The Traditional Mass and seminaries

Is it appropriate to have celebrations of the Traditional Latin Mass / Extraordinary Form within seminary buildings? On the face of it, this is a very strange question. Why might it not be? Is the Extraordinary Form some kind of contagion which must be quarantined? What, exactly, might the concerns of the authorities be?

Could celebrations of the TLM interfere with the timetable? Only if they were held during lecture-hours and the students were allowed to bunk off to attend. Neither seems necessary. Why not have them at some other time?

Seminarians are supposed to be studying; they study among other things the liturgy, and it is impossible to study the 1970 Missal without some discussion of the motives of the liturgical changes, and of what went before. The Latin Mass Society put up facing-column 1962/1970 Mass Ordinaries (in translation), to illustrate the differences, not only as a service to the general public but following a request from a seminary professor. Differences like the one below, the Offertory Prayers, are expounded and discussed in class. But you can't really get a sense of the Church's ancient Latin liturgical tradition (as the Holy Father calls it) without seeing it celebrated. So wouldn't it have pedagogical value, not only for the TLM to be celebrated in seminaries from time to time, but for the students to be told to attend?

That would also deal with another possible objection, that celebrations of the TLM would be a cause of division, with some students going and others not. Make them all go. They really need to. At worst, they need to know what the fuss is all about. Perhaps they'll decide that it is a lot of obscurantist nonsense and they'll guide their future flocks away from it. Do their superiors trust them to come to the correct conclusion, under the guidance of their professors?

But then again, seminaries are divided in all sorts of ways; not everything seminarians do is compulsory, and what is more they talk to each other and soon realise that the student body includes a spectrum of opinion, that's only healthy indeed. Why should it be a problem if some students develop an attachment for the TLM and others don't? Are they going to start killing each other about it? I don't think so. Wouldn't it be possible for the seminary authorities to foster an attitude of peaceful coexistence? Or even - now what's that phrase? - of 'mutual enrichment'?

Here's a more radical question: why not have training in how to say the Traditional Mass? At least for those who want it. Now we always hear that there isn't time in the seminary timetable. But that doesn't matter, because it can be done outside the timetable, in the seminarians' free time. This is what they do at the North American College in Rome: over three years, the Extraordinary Form is taught in monthly or fortnightly sessions. (They start with learning to serve, then how to be deacon, and then how to celebrate.) It really isn't so very difficult, it doesn't take that many student hours, over three years it can easily be fitted in. I would guess that most seminarians spend more time watching TV than would be needed to learn the TLM.

Are there any precedents for this? Of course. As well as the North American College, which is hardly some marginal institution out in the Styx, there's the diocese of Frejus in France, where not only can seminarians learn the EF but they can be ordained in it, if they wish. And there's the diocese of Masison in the USA, where bishop Morlino actually insists seminarians learn it.

After five years of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, you'd think we'd have got beyond this absurd discussion by now. The North American College introduced its scheme to teach the EF in 2008 - right off the bat, after Summorum Pontificum can into effect in September 2007. Since then we've had Unversae Ecclesiae explicitly calling for training to be offered in seminaries, in 2010. When can we expect these documents to percolate through to England?

Natural Law and Marriage, 5: Civil Partnerships

Elton John and Civil Partner David Furnish

One of the issues on which defenders of marriage disagree is whether, at least from a pragmatic point of view, and perhaps from a principled point of view, we should be glad that Civil Partnerships exist. Does the existence of Civil Partnerships make it easier to argue against Same Sex Marriage, or harder?

Some people parade their support of Civil Partnerships as a badge of honour: look at me, I'm all in favour of giving legal recognition to same-sex relationships, I support Civil Partnerships; my opposition to marriage must, therefore, be given the benefit of the doubt: I can't be motivated by prejudice.

Others simply say: rightly or wrongly, we have Civil Partnerships, so there is simply no need for SSM.

One problem with both approaches is that they prevent defenders of marriage from using arguments in favour of marriage which also count against Civil Partnerships. That is always a problem with politically motivated debating positions; it is much better to let the arguments lead you where they want to go, if they are good arguments. Otherwise you can find yourself actually rejecting principles which are essential to a coherent presentation of your own world view. Tory politicians do this all the time.

