Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State: A Centenary Reflection - by Allan C. Carlson

In The Family in America

This year marks the centennial of Hilaire Belloc’s curious book The Servile State. Recent commentators have been unsure where to place this volume on the ideological spectrum. In the Liberty Fund edition, Robert Nisbet labels Belloc a “libertarian Catholic,” a writer taking his inspiration from the nineteenth century’s Cardinal Newman and Lord Acton.¹ In his biography of Belloc, Joseph Pearce also terms his subject’s creed “essentially libertarian.”² Such labels, though, imply a respect for free-market capitalism that simply cannot be found in The Servile State. Rather, Belloc deemed “the capitalist state” both “unstable” and deadly: “If you left men completely free under a capitalist system, there would be so heavy a mortality from starvation as would dry up the sources of labor in a very short time.”³ And he went on to advocate the use of state power, particularly the power of differential taxation, to dismantle big corporations, to thoroughly soak the rich, and to massively redistribute their property to those without any.⁴

Considering that agenda, other biographers have labeled Belloc a kind of socialist.⁵ They cast his political-economic agenda as “childishly simple” and attractive primarily to “shaggy William-Morrisy idealists,” precursors to the Hippies of the 1960s.⁶ In reality, though, Belloc condemned public ownership of property and indicted the political order of early twentieth-century Britain for introducing a new kind of slavery into the world.

Such confusion, especially among conservative readers, also attends Richard Weaver’s small book Ideas Have Consequences⁷ and for the same reason. The titles of these volumes are wonderfully adaptable to the vacuous form of discourse common to early twenty-first-century American conservatism. It seems clear that few contemporary conservative pundits who cite these titles have actually read them; fewer still have understood them. For the key to the two books is a common reading of history and an implicit common agenda. Simply put, both Belloc and Weaver saw Europe’s High Middle Ages (circa A.D. 1250) as an era when human society embodied inspiring ideals; and they saw philosophical nominalism, scientific logic, and capitalism (properly defined) as the modern enemies of those social ideals.

Belloc insisted that the critical parts, or cells, of this good society were productive families, secure in their property. The whole objective of his political economy was to break down the corruptions of modern capitalism and socialism, and re-establish families in working homes set on land in freehold tenure. His models were the artisans and the free peasants of the High Middle Ages, a community held together by the Christian church and a religiously infused aristocracy attentive to its duties. To be understood, The Servile State must be read through this lens, one rarely used by Tea Party enthusiasts or talk-show pundits. 

Building on the Insights of Pope Leo XIII

Hilaire Belloc was clear that the inspiration for his analysis in The Servile State was Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum. On the one hand, this document was “modern,” representing the Roman Catholic Church’s readiness to engage—rather than simply denounce—the new urban-industrial age and the place of wage laborers within it. On the other hand, Rerum Novarum was “reactionary,” for its program aimed at restoring a social-economic order that resembled—in its most important components—that of the High Middle Ages.

For example, the encyclical was agrarian in its insistence that all wealth derived from the land: “the earth, even though apportioned among private owners, ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of all, in as much as there is not one who does not sustain life from what the land produces.” Even those who possessed no soil contributed their labor. In consequence, “it may truly be said that all human subsistence is derived either from labor on one’s own land, or from some toil, some calling, which is paid for either in the produce of the land itself, or on that which is exchanged for what the land brings forth.”⁸

Leo also affirmed the theory of “labor property,” rooted in the “law of nature.” He wrote:

Now, when man thus turns that activity of his mind and the strength of his body toward procuring the fruits of nature, by such act he makes his own that portion of nature’s field which he cultivates—that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his personality.

It was “just” that the laborer possess what he had made, and no one had standing to violate that right.⁹

The “natural and original right of marriage” and “the principle purpose of marriage ordained by God’s authority from the beginning”—namely, to “increase and multiply”—were also linked to the physicality of home, tools, and land: “The right of property . . . must in likewise belong to a man in his capacity of head of a family.” Indeed, this right was “all the stronger” as it found “a wider expression in the family group.” The ability to pass on resources for survival to children through inheritance was also important: “in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property.”¹⁰

It was in this context that Leo rejected “the main tenet of socialism, [the] community of goods,” because it “would violate a natural right and introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal.” Indeed, private ownership should “be held sacred and inviolable.” However, this meant something other than merely protecting the assets of the relatively few who—circa 1912—actually owned productive property. Rather, as Leo explained, “the law . . . should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.” This would also be the solution to “the social question” of the age: “If working people can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land,” then “the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty will be bridged over.”¹¹ 

The Development of the Capitalist State

Belloc’s project in The Servile State was to analyze how that “gulf” had emerged, what had been the consequences, and how the elements of a good society might be put back together again. An important component of this task was to reframe history, in order to understand how a system of ordered liberty and widely dispersed property had come to an end. Belloc began the story shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Between A.D. 500 and 1000, he said, the Christianized Europeans—just like the pagan Romans before them—took slavery for granted. However, slaves were no longer “made” by conquest. Rather, “it was poverty that made the slave,” as individuals or families accepted slavery as an alternative to indigence. There was no organized protest against the system based on conscience. Rather, owners and slaves alike accepted slavery as an inevitable aspect of the human condition.

The end of European slavery, according to Belloc, came through “the experiment called the Christian church.” While no church dogma explicitly condemned slavery, the Christian emphasis on spiritual equality undermined its premises. At a physical level, the emergence of the autonomous villa, or estate, eventually rooted the slave. Over time, an implicit bargain emerged between lord and slave family: the latter would be attached to a particular section of land, would pay the lord a fixed amount of crop (or, later, a customary fee), and would retain the balance for consumption or private sale. By A.D. 900, the market in men had come to an end. About the same time, cities began to re-emerge as trading centers. Craft guilds developed as self-governing enterprises to control competition among artisans, assuring good quality, “fair” prices, and secure incomes. Under these circumstances, there could be neither capitalist nor proletarian. Indeed, by A.D. 1250, a well-developed “distributive system” existed in Central and Western Europe (including Britain), with three forms of labor: the serf, secure in his position, who paid regular but limited dues and services fixed by long custom; the freeholder peasant, who supported rulers through taxes; and the guildsman.

