Loose Canon Archive: March 2005

A Time to Pray

March 31, 2005 | 6:20 p.m.

As "unconfirmed reports" (

here

and

here

) that Pope John Paul II has received the Church's last rites emerge, we can only pray that God hold the Holy Father in the palm of His hand. God, of course, will do this, whether we remember to ask him or not. For those of us who love John Paul, however, we will benefit from act of praying for him, an old man, now not far from the judgment that awaits us all, sick and doing something that, no matter how many are present, we all do alone with only one other Actor.

Christianity made headway in the early years because it valued each human life, old and ugly, slave and free, male and female. Watching John Paul, his face partially paralyzed, his voice almost inaudible, unable to walk, we remember that Christianity is about the cosmic significance of every human being who comes into this world. He is as human and worthy of our love today as when he was a vigorous, relatively young pope from Poland.

It is odd that the Holy Father may be approaching his earthly end the same week that Terri Schiavo was starved to death. Her death shows that society is turning to pre-Christian values. At least, the

frail pope with his feeding tube

is a sign of that all human beings, even those at the brink of death, matter.

After Terri Schiavo, It's a Dangerous World...

March 31, 2005 | 6:10 p.m.

After thirteen days of starvation, Terri Schiavo

died around 10 o'clock this morning

. For those who sometimes had a hard time remembering that there was a real woman at the center of "the Terri Schiavo case," the

Dallas Morning News has a profile

. I am glad the

Vatican called the death what it was

.

Terri apparently died without members of her immediate family present. According to Father Frank Pavone, a Catholic priest, who was with the parents in their battle to keep Terri alive, her kin were not allowed in the room when she died:

"'Bobby Schindler, her brother, said 'We want to be in the room when she dies.' [Estranged husband] Michael Schiavo said, 'No, you cannot.' So his heartless cruelty continues until this very last moment,' Pavone said."

The Weekly Standard

calls the death

a "judicial execution by dehydration." Author William Anderson asks, "How could such a thing have happened? Students of law, medicine, and ethics will examine this tragedy for decades to come."

A psychiatrist, Anderson has interesting observations about the legal fiasco that led to Terri's starvation. Even more compelling is this tidbit from Dr. Anderson:

"For several years," writes Anderson, "I had the honor to be the physician for a neuropsychiatric hospital unit which served seriously disabled people. Some of them appeared to be similar in condition to Terri. The nursing staff worked hard to keep these patients alive, comfortable, and stimulated by the environment to the maximal extent possible. They typically had guardians, and their instructions were followed, including the occasional refusal to employ tube feeding. But no one on the treatment team would have dreamed of acceding to a guardian's demand to withhold water. We would not have done it. And no judge would order it." The only precedent, writes Anderson, is Germany in the 1930s.

Writing in the same magazine, ethicist Eric Cohen

noted that the courts had made some serious mistakes

along the way in the Terri Schiavo case:

"But the problem went deeper than incompetence: It also had to do with ideology--with a set of assumptions about what makes life worth living and thus worth protecting.

Procedural liberalism

(discerning and respecting the prior wishes of the incompetent person; preserving life when such wishes are not clear) gave way to

ideological liberalism

(treating incompetence itself as reasonable grounds for assuming that life is not worth living). When the district court's decision to allow Michael Schiavo to remove the feeding tube was challenged, a Florida appeals court framed the question before it as follows:

"We were told that her 'choice to die' was being 'honored,' although the evidence that she had, at age 26, given any considered thought to her own mortality and potential incapacity was thin and highly suspect - its lone source being a husband who incongruously proclaimed his solemn fidelity to this purported wish of Terri even as he started up a new family, denied Terri basic care, and insisted on denying her heartbroken parents their desire to care for their child."