The central argument I've been proposing might look as though it will leave Civil Partnerships unscathed, however. It says: in order to accommodate same-sex couples, the legal understanding of marriage will have to be changed in ways which will make it far less supportive of heterosexual couples wishing to start a family. A separate legal arrangement for same-sex couples, which doesn't affect marriage, looks as though it might be ok.

However that is a superficial reading of the situation. Consider what we concede, when we concede Civil Partnerships.

1. The law has an interest is recognising and regulating important, long-term romantic relationships. This is not only preposterous (and it is always a mistake to accept preposterous principles, even if they look harmless), but it is exactly what we want to deny in order to argue that the unique legal recognition of marriage is based on its connection with social goods, most importantly those connected with procreation.

2. Same-sex couples should be facilitated in their desire to adopt or create children. While it may happen from time to time that an orphan will be brought up a couple of maiden aunts, what Civil Partnerships suggest is that same-sex couples can and should be regarded as exactly similar to married couples in their suitability as adoptive parents, or candidates for IVF. (Surrogate motherhood is not legally regulated, but the same would go for that.) Again, this is exactly what we want to deny, for the same reason as before. Marriage is uniquely suited to the raising of children: that's why it needs legal recognition.

3. The law of the land can and should create new categories of legally recognised personal relationship, in imitation of marriage, by fiat. Again, we need to deny this, in order to point out that marriage is a natural institution, which the law did not create, but has an interest in recognising. The natural institution of marriage is tied into the deepest features of human aspirations, instincts, and fulfilment. It has recognisable contours: even if these are sometimes distorted by injustice, such as men in some societies being able to divorce their wives at will, those features are recognisable as distortions. The natural and just features of marriage are those which should be recognised by the law, and attempts to mould them to new understandings of human sexuality and new models of childrearing are totalitarianism, pure and simple. That, however, is exactly the precedent set by Civil Partnerships.

From the Daily Mail

It is true that Civil Partnerships are not as immediately disastrous as same-sex marriage, and it is perfectly defensible to argue for or against one legal proposal at a time. But the idea that we can accept Civil Partnerships and reject SSM is ultimately incoherent. Indeed, the co-existence of Civil Partnerships and (heterosexual-only) marriage was never going to work: it is a clear example of discrimination, making same-sex couples second-class citizens compared to mixed-sex couples, while simultaneously conceding many of the best non-discriminatory arguments against SSM. We really should have seen this one coming.

But there are other things we need to reconsider as well. There has been no meaningful campaign to resist and reverse the trend of easier and easier divorce, the undermining of parental rights, the taxing of married people on the assumption that they should each be earning, the promotion of non-parental child-care, the availability of contraception, the social attack on large families, and the social acceptance of unmarried parenthood. Each of these either distorts the nature of marriage, as legally recognised, or undermines the protection given to married couples by society or the state. We are not entitled to be surprised that fewer people are getting married (a trend even more striking than the divorce rate): the institution of marriage has been debauched. Notice how the number of marriage fell after the Divorce Reform Act 1969 came into effect (Jan 1971): that right, the number of marriages didn't rise with 'no fault' divorce, it fell. It became an institution less useful and attractive to couples, not more.

If we are serious about defending marriage, then we have an agenda as long as your arm. On all of these issues the typical response by Catholic leaders - lay and clerical - has been: we Catholics have our own rules, and these changes don't affect us. This is not only a gross dereliction of our duty as citizens, it is false: Catholic couples have to live in the real world, they have to pay the taxes and deal with the growing social hostility to those exemplifying the traditional family model, they and their children face the incentives not to marry which affect everyone. We should stop being so inward looking, and do our bit to save the society we are living in.

Bishop Egan has just issued a pastoral letter on Humanae Vitae. (Fr Tim Finigan's commentary is also worth reading.) This weekend's Tablet publishes defences of marriage (on the letters page, responding to an article by John Gummer, aka Lord Deben), from Bishop Sherrington (auxiliary in Westminster) and Arcbishop Conti (emeritus of Glasgow). The Midnight Mass sermon of Bishop Davies of Shrewsbury addressed it, and Archbishop Nichols of Westminster did the same, also giving an interview in which he described the proposal as Orwellian. A couple of weeks earlier Archbishop Smith of Southwark issued a statement on the subject. The Holy Father addressed it in his Christmas Address to the Curia.