All three types of labor also shared in the common property of villages, where rights to graze a cow or gather acorns and firewood were well defined and zealously protected. This was essentially an agrarian system: “Then, as now, the soil and its fixtures were the basis of all wealth.” As Belloc summarized: “all three between them were making for a society which should be based upon the principle of property. All, or most—the normal family—should own. And on ownership the freedom of the state should repose.” It was true that co-operative bodies, such as guilds and religious fraternities, placed certain restraints on personal economic liberty. However, this was for the preservation of a greater liberty resting on real economic democracy.¹²

The end of the medieval-distributist order came in the sixteenth century, when there arose, according to Belloc, “the dreadful moral anarchy which goes by the name of capitalism.” While most economic historians trace the origin of this economic ideology in Britain to the eighteenth century, Belloc insisted that the change was much older. And in the course of three centuries, it transformed Britain from a land of owners into (by 1912) a place where a third of the people were indigent and 95 percent were dispossessed of all capital and land.¹³

Capitalism emerged through “the deliberate action of men, evil will in a few, and apathy of will among the many.” The first stage came in the 1530s, an “artificial revolution of the most violent kind,” involving the seizure of monastic lands by King Henry VIII. Prior to this revolution, about a third of England’s land belonged to the squires or county lords; a third belonged to free peasants; and a third to church entities. Most of the land that Henry confiscated, as part of his “Reformation,” eventually wound up in the hands of the squires, who now emerged as a powerful, effectively uncontrolled economic oligarchy. In the 1640s, this group eliminated the monarchy as a threat to its power. The same small oligarchy controlled Parliament and used Enclosure Acts and a Statute of Frauds to chase free peasants off their customary lands and to seize the village commons for consolidation into corporate-style farms.¹⁴

Few Property Owners, Many Dispossessed Workers

Reflecting on this startling departure from orthodox history, Belloc concluded that by 1700, “England had already become capitalist,” with “a vast section of her population” proletarianized. It was this change, he insisted, and not the later Industrial Revolution, “which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves today.” The introduction of industrial processes—Watt’s condensor, Hargrave’s spinning jenny, and King’s flying shuttle—were not the causes of monopoly. By the time they appeared, England had already been captured by an oligarchy. If these inventions had arrived in the thirteenth century, Belloc insisted, they “would have blest and enriched mankind” and would have been organized on a cooperative basis. Instead, they fostered still further consolidation through the trusts; such economic combinations brought “the ruin of the smaller competition through secret conspiracies entered into by the larger men, and supported by the secret force of the state.”¹⁵

Socialism emerged in the nineteenth century as a movement to counter the oligarchy. However, “the effect of socialist doctrine upon capitalist society is [actually] to produce a third thing different from either of its two begetters—to wit, the servile state.”

This was not meant just as a criticism of the modern welfare state, as many conservatives now suppose. Rather, The Servile State marked “the re-establishment of slavery as a necessary component of capitalism.” More specifically, the Servile State existed when ownership of the means of production “by a few” came into “stable equilibrium by the establishment of compulsory labor legally enforceable upon those who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those who do.”¹⁶ What did Belloc specifically mean by these claims?

He saw capitalist society dividing into two classes: a small number of free citizens who owned productive property and a dispossessed majority who were masters only of their labor and who had no control over capital or land. The Servile State develops as the ownership class and the government converge around the goal of security. In this form of state capitalism, government provides to the free “security” in their property and profits, rent and interest. For the property-less unfree, the government guarantees security in subsistence. In exchange for a surrender of economic autonomy and for acceptance of permanent status as wage-laborers, the unfree gain a minimum wage which provides “sufficiency and security,” workmen’s compensation insurance which cements a new form of inferior status, and means-tested unemployment and sickness insurance which reinforces their status as proletarians. The inevitable consequence of these measures, Belloc argued, was compulsory labor: the expectation that all unfree adults would be in the wage-labor market. State schooling reinforces the process: “Roughly speaking, it is the generation brought up under the Education Acts of the last forty years which has grown up definitely and hopelessly proletarian.”¹⁷ Notably, the children of the unfree learned that property ownership was beyond them, that they must think of themselves as wage earners alone.

Belloc neatly summarized the new servile order: “Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the capitalist, as a capitalist, and because I am a capitalist, with special converse duties under those laws.” Laborers accept this surrender “of a mere legal freedom” because the Servile State provides “the very real prospect of having enough and not losing it.” Indeed, Belloc acknowledges that in strict terms of material welfare, the newly enslaved may be better off than if they owned property and were responsible for their own support. Partly for this reason, Belloc concluded that the strains of capitalism would relax “and the community will settle down upon the servile basis which was its foundation before the advent of the Christian faith, from what that faith slowly weaned it, and to which in the decay of the faith it naturally returns.”¹⁸ 

The Distributist Alternative

How might a community escape this end? In The Servile State, Belloc offered little practical guidance. The clear alternative was rebuilding a social-economic order featuring widely distributed property. However, “Will man want to own? . . . Can I discover any relics of the cooperative instinct . . . ?” Most of the unfree, Belloc mused, seemed content in their servility. Owning property meant bearing responsibility for its protection and maintenance and facing many risks, without guarantee of reward. In comparison, the Servile State offered a meager but secure level of subsistence: a genial form of slavery.¹⁹ Most modern men wanted income, the consumption of cheap, industrial goods, and the security of state welfare, not the challenges of property.