I kept finding it odd that the backdrop for Holy Week was that a woman was being starved unto death in a room with guards to keep her distraught parents from feeding her. At least, I thought, we are forced to know what is going on. But, as National Review

points out

, we weren't really--there were so many euphemisms to conceal the nature of the horror that was being perpetrated in a supposedly civilized country:

"Perhaps chief among these [euphemisms] was the fiction that we were 'letting her die.' On March 18, Schiavo was in no medical danger of death. She was profoundly brain-damaged (although just how profoundly remains unknown), but she was not in a coma or on a respirator. She was not being kept alive by artificial means, any more than small children are kept alive by artificial means when their parents feed them. Her body was functioning, there is some reason to believe she was minimally conscious, and she was responsive to stimuli (it's been reported she was actually being administered pain medication). She had devoted parents and siblings who were willing to care for her. She could easily have gone on in these conditions for many years. She was not close to dying. For death to arrive, she would have to be killed."

But perhaps Terri Schiavo died for aesthetic reasons.

Richard Brookhiser raises this disturbing issue

in a piece on the "culture of life":

"The Schiavo case threw us into the middle ground of the ailing. When are the crippled and the old as good as dead? When, therefore, can we kill them without a qualm? Our motives in these matters are partly aesthetic. From Homer to Hollywood, our civilization has valued beauty and strength. We turn away from ugliness and weakness, and we turn away, even more sharply, from the thought of being ugly and weak ourselves."

In addition to the stories I've already mentioned,

Christianity Today has a number of stories

on the issues involved in the court-ordered killing of Ms. Schiavo.

While Teri Schiavo was dying, the husband of a dear friend was rushed to the hospital. My friend was awakened in the middle of the night by a frantic call from the hospital: Was there a Do Not Resuscitate order? Seems her husband, exhausted and irritable, had uttered the words, "Leave me alone." Those are dangerous, possibly fatal, words in a modern hospital. With Terri Schiavo's death, something terrible has happened.

But of course the issues aren't the only story: My heart goes out to Ms. Schiavo's grieving family.

Could the Blogs Have Saved Ms. Schiavo?

March 31, 2005 | 6:10 p.m.

Pegged to sad story of Terri Schiavo, US News & World Report columnist

John Leo had a provocative recent piece

on red versus blue bioethics: "A key factor in the rise of bioethics, [ethicist Daniel] Callahan wrote, was the 'emergence ideologically of a form of bioethics that dovetailed nicely with the reigning political liberalism of the educated classes in America.' Instead of the traditional emphasis on the sanctity of life, bioethics began to stress the quality of life, meaning that many damaged humans, young and old, don't qualify for personhood because their lives have lost value. The nonpersons should be allowed to die and in some cases be killed. This explains why so few bioethicists have protested what the state and her husband planned for Terri Schiavo, who is severely damaged, but not in pain or dying, not brain dead, and in no position to protest her own execution on grounds that other people consider it best for her."

Leo wrote that the mainstream media is blue. This raises a question: Could bloggers, who have demolished so many blue media stories, have saved Terri Schiavo, if the blogosphere had been operative in the beginning? What do we really know about Michael Schiavo's new life with his new family? Would blog reports on such matters have changed the dynamics of the story? By the time the blogosphere had emerged as a force, the legal system had already doomed Terri Schiavo. It was about ten years too late.

The Glitzkrieg

March 31, 2005 | 6:10 p.m.

One of the best pieces of writing Loose Canon has seen in quite a spell is Noemie Emery's

article on what she dubs "the glitzkrieg,"

the shallow people's war against George Bush. Vanity Fair, which has transformed itself into an anti-Bush rag, is the best example:

"The really fierce strains of anti-Bush feeling come less from established political sources than from what might be called the 'glitz-based community' --people connected to Hollywood, fashion, or celebrity media, who produce diversions and lifestyle advice. At the shallower end of the pool of arts and intellect, they tend to produce the facile and transient; they make TV shows, or write them; make clothes, or write about them; try to become, or failing that tend to the needs of, celebrities...

"'There will be a draft,' imagined New York's James Atlas: 'The polar ice caps will melt. . . . The Patriot Act will be used to stifle dissent in the media. . . . Jews will be rounded up.' 'Rounding up Jews' might not seem to compute with Bush's being a captive of neocons, but logic is not the strong suit of this faction. What Bush seems to be facing is less the normal opposition of a traditional part of the political class than a visceral uprising among fashionistas, a vast metrosexual spasm on behalf of a self-image based on cultural preening. ...