This is really quite a turn-out; I'm sure there are more examples I've missed. If the bishops, and the Holy Father, are taking this lead, are we going to follow?

Natural Law and Marriage, 4: More specific arguments

One of the things people tend to assume, when they want to avoid using religious arguments for something, is that they shouldn't use moral arguments. They also assume that non-religious arguments can't talk about the existence of God. Both morality and the existence of God, however, are regarded, in the Natural Law tradition, as being matters of reason rather than faith. What St Thomas Aquinas and others meant by this is that, in order to know that God exists and that fornication is wrong, we don't need a special revelation from God or his prophets. We can infer these facts from the nature of the world and our inner moral sense. This of course is what St Paul says in Romans 1.19 and thereabouts.

A separate issue, which can be confused with this, is the importance of appealing to premises which one's opponent already accepts, in order to convince him of something he doesn't already accept. It is true that one can prove the existence of God from observable facts about the Universe; this doesn't mean one can use the existence of God as a premise in order to convince an atheist, say, of the importance of religion in society. You'd have to convince him of the existence of God first, and, even though theoretically possible, that might not be the quickest way of getting to your immediate goal.

But there are two other reasons why people place morality in the same category as revealed religion. One is the influence of Protestantism. The Lutheran and Calvinist traditions have it that morality is a matter of God's will, as opposed to the nature of things in the created universe, so you can't know about morality from looking at creation (or even yourself), you have to look at the Bible, and, optimistically, a conscience which functions as God's voice in your head.

The other reason, which I think has been helped along, historically, by the first, and has come to replace it, is moral subjectivism, the view that morality is just a set of personal preferences or commitments (I don't approve of fornication; I think charity is admirable). This goes neatly with the view that religion is a matter of personal choice, commitment, or emotion. On this view, neither religion nor morality are matters susceptible of rational discussion. This is makes for a quiet life in a pluralistic society.

Subjectivism about morality is, however, a non-starter, for all sorts of reasons. From the point of view of practical debate, very few people, if any, are prepared to say that torturing children for fun is only wrong insofar as they have a personal preference against it. There have to be at least some moral principles. And of course the moral justification of any kind of state, and any kind of coercive state policy, has to be found in morality, and we have to insist on that justification even against people who don't like it.

I get the impression, however, that subjectivism is going out of fashion. It was a useful way of attacking the moral consensus when this was essentially conservative. Now that conservative consensus has been undermined, the ever-busy liberals are establishing a consensus of their own, and the last thing they want is people saying that morality is just a matter of personal preference, when they've set what morality is held to say.

This is a specific case of a wider phenonemon, explained years ago by Edward Norman (I'm so glad he's become a Catholic at last): when the Church of England found it couldn't enforce religious conformity in the 18th Century, it had to practice tolerance. But this tolerance wasn't ever going to be a permanent state of affairs, it just continued until a new ideology felt strong enough to be intolerant. And that is happening now.

So we find the advocates of Same Sex Marriage (SSM) are not, in the main, saying: there is no objective morality, so you can't insist on hetero-only marriage. Rather, their arguments usually take the form: justice / personal fulfilment / social goods demand that we have SSM, and it is wrong to resist it.

So there's no point pussy-footing around trying to avoid making arguments from morality. What we do have to do is make arguments from moral premises which are accepted, if not by the fanatical SSM-proponent, then by the undecided people in the middle. And what sort of premises are those?

Yesterday I explained the central argument in defence of marriage: that SSM will destroy marriage as it currently exists, and replace it with something that will fail to meet the needs of heterosexual couples wanting to start a family. The bottom line is that heterosexual couples and their children need an institution which is quite different from the one which is going to emerge from the attempt to shoe-horn same-sex couples into it. Their needs and the needs of same-sex couples are different. One might quote that old radical William Blake: 'One law for the Ox and the Ass is oppression'. (He was paraphrasing Deuteronomy 22.10, but we needn't mention that.)

