Genetically Modified Organisms: A Catholic’s Animadversions

(A guest post by Peter A. Kwasniewski of Wyoming Catholic College)

Cloning and some other experimental or therapeutic procedures that constitute a direct assault on the human person’s dignity have been condemned by the Church’s Magisterium, but the case is not so clear with the genetic engineering of organisms more broadly speaking.  In the Holy Father’s discourse for the 35^th Assembly of the Worldwide Medical Association in 1983, we read that certain genetic manipulations violate the person’s rightful autonomy by reducing a human life to an object.¹  One could ask, more broadly: even if no non-human organism has the kind of inherent rights that distinguish persons from non-persons, should any natural thing ever be reduced to the status of a mere object?  In his message for the World Day of Peace on 1^st January 1990, the Pope said the following:

We can only look with deep concern at the enormous possibilities of biological research.  We are not yet in a position to assess the biological disturbance that could result from indiscriminate genetic manipulation and from the unscrupulous development of new forms of plant and animal life, to say nothing of unacceptable experimentation regarding the origins of human life itself.  It is evident to all that in any area as delicate as this, indifference to fundamental ethical norms, or their rejection, would lead mankind to the very threshold of self-destruction.

In an address to participants at a convention in 1982 on biological experimentation sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Holy Father did not directly engage the question of the licitness and prudence of gene modification, but seemed to take for granted the licitness of at least some procedures, repeating that research and application must be governed by universal moral norms (which are, to a large extent, left unspecified in this address).  An endorsement of genetically modified organisms [GMOs] is implicit in the statement: “I wish to recall . . . the important advantages that come from the increase of food products and from the formation of new vegetal species for the benefit of all, especially people most in need.”²

The procedure’s moral permissibility would appear to be upheld by the Magisterium, if we may regard as signs the amount of favorable discussion that has taken place under the auspices of the Vatican, as well as the largely optimistic treatment found in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (nn. 472–480).³

However, the debate is not exhausted by settling the question of licitness.  It is one thing to decide on the simple morality of GMOs—that is, whether or not fashioning such things is per se immoral—and another to make a prudential decision about the wisdom of their development, usage, and multiplication.  A perusal of the relevant Vatican documentation indicates how carefully endorsements are hedged about with cautionary notes and conditions.⁴  As always, if Church officials take a stance in regard to a strictly prudential matter such as the use of GMOs, they do so as offering their personal opinion—based, undoubtedly, on some legitimate reasons, but not binding on Catholics who evaluate the concrete situation differently.  The non-sinfulness of a given technology does not entail the desirability of its deployment.  For example, if a new technology would allow a cost-effective substitution of computers for bus drivers and train engineers, one could still doubt the wisdom of wiping out thousands of jobs that bring wages to workers and put a human face on an otherwise impersonal system.  I will come back later to this modern temptation of doing certain things mainly because we have figured out how to do them.  We exult in our triumphant dominion, but often fail to ask probing and uncomfortable questions about the potential dark side of our triumph.

We can sum up in three points what has been said so far about magisterial interventions.  First, it is one thing for the Holy Father to address a question with an explicit intention to determine the answer for all Catholics, and another thing for him to speak of some matter in a more hypothetical vein, offering his own judgment.⁵  This latter ought to be taken seriously, but it does not yet amount to definitive teaching.

Second, if the pope were to state that a particular form of technology (such as GMOs) is a positive benefit and should be deployed on a wide scale, this could only be a prudential judgment on his part, not a doctrinal one; the pope has no competency to select, much less command the use of, secular means for secular ends (though clearly he may forbid Catholics to use any morally dubious or disordered means, whether directed to good or to bad ends).  Put differently, for the use of GMOs to be obligatory, it would have to be proved that only by their use could poverty or food shortages be solved.  Even the most vigorous promoter of GMOs would not honestly be able to assert this, since in contingent human affairs there are many possible solutions, and it is often better morally to adopt a materially less satisfactory solution. ⁶ 

Third, what a Congregation or a Council or a particular curial official declares cannot be taken as the Holy See’s or Holy Father’s position; much less can it be taken as a definitive magisterial pronouncement until further, well-known criteria have been met.

General thoughts of a Catholic

In mid-November 2003, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace held a conference in Rome on “Genetically Modified Organisms and the Social Doctrine of the Church,” bringing together 67 “international experts.” ⁷  What I find really striking about the trend of the debate over GMOs among ethicists and scientists, exemplified in the reports I read about the conference, is the economist premises of most parties to the discussion.  The first questions are rarely disinterested ones such as: Are GMOs potentially disastrous for the environment and for the animals, including human beings, who will consume modified crops?  Could such modifications be an assault on the integrity of created being?  Is man authorized, even by his God-given dominion over nature, so to enter the innermost stuff of things and manipulate it?  These are the questions that thinkers and believers pose.  But the first questions in most discussions have tended to be: Can we find adequate ways of feeding the burgeoning poor of the Third World unless we have recourse to GMOs?  Will GMOs help poorer countries lift themselves out of low productivity?  In short, does the world economic situation demand GMOs?  Thus, for example, Fr. Gonzalo Miranda, Dean of the School of Bioethics of the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical Athenaeum, remarked in an interview: “If GMOs represent a real opportunity to foster the development of all countries, especially the neediest, it would be a real moral and solidaristic duty to favor their dissemination.” ⁸  “Resistance is a mixed bag of hypersensitivity to food safety, and a European agenda of protectionism,” commented US Ambassador to the Holy See, James Nicholson.  “Meanwhile people are dying in Africa.” ⁹

Yet we cannot simply undertake, systematically and globally, what is unquestionably the most breathtaking human modification of the natural environment in the history of agriculture without thorough, long-term, international, multifaceted research into every aspect of the problem.  Unfortunately, this is exactly what has not been done, and will not be done, as long as the wealthier regimes and their agri-business supporters are holding the reins.  A revealing article by F. William Engdahl in Current Concerns summarizes the synergy that unites the interests of the most powerful nations and of the most aggressive GMO companies, such as Monsanto. ¹⁰  “Most shocking is the near total absence of fundamental independent research on the possible effects on humans and animals of introducing GM substances into the food chain,” writes Engdahl, who goes on to summarize the few such studies that have been done, all of them warning urgently against the present rapid deployment of GMOs and identifying actual or potential GM-related damage to organisms.  Engdahl also notes the unsettling, though not surprising, fact that unfavorable research has been quickly stifled by the combined pressure of commercial and political interests.  Outspoken researchers have quickly lost their jobs. ¹¹

No wonder John Paul II, in a discourse on biological experimentation, warned against “every economic or political opportunism which reproduces the schemes of an old colonialism in a new scientific and technical edition.”¹²  At the conference of November 2003, a similar warning was sounded by Fr. Roland Lesseps, formerly a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans and now a scientist in Zambia:

There are other and more suitable ways to feed a hungry world than adopting a potentially dangerous technocratic approach.  Food is not merely another economic commodity governed in its production and distribution by the laws of the market. . . .  [G]enetic modification does not meet the tests of the social teaching of the Church for genuine integral development that respects human rights and the order of creation.

The spectre of consequentialism looms in pro-GMO arguments as in so many other arguments over global issues.  No matter if we risk irreparable damage to the natural world; no matter if we risk unforeseen, gradual side-effects that our controlled experiments could not have revealed; no matter if we are gambling with the gift of creation—there are people who need food and so we’ve got to multiply it.  The old-fashioned choices were bread from hard work and bread from heaven, one for the body, one for the soul.  The new choice is bread from technology.  It would be a dubious advance.  The truth least often proclaimed in discussions of GMOs is the truth that matters most: the main guarantor of poverty in the Third World, the ultimate source of the profound social unrest, cultural flux, and government futility we see all over the globe, is not inadequate agricultural technology, much less overpopulation.  It is social injustice rooted in massive political untruths.  Due to First World colonialism and its modern version, the “global village” (which Timothy Radcliffe OP has more aptly named the “global pillage”), starving people in one country are indirect slaves of wealthy people elsewhere, whose trash bins hold enough uneaten food to feed the poor twice over.  One can often find the origins of misery and overcrowding, and one can always find their compounding agents, in the theories of human life, of goods and values, state and society, money and commerce, espoused by Americans and Europeans of the modern age—theories that conveniently support the lifestyles of those who are “favored by fortune.”

