“Hugging the cactus” — now that’s a powerful image.

I think you can figure out the backstory. Frank Weathers discusses it. Evidently the event organizers had no idea that Robert Downey Jr. had this planned. They chose Mel Gibson to introduce Downey because they were “concerned a bit about Robert’s checkered past, so they chose someone to present the award who could help balance that out and the choice was so obvious, Mel Gibson.”

Well, they ended up getting a whole lot more than “balance” — they got a peak at what forgiveness looks like as well as the eternal offer of redemption.

I’ve written recently about my hopes that Mel Gibson overcomes his (many) personal demons and seeks and finds forgiveness for his numerous public sins. Too often we can generalize that Hollywood is full of immoral people and forget that, even here, grace and mercy are sometimes powerfully at work.

As for Downey Jr., I outed him as a closet papist long ago — when an AmP reader spotted him wearing a John Paul II t-shirt on Good Morning America:

Downey Jr. talked in 2004 to the New York Times about his experience with the Catholic faith while in prison:

Q. Are you religious? Many people find God as part of their recovery process and there seem to be veiled references in a few of the songs.

A. I’m not above it. But like Jung said about people using religion to avoid a religious experience, I have managed handily to avoid a religious experience. I don’t know where I fall. Spiritual Green Party? There were times when I was into the whole Hare Krishna thing, which is pretty far out. Now I would call myself a Jew-Bu, a Jewish-Buddhist. But there were many times when Catholicism saved my butt.

Q. You were a practicing Catholic?

A.I was in as much when I was on the B yard and they asked me, “Are you going to Catholic services or Presbyterian services?” I think I’m going to Catholic because they just give you more stuff. More candles and there’s a whole calendar where this day you read this, the next day you read that. It’s like a call sheet for spirituality.

God calls everyone, even the broken heroes of Hollywood.

Writing in the Huffington Post, Penn had said that it was a “defamation” to refer to Chavez as a dictator.

“This is not a dictator supported by the wealthy classes, but rather, a president elected by the impoverished and at the service of the Venezuelan constitution, a document not unlike our own. He is a flamboyant, passionate leader,” wrote Penn.

Ozzie Guillen would have none of this. Born in Ocumare Del Tuy, Venezuela, the manager of the White Sox slammed Penn:

“Sean penn if you love venezuela please move to venezuela for a year. But rent a house in guarenas or guatire to see how long you last clown.”

Most Americans are ignorant of Hugo Chavez’ outrageous actions. So they might be susceptible to believing Sean Penn’s wild assertions. I’m glad to see some push back from Ozzie Guillen.

For a great write-up on Hugo Chavez, don’t read Sean Penn. Instead opt for “Hugo Chavez: Anti-Catholic, Narcissist, Leninist” in The Catholic Thing written by George Marlin.

Hugh Grant and Ann McPherson

• This past week long-time assisted-suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian died in Detroit. On the other side of the pond, another assisted-suicide advocate also died. Ann McPherson founded Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying to promote assisted-suicide in Britain. Thankfully, the practice is still illegal in the United Kingdom. According to LifeSiteNews, actor Hugh Grant is a financial supporter of McPherson’s work. “She’s right on assisted dying,” said Grant. “That seems to me like the dignified option. I don’t know quite what she wanted in her last few weeks, but she was a great champion of the right to die in a dignified manner, which it seems she did.” Sad to see another celebrity to use their notoriety to promote the Culture of Death.
• Ross Douthat, writing on his New York Times blog, speculates what legalized assisted-suicide would look like in the United States if the practice became as prevalent as abortion: “If the right to die really became ‘a lot like’ the right to abortion in America, there would be Swiss-style thanatoriums in most American cities, the Hemlock Society would be a major lobbying group (boasting, no doubt, that most of its resources go to palliative care rather than assisted suicide), and Kermit Gosnell-style thanatists would prey on the elderly while the courts looked the other way.” God help us all if that ever happened.
• Catholic colleges are getting intense scrutiny from the Obama administration. Adam Wilson has an excellent write-up on the clash between Catholic colleges and the National Labor Relations Board. It cuts to the heart of religious independence from the state. “On May 26, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found that one Catholic college lacks substantial religious character and hence cannot stop adjunct faculty from unionizing. They ruled that St. Xavier University in Chicago ‘is not a church-operated institution’ and is therefore subject to federal labor law. That was the second such ruling in a few months. The NLRB declared in January that Catholic Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York, is not recognizably Catholic.” Read the rest of the article at Crisis magazine.