"What makes all this more than mildly funny is the fact that glitzkrieg--political war as carried on by the glossies--has become in a sense the core of the Democrats, their chief source of lucre, and most prominent face...."

Who Speaks for the Innocent?

March 30, 2005 | 5:35 p.m.

While Terri Schiavo was doomed to starvation by the judicial system, the life of convicted rapist and murderer Robert Harlan was

spared BY judicial shenanigans

. Harlan was sentenced to death for the kidnapping and killing of Rhonda Maloney, a 25-year-old cocktail waitress (whom Harlan held captive for two hours before finishing her off) in 1995. Harlan's defense lawyers found a way to get him off death row--they discovered that several jurors had consulted the Bible before deciding on the death penalty. The Bible is indeed the holy book of a particular religion. That its use in making a life-or-death decision is enough to void a sentence indicates that the judicial system now finds Judeo-Christian values inimical. Without those values, who speaks for Terri Schiavo and Rhonda Maloney?

The Hinge of History

March 29, 2005 | 12:10 p.m.

Newsweek's Jon Meacham was the journalistic grinch who tried to steal Christmas. His

cover story on the Nativity

lit up the Christian blogs. The American Thinker noted its "confusion" and was moved to quip that the piece was about the "non-virgin" birth. Loose Canon approached Meacham's Easter cover story "How Jesus Became Christ" with a jaded sensibility. The title alone predicted it would be about the transformation of a simple teacher by early theologians. But that is not what Meacham did.

"The uniqueness--one could say oddity, or implausibility--of the story of Jesus' resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological," Meacham wrote. "Either from a 'revelation' from the risen Jesus or from the reports of the earliest followers, Paul 'received' a tradition that the resurrection was the hinge of history, the moment after which nothing else would ever be the same. 'If Christ has been been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain...' Paul writes. 'Lo! I will tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.'"

LC could quibble with many aspects of the piece, but it was a real shocker to read something this good in Newsweek. Meacham penned an erudite piece chock full of good quotes from Christians ancient and modern. Once could argue with his contention that today Christians regard their faith as "monumental" and "comfortably unchanging." Even if that was a dig at the religious right, Meacham's piece is well worth reading.

A Fair Shake for Opus Dei?

March 29, 2005 | 12:10 p.m.

A new book on

Opus Dei

, the 85,000-strong Catholic society that got such a bad rap in Dan Brown's novel,

"The Da Vinci Code,"

is coming out soon. It's by John Allen, an excellent reporter, even if he does work for the liberal National Catholic Reporter.

Loose Canon is planning to read the book, and, judging from an

interview with Allen in Newsweek

, it might

not

get my blood boiling. Asked why Opus Dei is regarded with such hostility, Allen explains, "In the 1930s and '40s [Opus Dei] experienced some enormous, extremely bitter rivalries with the Jesuits [because] some young Spanish men were deciding not to become Jesuits and signed up with Opus Dei instead. And this was, I think, the initial source of tension, that there was this perception that Opus Dei was kind of poaching ... Some Jesuits began circulating, from my point of view, really outlandish charges against Opus Dei, things like they had secret tunnels under their centers, they were engaging themselves in bizarre rituals like crucifying themselves on crosses in Opus Dei centers."

(For the record, Opus Dei members do practice self-mortification, using a device with small spikes.)

Happy Easter!

March 28, 2005 | 11:40 a.m.

Loose Canon hopes you behaved better during Lent than she did and wishes you all a happy Easter. LC was amused by an Easter sermon by

"the post-Christian bishop of New Westminster"

on the "dead Jewish-Carpenter guy:"

"Easter," the bishop explained, "is much more than a story about the body of Jesus walking out of a tomb." Oh, really?

Leaving aside that that is a pretty minimalist statement on what happened that first Easter, what could be more wonderful? A man who was dead lives? Not only that, he offers us the same opportunity. With such great material, the bishop chose to preach instead about Einstein and Francois Sagan. Two interesting thinkers, of course, but I'm told that neither discovered how to make a dead man walk.