In company with all the modern popes, we must have the courage and clear-sightedness to address the political-economic roots of the Third World crisis.  If we do not, how shall we resist the temptation whispered to us by the devil: “Use your money and brains to find a technological solution, and then you don’t have to change your decadent way of life, you don’t need to repudiate your ideologies!  You can multiply bread in the wilderness.  See, then, it’s not a win-loss scenario, but a win-win; we don’t have to fight over the pieces of a small pie, we just have to multiply the pies, and everybody will get some.”¹³  It is a devil’s bargain, for the devil is capable of guessing far better the effects of our selfish and short-sighted actions than we are, and he is only too glad to relieve temporary crises if he can gamble for long-term disasters.  He will be pleased if multinational conglomerates can, by owning a greater and greater share of the world’s plant species, dominate local economies and disenfranchise independent farmers.

At this point, someone might raise a double objection: first, that the entire world was “poor” a few centuries ago, not because of any exploitation but just because of a shortage of overall production; second, that capitalism, at its best, has increased the general sum of possessions across all classes, and at its worst, has merely enriched certain sectors and has left other sectors as they would always have been.  This argument is fallacious.  The miserable poverty that afflicts the masses in Mexico City or other such places in South America results from industrialization and urbanization, which are capitalist phenomena.  The simple and honorable poverty in which most men have lived throughout most of history is not of the grinding, horrifying sort described by Dickens in Hard Times.  On the other hand, it is true that not all poverty can be linked to Western structures of sin.  Nevertheless, the links are more numerous and more profound than most people are aware of.

In any event, there can be much hypocrisy involved in this rhetoric about “we’ve got to help poor African countries produce more food, so let’s genetically modify crops to produce bigger yields.” The real problem is not whether you can get fifty bushels or one hundred bushels from a field of wheat. The real problem, as the social encyclicals point out, is structures of sin.  One hundred bushels of wheat will fill some bellies over a short period; it won’t dissolve the structures that lead to mass poverty in the first place. Every Catholic has to bear witness that the crisis of the poor in the Third World and elsewhere is, to a large extent, our own fault—the fault of colonizers and neo-imperialists, of ideologies imported from Europe and America, of efforts to “help out” with contraceptives—and will never clear up until we reform ourselves.

Moreover, let us not lose sight of the less-than-honorable motivations of major GMO proponents, who are well positioned to profit enormously from the success of their enterprise.  Is it not a flagrant violation of social justice that a company should own a species of plant and charge people for its ongoing use?  In the past, a company has sold seeds to a farmer, and then the farmer owned the seeds and their produce.  By contrast, a GM seed is patented, and the company that designed it holds a stake in all the future seed that bears this genetic signature.  It seems, too, that techniques have been developed for designing seeds with an internal shut-down mechanism, so that after a number of generations the species would become infertile, compelling repurchase from the original manufacturer.  With such tactics, it will not be long before the world’s farmers gather in droves to pay their tithes to the Lords of Monsanto.

Particular thoughts of a philosopher

At first glance, the theory of evolution might seem to support the view that modifying an organism isn’t a big deal. After all, the evolutionist assumes that “Nature” has been modifying organisms more or less at random for millions of years, and the world is all right. Why can’t man play the role of natural selection, and “select” in favor of a bigger soybean, a worm-proof corn?  I will say a little later why human beings are foolish to try to “imitate Nature” in this manner, but it seems to me that this kind of evolutionary thinking remains at the surface of things, and does not engage the perennial issues.

If one takes seriously the Aristotelian-Thomistic notion of substantial form, to manipulate the material elements of a thing is an assault on its formal integrity.  On Aristotelian grounds, no one can actually modify a substantial form. But a scientist can certainly change the material elements, the “stuff”, because that is what our scientific instruments give us access to. No one can make me more or less a man, or change what it means to be a man, but he can chop off my arm, or reshape my nose, or pump drugs or hormones into me, or transplant an organ into my body. So too with plants: one can engineer their “stuff”, their DNA, but this will not ever bring about more than a variety, or at most, a combination of two closely-related organisms, or a modification of one species by some trait belonging to another species.

It is never the species in the philosophical sense that is being changed, but rather the coding that regulates the material unfolding of what is precontained in the form. And forms, as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas recognized,can hold within themselves great capacities for development that are not always actualized. So there is plenty of room in the traditional philosophy of nature to account for the kind of experimentation geneticists are doing and the results they get, just as there is ample room in Thomistic metaphysics for the kind of developments that scientists typically claim as evidence for evolution.

The problem is, for every change we make, we risk initiating a snowball effect in future generations that we cannot expect to know ahead of time. How could we know, with certainty, what our changes will provoke—in other plants, in insects, in animals who eat the crops, in people who eat the crops or the animals? When modified corn and soybeans test-planted in northern Europe got mixed up with regular plants, and hence got intothe food supply of the animals, people in those regions began to suffer hitherto unknown food allergies. This is not surprising. Allergies occur when the body rejects some organic matter deemed foreign, potentially dangerous; “this is something we can’t deal with,” the body’s systems are saying. The whole natural world could be ready to cry out, similarly, “these artificially-modified organisms are not something we can deal with in the long run!”

Even if genetic manipulation of an organism is not in itself morally off limits, a basic reverence for creation as it comes from God’s hands—respect for the natures that things have, awareness of the limits of organic tolerance, caution about unforeseen consequences—should be at work to dampen our enthusiasm for the project.  A failure to cultivate an appropriately cautious attitude would itself be a sin against prudence, whatever may be said of the scientific procedures involved. Let’s not try to make a plant bigger, stronger, more resistant, more winter-proof, etc. Instead let’s use, with ingenuity and a spirit of gratitude, what is already available in the ecosystem. If some version of the evolutionary hypothesis is true, then the world has evolved what it can deal with right now. If that hypothesis is false, a fortiori the species we’ve got are what God intends for the world, at least at this time. In either case, technological interference is a bad idea and deserves opposition. Even if there were a slight chance of serious long-term problems, that would be more than sufficient to defeat the wisdom of GMO implementation.

One wishes that the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace would get some heavy-duty moral theologians and natural philosophers down in Rome to wrestle with the big questions, unencumbered by prior political commitments.¹⁴  Perhaps their reflection would lead them to advocate a stance of utmost vigilance, out of a legitimate love for the natural world, that fragile, magnificent gift of God.  Respect for God’s creation would seem to demand, at very least, that one should not tamper with the genetic structure of living things.  That is their inner sanctuary.  As Wendell Berry recounts:

Wes Jackson of the Land Institute said once, thinking of the nuclear power and genetic engineering industries, “We ought to stay out of the nuclei.”  I remember that because I felt that he was voicing, not scientific intelligence, but a wise instinct: an intuition, common enough among human beings, that some things are and ought to be forbidden to us, off-limits, unthinkable, foreign, properly strange.

Berry goes on to note the naiveté of believing in, or the hypocrisy of appealing to, the “freedom” and “neutrality” of scientific research:

A good many people, presumably, would have chosen to “stay out of the nuclei,” but that was a choice they did not have.  When a few scientists decided to go in, they decided for everybody.  This “freedom of scientific inquiry” was immediately translated into the freedom of corporate and/or governmental exploitation.  And so the freedom of the originators and exploiters has become, in effect, the abduction and imprisonment of all the rest of us.  Adam was the first, but not the last, to choose for the whole human race.¹⁵

Objections and replies

Let us return to the most common objection against my view.  “Feeding the poor is so pressing a task, so noble an end, that it fully justifies the use of whatever means are available, unless there is something intrinsically immoral about them.  Thus, if you cannot prove to me that GMOs are simply immoral, I conclude that their use is mandated.”

The flaw in the argument is this.  It may be the case that a particular GMO seed will not, as a matter of fact, prove environmentally harmful.  However, unless we are certain of this fact, and in general, until we could be certain that we are genuinely entitled, as stewards of the natural world, to break into and modify the fundamental structures of things, we have an obligation to exercise extreme caution and to refrain from activity.  The application of technology without adequate assurance of safety is itself immoral.  What would constitute adequate assurance in a matter as subtle, complex, and grave as this one is probably such that it could never, in principle, be attained, and so the legitimacy of using GMO products would remain perpetually questionable.