It would be in his subsequent The Restoration of Property that Belloc laid out a fairly complete distributist program of reform. Family freedom, he said, required “a jealous watch against, and destruction of, monopoly” and “the safeguarding of inheritance, especially the inheritance of small patrimonies.” The goal was “a society in which property is well distributed and so large a proportion of the families in the state severally own and therefore control the means of production as to determine the general tone of society.” Controversially, Belloc reasoned that since the architects of the Servile State had used law and police powers to build their regime, from Enclosure Acts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the welfare measures of the early twentieth, “in this attempt to restore Economic Freedom, the powers of the State must be invoked.” This would include protection against “direct rapine” and from “the exaggeration of competition.” Guild-like structures should be empowered and official machinery created to foster the propagation of small property.²⁰

Regarding specifics, Belloc favored the use of differential taxes to redistribute property. For example, he would tax “chain” retailers so that one company could run no more than a dozen stores. He would handicap department stores, like Harrod’s, in a similar way. A “turnover tax” would be imposed on large wholesalers; small, family-held firms would be tax-free. Large industrial plants would face a tax on power used; artisans would enjoy protection and subsidized credit. Electricity and the internal combustion engine—both favorable to family-scale production—would be encouraged; steam and water power would be taxed. Agricultural land would be restored to families: “there must be a radical difference in the burdens imposed upon the land occupied, as land (according to our view) should be occupied, by a human family living thereon, and land occupied by others from whom the owners draw tribute.” State policy should support subsistence farming and “privilege” this peasantry “as against the diseased society around it.” Taxes on real estate transactions should “make it easy for the smaller man to buy land from the richer man and difficult for the larger man to buy from the smaller man.” Belloc noted that medieval guilds had not entirely disappeared; doctors and lawyers, for example, still maintained guild-like structures that controlled entry into the professions, mandated certain forms of training, and the like. The trade unions, which bore a “proletarian spirit,” should be replaced by similar guild structures that again controlled quality, regulated training, and set just prices.”²¹

While the sweep of Belloc’s public-policy agenda would cause mass heart failure at a modern Tea Party rally, he insisted that his project was properly labeled reactionary. He sought the method:

by which a reaction against Capitalism and its product, Communism, may be begun . . . . The main task remains not that of elaborating machinery for the reaction toward right living, but of forwarding the spirit of that reaction in a society which has almost forgotten what property and its concomitant freedom means.²² 

Policy Insights for Today

Is The Servile State, with its strong whiffs of medievalism, actually relevant to America, circa 2012? The answer is yes. Certainly, the financial crisis of 2008 and its consequences underscored the reality and perils of a servile economy. The vast majority of Americans put their faith in wages, retirement accounts resting on stocks and bonds, and the government safety net. Faith in all three has been shaken by subsequent events, just as Belloc would have predicted. Jobs were lost; the decline in real wages—evident since the 1970s—accelerated. Individual Retirement Accounts proved to be fragile, ephemeral forms of private property; as the old saying went, you can’t eat a stock certificate.  And the government safety net revealed many holes, sure to become wider and more numerous as lawmakers deal with yawning federal and state budget deficits.

All the same, was not the “housing bubble” the cause of the Panic of 2008? And was it not a consequence, in turn, of the distributist goal of delivering widespread home ownership? Could not Belloc’s very scheme be indicted as the cause of current economic woes?

If still alive, Belloc would probably give three answers. First, he never claimed that everyone should own property. Even under the best of cultural circumstances, many were unfit to bear the responsibilities involved. He certainly would not have approved of issuing mortgages to persons without the means to pay for them. Second, Belloc would have objected to the very nature of the modern American housing market. Laws favoring home ownership should have the purpose of settling families in proper structures and building stable communities. In America, however, home ownership has become in large measure a method of speculative investment. This is the very antithesis of distributist principles. And third, Belloc would have stressed that distributists never sought just home ownership. The goal was to place families in productive homes, with small workshops, loom rooms, food-preservation facilities, chicken coops, and gardens as the norm. Today, he would have added home offices, computer rooms, home-schooling rooms, and so on. The typical American suburban home—commonly prohibited by zoning laws and restrictive covenants from housing any kind of productive work—is simply not part of the distributist vision.

Today, a chastened American population is rediscovering the merits of property ownership, home production, and true liberty. The home-schooling revolution led the way, showing how families could reclaim a vital endeavor from the industrialized maws of public education. Family gardens have returned; so have chicken coops: for proof, examine Backyard Poultry magazine. The home computer and the Internet have opened remarkable opportunities for small home businesses; and the number of such enterprises has climbed sharply during the last twenty years.

From Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson to contemporary writers such as Wendell Berry, the linkage of property ownership and a vital home economy to true liberty and security has endured in the political vision of those who cherish liberty and the family. Whereas raw capitalism ends up in an unholy alliance with collectivism known as the Servile State, the distributism of Hilaire Belloc delivers an economy fit for families. Far from being just a reactionary medievalist, Belloc actually represents the most prescient of analysts and guides to a sustainable and child-rich future. 

Dr. Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, is professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Notes

1. Robert Nisbet, “Introduction,” in Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1977 [1912]), p. 18.
2. Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), p. 195.
3. Belloc, The Servile State, p. 114.
4. The full policy implications of The Servile State are drawn out in: Hilaire Belloc, The Restoration of Property (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936).
5. Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (London: Hollis & Canter, 1957), p. 317.
6. A. N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), pp. 292–94.
7. Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).
8. Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum [May 1891], http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_1-xiii_enc_1505189, p. 3.
9. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, p. 4. Emphasis added.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid, pp. 5, 12, 14.
12. Belloc, The Servile State, pp. 64–81, 87. Emphasis added.
13. Ibid, p. 82. 
14. Ibid, pp. 82–94. Emphasis added. 
15. Ibid, pp. 96–102, 117.
16. Ibid, pp. 32, 35, 39. Emphasis added.
17. Ibid, pp. 48–61, 155, 174–184.
18. Ibid, pp. 143, 161, 198.
19. Ibid, pp. 131–33.
20. Belloc, The Restoration of Property, pp. 17, 28, 35.
21. Ibid, pp. 67–73, 90, 107, 113, 116, 137. Emphasis added. 
22. Ibid, p. 144.