For Catholics and indeed all who admire Pope John Paul II, this is an especially poignant Easter season. Who was not touched by the

"silent and suffering" pope blessing the crowds

in St. Peter's Square? The frail pope enriched all our Easters with the word (delivered via a cardinal) that he has

"serenely abandoned himself to God."

That

is the perfect sermon.

A Quantum Leap for the Euthanasia Movement

March 28, 2005 | 11:40 a.m.

Along with the sufferings of John Paul II, the starvation of Terri Schiavo was the backdrop of Holy Week and Easter this year. Terri Schiavo's anguished parents looked like any parents would in such circumstances--utterly dejected. Let's hope Ms. Schiavo

wasn't

aware of their sufferings. But this was not merely one family's anguish.

James Q. Wilson, a respected writer on moral issues, made the decision to allow his terminally sick mother to die.

Why does he not think this was the right thing for Terri Schiavo?

"In 1995, when the American Academy of Neurology published its report on people in a persistent vegetative state, it found that there were as many as 25,000 adults and 10,000 children in this country who suffered from PVS. Based on the best studies the academy could find at the time, some adults in a vegetative state 12 months after a devastating injury or heart failure could recover consciousness and some human functions. The chances that such a recovery will occur are very small, but they are not zero.

"If they are not zero, then withdrawing a patient's feeding tubes and allowing her to die from a lack of water and food means that whoever authorizes such a step may, depending on the circumstances, be murdering the patient. The odds against it being a murder are very high, but they are not 100%."

Phil Lawler, a Catholic layman and writer, penned

disturbing thoughts

on why the starvation of Terri Schiavo bodes ill for us all:

"[W]ith the Schiavo case, the 'right to die' movement recognized the opportunity to skip over several intermediary steps, to score a major legal and political coup. If the courts would authorize the starvation of this woman, and if the public would accept it, the entire debate would shift in favor of euthanasia. If Terri Schiavo can be starved to death simply because her life has been judged burdensome, then every person who is disabled, retarded, or senile becomes a candidate for similar treatment. The key precedent will have been set; the principled opposition to 'mercy killing' will be thoroughly undermined."

Relapsed Catholic

, a good source of information and perspectives on Terri Schiavo, spotted

this alarming thought

from Another Think, a Christian blog:

"Men and women who are incapacitated, even when they face no immediate risk of dying, may now be declared unfit for further life-sustaining care. If an estranged husband can achieve this result over the objections of his wife's own parents, surely insurance companies, the Veterans Administration, Medicare, and other health-care funding agencies will realize that they might make use of this precedent as well, to cut off care for chronically ill patients when they have become a drain on our national healthcare resources."

Loose Canon is going to write a living will saying that I

don't

want them to pull the plug. Of course, the way society is headed, it won't mean a thing.

A Mystifying Double Standard

March 28, 2005 | 11:40 a.m.

One more thought on Terri Schiavo:

"Thank God for our robed masters,"

writes Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard

. "If it weren't for them, Christopher Simmons might soon be executed. In September 1993, seven months shy of his 18th birthday, Simmons decided it would be interesting to kill someone. He told his buddies they could get away with it because they were still minors. He broke into the house of Shirley Crook in Jefferson County, Missouri, bound her hands and feet, drove her to a bridge, covered her face with tape, and threw her into the Meramec River, where she drowned. He confessed to the crime, and was sentenced to death according to the laws of Missouri. Last month the Supreme Court saved Simmons's life."

The courts, of course, did not intervene to save Terri Schiavo. Quite the contrary. Ruling after ruling brought Ms. Schiavo's death closer.

There was about as much chance that Schiavo would recover as that Simmons will repent--which is to say miracles are always possible. Why, then, did the courts spare Simmons and not Schiavo? I have a terrible fear that it is because our society is becoming more and more biased in favor of euthanasia for those who are not able of body.

Simmons is able-bodied and guilty; Schiavo damaged but innocent. The court system chose Simmons.

Hurtful Charles

March 28, 2005 | 11:40 a.m.

As Prince Charles prepares to do what cost his Uncle David the throne--marry a divorced woman--at least one primate in the much-diminished Church of England is

asking Charles to apologize to Camilla's ex

. The bishop is concerned about the state of Christian marriage? As far as LC can tell, his overriding concern is any "hurt" Charles might have caused Andrew Parker Bowles. I guess that's better than nothing--but not much.