The burden of my argument is this: genetic modification ought to worry people simply because of what it is—a way of manipulating natural codes we do not fully understand, with effects we may not be able to envision much less control.  All that we do is going to be irreversibly perpetuated in the wild once the seeds are out there, as has already happened and will continue to happen at an accelerating pace.¹⁶  This is a much more serious matter than, say, pollution caused by cars or airplanes.  All engines cause pollution, and pollution in general is a bad thing.  But there is only a remote connection between the use of any particular machine and the harm of the earth’s atmosphere.  The atmosphere can handle a lot of pollution, pollution isn’t self-reproducing, and finally, we and our animals don’t directly consume pollution, though it affects us in a variety of ways.  With GM seeds intended for the open fields—seeds that will grow into plants bearing many more seeds, until, by predictable patterns of consumption and random distribution, these new varieties come to be present in the entire food supply—there is a far more immediate, and a far deeper, concern.

To turn the objection on its head: if you cannot tell me that you are certain that this exercise of mastery over nature will not be a catastrophe in the long run, I can argue with considerable probability that it is immoral to attempt it.  Something similar can be said about the development of nuclear weapons.  Had the physicists in question known or even suspected what they were going to end up with, this foreknowledge would have rendered gravely immoral any effort of theirs directed toward inventing a nuclear weapon.  Had they known or suspected the future evil, perhaps they would never have consented to begin the project, let alone bring it to completion.  Perhaps.  One wonders if modern man will ever learn his lessons.

A related objection would run like this: “Maybe I don’t know enough about GMOs, but I don’t see a clear line in your argument to separate the high-tech processes from the things that farmers routinely to do make their crops richer and sturdier.  After all, if you design a disease-resistant carrot or something like that, aren’t you perfecting a thing, and so bringing it closer to its ideal condition?  At any rate, we have a divine mandate to subdue the earth, presumably meaning that we should harness nature’s forces to serve the legitimate needs of mankind.  I don’t find a compelling argument that gene modification crosses a clear moral threshold.”¹⁷

My response is this.  What farmers have always done is to combine or separate strains already given in nature, to make a stronger plant with bigger yield, and so forth.  This new strain, though produced by artful interventions, is no less natural, and no more a product of human engineering strictly speaking, than the original strains.  Breeders do the same with animals to produce “better” varieties.  Whatever the change may be—a healthier grain with a bigger yield, a new strain of rose with a captivating scent, a fatter and meatier pig—man has stayed out of the nucleus; he has not profaned the sanctuary where an organism’s destiny is determined.  He has merely, though cleverly, orchestrated which genes, among those that are naturally present, are going to dominate through reproduction.  Breeding brings into proximity strains that could have naturally bred; whatever the results are, they are entirely secundum naturam—in accord, that is, with the natures of the organisms.  Specialized crops or bred animals, when released into the wild to mingle with native varieties, revert to native characteristics with surprising swiftness.  That is because nothing was really done to the genetic blueprint of the species; its possibilities were artfully drawn out, and nature can just as easily draw them back in.

Genetic modification, in contrast, is an “inside” operation that touches on the most fundamental material identity of an organism, the “program” it follows in living.  We have now the power to do this, but have we the warrant?  Compare atomic energy and nuclear bombs: we discovered how to make a radioactive explosion equivalent to thousands of conventional bombs, but can we, by any stretch of reasoning, seriously maintain that this was part of our divine mandate to subdue the earth?  It is, on the contrary, a perversion of our godlike image, a “playing at God” rather than a cooperation with Him.  If we were not habituated from childhood to place an implicit trust in all the goals and means of scientific research, we would feel an instinctive repugnance to the very idea of “modifying organisms.”  Berry quotes apposite lines from C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength: “Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God.  The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory [one would have to add now: the geneticist’s laboratory] were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnancies was the first essential for progress.”¹⁸

The goal of producing the “perfect carrot” is another example of Cartesian idealism, as if the natures of material things were indefinitely perfectible, as if man for his part could find the key to an endless perfectibility, appealing to “compassion for the poor” as his motivation (though in one’s idealism, one shouldn’t forget about owners and investors who would collect a handsome profit from sales of “perfect carrot” seed).

I am all in favor of measures for the poor, even radical ones; but the Church has never ceased to preach, and to demonstrate in action, that the measures must be above all social and spiritual, not technological.  A technological solution is often a way of keeping bad lifestyles intact while stopping up the cracks in the dam so that the inevitable collapse of Western capitalist culture can be postponed a little while longer.  Getting back to carrots: God created the carrot’s nature, whether directly by a creative act, or mediately through virtutes seminales implanted in more basic creatures.  In either case, it exists as He wishes it to exist in the ecosystem.  Maybe the carrot’s imperfections, if it has any that a carrot shouldn’t have, are linked to the fall of man, since the whole of nature mysteriously fell when its lord and master fell; maybe they stem merely from the inevitable imperfection of each and every material thing as such, since prime matter is an indeterminate potency that substantial form cannot altogether master.  In either case, the carrot (or any other species) in its very limitations is more than sufficient for our needs, if we farm according to sound agricultural principles.  By trying to improve upon it from within, we cross the line from stewardship, which receives thankfully and works diligently, to an arrogant emulation of God’s creative power.

In the final analysis, GMOs are a potent manifestation of the attitude of the “mastery of nature” found in Francis Bacon and René Descartes, which is plainly Luciferian and in no way Christian.  For Bacon, final causality exists only in the case of man, who freely acts for an end.  In the case of other bodies, finality must be totally dismissed, for it is no more than a misleading metaphor.  Bacon thus denies that anything in the natural world truly acts for an end.  But if nature has no end, if it is simply malleable matter, there could be nothing wrong with reshaping it to correspond, as closely as technology allows, to man’s freely-chosen intentions.  One might even say that if something doesn’t have an end, it is a good thing to give it one.  The male chauvinists used to say: “A woman needs a man to give her direction.”  Similarly, the Baconian master of nature says: “What we call ‘plants’ and ‘animals’ are just raw materials waiting to be directed, channeled, used.”  The moment we let go of formal and final causalities, the basis for ethical limitations is abandoned.  If a plant or animal has no nature or essence—if it is simply matter obeying laws—then there is no reason why man, who has discovered those laws, should not reconstitute the matter as he wishes, for his own purposes.  There is simply nothing else that deserves to be taken into consideration.

To be skeptical about this attitude does not mean that one must be a romantic or a purist toward the natural world, viewing human intervention as necessarily or even generally bad, and, in contrast, thinking it optimal to leave everything untouched in its wild state.  Were this true, even primitive agriculture would count as a betrayal of naturalness, and hunting and gathering would count as aggression.  But there is good reason to see the modern (post-Reformation) attitude toward and treatment of nature as a departure from a healthy Catholic attitude, which recognizes in the world both a metaphysical symbol of the beauty of God and a storehouse for human needs, an incentive to human industry.  This is what one finds, for example, in St. Bonaventure’s authentically Franciscan cosmology.¹⁹

When we are uncertain about what is right and what is wrong on a difficult issue, we must not abdicate our social responsibility out of awe before the high priests of statecraft or salesmanship, but keep our freedom of judgment intact while searching for the truth.  At all costs we should not fall prey to the universal assumption that we might as well try out new technology even if we still have some disturbing questions about its long-term consequences; “we can do it, therefore we should do it.”  This is what got us nuclear weapons, contraceptives, and other technological burdens.  It might prove no different with GMOs.  As Fr. Lawrence Dewan OP has written: “some technical devices, viewed not merely as works of art but as expressions of total human appetite, can be the very embodiment of perversion.  Technology can be put in the service of virtue, but it can also be put in the service of vice, i.e. greed, unscrupulous power, the lascivious life, massive injustice.”²⁰

My plea, then, is a plea for caution, for serious investigation, for clear thinking.  Without this, we may stumble ahead, with all our good intentions, into a major ecological crisis for which absolutely no remedy exists.²¹

NOTES

1 The discourse, given in French, is contained in Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, vol. VI,2 (July-December 1983), 917–23.

2 The text, in English, may be found in Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, vol. V,3 (July-December 1982), 889–93, n. 6, emphasis in original.

3 It cannot be overlooked that the vagueness and ambivalence of most of the official statements to date render a clear-cut stance, whether for or against, hard to maintain.  I have begun to wonder if this is not an unintentional admission on the part of the people who write these documents that the problem is too complicated for them, and that they would prefer not to get too involved in the business of discernment and judgment.  If so, it may be that such statements are ultimately more a disservice than a service to people who are actually attempting such discernment and judgment.