While covering the Sermon on the Mount, I had students read the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew and then create a list of “Modern Beatitudes.” I told students to imagine the perspective of, for example, the head of MTV or the publisher of a popular magazine. From that perspective, I asked, what makes someone happy or blessed?

Here are examples of what students wrote:

Blessed are they who have problems, for they will be given attention.
Blessed are those who get pregnant at 16, for they will get a TV show.
Blessed are they who have money, for they will have anything they want.
Blessed are those who are angry, for violence is the only way to power.
Blessed are those who don’t eat, for they shall be “beautiful.”
Blessed are those who play music, for they bring joy to the world.
Blessed are those who are intelligent, for they gain respect from their peers.
Blessed are those who overcame drinking and drugs, for they will be on Oprah and Dr. Phil.
Blessed are those who get plastic surgery, for they shall remain ever young.
Blessed are those who have many Facebook friends, for they shall never be lonely while browsing the internet.
Blessed are the stoners, for they will not have to deal with reality.

Teen pregnancy, plastic surgery, drug use, “problems,” technology, social networking sites, violence—this is the stuff that a group of 15- and 16-year-olds believes its culture prizes. This is the stuff our students walk into, and out of, and back into, every day.

During the commercial, Edelstein narrates:

Decades ago, women suffered through horrifying back alley abortions. Or, they used dangerous methods when they had no other recourse. So when the Republican Party launched an all out assault on women’s health, pushing bills to limit access to vital services, why is the GOP trying to send women back … to the back alley?

This, of course, is nothing but a disingenuous scare tactic. She’s talking about, I assume, H.R. 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” the Protect Life Act, and efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. They are all modest legislative goals. They also aren’t entirely partisan.

I might also add: While leadership has not discouraged the latter two efforts, the Speaker has only endorsed one. Theirs is hardly a top-down crusade. It is more like keeping a simple Pledge promise.

The counter to the commercial inadvertently — or prophetically — came in the form of congressional testimony last week from George Mason University law professor Helen Alvaré. Testifying about the Protect Life Act, to the Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, she said:

First, clearly even if one believes that abortion is an integral part of women’s health care — which I do not – it is hard to claim a shortage of abortion providers when there occur over 1.2 million abortions annually in the United States, with a disproportionate number concentrated in our poorest communities, and among women of color.

Second, our nation’s most vulnerable women—the poor, and women with less privileged educations — are more likely to oppose abortion than are men, and than their more privileged sisters. They are also less likely to abort their nonmarital pregnancies than the latter group.

Third, it appears that what opponents of conscience protections — which they call “refusal clauses” — actually intend, is to force the government and conscience-driven private providers to give them what the market has steadfastly refused: widely dispersed sources for abortions provided in hygienic medical settings. What they have instead – even after 38 years of legal abortion in the United States — is a market that looks like this: 87% of U.S. counties with no abortion provider; steadily declining numbers of abortion clinics (which decline began long before clinic prayer vigils and protests began in earnest), largely due to the stigma associated with abortion among physicians and in the medical profession generally; delivery of abortions, in the words of the New York Times, at the “margins of medical practice,” i.e. abortions being performed in the vast majority of cases in free standing clinics (many run by one vocal interest group, Planned Parenthood) with relatively few (about 5%) abortions provided in hospitals or doctors’ offices; and a steady stream of reports of abortion providers violating the most basic standards of health care for vulnerable women, or violating even women’s human rights. Credible reports emerged just last week about employees of several Planned Parenthood clinics offering to cooperate with a man posing as the leader of a sex trafficking ring of minor girls.