Tras perseguir a la Iglesia durante décadas fue bautizado por su hijo al que prohibía ser creyente

In Religión en Libertad 

Dios tiene sus tiempos para encontrarse con las personas y utiliza los instrumentos más inimaginables para realizar su obra. Es lo que ocurrió con Hung Phuoc Lam, un dominico vietnamita, cuya vocación fue utilizada por Dios para transformar el corazón de su padre, un perseguidor de la Iglesia.

Este fraile de la Orden de Predicadores cuenta en su experiencia que nació en una familia pagano-católica puesto que su padre veneraba a sus ancestros y su tía era monja budista mientras que su madre era católica. Aun así, él fue bautizado católico.

Su padre les prohibía ir a la Iglesia
Sin embargo, Phuoc Lam relata que la vida de fe y la de su madre no era nada sencilla. “Mi padre era muy severo y prohibía a mi madre ir a la Iglesia –y por lo tanto también estaba prohibido para mí”. Su padre odiaba el catolicismo por el trato que había recibido en un par de ocasiones por varios curas y religiosas, algo que no admitía. “Desde entonces se llenó de prejuicios contra los sacerdotes y contra la Iglesia, y el resultado inevitable era esta prohibición a los miembros de mi familia”.

La fe en Dios durante tantos años de su madre alimentó también a Hung y como él mismo recuerda, “con Dios todo es posible”. “Sólo puedo decir que esta situación era muy triste. Yo seguí confiando en Dios. Rezaba. Le rogaba que cambiara el corazón de mi padre costara lo que costara. No excluí mi propia llamada”.

“Que Dios cambiara el corazón de mi padre”
El Señor no tardó en responder a las oraciones de este joven vietnamita. Y la respuesta fue contundente. “Dios me llamó a la orden dominica, tenía 26 años y mi padre no aceptó la vocación”, asegura. Entonces fue cuando pudo entender las palabras del Evangelio de San Mateo: “no he venido a traer paz, sino espada”.

Su padre estaba furioso y le decía: “¡te prohíbo ser católico y ahora quieres ser sacerdote! ¿No te das cuenta de cómo son los sacerdotes y las monjas?”. De hecho, tomó una actitud “indiferente” hacía su hijo y casi le abandonó. A pesar de ello, “yo seguí adelante, en silencio, confiando en Dios. Y todos los días recé por él con mi madre”.

“Dios cambió a mi padre”
Hung Phuoc Lam entró en el Noviciado para ser fraile dominico mientras el Señor comenzaba también a actuar en su padre. Pasaron los años pero “Dios cambio a mi padre y lo hizo de verdad”.

¿Qué ocurrió para que se diera este cambio de actitud? La clave estuvo en la profesión de sus primeros votos. Ahí fue cuando aceptó la vocación de su hijo. “Luego hice mis votos finales en la Orden de Predicadores y participó en la celebración y gradualmente fue desapareciendo su prejuicio contra la Iglesia”.

“He sido derrotado por Dios”
De este modo, antes de su ordenación hizo una petición muy importante a su padre: que dejara a su madre ir a la Iglesia. Aceptó y su madre era la mujer más feliz en la faz de la tierra. “Fue una alegría el día de mi ordenación, pues la paz regresó a mi familia. Recibí aquello que pensaba haber perdido”, cuenta ahora.

Dios aún no había acabado su trabajo y en la ordenación el padre fue consciente de la realidad: “he sido derrotado por Dios; no le puedo arrebatar a mi hijo. Mi hijo es sacerdote. Está decidido; es un hecho”.

“Bauticé a mi padre”
Como el Señor es el que maneja los tiempos cuatro años después de hacerse sacerdote ocurrió el hecho más maravilloso. “Mi padre expresó el deseo de ser cristiano”. Fue el hijo el que bautizó a su padre en 2006. El que le dio la vida material era ahora el hijo espiritual. “Bauticé a mucha gente, pero jamás olvidaré el momento en que bauticé a mi padre”.

Afirma este fraile dominico que “Dios derrotó a mi padre y el Señor hizo cosas grandes por mi familia”. Tiene clarísimo que “esto fue obra de Dios y que todo es para su gloria. Me dio mucho más de lo que yo le pedí en 20 años de oración silenciosa y perseverante. Él, con su poder, hace milagros en cosas normales”.

La intercesión de la sangre de los mártires
Su vocación dominica, la conversión de su padre es como dice él mismo una obra de Dios y también por la intercesión de los mártires. Vietnam es una tierra regada por la sangre de los mártires y especialmente por numerosos domínicos que dieron su vida por el anuncio del Evangelio en esta tierra.

Obispos, frailes y laicos derramaron su sangre en Vietnam por amor a Dios y a las almas. Sangre que nunca será balde y que bendice la tierra en la que se esparce. En 1988 Juan Pablo II proclamó santos en la Plaza de San Pedro a un total de 117 mártires vietnamitas de los siglos XVIII y XIX, y cuya memoria se celebra el 24 de noviembre.

Muchos de ellos eran dominicos. Seis obispos de la Orden, entre ellos San Valentín de Berriochoa y San José María Díaz Sanjurjo, 15 frailes dominicos, 2 sacerdotes terciarios dominicos así como decenas de laicos y catequistas de la Orden de Predicadores, fueron asesinados por su fe.

Del total, setenta y cinco fueron decapitados. El resto fueron estrangulados, quemados vivos, descuartizados o torturados en prisión. Todos ellos se negaron a abjurar de su fe y pisotear la Cruz de Cristo. Ahora su sangre sigue dando frutos en el país por el que entregaron su vida.

Yamanaka and iPSCs: A reply to some skeptical friends in the pro-life community - by Christian Brugger

In Culture of Life Foundation

In 2006/7 Japanese cell biologist Shinya Yamanaka published important research showing that specialized adult cells such as skin cells could be “reprogrammed” to become pluripotent stem cells.  Yamanaka called the reprogrammed cells “induced pluripotent stem cells” (or iPSCs) and the type of research “cell reprogramming”.