Why?

1. Heterosexual relationships are far less tolerant of sexual infidelity, so it makes sense to make sexual fidelity a make-or-break characteristic of their union. This is a psychological generalisation which can, if anyone is inclined to doubt it, be backed up by sociological research. It is connected, for obvious reasons of evolutionary psychology (for those who like that kind of thing), to the fact that we are talking about a union ordered to procreation. But it doesn't matter why heterosexuals have this hang-up: they do, despite decades of propaganda about the joys of open relationships, and we must accept straights as they are and seek to meet their felt needs. (That's only right, isn't it?)

2. Children need a stable home to grow up in. The research showing that children are least likely to be beaten up in a home where their biological parents both live, married to each other, is as beautiful in its clarity as it is ugly in its implications. This kind of generalisation doesn't justify state intervention take children away from unmarried mothers and so on - of course not - it just means that the state does well to promote the best kind of environment for children, so as many children grow up in one like that as possible, without social services intervening or anyone being fined or imprisoned. One way of doing that is to give marriage legal recognition and support, and not, well, to destroy it.

3. Children need parents of both sexes. This is also obvious, and also backed up by research. People promoting SSM don't like this kind of research and try to say it is ambiguous, and come up with alternative studies with bizarre methodologies, but for the open-minded this is an excellent argument. Of course boys need a male role-model, and girls a female one. They also need to experience the opposite sex. And they need to see a healthy relationship in action. Ok, it's not always possible, but we do well to help people who want to create the ideal situation, and not make things harder for them.

Catholics have really missed out on the debates on these issues over the last thirty years. There has been a huge amount of research and debate about the 'need for a father', about educational outcomes for children from broken homes, all that kind of thing, and while many Catholics have worked hard on these issues there has been no outrage from the hierarchy or from well-placed Catholic intellectuals or politicians, or not nearly enough. Welfare policies and the direction of divorce reform have done endless damage to the most vulnerable in society, and it is time we took notice. Luckily for us, people like Family and Youth Concern and Civitas can direct you to all the research.

The liberal response to this kind of argument is often that, if we are concerned about these things we are free to have families on the traditional model; other people don't want to have families on the traditional model. But that is not the line they take on other issues. Everyone is free not to smoke: and yet the Government pours endless money into propaganda, and taxes smoking at a punitive rate, so by information and incentives they can bring about a change of habits. Everyone is free not to get sexually transmitted diseases, and yet vast resources are expended on changing behaviour (with little to show for it). Everyone is free to set up a home in which there is plenty of food, lots of healthy exercise, and freedom from prejudice: this doesn't mean the Government feels it needn't do anything about those issues. Most insidiously, indeed, Government policies today often aim explicitly at social change. They want to change attitudes as well as actions.

So if the liberals are concerned about these things, why are they not concerned about the effect on working-class boys of having no father? It is simply inconsistent. There is no response to this. In my experience, confronted by this kind of argument, liberals change the subject. More open-minded people need to hear it more often.

This raises another point, for another post: the way lost battles in the past have made our task today harder.

Natural Law and Marriage: 3: changing marriage

Smashing a glass at a Jewish wedding: irrevocability.

The best thing I've found (my search has not been exhaustive, I should add) on this subject is the Girgis, George and Anderson paper, What is Marriage? (A revised and expanded version is available as a book to buy.)

Also very worth reading is the paper by the British lawyer Julian Rivers: Redefining Marriage: the case for caution.

The Confraternity of Catholic Clergy have a good, short 'Briefing Paper on "Same Sex Marriage"'

Bishop Egan's short and trenchant statement is here.

A common theme in these treatments, which is developed at greatest length by the Girgis, George and Anderson (GGA) paper, is that the proposal is not simply to 'let gays marry', but represents a fundamental change to the legal understanding of marriage. GGA point out, in fact, a very important weakness in the case for change, in that advocates do not appear to have a coherent account of what marriage is, and for the most part they avoid even addressing the issue. This is a very important tip in dealing with them in debate: remember to ask what advocates of Same Sex Marriage (SSM) actually want. What is their vision of marriage?