Still, extant abortion providers manage to perform over 1.2 million abortions annually, disproportionately among poor women and women of color. If opponents of conscience protection believe this to be too few abortions, current law leaves them free to provide more abortion services themselves, rather than force conscience-driven providers to do so by means of federal fiat. Although recent events indicate that even the nation’s largest abortion provider is having difficulty convincing its own members to expand the supply of abortion. Just this past month, a Planned Parenthood affiliate resigned from the national organization after the latter insisted that each affiliate perform abortions. The head of the Texas affiliate reported to the Corpus Christi newspaper that “there are far greater needs in our area than abortion…We don’t need to duplicate services.”

Fourth, when insisting that women’s “health care” needs merit specialized attention – a claim I also affirm — opponents of conscience protection ought to be willing to engage in a thoughtful conversation about the meaning of health care. In the case of abortion, we find ourselves today in the midst of an emerging scientific and cultural awareness that abortion is not health care. A majority of our U.S. Supreme Court calls abortion “killing.” Many abortion providers and advocates of legal abortion do the same. More broadly, there is emerging evidence from a growing body of sociological, as well as law and economics literature, that more easily available abortion is associated with women’s “immiseration,” and not their flourishing. When Justice Sandra O’Connor wrote in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey opinion that women had “organized intimate relationships, and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail,” she was even more right than she likely knew. According to leading scholars, it certainly appears that more easily available abortion has led to expectations of more uncommitted sexual encounters – a situation which itself contradicts women’s demonstrated preferences – and thereby to more sexually transmitted infections, more nonmarital pregnancies and births, and more abortions. Women of color, poor women and recent immigrants, are suffering these consequences in disproportionate numbers.

[More on the misery of it all here.]

If opponents of conscience protection want to encourage high quality, readily available health care for women, especially vulnerable women, they could not do better than to ally themselves with supporters of conscience protections. In the United States, this group is regularly comprised of the kinds of providers and institutions ready to assist the most vulnerable women, even with free or low cost care. These include, for example, Catholic hospitals which in 2009 alone, provided care for nearly 86 million patients at 561 hospitals.  These also include networks of individual doctors willing to provide free or low cost health care to women. These providers have demonstrated their sense of vocation, and a sensitivity to the needs of the most vulnerable. If not for these institutions and providers, a great deal more of the work of caring for the sick, the poor and the marginalized would fall to the government, or simply go undone. They are proof that protection of conscience and care for the vulnerable are not opposite values, but overlapping ones, or even one and the same. These are not the providers that the law should be driving out of the health care marketplace.

Any prime-time actresses in for the commercial? The cause doesn’t get better.

I rather doubt Pope Benedict XVI follows [Charlie] Sheen, but the actor may recognize himself in what Benedict had to say in his latest book, Light of the World. Commenting on the terrible scourge of drugs and the sex trade, he said: “You see, man strives for eternal joy; he would like pleasure in the extreme, would like what is eternal. But when there is no God, it is not granted to him and it cannot be. Then he himself must now create something that is fictitious, a false eternity.”

Man’s heart desires that which endures, but when he denies himself enduring things, he turns instead to more intense experiences of passing things. It is a “fictitious, false eternity” but man demands eternity, whether authentic or counterfeit. The heart of man desires true love, something good that will last. If he gives up on that, or hardens his heart against that possibility, he teaches himself to settle for counterfeit love and makes do with superficial things that pass away. Not every man ends up at the brothel door, but every man knows the steps in that direction.

Valentine’s Day is harmless enough — save for those single souls unkindly made to feel left out — but it is to true love what gold plating is to the real thing. It might look like it, and may serve to fool someone for a time, but it fades. The commercial message of Valentine’s Day is that indulgence is the path to love — flowers, chocolates, jewellery, extravagant meals. All of which may be enjoyed, but cannot be the path to love, for indulgence fundamentally turns in on the self. Sacrifice is the path to love, for it alone goes beyond the self to the service of the beloved. Sacrifice and service are the measure of love.

It is not only the men outside the brothel who are looking for God. So too the women inside, who desire that someone may come who might sacrifice, not his money, but himself, not to possess but to serve. Having given up on being served, they settle for services rendered.

