired by what one of my friends (okay, relatives) thought was a charming photograph put up in Stars and Stripes, if I recall correctly, of a bunch of female troops breastfeeding their children.
The United States has been phenomenally lucky, maybe, to avoid any major wars since the Vietnam War. I know right away somebody's going to state, "Since the Vietnam War? What about . . . "
I stand by my comment. The US hasn't fought a major war since the Vietnam War.
The long war in Indochina required the United States to deploy 549,500 service members at its peak in 1968 in what is actually a very small country. After Tet, Westmoreland asked for the number to be increased to 750,000, and to be allowed to invade North Vietnam. The maximum US deployment in Afghanistan was 110,000 in 2011. 157,800 was the maximum for Iraq during the second Gulf War.
In contrast to all of these, the U.S. Army, just the Army, reached the number of 8,200,000 troops during World War Two. About half that number were inducted into the service in World War One.
Okay, so what?
Well, this,
War is a male deal by its very nature, and I mean nature. Warfare is one of the handful of roles written into a Homo sapiens's nature when they have an X and Y chromosome. If they have two X chromosomes, it is not. This is true for all members of the genus homo across time, distance and culture.
The male role as soldiers also, at one time, tended to propel them to leadership in society. Tribal leaders who proved adept at war often had an influential role in society. Geronimo didn't become a leader of his society, for example, by hosting tea parties or screaming in Congress like a howler monkey.
Indeed, early on most societal leaders in budding nation states had this origin. Kings were originally simply leaders of their kin, in war and peace, but by the time they ruled over any appreciable amount of territory it was because they could command men in battle. Put another way, it wasn't their respective views on Brexit that decided the contest between King Harold Godwinson and Duke William of Normandy.
In more modern times, it was still the case that having been a notable military leader, or even just having served notably, could result in later success in politics or business. We seem to have passed that era by, however, and probably for the better. Our last President who was a really well known military figure was Dwight Eisenhower and we've not had a President who served in the military since George Bush II. As the modern world is less and less violent, having leaders who are good at something else makes sense.
Which is probably the underlying, quite reason, that Western societies became concerned about women not being allowed to fulfill combat roles in their militaries. We don't really expect them to actually have to fight. The militaries, that is. And we've grown use to the idea that the fighting will be done by commandos where women are unlikely to end up, or by drones, which can be flown and commanded by anyone.
The war in Ukraine, however, is proving a real throw back.
Which proves that large-scale, peer to peer, war is still possible. Indeed, we're edging up on one with China right now, by which time China will have the largest, if not the most capable, Navy in the world and an outsized army and air force.
All of which is why opening up combat roles to women in the military has been a mistake, and may well prove to be a really fatal, and worse, mistake for women and men both. Oddly enough, I saw two women debating this recently on Twitter, in which one of them definitely noted an aspect of this:
HrafnJá 🇮🇸 @RedStarSysop 19h Replying to @daily_cowboy
I remember similar arguments as to why I couldn’t serve in a combat unit but living in the field was fine. “Well, you’re built different. Well, hygiene issues. Well, if you get hurt we’ll look bad.” I joined to do the work. The brass’s squeamishness was their flaw, not mine.
Lady Hecate @hecate40 18hReplying to
@RedStarSysop
and
@daily_cowboy
Women don't belong in combat. They are not physically able to do the job.
Eric Quallen (he/him)@QuallenEric10h Replying to
@hecate40
@RedStarSysop
and
@daily_cowboy
Have you been in combat?
Lady Hecate @hecate409h Replying to @QuallenEric
@RedStarSysop
and
@daily_cowboy
No. I have been in fights with men. I got my ass kicked.
Well. . . yeah.
Psychologically, combat is a male role. Physically, it is as well. And not to go into too fine of detail on it, morphologically, men are suited to it in ways women are not. Men are generally stronger, more aggressive, do not have bodily cycles that prove to be a frequent periodic health and sanitation problem, and don't get pregnant. And frankly men are generally replaceable in their other roles fairly readily, whereas women are not.
On some of these, it might be noted, there's a reason that women have not supplanted men in sports, which is not a substitute for combat in my view, but which has certain analogous features. Indeed, the small invasion of female sports by men masquerading as women through "transgenderism" is an acknowledged threat to first rank female athletes in their own sports, and one which, frankly, sees the best of the best in female athletics being displaced by males who are nothing more than also-rans when they compete against men.
The latter is illustrative as the insertion of women into this male role has led to the decrease in standards across the board in militaries. In order to make military service suitable for women, standards of all types have to be significantly depressed. This is widely known, even if the information is routinely suppressed.