4 For example, the Compendium of Social Doctrine states that man is permitted to intervene to improve characteristics or properties of living beings, but then says that any intervention that may have a forceful and widespread impact on organisms should not be enacted lightly or irresponsibly (n. 473).  But what does this mean, concretely?  If genetic modification is not an example of a procedure with deep, far-reaching, and worrisome implications for the environment, what is?

5 The papal intention is clear from such circumstances as the manner of speaking, the type of document employed, and the frequency of a doctrine’s reiteration.

6 Cf. Compendium of Social Doctrine, n. 474: “[O]ne must avoid falling into the error of believing that only the spreading of the benefits connected with the new techniques of biotechnology can solve the urgent problems of poverty and underdevelopment that still afflict so many countries on the planet.”

7 The proceedings of this conference have been published in a volume entitled OGM: Minaccia o Speranza? and published by ART.  These proceedings join two earlier publications of importance for our subject: the Pontifical Academy for Life’s Animal and Plant Biotechnology: New Frontiers and New Responsibilities (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1999) and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ Genetically Modified Plants for the Production of Food (2001).  Both of these may be regarded as generally in favor of genetic modification.  The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004) contains a section on biotechnologies, nn. 472–480.  Finally, in September 2004, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the US Embassy to the Holy See sponsored another conference: “Feeding the Hungry: The Moral Imperative of Biotechnology.”  The build-up in pro-GM propaganda can be seen simply in the progression of the conference titles.  One may be forgiven, I hope, for thinking Vatican officials guilty of naïveté; does it need to be pointed out to them that huge American commercial and political interests are at stake in the deployment of GMOs?

8 See Zenit report ZE03112104.

9 In an interview with Delia Gallagher for the Zenit News Service.  It is to be noted that the US Embassy to the Holy See has played a front-ranking, even aggressive role in the promotion of GMOs at the Vatican.

10 See “Gene-manipulated Seeds: Are We Losing Our Food Security Too?”, Current Concerns, July 2004, no. 4, p. 1.

11 Ibid.

12 Insegnamenti V.3, 893 (see note 2 supra).

13 I am paraphrasing some comments made by a well-known advocate of the free market; see www.acton.org/publicat/randl/interview.php?id=14.

14 See notes 5 and 7.

15 Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), 76–77.

16 See the summary of inevitable GM crop pollution in Engdahl, p. 1.

17 The words in the Book of Genesis about subduing and having dominion over the earth (cf. 1:26–28) have got to be among the most badly abused verses in the entire sacred book. Listen, for example, to how Fr. Gonzalo Miranda glosses it: “Some people think that genetic manipulation of living beings is an ethically reprehensible act because it tends to alter what is natural, but the Church’s anthropological view leads to different conclusions. . . .  God has put man as a gardener of creation, who must act with responsibility to cultivate and take care of creation.”  Do we not encounter in these words the fallacy that Greek logicians long ago called begging the question?

18 Cited in Life is a Miracle, 75.

19 See my article “The World as Symbol of Divine Beauty in the Thought of St. Bonaventure,” Faith & Reason 24/25 (1999–2000): 31–54.

20 Antimodern, Ultramodern, Postmodern: A Plea for the Perennial,” Etudes Maritainiennes \ Maritain Studies 9 (1993), 7–28; 24.  Fr. Dewan goes on to say: “Technology, by virtue of the very richness it has attained to in our time, forces us to face up to the essence of morality, to ask what questions we should really be asking.  Should we merely consider: is the undertaking feasible?  Will it work?  Or will we be the sort of people who ask whether it is a procedure which accords with a noble idea of humanity?”

21 The author wishes to express his thanks for comments received from readers of an earlier draft: Dr. Helen Watt of the Linacre Centre, Prof. Celia Deane-Drummond of the Centre for Religion and the Biosciences, Philip Lawler, Philip Zaleski and Stratford Caldecott.  My mention of these readers does not imply that they agree with the opinions I have expressed.

Contra Thomas Woods

Almost five years ago I wrote for ChroniclesMagazine.org a piece attacking Thomas Woods’ views on the authority of Catholic social teaching. My main point was that Woods exalted the supposed teaching of economics, specifically Austrian economics, over the authority of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. At that time there was a further reply by Woods and a response by me and numerous comments by readers.

Then this past fall the Catholic Social Science Review published a scholarly article by me on the implications for economics of papal social teaching. The journal published this as a symposium, with a formal response by Thomas Woods and some shorter responses. Then around the beginning of this month Woods posted his CSSR response to me on lewrockwell.com. Because he had taken this dispute to a wider audience I felt compelled to make a further response. The editors of ChroniclesMagazine.org have kindly allowed this to appear on their website. It is in four parts.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

—Thomas Storck

An Accidental Beauty

In my last post I lamented the passing of the small city forest I walked beside early in the morning on my postal route. The destruction is nearly complete, the final bit of woodland in the process of being devoured. This is the piece of land on the west side of the retirement community, a narrow valley with apartment buildings on the far side.

It is indeed sad, this loss of good wildlife habitat in the middle of the city, and I will miss the proximity of the woods on my morning walk: the birdsongs, the green, the sound of wind in the leaves. But I am realizing that, true to form, beauty endures.

First, apparently the corporation that sold the timber off the land does not own all of the woods; the far hillside on the western end is not theirs, and the clear-cut stops where the far hill rises. And on the south and east sides, too, there is forest beyond the clear-cut.

Secondly, the cutting of the trees has opened a splendid view of rolling hills that could not be seen before. And of course the current moonscape will not endure. When Spring comes  millions of  opportunistic seedlings will sprout and grow, and by May the view will be of green rolling fields with woods and hills beyond. Not as lovely as walking beside a wood, but not bad.

This is the way God works, after all: every sin opens the way for new grace, every fall a new redemption. Even where human misrule has all but obliterated the natural world wildflowers bloom through the concrete’s cracks. In the words of Hopkins, there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

Of course the long term prognosis is not good. The land is for sale and is zoned for multifamily housing. Should the economy revive, my soon-to-be green field will be gone. But I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it. And hope for some new, unforeseen good, some accidental beauty, to appear even there.

—Daniel Nichols

Ironic Destruction

One of the things I quickly came to love about my new postal route last year when I started it was my morning walk by the woods. One of the first deliveries is a retirement community, 150 small apartments nestled on 20 or so rolling acres, surrounded on three sides by forest, right in the middle of town. In the summer it is the coolest time of day and the hour or so it takes to deliver it became a soothing part of my routine, the deep green of the woods, the bird-songs, and the Jesus Prayer proved a great preparation for the rest of the day. Of course, in the winter mornings are cold, but in all but the most inclement weather a brisk walk will warm you in about fifteen minutes.

I don’t know if you know any postal workers, but in the last year or so things have gotten bad in the workplace. With diminished volume we have been losing a lot of money. I like to say that the Postal Service is like a cross between “Dilbert” and “Beetle Bailey”: it is a government bureaucracy trying to act like a corporation. So you end up with the worst aspects of socialism wedded to the dumbest parts of capitalism. Postal management is a bastion of mediocrity, and the response to the crisis consists of micromanagement from afar combined with an effort to squeeze ever more out of the workers. Morale is the worst I have seen in 25 years. All of this has served to confirm my aversion to bigness and centralization in all its forms, not to mention the necessity of labor unions. Faceless bureaucrats in Cleveland, an hour away, who have never delivered mail, send down decisions telling us how to do our jobs, which would be comical were it not for the fact that it often hinders our attempts to deliver the mail efficiently. I won’t bore you with the details, but mail is actually delayed daily by managerial fiat, just so their numbers look good. And as I said, they are putting the squeeze on postal workers. When someone retires now, they most often eliminate their route, splitting the deliveries among the other carriers. I recently had roughly an hour added to my route, for example, and am expected to “absorb” it; that is, do it in the same amount of time as before. This has led, as you can imagine, to increased stress and frequent conflict with supervisors.

And I used to love my job.

So I really came to appreciate my contemplative morning walk by the woods. But there is a good reason the Salve Regina calls this world a valley of tears: things can always get worse.