He neither created nor experimented upon human embryos in his research.  But to make reagents for reprogramming the somatic cells, he apparently did use cells from a cultured cell line created in 1977 and originally derived from the tissue of a child who was aborted earlier in the 1970s (called “HEK cells,” Human Embryonic Kidney cells).  If I understand the process correctly, the genes used to reprogram the somatic cells were delivered into the cells using viruses (called lentiviral vectors).  These viral delivery systems were created using HEK cells.

Pro-life groups such as Children of God (COG) for Life have drawn attention to this little known fact and in doing so have provided the pro-life community an important service.  

Unfortunately, some of these groups are claiming that because Yamanaka used ‘tainted’ cells in his research, the production of iPSCs by cell reprogramming is intrinsically evil. 

They are incorrect.  The production of iPSCs does not require the use of HEK cells, and can be—and is being—done successfully without them.  If the research is carried out without using ‘tainted’ cells, then the procedure itself need pose no moral problems.  

They also argue that because Yamanaka used tainted cells, his research, for which he received the 2012 Nobel Prize, deserves a blanket condemnation.  For two reasons, I disagree.  

First, a blanket condemnation fails to make distinctions between what is praiseworthy and what might deserve criticism.  With respect to the latter, if Yamanaka knew the immoral origin of the HEK cells, had reasonable alternatives available to him, and yet still used the tainted cells, then (to that extent) I think he did wrong.  

His wrongdoing certainly would not be the wrong of killing; nor would it be wrongful cooperation in killing, since using cells from the cultured line 30 years later did not facilitate the original evildoing in any way.  Moreover, using HEK cells in research is unlikely to cause scandal in the formal sense (i.e., be a cause of leading others into grave sin), since HEK is so widely used in the scientific community that it barely raises an eyebrow.  

Its wrongness would lie in the failure of the duty we all share to testify to the value of human life, in this case by refusing to use products created by exploiting life: a failure of duty to bear witness to the truth.  To constitute a moral failure, however, Yamanaka would have had to know the origins of the cells, have reasonable alternatives available, and not select them.  I don’t know if these conditions prevailed.

Because of Jesus’ perspicuous self-sacrificing witness to truth, Christians, called to be Christ in the world, have an especially strong duty to bear witness.  I don’t know if Yamanaka is a Christian.  If he is, then he shares that stronger duty.  If not, he still has a duty to the truth.  But we know that even Christians, including Christian leaders, sometimes fail to bear rightful witness.  Blanket condemnations of their lives or apostolates would be simplistic and could be wrongful.  Why?  Because one’s life is a complex matrix of actions, some of which may, and others of which may not, bear perspicuous witness.

If in one respect his research fails to measure up to ethical standards, in another, the Japanese researcher has been an extraordinary witness to the truth of the sanctity of human life.  As one of the leading adult stem cell researchers in the world, he dedicated years of his life to finding a way of deriving pluripotent stem cells without killing embryos.  His research has transformed a field, which once was almost monolithically committed to embryo destructive research.  At a time when Obama was about occupy the Oval Office and running on a platform of overturning the Bush stem cell policy, just twelve months earlier (Nov. 2007) Yamanaka published this almost incredible news: “a new way to make pluripotent—embryonic like—stem cells without exploiting embryos.”  I don’t think there’s any doubt that because of his accomplishments, many, many less embryonic people are being killed today in research than otherwise would be.  And this was precisely part of Yamanaka’s motives, to stop embryo destructive research.  Whatever in his research deserves criticism, this deserves praise.  

Second, modern secular science is a morally mixed bag.  The wheat and weeds are mixed together in a giant field we call the scientific endeavor.  One of the points of genius of the empirical method is its limitless and unfolding capacity for generating new and deeper knowledge by building on the systematic accomplishments of earlier research.  If earlier research, however, entails immoral activity, the products and knowledge gained by it will in some way be tainted by the immorality.  

In the field of stem cell research, including morally licit adult stem cell research, no one can claim that the knowledge they rely upon or the products they use are “pure” and unrelated to prior research that has been illicitly obtained.

So how should we assess scientific accomplishments, such as those of Yamanaka, that include morally questionable elements?  We condemn gross immorality when we find it; and so we condemn the original killing of the baby in the 1970s, which Yamanaka had nothing to do with.  We criticize the scientific exploitation of the baby’s mortal remains.  We deplore the indifference of some scientists to the original killing.  And we admonish researchers in the present to bear witness to the truth by refusing to use products derived from the baby’s tissues.  

If they use them out of non-culpable ignorance, then they do no more wrong than did children who innocently drank Pepsi products that utilized flavor chemicals developed in research using HEK cells.  

If they use them with full knowledge, but don’t have reasonable alternatives, then we assess two things: 1) whether the use is likely to cause scandal, and 2) if the research is serious enough to warrant tolerating (but not intending) other harms that might arise from the use (e.g., legitimizing in people’s minds the original illicit act).  If there is proportionately grave reason and if using the products is unlikely to cause scandal, then we may conclude the researchers are justified in using them.  

If reasonable alternatives are readily available, and informed researchers don’t use them, then we are warranted in concluding that they fail in their duty to witness to the truth by refusing to use the alternatives. 

But we also praise the good they do, in Yamanaka’s case, in effectively—and by intent— dealing a lethal blow to one of the most immoral forms of scientific research in modern history.

Marriage = Biology (Not Bigotry)

The Tragic Heroism of Pope Pius XII - by Rev. George W. Rutler

In CRISIS

There are commentators on the sports channels whose numbing dialogues would never be confused with the Algonquin Round Table.  These are the so-called Monday Morning Quarterbacks. Some historians quarterback that way.  Pope Pius XII, hailed in his lifetime as a protector of persecuted people, has suffered  in reputation from lax minds who never exercised themselves in the great contests of civilization.