And young men, who no compunctions about being attracted to women, also tend to avoid wanting to serve in combat roles with them. This is likely due to a deep instinct in them that's twofold. They know that serving with women will depress the martial nature of their units, but they also know that, if htey're decent men, that they'll protect women first. No combat unit with any sufficient number of women in it is going ot have combat cohesion for long, as some man is going to act to save women in the unit, before his mission. It's just a fact.
Goyaałé (Geronimo) legedary Apache leader.
One thing that had never occurred to me, but which I find really interesting, is the modern expansion of the university is coincident with the rise of new academic disciplines. That would never have occurred to me but for listening to a Catholic Things you Should Know podcast. But once considered, it's quite clear. Education prior to the expansion of scientific disciplines in the university was concentrated on a very limited number of fields. This probably provides the reason for why the service academies came into existence in the U.S. They were engineering schools. I know that, but it hadn't occurred to me exactly why there would have been a deficit of engineering schools. The reason is pretty simple, the pre scientific revolution university didn't really dwell on such topics. A person would come out of them with a good education in history, literature, and language, and depending upon where they went, quite often religion, but engineering, biology, etc. . . well, not so much.
In the mid 19th Century, that all changed. But one thing about change is that it tends to be self-driving. Legitimate fields like sociology covered an awful lot, and then the academy in those areas kept on keeping on. For that reason, we currently have things such as studies on sexual diversity that take themselves really seriously. We've addressed this a couple of times as well.
The overall problem is that at some point you cross over certain bars. Graduating from high school was actually subject to a fairly high bar at one time. Starting in the 1970s it was lowered, and was low in the 80s, but efforts following that started to set it high once again and much of htat has recovered. Be that as it may, university, which was never intended to be universal, lowered its bar starting in the 80s and it's stayed low in some areas.
Part of that is because academic positions are professor's rice bowls. The College of Law at the University of Wyoming, for example, openly wrings its hands in angst about whether low bar passage rates will mean the end of the school. It probably won't, but the spiraling "let's make passing the bar" easier reaction is the wrong one. Rather, the school probably ought to make itself tougher.
Some fields, we'd note, mostly scientific and engineering ones, can't lower the bar no matter what. They are what they are, and for that reason they keep on keeping on, unimpeded. They ought to be the model.
This would mean, society wide, that there would be fewer college graduates. So be it. Dropping the bar as low as it's gone means that lots of degrees have no value, and some degrees only have value within academia itself. As pointed out in our Oikophobia post the other day, if a degree only has value within academia, it probably really has very low value, and there may be a wholesale falseness associated with it.
Your value as a person is not determined by your performance on this exam or any other exam, your performance in law school nor the bar exam. Your value is inherent and inviolate and nothing can take it away from you.
Professor Shelley Cavalieri.
The law is a bitch.
Common, but unattributed.
We just touched on this topic.
When I took the bar exam, we used a state and national test. The state test was all essay, and only on the state's law. The exam took a couple of days, and was followed by an oral interview.
Prior to my taking the bar exam, the examiners, in the oral interview, could and did ask oral questions. That had been dropped by the time I took it.
Much more recently, the state went to the Universal Bar Exam, which is a joke. The state test was dropped. The interviews were dropped.
The quality of lawyers. . . dropped.
Interestingly, law grads locally are now having a hard time passing the UBE. It hasn't gotten tougher, everything has just declined.
Law schools, as noted, and state bars, spend a lot of time worrying about this, they shouldn't. Rather, they should take the counsel of Sgt. Ronald E. Adams. Maybe, if you can't cut the mustard, like Professor Cavalieri notes, you aren't a bad person, but just weren't meant to practice law.
I'll never get a gold medal in the Olympics. I won't win the Medal of Honor. I'm not going to be President.
But like most people, there are challenges that I have faced and will face. Demanding that the standards be lowered so I don't have to face them is a personal defeat, and a defeat for everyone else as well.
Footnotes
1. It may seem odd to start with a quote from the Coen Brother's comedy, Hail Caesar! here, but in fact, the movie is taken fairly seriously by philosophic and religious commentators. The Coen brothers themselves made comments at the time that it was released that it was actually a serious religious picture presenting "big questions". This has lead to discussion of whether the film, which is by two Jewish filmmakers, has a Christ figure in it.
Christianity Today, at the time of its release, stated.
This is a passion play, one with Eddie Mannix at its center, our Man of Sorrows, the savior of the (movie) world.... But he has reached a crossroads—a point of temptation, if you will. The tempter is a friendly Lockheed Martin executive, who wants him to abandon his true work in the world and come live the easy path.
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