Again and again, in the discussion of Live Action’s well-intentioned and youthful project of lying for Jesus, defenders of the LA tactics complain that telling a few little white lies to Planned Parenthood is nothing compared to the evils PP commits.

Very true. And quite irrelevant. Nobody says, and certainly I don’t say, that lying about your identity is on a par with sticking scissors in a baby’s brain. What fool would? Nor, as I have labored to point out, do I consider all speech acts which do not consist of flat-footed literalism to be lies. So constant attempts to claim that I am a fundamentalist who would condemn a novelist or an actor or Jesus for not speaking literalistically are all attacks on a straw man. Likewise are all claims that I believe the only course of action with the proverbial Nazi at the door is to prissily say, “I cannot tell a lie” and guide them to the cowering Jews behind the false wall boasting, “You will likely be gassed, but I have kept my precious moral purity! Ta ta!”

All of this is unserious and cartoonish. I get, like all people who are not brain dead, that there are times when you should not tell the whole truth. As I have said, again and again and again, the Catechism, in addition to saying that lying is, by its nature, to be condemned, also says:

2488 The right to the communication of the truth is not unconditional. Everyone must conform his life to the Gospel precept of fraternal love. This requires us in concrete situations to judge whether or not it is appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks for it.

2489 Charity and respect for the truth should dictate the response to every request for information or communication. The good and safety of others, respect for privacy, and the common good are sufficient reasons for being silent about what ought not be known or for making use of a discreet language. The duty to avoid scandal often commands strict discretion. No one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not have the right to know it.

2490 The secret of the sacrament of reconciliation is sacred, and cannot be violated under any pretext. “The sacramental seal is inviolable; therefore, it is a crime for a confessor in any way to betray a penitent by word or in any other manner or for any reason.”

2491 Professional secrets – for example, those of political office holders, soldiers, physicians, and lawyers – or confidential information given under the seal of secrecy must be kept, save in exceptional cases where keeping the secret is bound to cause very grave harm to the one who confided it, to the one who received it or to a third party, and where the very grave harm can be avoided only by divulging the truth. Even if not confided under the seal of secrecy, private information prejudicial to another is not to be divulged without a grave and proportionate reason.

2492 Everyone should observe an appropriate reserve concerning persons’ private lives. Those in charge of communications should maintain a fair balance between the requirements of the common good and respect for individual rights. Interference by the media in the private lives of persons engaged in political or public activity is to be condemned to the extent that it infringes upon their privacy and freedom.

So I get that while you cannot lie, neither are you obliged to reveal all truth to everybody. So the trick with the Nazis is not to lie well, but to hide your Jews well, then invite the Nazis in, offer them tea, invite them to search, and give them a warm “Heil Hitler” before they go. None of that is lying. It is merely allowing them to draw erroneous conclusions and not volunteering information to which they have no right. This is, in fact, smarter than lying since the SS will search your house anyway.

Similarly, I would have no problem with information requests which allow PP to describe what their policies are. LA, in fact, did exactly this with mammograms. They called and asked, “Do you do mammograms?” and were told “No”, thus demonstrating Cecile Richards is a liar when she claims PP clinics did mammograms. No lying necessary. Just a simple question. Way to go, Live Action! They let PP hang themselves.

But, unfortunately, that’s not all LA does. They also lie to PP, thereby giving Planned Parenthood a golden opportunity to claim they lie *about* PP. More than that, they lie to PP for the express purpose of tempting PP workers to commit mortal sin by cooperating (as they suppose) in helping the LA woman to obtain an abortion. I am skeptical LA people really have given much thought to the seriousness of that, and so I am inclined to think they are not very culpable for this sin of tempting somebody to be an accomplice to abortion, but sin it remains, and possibly grave sin if the person doing the tempting does do so with full understanding and freedom. It is, quite simply, very grave matter indeed to entice somebody to commit or to be an accomplice to the sin of murder.

Now, as the Catechism point outs, the gravity of a lie depends on the usual stuff–grave matter, freedom, understanding, etc. So in the example of the Nazis at the door, the fib told by the flustered teen makes the gravity of the lie almost non-existent. Likewise, when a schoolchum protects his innocent buddy by stammering out a lie to the school bully about his pal’s whereabouts because he can think of nothing else to do, the sin of lying is strongly mitigated by his good aim. This is all common sense, of course.

The problem, however, comes in when Christians, seeking to justify LA’s lies, appeal to such examples as a basis to argue that LA therefore has a right to embark on a campaign of premeditated lying. At that point we move from saying that somebody who tells a white lie in a pinch is not very culpable to saying that somebody who deliberately and carefully manufactures lies for the purpose of tricking someone into being an accessory to murder is permitted to do so by a sort of moral 007 “for the greater good”.

