American Catholic Millennials

I just got the most recent Columbia magazine and found in it an interesting survey of Catholic Millennials. The survey makes some interesting positive finds about this demographic, especially a commitment to marriage and life issues. But, being curmudgeonly and jaded as I am, I'd like to focus on a couple of negative results.

Fornication--Almost 40% of the general American population believes fornication is wrong. Among Catholics this drops under 30%. Among Catholic Millennials it drops to around 20%. This is a very basic moral teaching of the whole Christian tradition; We find it condemned in Scripture on the very lips of Our Lord (Mk. 7:21)--It doesn't get much more authoritative than that. That fact that this teaching is rejected by ~80% of Catholic Millennials is a good indicator of where this is going.

Moral relativism--The article says that 56 percent of Americans reject universal moral norms, as compared to 64% of Millennials at large. But among Catholic Millennials, this number skyrockets to over 4/5ths. Fewer than 1 in 5 Catholics between 18 and 29 recognizes that there are any universal moral absolutes.

Practicing religion--only 1 in 4 Catholic Millennials attends Mass once a month, which is lower than their generation as a whole, of which 1 in 3 attends a religious service once a month.

Practicing multiple religions--Almost 2/3rds of Catholic Millennials "see no problem with practicing multiple religions". It isn't clear what the question was but the context suggests that this indicates practicing their own religion and another (as opposed to approving of someone practicing two completely different religions), which is to say, it seems that this is saying that they approve of a Catholic attending Lutheran services, not of a Hindu practicing Buddhism. So it seems that in addition to moral relativism, we have a healthy dose of dogmatic relativism as well. That is, this attitude seems to suggest that they do not take the doctrine of the Church terribly seriously; Rather they seem to think that all religions are really the same at heart. But it gets better.

Atheism--The article finds hope in the fact that Catholic Millennials are more likely to believe in God than their peers (85% do); I, on the other hand, find it disturbing that we are even able to measure atheism among Catholics, let alone that a full 15% reject monotheism, which is a preambulum Fidei, a prerequisite to the Catholic Faith.

A couple caveats: This age bracket is notoriously liberal and experimental. I would guarantee that in 20 years, after these people go out and actually start the families they say they want, a large number of them will swing back towards their Faith. Also, for what consolation it offers, these numbers are much better for practicing Catholic Millennials.

None the less these numbers are significant. They show that Catholicism is in absolute crisis. Catholics have done a miserable job of passing on their Faith.

Indulge me dear reader while I offer some short diagnosis of this lamentable state of the Catholicism.

How can we help but look at the liturgy? Lex orandi lex credendi. We see clearly in this survey that the Catholics raised over the last 30 years reject even fundamental parts of the Catholic Creed. Is it surprising that the generation that rejects even the most basic Catholic belief, also has given up on Mass.

We can of course go back further than liturgical innovation. "Sexual liberation" has undoubtedly contributed to this apostasy. The widespread rejection of Humanae vitae is the most obvious example of sexual liberation leading to an undermining of the Church's doctrine and authority. It is helpful to remember Our Lady warned in 1917 that more souls go to Hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason, and that theologians have warned for centuries that lust does more than risk unwed mothers, it dulls, blinds, and perverts the mind. Thus Thomas teaches, in line with a long tradition, "And therefore, through these vices [sins of the flesh] man's intention is applied to the greatest extent to bodily things, and therefore man's understanding of intelligible things is consequently incapacitated . . . Therefore lust gives rise to blindness of mind, which excludes as if entirely the the knowledge of spiritual goods" (IIaIIae Q15 a3).

The roots are deeper still: Since the 19th century Popes have been warning us of modernism, but their warnings have time and again been ignored by American Catholics. American Catholics have, I would venture, been far too quick to embrace a culture that is wholly secular and modernist, which is at heart fundamentally opposed to central claims of the Church and undermines her authority, and consequently their children have, for all intents and purposes, lost the Faith on a grand scale.

Lamentabili exitu indeed.

E. Michael Jones on the SSPX and Thomas on Schism

It may be in bad form to drag up an old argument, but I was recently given a copy of a very old (1993) article:

E. Michael Jones's "How I won the Debate."

In this article Mr. Jones, editor of Culture Wars, arrogantly recounts a debate he had with Michael Davies, RIP, concerning whether the SSPX is schismatic.

One of Mr. Jones's key points is that Mr. Davies's distinction between acts of disobedience and acts of schism is false, that Mr. Davies's insistence that a particular intention is necessary for disobedience to be schismatic is heterodox.

He writes,

Mr. Davies implies more than once that only a person who denies that he is subject to the pope is guilty of schism. He contrasts this with what he terms mere disobedience, where the person refuses to do what the Pope orders.

He continues,

In a letter to the editor which appeared in Daily Telegraph of July 6, 1988 [Davies] writes that "a Catholic who for some grave reason, on a matter not involving faith or morals, feels bound in conscience to disobey the pope in a particular instance without wishing to sever himself from the Church or deny the authority of he Pope, cannot be said to be in schism."

Finally Jones concludes:

These definitions are, as they say, interesting, but they are totally the creation of Michael Davies. As before, Davies puts heavy emphasis on the subjective. In true liberal fashion he claims that the subjective state of the person committing the act is more important than the ontological status of the act itself.

To substantiate this point, that the subjectivity of Davies's subjective understanding of schism is false, he calls on the 1983 and 1917 codes of canon law. He then appeals to St. Thomas. All three use a similar definition of schism: A refusal either to submit to the Pope or to be in communion with those who do submit to the Pope.