About two months ago an unfamiliar noise was coming from the east end of the small city forest. When I got near I saw men in trucks and bulldozers. In a few days they had constructed a sawmill. When I asked the ladies in the office what was going on, they told me that a logging crew was thinning the woods. I was relieved; it just sounded like good stewardship. But they have proceeded to clear-cut the entire woods, stripping the land down to bare earth. In another week or two the whole piece of land will resemble a moonscape. Thinning? It would be more like walking into the barbershop, asking for a trim, and walking out with a bald and bleeding scalp. Apparently the owners, a corporation in- where else?- Cleveland, decided to milk as much profit as possible before selling the land for development.

Now I realize that we need lumber. But it seems shameful to harvest it from one of the few stands of timber in the city. Among other things, I feel bad for all the old people, whose birdfeeders now stand silent. And I have never liked clear-cutting. I remember once, hiking the wooded hills of northwest Michigan, a green landscape broken only by deep crystalline lakes, I came across a beech forest that had been clear-cut. Beech trees have a smooth bark, like grey skin, and the limbs lying scattered about looked like severed arms and legs, as if silver giants had been slaughtered and dismembered.

What will sound strange to someone not in an area like this is that the men on the bulldozers were wearing straw hats: it was an Amish logging crew. But, most will object, the Amish don’t use machines, do they? Well, there are Amish and then there are Amish, roughly divided into “Old Order” and “New Order” branches. The strictest Old Order community is not technically Amish; they are Hoover Old Order Mennonite, and they do not use any machines at all. They live in Ontario and in Kentucky. Around here, the most austere sect is the Swartzentruber Amish, who eschew all machinery except the diesel washing machine, which tells you something about the power of women in this patriarchal society.

Old Order Amish are easy to spot: men wear their hair in a distinctive earlobe-length bowl cut and their beards are untrimmed. All but the Hoovers shave the mustache, which smacks of the military to these pacifists. Clothing is homemade and dark in color, unlike the bright colors the New Orders wear (with short sleeves, no less). Old Order buggies have no lights except a lantern, and no reflective tape. In hilly eastern Ohio this is a safety hazard, it is true, but a matter of conscience as well.

New Order communities are marked by a more evangelical faith as well as greater openness to modernity and technology. Amish praxis is a continuum, and decisions about technology are made at the congregational level, but the most lax of the New Order groups use tractors in the field- though they still travel by horse and buggy- buy clothes off the rack, trim their hair and beards, and unlike the Old Orders, eschew tobacco and liquor. Among the more affluent, homes look like conventional suburban houses, and while they do not  use electricity from the grid, they do have propane powered refrigerators and other appliances and gas lights that flick on with a switch.

New Order Amish allow even greater freedom in using technology for business. Moses Miller, a farmer who runs a vegetable market I stop at in the summer, uses a calculator, for example. I know too of an Amish cement contractor who has a fleet of trucks and all the other machinery associated with modern masonry.

Hence the logging crew.

The second thing that might puzzle those who don’t live near them is that these Amishmen plundered this pretty little forest for the profit they could pocket. The Amish are widely regarded as environmentally aware, after all. The “English” tend to romanticize the Amish. Indeed, I edited a magazine that was frequently accused of this because we saw Amish culture as a model of sustainability. But it wasn’t true; my moment of disillusion came in the late 70s, long before Caelum et Terra, when I lived in St Mary’s County, Maryland, were there are small Amish and Mennonite communities. I remember being shocked when I saw buggies parked at McDonald’s and KMart. I don’t know what I expected, but this was a surprise. Maybe I thought the Amish so different that they would never succumb to a Big Mac or a blue light special.

But if you live in an area with a large Amish population it doesn’t take long to realize that, as in every community, there are both saints and sinners among them. Indeed, among the local “English” the sins are exaggerated: like everywhere with a visible minority there is a good deal of prejudice around here. Much of this revolves around the practice of “rumspringa”, the “running around” period when much misbehavior is tolerated among Amish young people, before they have been baptized and obliged to follow the Ordung, the Amish rule of life. This causes a good deal of scandal among the locals, though most of the mischief is petty: drinking and carousing, traffic tickets while driving their illicit cars. But sometimes crimes are more serious. There are a couple of Amishmen listed on the local sex offender registry, for example. And in the last year or so the area was racked by two violent crimes, a rarity among the Amish.

In the first, an Amishman murdered his wife and son, then turned the gun on himself. In the second, an Amishman and his Mennonite lover- apparently one of several adulterous relationships he was involved in- were convicted of plotting the murder of his wife, the mother of his five children. The woman pulled the trigger while he established an alibi, fishing with some friends. They were convicted quickly, as the crime had been plotted in easily retrievable text messages (he was a New Order businessman). As the names of the criminals- Mullet and Weaver- were not stereotypically Amish- Yoder or Hostetler, say- the national media never picked up on the stories and there was little attention paid beyond the Wooster Daily Record. I was surprised by this; murder among the Amish is such an anomaly I thought someone would notice.

What is more likely to draw national attention is the community’s other anomalies, like when the Pennsylvania Amish reached out in forgiveness to the man who gunned down their schoolchildren and to his family. This is more typical of the ethos of the community, whatever the sins of individuals.

Indeed, on a purely cultural level it is hard not to idealize the Amish. To drive through the countryside just south of where I live is to pass mile after mile of well-tended farms and productive homesteads, with hundreds of small workshops. It is a distributist dream; a garden-like landscape. Or, with all the long beards and wide-brimmed hats, like the Shire, only filled with wizards instead of hobbits. Just don’t generalize from this to notions of sinless Amish environmentalists.

After all, the Amish loggers, after violating that little forest in a fit of ironic destruction, went home to those idyllic small farms. Whatever ugliness they  worked they  did not take it home with them. They left it with us, the 150 old people and I, our once verdant corner of the city now barren. I wonder if any of them even gave it a second thought.

At least no one can take the Jesus Prayer away from me.

—Daniel Nichols

Second Generation Soul Gardening

Editing the journal Caelum et Terra was a rewarding experience, but it was also at times a frustrating one. We had Big Ideas, all right. But we always had a small readership. At its peak, we had around 2,000 subscribers. People would sign up after reading a positive review in the Catholic press- we got good reviews in everything from The Wanderer to The Catholic Worker- but most of them did not renew their subscriptions. Many of these folks felt compelled to write letters to the editor, often hostile and sometimes unintentionally funny, explaining just why it was that we were not what they were looking for. We were too Left, too Right, too Catholic, not Catholic enough, too hippie (the phrase “superannuated flower children” stuck in my mind).

But for those who renewed, C&T was a lifeline, a connection to like-minded people. We had an unusually devoted readership. And while we didn’t appear to have much influence on the Church or the world, we did have a big influence on this small band of readers, many of whom took the ideas we wrote about much further than we ourselves did. And they in turn influenced their children , many of whom took these ideas even further.

I think of Jenny Baklinski, nee Hayden, eldest daughter of enthusiastic C&T readers. Her parents were intensive gardeners and soap makers, pioneers of humanure; the mom sewed the family’s clothes. But the dad kept his day job, like most of us. Jenny, on the other hand, is farming 200 acres in Ontario -about as far north as one can possibly farm- with her husband Tim, a couple of brothers, and her small children. She married into a large and close rural family, so her life is rich in the sort of community life that most of us do without. Recently she wrote about protecting their livestock from marauding wolves. Their income is supplemented by the soapmaking she learned at her mother’s knee, and by Tim’s piano teaching.

Or I think of another young man, Luke Dougherty, son of a couple who hosted the Steubenville Caelum et Terra reading circle in the early 90s, and who own a small homestead and a milk cow. Luke married into a farming family in Minnesota; he is a full time farmer and part time handyman. His wife just had their first child and he is apparently a very happy man.

Now I am not saying that one has to be fending off wolves and otherwise living the pioneer life to aspire to the whole sort of life we espoused. Tom Storck’s son Michael is a college professor, but he often bicycles to work, gardens, and has raised chickens.

And last week we had the rare treat of spending time with the Nickelsons, a young family living in Washington state. Sia Nickelson is the daughter of Will and Dru Hoyt, who own a small farm an hour east of here. Will wrote the wonderful article “Into the Rose”,  a beautiful meditation on the life of John Muir, for the magazine.

When I first met Sia, in the mid 90s, when her family moved to Ohio from Berkeley, she was 13. I was struck even then by the way she integrated the best of the hippie counterculture with her Catholic faith. T Bone Burnett may have sang that the culture kept all the bad and destroyed all the good, in his song “The Sixties” but Sia did the opposite. She was intent, from an early age, at living life in a beautiful and earthy and spiritually fruitful way. In the years before she married she became an accomplished potter, though with three little boys she hardly has time for much of that now.