No. They are not. Saying that somebody’s culpability for a lie is mitigated by surprise and good intentions is not saying that good intentions henceforth give us a license to deliberately and carefully lie–and especially not to lie somebody into helping with a murder. That kind of logic is exactly how venial sin become the gateway drug to mortal sin.

And I don’t mean the mortal sin of LA. I mean the mortal intellectual sin of Christian cheerleaders trying to justify LA’s tactics. i’ve never spoken to anybody at LA. But I have spoken with plenty of comboxers who are allowing their commitment to justifying the (probably minimally culpable) action of LA kids to lead them into crazy claims that lying is like a priest acting in persona Christi, that tempting somebody to commit mortal sin is good, that Jesus was a liar so we can lie, and that we have to do evil that good may come of it. In just this way does venial sin become the gateway drug to mortal sin. It is breathtaking to see Christians spending vast quantities of energy asking not, “How do we fight PP with integrity?” but “How can we argue for the goodness of the Noble Lie? How can we euphemize lying as ‘pretending’ or (heaven help us) as indistinguishable from a priest acting in persona Christi? How can we pretend that tempting somebody to mortal sin is really ‘saving their soul’? How can we convince ourselves that when PP gleefully reports that LA’s tactics are a windfall to fundraising, we are “defeating” PP?”

My suggestion: stop pretending that any sin we commit that is not as bad as PP’s is actually good. Figure out that “venial sin” and “mortal sin” does not mean “sin you can commit for the greater good” and “really bad sins”. Nor does the Church mean that decreased culpability for a sinful act means “go ahead and do the same thing with deliberate planning and foresight”. Venial sin is a gateway drug that leads to mortal sin if not repented, not a license to go ahead and “sin responsibly, as long as it’s for a good cause.”

…are liable to lash out and punch you in unexpected places.

So, for instance, those who argue that since killing is permitted in war, lying to Planned Parenthood is permitted don’t seem to realize that the logic goes in a very unpleasant direction. Namely, if it’s okay to lie to your enemies because this is “war” then it’s okay to kill them too. Some “prolife” people have already followed this logic to its fatal conclusion.

Me: I think people need to realize that this is “war” only in a metaphorical sense. Otherwise, they are inviting, by their rhetoric, more murders of abortionists since, as some put it, “Any law may be broken to save a life”.

No.  Really.  Some people are actually saying that.  Take, for instance, this stunning piece of “You might want to rethink that” rationalization for lying in this amazing “anarchy for life” argument, which adds blasphemy to the mix:

A priest consecrates the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ acting “in Persona Christi”, with the intention of Christ. Lila Rose approaches the abortionist acting “in persona aborted and unborn” whose souls are enlivening her actions. In the covenant of the human being’s rational, immortal soul, all permission is granted. Any law may be broken to save a life, but there is no law broken by Lila Rose any more than a firefighter who enters a burning building and seizes a frightened child and carries her to safety. Will you then say that the firefighter laid hands on the child unlawfully? No, Lila Rose is actually saving the abortionist’s immortal soul and preventing him/her from going straight to hell. Now, that is doing God’s work “in Persona Christi”. Something about paying thithes on mint and ignoring and disobeying God, our Father in Heaven. Get real.

“Any law may be broken to save a life”. Really? Any law? i can break the moral law against blasphemy or child molestation or rape simply to save my own skin? If a psycho commandeers a restaurant and tells the terrified patrons they must rape one of the kids or he will murder a hostage “any law” can be broken in order to save that hostage, including the law against rape? Really?  If the Emperor bids me to blaspheme Christ and worship Caesar I can break the first commandment in order to save a life?

I realize what the commenter is {recklessly) saying: the law was made for man, not man for the law. But the main thing to realize is that she is saying it recklessly and without regard for the consequences of her thinking–which is exactly what Live Action and their ardent defenders are doing (which is particularly ironic since, in fact, none of these “stings” have saved a single life, but have helped PP raise more money).

Nor does the commenter’s recklessness stop there. Because in wildly concocting the theory from thin air that Live Action’s lies are just like priests acting in persona Christi, it doesn’t seem to occur to this reader that the inevitable corrollary of her claim is that a priest acting in persona Christi is, therefore, lying about representing Christ. This is an… inadvisable… way to proceed. Particularly since the Live Action people do *not* claim to be acting in persona foetus. They did not walk up to the door of Planned Parenthood and claim to be unborn babies or to be acting on their behalf or in their place. They claimed to be pregnant and seeking a sex selective abortion and they then tried to get a PP worker to help them kill their baby on those grounds.