There is increasing evidence that attempts to misrepresent the Pope as feckless and even criminally compliant, began as the work of Communist propagandists, seminally in East Germany at the direction of Moscow.  This was taken up later by people either uninformed or polemical. An impressive number of works have been published recently to correct this, and to them I can only add from my own studies a few details in the anguish of the most terrible years of the 1940’s.

As a child, Eugenio Maria Giuseppi Pacelli  was moved by the early Roman martyrs, and told his uncle that he wanted to be a martyr, but “without nails.” As Pope, his crucifixion without nails began when the diplomat confronted the Evil One who has two faces and hides one.  Pacelli became well aware  that the strengths of diplomacy can strain the apostle, which is why the only one of the Twelve Apostles who was a diplomat, hanged himself.  As a youth sensitive by nature and tutored at home because, according to his sister, he could not take the bad food in seminary, he had the gifts and limitations of a rarified formation. The grandson of an Interior Minister in the Papal States was reared in an intensely clerical world, and one far removed from the nuclear age he would live to see.  

He was born on the day that Rutherford B. Hayes was declared president, and  three years before Newman was made a cardinal.  That early environment cultivated his lifelong propensity for baroque effusions, such as his display after the bombing of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, which greatly annoyed the historian Philip Hughes, an admirer, for its contrast to papal serenity during other more distant and rebarbative devastations.

The Fascist propagandist, Farinnaci,  saw the Vatican and its Pope as an enemy in his crosshairs. In 1942, he wrote: “Undoubtedly, we could not agree with the Vatican Wireless broadcasts of sympathy for Jewish Poland; the telegram sent to the Protestant Queen Wilhelmina; the considerable contribution made to the Holy See a few years ago by the Jews; …the appointment of Jews to posts in the Vatican City, almost in defiance of our anti-Semitic (and therefore Catholic) policy.”  To corroborate Farinacci’s case, Jewish prisoners in an Italian concentration camp in Tossica, sent a letter to the Pope who was  a “revered personality who has stood up for the rights of all afflicted and powerless people.”

Around Christmas of 1942, the Vichy government in their collaboration with the Nazis under Laval as head of government distinct from Petain as chief of state, complained about the “Vatican cliques” who “fly up in the air every time it is a question of the descendants of Christ’s Murderers.” On September 2, The New York Times headlined: “Laval Spurns Pope—25,000 Jews in France Arrested for Deportation.” Laval had already exploded in anger against Monsignor Valerio Valeri, dean of the diplomatic corps in France, for speaking out against the government’s anti-Semitism and deportations of Jews.

On September 12, 1942, ten days after German troops entered Stalingrad, exiled Poles and Belgians sent a plea to the pope to condemn Nazi war crimes.  The Pope did not respond, possibly because in the previous year when he had condemned the racial legislation of the new pro-Nazi republic of Slovakia the German SS retaliated with mass executions of 3,500 Jews in Lodz, Poland.

Also in 1942, Joseph Goebbels published ten million copies of a pamphlet condemning the Vatican’s attempt to protect Jews by enabling hundreds to flee Poland for Spain and Portugal, and sequestering many in the Vatican. For such acts, The Pilot, then an influential Catholic newspaper in Boston, compared Pius XII to other papal protectors of Jews:  Sixtus IV, Clement VII, Eugenius III, Gregory IX and Pus XI.

The journals of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, formerly a German  spy in Spain and later a counter-spy for the Allies, explain not only how he had persuaded Franco not to allow German troops to attack Gibraltar through Spain.  A devout Catholic. he also foiled Hitler’s attempt to kidnap or assassinate both Pius XII and King Victor Emmanuel after the 1943 arrest of Mussolini at the king’s orders.

From a different perspective, in June of 1942, Bishop Veglia in Yugoslavia, lamented Vatican silence about Italian atrocities among the Croat and Slovene populations annexed to Italy: “…the people are, alas, more and more losing trust in the Catholic Church and loyalty to the Holy Father, while on the other hand they are being thrown into the arms of Communism, in which they are beginning to see the only element which will defend them in the forests against the cruelty of the Italian elements.”

On Christmas Eve, 1942, Pius XII famously broadcast a message to the world, nuanced by his mindfulness of the failed strategies of Pope Leo X with the German princes, and Pope Pius V with Queen Elizabeth I.  The New York Times said of the Pope: “This Christmas more than ever he is a lonely voice crying out in the silence of a continent.” Bishops took up the message and, for instance, Archbishop Gounot in Tunisia, anticipating the Allied landings in French North Africa, denounced the Vichy persecution of Jews.

In Belgium at the start of 1943, the Germans would not let Cardinal van Roey publish the Pope’s Silver Jubilee address, and the Italian government banned the film “Pastor Angelicus” about the life of the Pope. In that same January, the London Tablet commented on the tendency to think that more would have been accomplished by a louder protest from more bishops:  “If there exists a vague atavistic memory that once Popes and Bishops spoke, and wicked Kings trembled, that salutary thing happened because the public opinion of the day had a much fuller and deeper sense of the rights and importance of spiritual authority.  Modern men, who have for so long applauded the narrowing down and emptying of that authority as the emancipation of mankind from the thralldom of superstitions, can hardly be surprised if, as a rule, prelates in the modern era tend in prudence to limit themselves to the field indubitably conceded to them by public opinion.”

In a letter to Bishop von Preysing on April 30, 1943, Pius XII described with unusual candor the theory behind his subtlety “We give to the pastors who are working on the local level the duty of determining if and to what degree the danger of reprisal and of various forms of oppression occasioned by episcopal declarations…seem to advise caution. Here lies one of the reasons, why We impose self-restraint on Ourselves in our speeches…The Holy See has done whatever was in its power, with charitable, financial and moral assistance.” The U.S. diplomat Harold Tittman recorded how anti-Nazi resistance leaders consistently had urged the Pope to follow this policy.