Sia’s husband Justin is a fine fellow, and we enjoyed the sort of good conversation that is too rare in my life. I long ago learned to avoid discussion of social doctrine and politics with my coreligionists, as it nearly always ends in total frustration. But Justin is one of those Catholics who considers the Church’s teachings to be more authoritative than any ideology. He is a Catholic radical and one of the few people I have encountered with whom I agree on almost everything. You can hardly imagine what a treat this was.

What’s more, Sia presented us with a copy of a new journal she has published with some friends. It is called Soul Gardening: Thoughts from the Home Front, and it is lovely. It is narrower in focus than Caelum et Terra, a small quarterly for Catholic mothers, but it very much continues the older magazine’s sensibility. First, aesthetically, Soul Gardening is beautiful, with a spare and elegant look and finely rendered line drawings, many by Sia. Secondly, there is the content. There are articles about raising chickens in the city, on liturgical seasons, and on candlelit family prayer. This last is by Mary Pemberton, daughter of Catholic writer, artist and iconographer Michael O’Brien, who once did a cover for us.

Sia is asking a donation of $14 a year for a subscription but will send it to anyone who asks. But I hope you will send a little more than the suggested offering.

While most of the second generation CTers do not share the technophobia that marked the magazine, and are very comfortable with the new media in all its forms, and while the young moms who produce this little gem of a journal began with the Coffee and Diapers blog a few years ago, I think this effort to produce a tangible, real thing you can hold in your hands, a real journal, deserves our support.

You can subscribe and send your donations to: Sia Nickelson, 7314 NE 58th Avenue, Vancouver, WA 98661

The byline of Caelum et Terra was suggested by a friend in Virginia, a former Baptist seminarian who later spent some years in a Zen Buddhist monastery, and who devoted himself to intensive greenhouse gardening and raising free range chickens. However eclectic his background, I am struck now more than ever by the utter aptness of the line he suggested: “The Kingdom of Heaven is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground and should sleep and rise day and night and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how”.

—Daniel Nichols

Our Man in Sudan

Franciscan Father Harold Joseph Brock was a contributing editor to Caelum et Terra, the magazine. Most issues he contributed a column called “Notes from the City”, about his experiences working with the poor and homeless in the very colorful South Bronx. When studies for ordination became too time-consuming other friars filled in with their own stories. Since ordination to the priesthood Father Herald was a founding member of a friary in Honduras, where he served for several years. For the last year and a half he has been working as a missionary in Sudan, serving the struggling Church in that troubled land.

Father maintains a web journal from his mission, with fine writing and lots of photos. It is eye-opening, this first-hand reportage, and it is heartening to see what God has done with this one man’s heartfelt desire to serve God in His poor. Check it out at cfrsudan.blogspot.com. Pray for Father Herald, and if you can, contribute financially to our old friend’s vital work.

—Daniel Nichols

Opposite Day

On Tuesday, voters here in Ohio will decide several ballot initiatives, including Issue 2, which will, by  constitutional amendment, establish a state board to oversee livestock production. At first, what I heard sounded good, a lot of talk about family farms, local food, and humane husbandry. One group promoting the initiative calls itself “Ohioans for Livestock Care”, which evokes images of herdsmen tending their flocks. The group’s website is www.safelocalohiofood.com.

But then I started noticing things, like the fact that the big stinky dairy farm I pass on the way to work sports a “Yes on 2″ sign out front. This is a farm that confines cattle to feedlots. That is, the cows eat from their troughs while standing in their own shit. And I noticed that huge amounts of money were pouring into the campaign for 2: mailings several times a week, billboards, radio commercials, ubiquitous mass-produced signs.

If there is an organized opposition to Issue 2 I haven’t seen it, only a few letters to the editor and a hand-lettered sign in front of a small organic farm south of town.

Then I saw a list of sponsors of the bill, which includes every agribusiness organization in the state: the pork producers, the egg factories, the beef and dairy “industries.” Plus the Chamber of Commerce and the Republican and Democratic parties. And weirdly, the Catholic bishops of Ohio. Agriculture in Ohio is big business, and apparently no one wants to cross it.

One flier was particularly telling. It said that the proposed board would protect Ohio farmers from outside animal rights groups that want to impose strict controls and even eventually outlaw livestock production in the state. Of course only a tiny percentage of Ohioans are vegans, and the odds of this are about as likely as a group of Manichees outlawing sex. And what is the source of this scary prospect? Well, it seems the Humane Society is trying to get a referendum on the ballot for the next election which would insure that confined animals would have room to stand up and turn around in their cages. That’s it; a pretty modest proposal, but such a threat to Big Farm Inc that they are striving to get a constitutional amendment passed to protect themselves from it. And exactly how does allowing animals to turn around in their cages make Ohio livestock any less safe or local? It doesn’t, obviously,but no matter. Hirsute PETA types serve here as the Scary Outsider, a staple in modern American politics, and the Industry has latched onto buzzwords that have nothing to do with the issue at hand. How can anyone be against safe local food?

Now, I am no vegetarian. Indeed, as a member of a Church whose central rite is rooted in Jewish Temple worship, in which the priest and people consume a Lamb after sacrificing Him, I think any moral objection to meat-eating highly problematic. Monks and ascetics, and the faithful during fasting times, may abstain from meat as an act of penance, but that is entirely different. It is giving up a good thing, like the celibate foregoing the joys of the marital embrace for the sake of something greater.

That said, there is something deeply wrong with industrial livestock production. In domesticating animals there is forged a sort of primal covenant. Yes, the advantages for humankind are evident: the stronger muscles of the ox or draft horse, the concentrated (and tasty) protein of eggs, milk, and meat.

But there is something in it for the animal as well: protection from predators, foods like cultivated grain which are not found in the wild, a secure source of sustenance in the winter, warmer and sturdier shelters than it can construct on its own. When man respects the nature of the domesticate animal, its life is more secure -and arguably happier- than that of its wild cousin.

But when  beasts are subjected to standing in their own excrement, or living in the crowded hovel of the egg factory, where chickens never see the sun or feel the earth beneath their feet, or breathe anything but the toxic ammonia-ridden air of their own waste, where instead of tender grain and succulent clover God’s creatures are fed offal and garbage, the farmer has drastically broken the covenant. These animals are living a life infinitely worse than they would in the wild.

Clearly Issue 2, with its supporting roster of agribusiness organizations, is designed to protect factory farms. Cloaking its true intent with slogans about safe and local food, on animal care, is cynical and Orwellian.

So Tuesday will be Opposite Day in Ohio, and it is not unlikely that most Ohioans will be duped, lulled by the nice words, and Issue 2 will pass, blown in on a wind of lies.

—Daniel Nichols

The Hitchhiker’s Lament

A friend at work recently returned from a trip to California. He had spent an afternoon in the redwoods and had been most impressed by the magical beauty of the place, surely one of the spots the Celts called “thin places”, where the veil between the worlds is translucent. That got me thinking of the afternoon I had spent in the redwood forest, nearly thirty years ago. It was in the middle of a long cross-country hitchhiking trip, from Virginia to Arkansas to Minnesota to Washington, then down the coast to California. I spent my redwoods afternoon in the company of a barefoot young woman who had picked me up, one of the two rides in my long history as a thumb gypsy that ended with a goodbye kiss.

Yes, unbelievable as it may seem, thirty years ago pretty young women stopped for hitchhikers. So did little old ladies, couples and families. It was not unusual to be taken home by drivers, fed and given a place for the night. True, the typical ride was a solitary male, but these other rides were not unusual.

Which is not to say that travel by thumb was perfectly safe even then. I had a few rides that scared me badly. One of the worst was when I was violating my own hitching code: I was on a freeway and it was after dark. It was in western Massachusetts, around two in the morning, there was a foot of snow on the ground and there were few cars. I didn’t think my sleeping bag would keep me warm, so I was going to hitch all night. A car finally pulled over and I got in. The driver was a huge man and I immediately sensed danger. It is uncanny, but peril is perceived quickly when hitchhiking. Sure enough, he started right in, talking about his homosexual exploits and the gun he had under the seat. The road was deserted and I sincerely worried that I would not survive this ride, but in the end he let me out when I told him to. Apparently terrifying me was a sufficient kick for him.