Rivers reminds us of the Common Law definition of marriage: 'the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others'. This is terribly simple, and it makes it look as though it would be a simple matter to extend it to same-sex couples. But, as Rivers explains, this is misleading, for without straying beyond a purely legal perspective there is a lot more to marriage than that. There is the connection with sex, both in relation to the seal of marriage (non-consummated marriages, however validly contracted, can be annulled, in civil as in canon law), and in relation to divorce (adultery is a ground for divorce; in canon law it is a ground for separation). There is the connection with property, which I don't need to go into, and there is the connection with children: they take their surname from their father, parents have all sorts of rights and obligations to determine their care, upbringing, and education, and even after divorce both parents normally have the right to see them. In short, the law's view of marriage assumes that it is an exclusive sexual relationship which will typically be fruitful. It needn't be either, of course, but the point of the legal penumbra of marriage is to deal with the fact that it normally is, and that is normally what people have in mind when they get married.

A military wedding: public recognition

Although they are rather keen on some of the tax implications of marriage, the advocates of SSM are not at all interested in the sexual and procreative aspects. They are hardly mentioned in the Government's various documents, for example. The question of what is going to constitute consummation, or adultery, in a same-sex marriage, is one they are keen not to ask. Instead, they just want to tweak the common law definition, so it says something like this: 'marriage is the voluntary union for life of two adults'. There would be no official definition of what kind of union it is, but (especially if siblings are excluded), the suggestion will be that it is a romantic union. And indeed, we are constantly told by advocates that it is all about recognising the love of the partners.

It is a fair assumption that, if SSM is enacted,  the concepts of consummation and adultery will, sooner or later, disappear from the legal understanding of marriage completely. Homosexual relationships, even successful, long-term ones, are not typified by sexual exclusivity, in any case, as a study cited by GGA points out. Nor are they as long-lasting, and this will put enormous pressure on the law to facilitate faster and cheaper divorces. The asymmetrical biological relationship between same-sex partners rights and any children they may have in their care will undermine the connection between the marital unit and the rights of children (in international rights law) to know and ideally be looked after by their biological parents.

The Arnolfini wedding: fidelity and fecundity

And so it goes on. It is interesting to note, of course, that the incidence of marital breakdown, the growth of unmarried families, and the growth of IVF, are all pushing the law in these directions already. The rights and duties of married parents vis-a-vis children are increasingly hard to distinguish from those of unmarried parents. Anyone in favour of destroying the family will see in SSM a golden opportunity to shove things a lot further and faster down the road we have been traveling, slowly, for a long time.

Now what is clearly out of the question, since it has already been tried (with Civil Partnerships), is a two-tier law of marriage, with one law for homosexual couples and another, stricter one, for heterosexual couples. That would obviously be discriminatory. Marriage will have to be made to fit homosexual couples, even if it is no longer so helpful to heterosexual couples. So the long and the short of it is that marriage, as it has been understood until now, will cease to be a legally recognised concept; in its place will be the notion of a legally recognised, personally significant, long term, romantic relationship, which may be sexually open, and may be ended at will by either party.

As the GGA paper explains, there is really no earthly reason why the law should get itself involved in personally significant, long-term romantic relationships, regardless of the sex of the parties. There is no need for legal (or indeed social) regulation of important friendships, and the addition of romance, whatever exactly that means, doesn't make any difference. Of course if it were a heterosexual romance, and children were likely to put in an appearance, then there are important social goods to preserve, and the law should, ideally, become involved, to strengthen the bond between the parents, and make provision for cases where the bond dissolves. But we are no longer talking about heterosexual relationships here.

'John Anderson my Jo': permanence

In a nutshell: in order to accommodate same-sex couples, the legal concept of marriage will have to shed the distinctive characteristics which make it useful and important for heterosexual couples starting a family. It will no longer be understood in terms of an exclusive sexual relationship, geared towards children, which is difficult to escape.