In May of 1943, the secretary of the Jewish Agency for Palestine asked the future Pope John XXIII, “to thank the Holy See for the happy outcome of the steps taken on behalf of the Israelites in Slovakia.”  At the same time, the Pope granted an audience to Dr. Kazimierz Papee, the informal representative of the Polish government in exile to the Holy See.  As recounted by the historian Dariusz Libionka, and mentioned in his own journal, Papee had expressed to the Papal Secretary of State, Luigi Cardinal Maglione, his exasperation with the Pope’s hesitancy to speak about the Polish situation in other than diplomatic language. According to Papee’s own memoirs, the Pope abandoned diplomatic reserve to berate him: “I have listened again and again to your representatives about our unhappy children in Poland. Must I be given the same story again?”  In his memoir, “Pius XII I Polska,” Papee recalled that the Pope raised his arms in the air as he reprimanded him.  Pope John XXIII had Papee removed, at the start of his pontificate. In the same week of this strained conversation, the Nazi-controlled Radio Paris  broadcast: “As soon as the Fuhrer assumed power in 1933, the Vatican let loose its hostility…National Socialism tried to settle all conflicts with the Church; the Church rejected the hand offered to her. May she bear the responsibility for this in the annals of history.”

The German  ambassador to the Holy See, Baron Ernst von Kessel, was by all accounts, even that of Churchill, secretly sympathetic to the Allies,  He was convinced that Hitler intended to occupy the Vatican, which he thought would be disastrous, especially if the Pope were shot “fleeing while avoiding arrest.”

That did not happen, and Pius XII became  a “martyr without nails.”  No Monday Morning Quarterback with any self-respect can say that Pius XII did not try his best, and indeed did more than most of the players on that historical stage of the war years, conspicuously in contrast to the mendacity of President Roosevelt in his whitewashing of the Katyn Massacre and the short shrift he gave to the resistance leader Jan Karski. Churchill, whom Pius first met in London in 1911 during a Eucharistic Congress, called him  “the greatest man of our time.” During an audience in 1944, Churchill was surprised at the vehemence with which the Pope urged strict justice for war criminals. An eloquent defender of capital punishment in Thomistic terms, Pius told a Swiss reporter: “Not only do we approve of the [Nuremburg] trial, but we desire that the guilty be punished as quickly as possible, and without exception.”  The diplomat in Pius was frustrated by the position of Monsignor Jozef  Tiso as chief of the Slovakian state. A Nazi puppet, Tiso always wore clerical dress and never suffered canonical censure. The Pope received him privately in audience more than once.  But diplomacy worked when Tiso yielded to the Pope’s sixth formal plea to stop deportation of thousands of Jews.  After the war, Tiso was hanged in his clericals as a war criminal.  However, nothing was done to the Herzegovenian Franciscans in the Ustashe center near Medjugorge, whose complicity in the killing of hundreds of Serbian women and children was described by Cardinal Tisserant as an abomination.

Pius XII’s diplomatic character was his triumph with civilized men and his anguish with barbarians. Had he died a martyr with nails, his legacy could not have been suborned by demagogues. Diplomats tend to live longer than prophets, but to fault diplomacy for not having done what a longer view judges should have been done, can be a self-serving form of detraction.  American Indian wisdom has it that you should not judge a man until you have walked two moons  in his moccasins. It is harder to walk in the Shoes of the Fisherman, for there is a rare succession of those elected to do that. The tension between diplomacy and prophecy was the stuff of tragedy, and that made Pius XII a man of his time, which was the most tragic in the annals of man.

When Cultural Radicals speak of “diversity,” they mean no such thing - by Msgr. Charles Pope

In AoW

You may have read in the news that a faculty member of the Gallaudet University in Washington DC has been placed on “administrative leave,” due to the fact that she signed a petition requesting referendum on the issue of gay marriage in Maryland.

 

Angela McCaskill is “Chief Diversity Officer” at Gallaudet University in Washington DC. She was at church one Sunday, and requested to sign the petition that would permit the voters of Maryland to vote on the issue of gay “marriage.” She signed the petition and says she did so because she favors democracy and allowing citizens to vote on such controversial issues, as opposed to having legislatures and courts force so-called “gay marriage” on the populace. (More HERE)

But the administrators at Gallaudet University consider her signing of the petition to be unacceptable. Apparently, as “Chief Diversity Officer,” they don’t consider her kind of diversity the right kind of diversity.

To be sure, it is refreshing and surprising to hear that a “diversity officer” would have signed a petition opposing Gay “marriage” and insist that gay marriage be brought to a vote, instead of merely being imposed. As most social conservatives know, and have experienced, the usual “diversity office” at a campus is anything but diverse in its views. And, that a diversity officer might actually understand that there more than one side to the issue of Gay “marriage” surprises not only social conservatives, but also (apparently) social leftists. In effect, the leadership at Gallaudet University sees Ms. McCaskill’s actions as incompatible with their notion of diversity, and are saying, in effect, “How could you!”

But merely expressing surprise is not usually enough for radicals on the left. Thus, they have placed her on “administrative leave.” Never mind all the usual calls for tolerance from the radicals, never mind the “free exchange of ideas” that they so often extol on college campuses. Never mind all that, according to them, Ms. McCaskill has to go.

The reaction well demonstrates that when leftist cultural radicals speak of “diversity,” they don’t mean it in any fair minded or straight forward definition of the word.

The word diversity comes from the Latin word diversus: di (two) + versa (turns or sides). Thus, the true meaning of the word “diversity” means “two sides.” Or by extension, “more than one side,” “more than one viewpoint” or just “different.”

But the cultural radicals mean no such thing. In their lexicon “diversity” means you have to accept anything they propose. But it does not that they should accept you, or that they should even consider the fact that you might be troubled that they propose anything, no matter how deviant the behavior has historically been seen to be. In their lexicon, being “open-minded” means that you agree with them. “Tolerance” is your obligation to agree with them, but not their obligation to accept you, or your deeply held Christian beliefs, no matter how ancient or how well attested.