There were several other scary rides and some very unpleasant experiences. Once in Wyoming- again at night- a pickup truck full of drunken cowboys passed and a beer bottle was hurled at me. When the brake lights lit up and the truck did a U-turn I headed off into the sagebrush. They drove back and forth a while, cursing out threats, but eventually gave up and left. The next morning, my thumb out again, a truck slowed. My relief turned to alarm when I recognized the cowboy hats inside, but they were apologetic: “Sorry about last night. We was drunk”.

But the scary moments were few, while the benign were many. Indeed, as any experienced hitchhiker will tell you the very act of sticking out your thumb renders you wide open to what I now know as grace. You are really putting yourself at the mercy of whatever happens, what I now call divine providence. Especially if you are traveling alone, which after a while was the only way I would hitch. It is much easier to get a ride solo, and hitchhiking can strain a friendship like little else. Further, you can learn a lot about someone -often way too much- by hitchhiking with them. I had a Zen-like, gospel approach to that mode of travel, even before I had a clearly defined faith in anything else. First, no one owes you a ride. Second, never complain about anything; it doesn’t help. Third, never ask a driver for anything. He or she has already given you a gift. Nothing like being stuck on the side of the rode with someone cursing every car that passes, bitching and moaning about the weather or the scarce traffic or the gnats. The very last time I traveled with anyone else it was a hometown friend, someone I thought I knew well. We set out hitchhiking to Maine and I quickly realized that not only was he an impatient whiner, but something of a con man as well: he would try to get drivers to give him cigarettes and money, and would  try to talk them into taking us further than their destination. The final straw was when I returned to our campsite on Mount Desert Island to find that he had been in town and had spent all of his money on drugs and junk food, leaving me -who only carried lightweight and nutritious dried fruit and nuts- to support him the rest of the trip, which ended our friendship.

It wasn’t long before I discovered the greatest benefit to solo thumbing: people will open up to a stranger while rolling down the road in a car. Perhaps it is the anonymity of it, perhaps because the driver has to watch the road and the strain of eye contact is reduced, but it is amazing how honest and open people will be with a perfect stranger, whom they will probably never see again. Particularly when one has surrendered to Christ, as I had a year before my afternoon in the redwoods, the hand of the Holy Spirit is evident. There were too many rides to count when I felt that the lives of the driver and I had intersected at the precise time of need. There was the pretty young Christian girl in West Virginia whose uncle had just died of a heroin overdose, the college student in Ohio, going home for the funeral of her father, the confused young man in Washington who had just left the Moonies. Or even one of the scary rides, a young man in Alabama fleeing a murder warrant. He had come from a remarkably violent background. His mother, father and a brother had all died by gunfire, and he had already killed. I realized, talking to him, that he could kill me with no more thought than if he had swatted a fly. I decided that if I was going to die I would die a martyr and go straight to heaven, so I began preaching the gospel to him, which he received meekly.

Today, of course, it is rare to see hitchhikers in the U.S., though I am told they are still common in Europe, which is the last place I hitchhiked, in 1988. The few hitchers you see here look pretty worn down and desperate. I made a vow once, when I was stuck at a  turnpike entrance ramp for 12 hours, that I would always pick up hitchhikers, no matter what, a vow I kept for many years, until the late 80s, when I stopped for a series of scary riders. The most memorable was in New England. He looked okay; long haired and carrying a guitar case. He was German, and soon began querying me in a thick accent. Did I think some zings were always wrong? What if zat was just a social convention? Maybe killing someone eez a morally indifferent act? The sun was getting lower in the sky and I came to the fork in the road where our ways parted. As I stopped the car he asked what my plans were for the night. I told him I was going to camp a few miles up the road. Can I camp viz you? No, I don’t think so. “I vill leaf my knife in zah car”. NO I DON’T THINK SO.

I rarely see a hitchhiker today, and I doubt very much if a young woman or a family or an old lady would stop for one. In the 70s the road was full of young people with backpacks, off to see the world. Most of us were harmless, and in spite of the stories I have told here, most of the drivers were benevolent. I reckon that I hitchhiked many tens of thousands of miles and met countless drivers, only a very few of whom were memorably bad. Of course I know it only takes one; Jeffrey Dahmer’s first victim was a hitchhiker, in Ohio in the 70s, around the time I was often traveling the same roads. But over all, unlike today, a young man could stick out his thumb, accept a ride from a stranger, and nearly always have a good experience. Of course it never was a good idea for a young woman to hitchhike, though I knew a few who crossed the country safely by thumb. I am grateful that I lived in an era where this was possible; at one point in the 70s, when I was thoroughly disgusted with America, a cross-country trip on the back roads restored my love of coutry, meeting good hearted rednecks in Mississippi, solid Midwestern farmers, old WWII veterans and the rest of Old America. As a mode of travel it was free, exhilarating, and a great way to get to know the country in all its local variants.

It is truly a sign of the decline of our culture that I would never recommend hitchhiking the U.S. to my sons. We as a people have grown too scared, and too scary, for that.

An era ended, somewhere in the 80s, when hitchhiking was a relatively safe way to see the country, when it was (again relatively) safe for a pretty young woman to pick up a hitchhiker and give him an innocent goodbye kiss, or for old ladies to bring a stranger home for a meal.

It will probably not be mentioned when some future historian chronicles the Decline and Fall of America, but the loss of hitchhiking as a viable way of travel says more about the loss of trust and solidarity of a culture than mere economic statistics of political facts.

—Daniel Nichols

Winds of Fear, Works of Mercy

I have not written anything here for two months. Without going into detail, it is enough to say that my melancholy self has been afflicted on nearly every side by travail: my mother’s cancer, added stresses at work, financial strain, growing alienation. The bright spots in all this have been the Divine Liturgy, my bride and my children. If it were not for the harbor of worship, love, and family I would be overcome.

And I have been devoting what spare time I have to iconography. After a long dry spell I have a backlog of commissions, enough to keep me busy for a good while.

But there is another reason I have not written: the world is increasingly filling me with dismay. Actually, “dismay” is too weak a word. “Horror” and “disgust” are more accurate.

While I have long argued for a new populism, what has emerged is not at all what I had in mind. I’m glad I am not a conservative, for I would be absolutely appalled that the Dumb Ugly Right has come to dominate the yelling match that passes for discourse in this country. From the crowds who consider it a great victory to shout down speakers in town hall meetings- you know, the sort of behavior they denounced when the Left did it- to marchers carrying signs calling Mr Obama a Hitler, a Mao, or a Stalin, I perceive that the level of fear and hatred has reached a new level. I saw a piece of political junk mail the other day which read, on the outside of the envelope, “Obama preparing a jihad through IRS audits”. And my sister reports receiving emails “proving” that Obama is the Antichrist (!). Oh, I know, as the culprits never fail to remind us, that the Left called Bush a Hitler and were hardly free of inflammatory rhetoric during his presidency. I even remember a “Bush is the Antichrist” website, but the tone was clearly tongue-in-cheek.

But there are a couple of distinctions to be made. First, objectively, the Bush administration, in reaction to the horror of 9/11, did act to erode the traditional rights and decencies that have marked our history: warrantless wiretaps, holding suspects for years without charges, torturing our enemies, and the rest of it. And secondly, the more extreme language was to be found only on the fringes, even when Bush’s poll numbers dropped dramatically. It was not bellowing from the radio and shouted out in the streets (and halls of Congress).

I am not great fan of the President’s, but I am concerned about where this is heading. Violence is beginning to emerge, and it seems only a matter of time before some unbalanced person reasons that if Obama really is a Marxist Nazi Islamic terrorist bent on turning the nation into a totalitarian state, if the country really has been “hijacked by a Marxist gang from Chicago”, as I heard a talk show host say last week, then it would be a patriotic act to assassinate him. The consequences of that are too horrific to contemplate.

The hyperbolic rhetoric would be comical, were it not so potentially tragic. I mean Mr Obama is a communist? Why? Because he has given billions of dollars to bankers and industrialists? What in the world would they call him if he had given all that money to the poor and middle class (where it might actually have stimulated the economy)?

The claims about the rather modest proposals to reform health care are equally silly. That these folks don’t think there is a problem in a nation where the majority of bankruptcies are from medical debt, which is in fact the only developed country where people go bankrupt because of such debt, and where people die because they lack medical insurance boggles the mind. Again, demagogues raise the specter of Communism, as if by enacting some sort of national health service we would be transformed into a totalitarian state. Like England or Australia, perhaps? Or the rest of our Western, democratic allies?