On the one hand, once the symbolic victory of allowing homosexual couples to marry has been won, no one is going to be able to explain the point of having all this legal flummery. It will have all the significance of a humanist funeral. And on the other, as the GGA paper explains, there will be no available explanation of why polyamorous groups should not be allowed to 'marry', or indeed humans and animals, or humans and inanimate objects. Sure, you'd need to tweak your conception of consent to let the last two types in, but it would be discrimination not to, wouldn't it? Polyamorous groups are not a joke: not only do many, many countries already recognise polygamy, but free-wheeling groups of people who are romantically involved are busily jumping on the SSM bandwagon already. The GGA paper gives you chapter and verse.

I think I'll say a bit more about some of the accusations made against defenders of marriage, in a further post or two.

More letters on the Egans

The Christmas issue of the Catholic Herald published my letter in reply to Martin Elsworth, on Br Egan's criticism of Bishop Egan. Round 1 is here. It was published beneath a second letter from Br Egan. My reply to Elsworth worked well as a reply to this new letter rom Br Egan, so this is a neat conclusion to this exchange.

Mr Elsworth (Letters, 14th December) defends the peculiar phrase ‘John’s last Supper model of the servant Church’, despite St John not giving us a narrative of the Last Supper, on the basis that the mandatum took place ‘at supper’.  Alternatively, the phrase might point to the ‘Farewell Discourses’ which follow. I think we can agree that the phrase is misleading, and that anyone familiar with the Fourth Gospel would more naturally refer specifically to the mandatum, or the Farewell Discourses, or whatever he actually meant, if he wished to be understood.

And what do we read in the Farewell Discourses? ‘If you love Me you will keep my commandments.’ (John 14.45) There is no tension between keeping the commandments and loving Our Lord and our fellows. Doing what God commands is the necessary precondition for helping others and attaining holiness, because it is nothing other than uniting our wills with God’s. As the Penny Catechism expresses it so pithily (123), ‘Mortal sin kills the soul by depriving it of sanctifying grace, which is the supernatural life of the soul.’

In the ‘liberal’ society praised by Br Edward Egan, whom Mr Elsworth defends, living according to God’s commands, according to Natural Law, is first allowed as a private eccentricity, then persecuted, and finally—as we can see with legislation before Parliament as I write—simply outlawed. We have already been told that teachers will be sacked for teaching about marriage in accordance with Natural Law. For how long will parents be allowed to do the same thing?

Our bishops have rightly alerted us to the danger. We should listen to them, not to Br Egan’s selective reading of the Gospels.

It is of course true, as Br Egan claims, that there is an historical connection between Christianity and liberalism, but it is not that liberalism emerged out of a Christian concern for toleration and freedom to pursue evils ways of life without hindrance. Rather, it emerged out of he failure of Protestantism to remain united as a national religion in England and places like Prussia and America, leading to people like Locke saying that toleration of religious dissent (not, of course, of Catholicism), was necessary if we were to get on with the serious business of making money from the slave-trade and the like. But that, as they say, is history...

Natural Law and Marriage: Part 2: religious liberty

Sacrificing a goat: protected by religious liberty?

In considering non-religious arguments for (real, traditional) marriage, a great deal has been said about the consequences for religious freedom. This has been the constant theme of the Christian Legal Centre: the very proposal for redefinition of marriage, and the enactment of civil partnerships, has been a key part of the drive to outlaw the proclamation of Christian teaching on sexuality. Legal recognition does not logically imply moral acceptance, and the law does not normally demand that citizens conform their ethical thinking to a state-approved model, but in practise the connection can be very close. In this case non-descriminatiion and hate-speech laws have made it closer still. In a nutshell, the legal recognition of gay marriage is going to mean that anyone criticising the gay lifestyle will be held to be attacking something legally established as legitimate, and this will facilitate the claim that it is unjustifiable hate-speech.

It is interesting that heterosexuals have never felt the need to invoke such laws against those who think that all sex and/or childrearing is wrong. Admittedly there aren't many Manichees or Cathars around today, but the claim that having children is irresponsible is increasingly made.

The Christian Legal Centre can point to a lot of court cases which illustrate their point, and it is certainly very worrying for orthodox Christians. But it is not an argument which has much effect against the proponents of same sex marriage, or on the less committed majority: or else the former would not push these court cases, and the latter's outrage would stop them in their tracks. The reason is simple: as I have pointed out before, what is regarded as a legitimate exercise of religious liberty does not determine, but rather is determined by, what is regarded as just.