Sneering at the Vatican

March 28, 2005 | 11:40 a.m.

Although Dan Brown's bestselling novel, "The Da Vinci Code," soon to be a major motion picture, has convinced many readers that Christ and Mary Magdalene were married, New York columnist Maureen Dowd joins the crowd in sneering at the Vatican for responding to the novel. But she gives the Holy See high marks for acting with dispatch: "[W]hen you think of the history of the Catholic Church, the Vatican is acting with lightning speed. It took the church more than 350 years to reverse its condemnation of Galileo. The Vatican only began an inquisition of the 16th-century Inquisition in 1998. It wasn't until the reign of Pope John Paul II that the Vatican apologized for the crimes of the Crusaders and offered contrition for the silence of Catholics in the Holocaust. The church has still not apologized for shameful dissembling by its hierarchy on the sex abuse scandal. And America's Catholic bishops only last week announced they were finally going to get serious about opposing the death penalty."

"Divided We Fall?"

March 24, 2005 | 2:30 p.m.

Are Protestant Churches bound to split? One of the most interesting religious blogs out there,

Pontifications

, has an incendiary piece saying that division is the inevitable fate of Protestant Churches. "The curse of Protestantism is division. The very nature of its origins, self-understanding and approach to the Word of God are inherently schismatic," Robbie Low argues. Low appears to be a former Anglican who has crossed the Tiber (just like Loose Canon.)

The piece has been blazing a trail through religious blogs, and it's no wonder, given the provocative ruminations like this one:

"Thomas More's hyperbole that he would 'rather cut a man's throat than let him read Tyndale's Bible' may seem rather shocking to us coming from the lips of such a humane and intelligent saint but More goes to the heart of the dilemma. In producing a version which did not have the authority of the Church Catholic, Tyndale was on a dangerous journey. We may applaud his motive and his industry but we should also recognize that it is the beginning of a long road that will lead through versions as bizarre and inaccurate as the Jehovah's Witness translations to the feminized travesty that is decanted from Anglican lecterns courtesy of the Common Worship lectionary. Tyndale's version was further inflamed by his marginal commentaries and interpretations. More was angered because he believed such proceedings could jeopardize the salvation of many. He recognized immediately that, although Rome needed reform, once protest magnified into schism there would be no end to the speculation, the special pleading, the splintering. So it has proved."

Pontifications, by the way, is fast becoming one of my daily stops. I love its theological debates, good writing, and sense of humor. Here are some of P-tiff's "endorsements:" From Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams: "I repent. I repent. I repent." From Pope John Paul II: "I have been an avid reader of Pontifications for months. You're a better pontificator than I could ever hope to be. In fact, you're darn near infallible!"

Their Penance is Voting Left

March 24, 2005 | 2:30 p.m.

Meet the

trustfunder left

. They're guilty, transnational, and they don't like singing "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Whodunit?

March 24, 2005 | 2:30 p.m.

Loose Canon has been traveling through the south this week, and she must admit that she has not observed Holy Week the way she ought to have done. Isn't that the way it always is? Well, it is for me.

Despite having been remiss, I hope I may still share with you a wonderful Good Friday hymn. It's one I've mentioned before because it answers that age-old question: Who is responsible for Christ's Crucifixion?

It was written by

Horatius Bonar

(1808-1880), one of the great evangelical hymn writers:

"I see the crowd in Pilate's hall,

their furious cries I hear;

their shouts of "Crucify!" appall,

their curses fill mine ear.

And of that shouting multitude

I feel that I am one,

and in that din of voices rude

I recognize my own.

"I see the scourgers rend the flesh

of God's belovèd Son;

and as they smite I feel afresh

that I of them am one.

Around the Cross the throng I see

that mock the Sufferer's groan,

yet still my voice it seems to be,

as if I mocked alone.

"'Twas I that shed that sacred Blood,

I nailed him to the Tree,

I crucified the Christ of God,

I joined the mockery.

Yet not the less that Blood avails

to cleanse me from sin,

and not the less that Cross prevails

to give me peace within."

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