I only hope that those who are so hostile to state programs are willing to voluntarily relinquish any claims to Social Security, Medicare and VA benefits, just to show the rest of us they are sincere and consistent.

But far more than the content of the shouted accusations it is the tone that worries me. There is in the air pure hatred. The winds of fear are blowing hard.

I think of the aforementioned radio talk show. It is called “Quinn and Rose: the War Room”, which I sometimes listen to on the way to work. The program combines the civility of Michael Savage with the intellectual rigor of Sean Hannity, if you get my drift. Jim Quinn is an apparently lapsed Irish Catholic, sixty something, and a former rock dj. The woman who goes by the single name of Rose is fiftiesh and looks Italian, but is a fervent Protestant of the American evangelical persuasion. She combines hate speech with insufferable piety, at one moment saying of Obama “Can I hate him, Jimmy? Why can’t I hate him?”, or telling us that she coats her bullets with lard to prepare for the day when she shoots Muslims, and at the next talking about God’s holy will, answered prayers, or her devotion to the Bible.

It probably is not good for me to listen to them, especially as over the years I have become pretty sick of right wing American Protestants. Don’t worry, I am sick of right wing American Catholics as well. If they were so many and vocal I’m sure I’d be sick of left wing Christians, too.

Which is why the other day I experienced a singular providential meeting, a moment of grace. I was in Michigan, visiting my ailing mother. My sister, Monica, was there, and her friend Kim stopped by to go out to lunch with us. I met Kim a couple of times over the years in passing, had never talked much with her. She looks Mediterranean (Monica says she is of French ancestry) and is vivacious and talkative.

My mom had chemotherapy the day before, and I had to run her up to the clinic for a follow-up injection. When we got back Monica and Kim were downstairs. Some paperwork on the kitchen table caught my eye. It was a copy of a report from the Arizona Department of Corrections with a photo of an inmate. I wondered at this but said nothing.

At lunch Kim did most of the talking and was animated and entertaining. She made several devout-sounding comments in the conventional American evangelical mode, which surprise me, as Monica had never mentioned that Kim was religious. I asked my sister, in a lull in the conversation, about the prison report on Mom’s table. Kim said it was a man she had hired to do some repair work at come rental properties she owned. And she told the story: she had met a homeless man with a drug and alcohol problem and a prison record who was looking for work. She had just heard a sermon at church on Matthew 25- “Whatsoever you do to the least of these you do unto me”- so she took pity on him and let him stay in an empty apartment and put him to work. He was a good worker, is kicking his habits, and is very grateful for the opportunity Kim has extended  to him. Of course, there is a good chance that his good intentions will not endure, but the last I heard the demand for mercy was not based on the odds of success.

I was tremendously moved by this story and by Kim’s simplicity in responding to the Gospel. And it got me reflecting. While Kim is not political- we only touched on the topic and she expressed the same sympathy for Mr Obama that she had for the homeless man- I realized that in writing off whole categories of people I was guilty of the very thing that appalled me in others. Hearing Kim’s story was a much-needed antidote to the negative perceptions of American evangelicals that had grown in me over the years.

It had not always been like that. I spent a couple of years with a more or less evangelical worldview before returning to the Church, and for a long time I had felt great affinity with those Christians. But that had eventually been eroded by a lot of things, and by the middle of the Bush years I had had enough. The true religion of most Americans, Protestant and Catholic, is America. They embrace the message of Christ only insofar as it does not contradict this One True Faith.

But I had allowed that to blind me to the undoubtable goodness of many evangelicals, no matter their blind spots. And when I thought about it I remembered that most of the right wing Catholics I knew were very generous in the face of human need, however deplorable I find their politics. Perhaps the problem is that while people will respond charitably to the needs of people they know or who are standing in front of them, other people- Palestinians, Iraqis, uninsured Americans, “the enemy”- exist as abstractions, as statistics. They simply don’t seem real and are rendered invisible by fear.

It gives me no comfort to realize that mine is the opposite vice: I have always found it easy to sympathize with the outcast and the underdog and the lost soul, but I love “the average American”, the regular person, my neighbor, hardly at all. Not good, when the only commandment Our Lord gave us was to love one another.And He didn’t qualify that at all.

I am tempted to political quietism; after all there is no place at all for me in the current shouting match. I do pray for this country. And I pray that my own heart will be more tender, kinder, more cognizant of the goodness of my fellow pilgrims, that seeking mercy I will be merciful.

Kyrie Eleison. Hospodi Pomiliu. Lord have Mercy

—Daniel Nichols

Losing My Favorite Beer

My family that I grew up in was not Christian in its beliefs.  My father, who definitely set the religious tone for the family, called himself a Unitarian, so although we almost always went to church, I was not expected to conform to any creed, quite the opposite really.  But culturally our home was decidedly Protestant.  One result of that was that we didn’t drink much alcohol.  Not that my parents were abstainers on principle – it just wasn’t something they did much.  When I was in junior high they began to drink wine occasionally, but beer never.  I think the unspoken attitude toward beer was that it was slightly declassé.

I drank beer a little as an undergraduate and afterwards, but not regularly until after I’d become a Catholic, when I encountered more people for whom it was an ordinary part of life.  And then I discovered beers that tasted better than the watery mainstream beers that manage to get sold to Americans.  I suppose Guinness – the real Guinness that you can sometimes get here but which in Ireland tastes so incredibly creamy – is my all-time favorite.  (The best Guinness that I ever had in Ireland, by the way, was in Knock.  I think that our Lady especially blesses it there.)

Eventually I found some affordable American beers I liked.  And so for quite a few years I drank different beers made by Yuengling.  Yuengling calls itself the oldest American brewery, and is located in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.  It’s an independent business, which also is nice.

Over the years I drank their Old German Beer, very tasty, but which for some reason they discontinued.  They I drank their Porter, then their Black and Tan when I couldn’t get their Porter anymore.

Unfortunately a few weeks ago I ran across this story on Counterpunch, about how the Yuengling management pressured their workers to decertify their union, telling them “that if they didn’t get rid of the union he would close the brewery and open up shop in a location in the southern US where labor was cheaper.”

Though it’s true unions have not always been reasonable in their demands, in a capitalist economy they are necessary, because management is rarely reasonable either – quite the contrary, they can be as greedy as pigs and in the last two or three decades generally have been.  The Church understands the necessity for unions and  has always supported them.  In his latest encyclical Benedict XVI notes that they “have always been encouraged and supported by the Church” (no. 64).  And much earlier Pius XI, in Divini Redemptoris (no. 50), complained of “those Catholic industrialists who even to this day have shown themselves hostile to a labor movement that We Ourselves recommended.”

So – it seemed clear that a Catholic should not patronize Yuengling anymore since they had “shown themselves hostile to a labor movement” that Christ’s Vicars had recommended.  It’s no excuse to say that times are hard.  Generally they’re especially hard for the workers themselves.  And if Yuengling is having difficulty surviving in this economy, then let them bring their union in as a genuine collaborator – not in an effort to coopt the union as sometimes happens in such efforts, but as a genuine partner, a practice also recommended by popes from Leo XIII to John Paul II.

Yuengling employees have at least as much stake in keeping the business open as do the owners.  It’s ridiculous to say that employees should just do their jobs and allow the owners or managers to do whatever they want to a company.  Companies are more than profit-machines, but share a context of place and common effort with their workers, and with everyone who lives near or interacts with the firm.  That’s why Pope Benedict, also in Caritas in Veritate, said “that business management cannot concern itself only with the interests of the proprietors, but must also assume responsibility for all the other stakeholders who contribute to the life of the business: the workers, the clients, the suppliers of various elements of production, the community of reference” (no. 40).  A company depends not only on its workers, but on the entire surrounding community – for roads, electricity, food, all the multitude of things, some free, some not, that make life possible for us humans, whether considered alone or collectively.  So it’s wrong for a company to assume that it owes nothing to those “stakeholders,” nothing to that community which has made the company’s existence and operation possible.  This attitude, which seems to be especially widespread in our own country, is one result of the spirit of capitalism, the result of that fatal separation of ownership and work which is the keynote of capitalism.

But what of my beer drinking?  I’ve begun to drink Dundee’s Honey Brown Lager, an ok beer, but nothing as flavorful as Yuengling’s Black and Tan.  But at least I can drink it with a clear conscience.

—Thomas Storck