Just let that sink in. Religions which sacrifice children have no case under religious liberty laws, because the sacrifice of children is a violation of justice. Whether religious believers are permitted to sacrifice goats, carry out cliterodectomy on girls, or circumcision on boys, or teach children about Hell, depends, and will always depend, on whether those practices are regarded as intrinsically unjust. You cannot make an argument for any of these practices being just from the fact that they are required by some religion or other. It simply doesn't follow. If you want to defend them, you need to defend their justice directly.

Natural Law arguments in defence of Marriage: Part 1

I've just read an interesting article by the lawyer Julian Rivers, published in 'Cambridge Papers' (read it here), which I don't wholly agree with but is well worth reading. Cambridge Papers is written by 'Christians' (the favoured self-description of Evangelical Protestants), but Rivers makes the obvious point that Protestant responses have been overwhelmingly biblically-based:

However, plural democracy will only survive if we also offer each other reasons we can expect each other to share. This is all the more important in an area which shows signs of collapsing into a 'culture war' in which mutual hostility takes the place of collective rational deliberation. If the only reasons against (or for) same-sex marriage are 'ideological' or a matter of gut reaction then all we are left with is mutual incomprehension.

This is or should be second-nature to Catholics, who are or should be used to appealing to Reason in dealing with non-Christians, just as to the Bible in dealing with Protestants, or the Magisterium in talking to each other. Grace does not destroy nature, it perfects nature. The idea that something like gay marriage could be perfectly ok according to nature and reason, but wrong according to revelation and divine law, is utterly repugnant. It just doesn't make sense.

(Failing to circumcise your sons is fine according to Natural Law, but wrong according to the Mosaic law, the divine law, for the people of the Covenant. Even here, however, Divine Law is building upon an obligation of Natural Law, to recognise the sovereignty of God, to worship and obey him. It specifies that obligation for a particular group of people, giving it a concrete expression.)

So if we want to defend marriage - real marriage, traditional marriage - we should be able to come up with arguments based on reason and nature - Natural Law, for those not allergic to that terminology. And in engaging with people who don't accept the teaching of the Church or divine Revelation, it is absolutely necessary. But Catholics have largely failed to do it.

There are two reasons this has happened, which are linked. One is the atrophy of Catholic apologetics. There are some vigorous and appealing apologists out there, but apologetics was once the natural extension of catechesis, it was something every Catholic should know about. It has atrophied in large part because of the rejection of St Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law tradition, and indeed of traditional catechetical methods in general.

The second reason explains why so few minded about this atrophy, from the 1970s to the 2000s: since the Second Vatican Council Catholics have, in general, given up trying to convince people of the truth of the Faith. The attitude has been: if someone feels moved to become a Catholic, that's nice, but we don't need to go out looking for them, getting into arguments, and telling contented Anglicans or agnostics that they are mistaken. The openness to the value of non-Catholic belief-systems, part of the 'spirit of Vatican II', led not to more genuine dialogue with outsiders, but a huge amount of introspection, and an almost complete loss of the set of skills needed to engage with people who don't share very many of your assumptions.

What we need now are people like Chesterton, but let's not fixate on him: over the early to mid 20th century there was Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn, Fr Martindale, Hugh Ross Williamson, Mgr Benson, and a host of others. (All very neglected, all very worth reading today.) The celebrities among Catholic intellectuals in the half-century from 1960 to 2010 were mostly people who told their fellow Catholics to tune in and drop out. (All now falling into a well-deserved oblivion. Some of them even lost the Faith themselves.) The apologetic tradition came to an abrupt stop.

The result is that today there is a strong tendency to argue, not from the truth of the Catholic position, which Catholics have forgotten how to do, but from the right of religious minorities to believe what they like unmolested, and therefore to educate their children, carry on careers in the medical profession, or whatever, with special provision made for them to avoid confrontation with the state ideology. I've explained before why that is a non-starter as an approach. Over the next few days I'll review some better arguments.