And, in their form of diversity, tolerance and open-mindedness, if they can punish your non-compliance or even just your non-placet, they will do so with a sense of righteousness, and they will do so firmly and swiftly.

The central point is, when cultural radicals use these terms, they mean no such thing.

To be sure, I am not hereby articulating a position that diversity is an absolute quality or virtue. There are certain diversities to be celebrated and/or tolerate. But there are certain behaviors, which ought not be tolerated, illicit sexual union and Gay “marriage” among them.

The intent in this post is merely call the cultural radicals on their bluff. When they talk about diversity, they don’t really mean it. When they try to parade around in clothes of openness, tolerance, and diversity, they are misrepresenting themselves. When they celebrate “diversity” they don’t mean you, especially if you are a traditional Christian. Their ‘diversity” doesn’t include the Scriptures or the ancient Judeo-Christian tradition, or Natural Law. And don’t even think about mentioning the Catholic Church to them, you’re certain to be shown the door out of their “diverse” world.

To them these things are not something to celebrate or tolerate. They are something to abhor, to legally block, and for some of them, even something to destroy.

Just remember, when they speak of diversity they don’t mean it. And if they mean it all, it is only for them and their favored groups. But they certainly don’t mean it for you, especially if you are a traditional, Bible believing Christian. No, you are not part of the rainbow, you are not part of their tapestry, or their mosaic. You have no place at their table, no place in their celebration.

The views of diversity officer Angela McCaskill regarding (so called) “gay marriage,” are not clear. But one thing is clear, she has (wittingly or unwittingly) called the bluff of the diversity motif of the cultural radicals, and has incurred special wrath because she has done so.

To them she is “off message.” She actually took the word diversity to me what it says. How wrong was that! And now she is cast out of the “hallowed halls” the radicals think they own. She is proof that when cultural radicals speak of diversity they don’t mean you, they only mean themselves.

Disclaimer: I have chosen the words “cultural radicals” carefully. I am willing to admit that there are many who oppose the Church’s teaching on Biblical marriage who are far less radical, who are of good will, and may also be shocked at what happened to Angela McCaskill. There are some who are willing to allow the cultural debates of our time to be conducted in an open and honest way, and accept that varying groups, including Christians, have the rights of any citizens to engage in the political process, and to seek to influence the discussions in the on-going cultural shifts of the West.

But the radicals have no such room in their world for opposition or even discussion, and they want to silence any questioning of their agenda. They are growing in number, especially in university and government settings, and it is to them that I address the concerns of this blog.

On Politics - James Schall, S. J.

In The Catholic Thing

At election time, we hear of an “obligation” to vote. This phrase always reminds me of our “right” to choose. Both “to vote” and “to choose” are infinitives. They mean practically nothing until we learn what we are voting for or what we are choosing. Looking at the available alternatives, we sometimes long for an obligation not to vote for this or for a right not to choose that.

The mechanisms of voting and choosing are very imperfect throughout the world. Many elections are, in practice, meaningless. Whenever we see elections decided by 98 percent of an electorate on one side, we can assume that no real election took place. How many votes in, say, Chicago are cast by the dead remains a lively issue.

Eventually, we ask ourselves: How important are politics anyhow? Edmund Burke’s remark is well known: “The only thing that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

But evil today, as always, presents itself in the name of what is good and noble. This is why elections are so enigmatic. Tyrants, likewise, especially the ones arising out of democracies, are often attractive men telling us what we want to hear so that they can gain or stay in power.

In his book on St. Augustine, Herbert Deane reminds us:

Nowhere in the Gospels or in the Apostolic teachings is it ever suggested that Christians have any obligation to participate in the operation of the political system or that the activities of the state have any real relevance to the conduct of members of the Church or to their overriding concern – salvation and participation in the kingdom of God.

The relative importance of things needs to be kept in perspective.

Though Revelation contains a warning about absolute state power, the New Testament was not designed to teach us what we could figure out by ourselves. Politics was one of these latter things.

We sometimes have the impression today that everything is political. Indeed, many believers elevate politics to make it identical with the kingdom of God.

The chief rival to Christianity today, besides Islam, is a secular messianism designed to “liberate” us from religious practices so that we can devote all our attention to politics as our “real” good. Religion, in this view, is what holds us back from perfecting ourselves.

The modern state wants to fulfill that proposal of Marsilius of Padua whereby spiritual things have nothing to do with politics. World religions would be assigned a common parliament that would function under the aegis of the state.

Nothing truly transcendent would exist. Religion’s function would be to explain the nobility of the state’s purpose. No conflict of church and state would be possible. And what would the purpose of the state be? Basically, it would be to “take care” of everyone, in life and death, especially the poor.

In classical politics, of course, the purpose of the state was a temporal common good in which people took care of their own affairs. There is something exhilarating about “taking care” of others. It seems so noble.

In a recent talk in Loreto, in Italy, Benedict XVI said: “Grace does not eliminate freedom; on the contrary it creates and sustains it. Faith removes nothing from the human creature, rather it permits his full and final realization.”

The “full and final realization” of politics can only be understood when we acknowledge that politics is not an eschatology. Its divisions are not those of the soul that are worked out in our living and dying.

But again, politics is not nothing. The fact that the New Testament pays little attention to it – “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” – means that it has a natural importance that we can grasp with our reason.

Aristotle called politics the highest of the practical sciences. He understood that something higher than politics existed. This transcendent order is what kept politics as politics and not itself a claim to man’s ultimate allegiance.

When politics claim our ultimate attention, when it subordinates religion to the state, it transforms the natural order into its own image. Civil societies, states, are not substantial beings with personal destinies of their own, as each human being is. They are arrangements of order and disorder wherein individual people work out their final destiny.

We can save our souls in the worst regime, and lose them in the best. Our politics do not automatically determine whether we reach or don’t reach everlasting life. Yet what we do and choose in politics also forms us into what we are, into what we make ourselves to be.

The polity exists so that greater and more varied goods can come about through our agency. The last judgment will include our political choices. Grace does not eradicate nature.