The Christian wisdom of Chesterton and Benedict is inclined to see the possibility of hope at the brothel door. A belated discovery of an enduring, eternal love remains possible. And the Christian remembers that Jesus preached the Gospel amongst the prostitutes.

He may be among the highest paid on television, but he is the least of my brothers.

Evil flourishes where hearts harden. (Abby Johnson’s new book Unplanned underscores this, too.) Never give up on the most hardened. He may, in fact, be most in need of love and an entrée into God’s merciful hand.

Fr. Raymond’s piece is worth reading — it’s written with a little help from G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton, who, “would not give up on [Sheen], for there he stands, at the door knocking.”

Anyway, the big news of the week has been NBC’s struggle over the time slots of Conan O’Brien & Jay Leno, with people reacting passionately, mostly in favor for Conan. It struck me as I as looking at all the coverage that people cared about this.

I point this out b/c the “issue” of NBC’s treatment of O’Brien has managed to be something that people genuinely care about whereas I would venture to say that in large part people have stopped caring about the health care reform. I know I have.

Before I get deluged, let me explain. I’m a law student so I’m fairly busy, but I like many of you I try to keep up with the news as much I can. But with school (or work in many of your cases), family and friends, there’s only so much you can do. I’ve tried hard to keep up with the progress of the health care reform. But at this point, I’ve just given up. Highly technical proposals have come almost every day and the bills change constantly, perhaps corresponding to when the lobbyists checks can clear. By the time I’ve tried to educate myself on what a particular proposal actually does and then move on to evaluating whether or not I think it’s a good thing, the Congress has already scrapped it and has a new thing, with a new set of charts, budget projections, and back & forth between experts.

I couldn’t tell you (outside of money for abortion) what’s in the current proposals. I venture to guess that most Americans can’t either. I may even be so bold as to suggest that most Congressmen don’t either. Indeed, their arguments seem to be tailored to be cookie-cutters to whatever emerges (GOP: this is too expensive! Big government! ah! Democrats: well, if this doesn’t pass then we won’t be able to do anything in the future-which by the way, don’t you love it when the argument for a particular form of reform is not that the reform is good but that the defeat of the reform would prevent actual reform in the future not connected to the present reform?).

All in all, the entire debate of this critical issue has managed to have been conducted in the hands & minds of politicians, lobbyists, and a few people who have read a bunch of health care books and already know the lingo. The American people, who are interested only in so far as they care about health care generally, have been largely untouched by the current debate.

There is an exception, and that is the exception of the abortion coverage. People understand abortion; it’s a real thing that people are able to feel passionate about and able to engage in i.e. you don’t have to have studied health care for years or be able to read a chart to discuss it. This is part of the reason why I think people care about O’Brien: everyone can understand the guy who works hard and stays loyal to a company to his detriment in order to achieve a goal, and then the company stabs him in the back when he’s almost there.

What should we take from this as Catholics attempting to engage the political process? Well, I think in the health care debate itself we should be mindful that abortion is one of the few issues that people across America can be passionate about in the health care reform. It, more so then a lot of other stuff, may be key to shaping public perception of it and the Democrats heading into a re-election year know it. We need to continue to apply the pressure so that the bill does not spread abortion.

But more generally, we need to be conscious that the importance of an issue is not enough to motivate people. Conan leaving NBC is of little importance but b/c we can identify with the situation we care strongly about it (perhaps more strongly then we should). In discussing political matters then, we need to make sure our representation of the Catholic social doctrine is not merely an argument for its truth, but also a presentation done in such a way as to help people identify with and understand an issue.

This is not to say that technicality must be avoided; on complex bills like health care there is inevitably a large degree of expertise required for some issues. But in the end, for democracy to be functioning properly and for the people to be motivated to make a learned decision the politicians and experts must be willing to step down from the ivory towers and present a case that people can identify with and care about. As Catholics, our task is to take the complex teachings of the Church and help people to understand them and care about them.

This is not an easy task but an essential one, one I hope this blog will contribute mightily towards.