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Return of Screwtape
Originally published in E-Leaven, March 23, 2009, Issue 6
by A Leaven Reader
With apologies to C.S. Lewis
(Quotes from The Screwtape Letters (N Y: Touchstone, 1966)

Once in a great while, a situation prompts Screwtape’s return. A brief summary of the facts in this case:

So Screwtape, devil-in-chief, e-mails Wormwood, devil-in-training:

My dear Wormwood,

“Ah HA! That’s one for our side, my boy.” (He has just closed his on-line version of the NEW YORK TIMES.) It proves once again that “one of our great allies at present is the Church” (22).

Get them puffed with self-righteousness and they capitulate easily.
Reminds me of that splendid Exodus 20 passage, warning them to observe the Sabbath. “No work may be done then, either by you… or your male or female slave,” the sanctimonious observed primly. Slid right over slavery in their Sabbath piety.

As I’ve told you before, getting them fixated on the wrong issue is easy enough. They’re so busy trotting out the slogans, they miss the larger point. Long ago I advised you: “remember the elder brother in the Enemy’s story” (27). When “meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes and crusades matter more to [them] than prayers and sacraments and charity, [they] are OURS” (39).

Even better: neither the bishop nor the Vatican mentions the role of the wonderfully wicked stepfather! Such a fiendish twist!

Unfortunately, Brazilian justice, so splendidly “iffy” in the Dorothy Stang murder, stepped in. They’ve placed this paragon of virtue “in police custody.” SO glad the church doesn’t dirty its hands with such nonsense! And we needn’t worry about them offering to pay for the child’s psychiatrist.

We’ve always gotten spectacular results from their factions. The Pro-this and Pro-that armies are so wrought up in their rhetoric, they’ve actually forgotten the girl. To quote myself again, “all extremes except extreme devotion to the Enemy are to be encouraged.” (38)

Except for that one troublesome guy who has the annoying compassion of the Enemy: Archbishop Rino Fisichella, obviously a dupe with a name like that. He’s president of some dumb Pontifical Academy for Life, and actually criticized his fellow hierarchs for their “hasty” decision. He had the stupidity to write, in the Vatican’s own L’Osservatore Romano, that the girl "in the first place should have been defended, hugged and held tenderly to help her feel that we were all on her side." Remind you of anyone, all that soupy “shepherding” twaddle? Remember what I once told you: “having been human [was] the abominable advantage of the Enemy’s” (20).

And the timing doesn’t get much better than this: it all occurred in Women’s History Month, when the pope benignly blessed the dear girls. Just when the boys in the Vatican had drummed up a brilliant frosting for the celebration cake--investigating the real villains of the current scene--women’s religious orders. What a splendid month it’s been!

But to be honest, dear nephew, sometimes even I get distracted from what counts most. The facts tug at some old, forgotten empathy. It’s diabolically irritating, but at 3 in the morning, all blurry, I remember:

She was nine.
She weighed sixty-six pounds.
Bearing twins might’ve killed her.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape

Editor’s Note – John F. Kane

We at Leaven have over the years consistently expressed our opposition to abortion. With so many abortion opponents, we also recognize the moral and pastoral difficulties presented by pregnancies that are the result of rape, and also by pregnancies which endanger the life of the mother. We are dealing with both in this terrible case from Brazil.

Speaking abstractly, it does make sense to say that the innocent life that results from rape is, indeed, innocent life that deserves protection. Yet Catholic morality and plain common sense have always known that there often are more than one victim in a crime – that in cases like the present there is more than one form of innocent life deserving protection. Catholic morality has also always distinguished between heroic virtue and the reality of our human fallibility – that few of us ever rise to the standard of heroic – and that in light of the physical reality of this very young girl, it is not even clear what heroic virtue might mean. The Catholic pastoral tradition has also reserved final judgment on some very difficult matters to “the interior forum” – often the private discernments made by a person in consultation with a confessor, and finally the discernments of individual conscience.

Archbishop Fisichella seems to get it right. Start with the real criminal and embrace the victims. Then allow those closest to the case, with the compassionate support of the Church, the freedom in prayer and discernment to find their way between conflicting goods. We have no reason to believe that the girl, her mother, and her doctors did anything other than this. We join them in prayer and great sadness.

On the first Bishop’s declaration of excommunication, and on the subsequent declaration of Vatican support, we feel both outrage and sadness. They seem so caught up in legalism, and probably also in approval-seeking from higher-ups and from the Catholic right, that they’ve lost touch with what is most central to the Gospel and to the best of Catholic moral and pastoral traditions.

 

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