He quotes Thomas: "Schismatics are those who refuse obedience to the Sovereign Pontiff and who refuse to communicate with the members of the Church subject to him." He goes on to conclude that this string of passages,

shows that Mr. Davies [sic] definition is unique to Mr. Davies. There are no subjectivist escape clauses in the Church's definition of schism.

This argument shows either intentional deception or utter incompetence on the part of Mr. Jones. The citation from St. Thomas is from IIaIIae, Q.39, a.1. This article could not more clearly stress that an intention of division is of the essence of schism. Indeed, the article is asking whether schism is a distinct species of sin, and the answer is that it is only because it includes the specific intention of division.

Let me quote from the body of the article whose concluding sentence Mr. Jones lifted:

Unde peccatum schismatis dicitur quod directe et per se opponitur unitati, . . . In quibus [rebus moralibus] id quod est intentum est per se, quod autem sequitur praeter intentionem est quasi per accidens. Et ideo peccatum schismatis proprie est speciale peccatum ex eo quod intendit se ab unitate separare quam caritas facit. . . . Et ideo proprie schismatici dicuntur qui propria sponte et intentione se ab unitate Ecclesiae separant, . . .

I translate:

Whence that is called the sin of schism which directly and per se opposes unity, . . . For in moral things that which is intended is per se, but that which follows unintended is as if accidental. And therefore the sin of schism is properly a specific sin because [the schismatic] intends to separate himself from the unity that charity makes . . . and therefore they are properly called schismatics who freely and intentionally separate themselves from the Church, . . .

The whole point of this article is to justify that schism names a particular species of sin, which Thomas does only by teaching that schism is constituted as such by a particular intention: namely, the intention to divide oneself from the Church.

The irony is overwhelming: This is one of the most radically subjective passages in Thomas's moral corpus (right next to IaIIae Q. 72, a 9, ad 2), and Mr. Jones uses it to prove that Mr. Davies is too subjective. As I said, deception or incompetence.

Flaunting Proper Usage

I open the Washington Times to page five and am greeted by a full-page ad boldly declaring in red capitals:

OBAMA FLAUNTS THE CONSTITUTION.

Flaunt, To show off, display ostentatiously, as in, "if you've got it, flaunt it."

Hmm, so is it his lack of taste that our authors are up in arms over?

Possibly, but I suspect they were actually looking for 'flout', To show contempt for, to disregard.

Although the Random House Webster's College Dictionary canonizes the error (as they do for any sufficiently common mistake), Dictionary.com gets it right. As does almost every contemporary usage guide I can find: Paul Brians's Common Errors in English Usage, The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing. Even About.com correctly explains the difference. I needn't multiply examples when Google will do it for me.

One thing that is interesting though is an observation made at Motivated Grammar. The author there notes, taking a cue from the OED (which dates this error to 1923), that this confusion appears to have arisen quite abruptly around 1920, which abrupt rise he demostrated with the aid of Google Books.

I had to try for myself.

The first occurrence of 'flaunt the law', index in Google Books, is from 1905, in the Pacific Medical Journal. This is as opposed to the 99 indexed occurrence of 'flout the law' that occurred up till that year. The first occurrence of 'flaunt convention' is from 1915, as opposed to 29 occurrences with 'flout'.

I decided to chart the occurrences of the two forms of these two phrases--'~ the law' and '~ convention'--in 5 year periods. Then I decided to compare the frequency of the two forms in each period and to look at the change over time.

A couple of things need to be noted. First, the sample-size is very small in the initial years (the total number of occurrences in 1905-10 was only 32, it only broke 500 in 1965-68, and 1000 in 2000-04), thus there is a tremendous level of noise in the early periods. Second, nothing was done to keep one book from being double-counted; what was counted was the number of books in which the phrases in question appeared, not the number of times the phrases themselves appeared; a book could theoretically be counted 4 times. Moreover different editions of the same book could be counted as different books, possibly in different periods. Finally, it is known that some books counted as instances of the erroneous usage, which books were in fact using it to point out that it was an error, e.g., the Dictionary of Disagreeable English, The Dimwit's Dictionary, and others. Thus it is quite likely that the ratio for recent decades is skewed high. Further, it should go without saying that the sample is of published books, and does not attempt to represent spoken usage.

The resulting charts however are fascinating, and do not show the expected roughly exponential increase one would tend to expect, in the adoption of a phrase. We see a sharp decline in the period of '45-50. Followed by a sharp increase rounding out at around 24% in the second half of the 70s. This is followed by a slight drop-off.

It would be interesting to try to account for the peaks and troughs. Did WWII result in a larger percent of publications in the 40s being authored by professors as opposed to novelist and journalists? Did some popular style-guide lambaste the error in the 70s? Who knows. I leave that to my readers, to whom I also leave the task of pointing out the deficiencies of my statistical analysis.

While there are many questions left, a couple things can be stated with some certainty: The use of 'flaunt' meaning 'flout' (in published writing) can be traced to the early 20th century. It has never been used by a majority (in writing). Finally, it is fairly obvious that it is an error insofar as it is clear that the substitution is based on similarity of sound leading to a confusion of meaning, and not on some natural extension of meaning. Neither can it be credibly interpreted as an intentional figure of speech.

Anyway, while I can't place too much fault on the poor, confused author for his inarticulate expression of outrage at the president, I can recommend that, in general, if one runs a full page ad in a national newspaper that he have someone with a decent sense of the language review the proof.