Think about that: What LA did was, in effect, urge somebody who is already complicit in grave sin to sin, if possible, even more mortally. Comparing “tempting somebody to sin mortally” to consecrating the Eucharist is grotesque. Calling it “actually saving the abortionist’s immortal soul and preventing him/her from going straight to hell” is, in fact, the polar opposite of what is being done. LA’s sting is, very simply, tempting the clinic worker to damn herself.

Someone will say, “The PP worker probably would do it anyway, so tricking them into doing it is okay.” Um no. “Temptations to sin are sure to come; but woe to him by whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin. Take heed to yourselves; if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” (Luke 17:1-4). When your brother or sister sins, you are to rebuke him, not tempt him to sin even worse.  Nowhere in the length and breadth of Christ’s teaching will you find a shadow of a hint that you can fight sin by leading your brother into temptation and then nailing him when he succumbs to your temptation. Not that temptation and accusation are not biblical, of course. It’s just that the character in the Bible who is known as the Tempter and the Accuser is not Jesus but Satan. Indeed, even with Judas Iscariot, whom Jesus *knows* will betray him, you see Jesus repeatedly trying to get Judas to repent, not hurrying him down the road to Hell since he’s already a mortal enemy anyway.

This illustrates a huge point: It is one thing when the evildoer’s will to evil is allowed to happen in respect for his freedom after all attempts to warn him and call him to repentance are exhausted (“One of you is a devil/One of you will betray me/What you do, do quickly”). It is another thing to present yourself to the sinner (and, by the way, for all we know, the PP clerk’s culpability may be minimal due to ignorance, trauma, or who knows what else and her conscience may still be as open to the Spirit as Abby Johnson’s was) and deliberately *tempt* them to commit a mortal sin. It is like offering a bottle of whiskey to an alcoholic and saying, “What the hell. He’s a drunk anyway. So what it if destroys him? It’ll really expose how the alcohol industry ruins lives!”

I am increasingly amazed that as the meager emotional dividend of schadenfreude for Live Action’s stunts now yields to Planned Parenthood actively crowing over turning LA’s “stings” into fundraising tools, Christians just double down and ignore it while laboring to defend lying for Jesus with more and more grotesque rationalizations. And now we’ve reached this nadir: that the sort of thing fundamentalist atheists used to say to condemn the “mumbo jumbo” of the Mass (“There’s no difference between a con man lying about his identity and a priest saying that he stands in persona Christi“) is now being said by “faithful conservative Catholics” to defend lying! The energy is all driving toward finding rationalizations for lying and for tempting somebody to damn themselves.  What in God’s Holy Name does that have to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ?  Especially when no lives are, in fact, saved and PP benefits.

For benefit they do, a fact to which apologists for LA are blind.  Prolifers who support this point exclusively to commentary from within the prolife bubble, slap each other on the back that Planned Parenthood has been “exposed” (meaning “prolifers who already know that PP is a disgusting organization have had their convictions ratified”) and do not stop to ask whether the huge percentages of undecideds out there share their certitude that the videos prove a thing.  Still less do they pay attention to the uses made of LA’s tactics by PP and its supporters, who do not, in fact, say, “Curses!  My evil plan would have worked if it hadn’t been for those darn kids and their hidden camera” but instead gin up the troops and make lucrative converts of undecideds with the fact that LA is documentably on record as lying.  Does PP lie too?  Of course!  All the more reason not to hand them a sword with “I lie to PP” writte on it, because they will happily shout “LA lies about PP too!”

So: even good ends don’t justify evil means. But who can explain why anybody in their right mind would continue to justify evil means when the good ends turn to crap in their hands and actually benefit PP? (Combox comment from HuffPo article linked above: “After seeing the unedited video I just e-donated more to PP than I was planning to this year.”) Dumb, dumb, dumb. It’s like prolifers who support and rationalize this stuff are so impatient to land a Hulk Smash! punch on PP that they are coming to care more about having an emotionally cathartic experience of schadenfreude than they are about actually doing what it takes to win the prolife struggle by the boring means of prayer, honest witness, and argumentation.  They want something fast and sexy, not the plodding practice of the virtues and the same old stuff.

Madness.

…is back in the game. The result will be the same as last time: a cheap short-term gain as prolifers feel a thrill over embarrassing Murder Inc. followed by the damage done, first to Christians who embrace lying for Jesus, and second by a public relations windfall for Murder Inc., who can rightly say that prolife Christians are liars.

For those who are unfamiliar with the controversy surrounding this matter, please go here before sounding off in the combox.

The usual rejoinder to those of us (like Augustine, Aquinas, and virtually every other major theologian) to address the question of lying is the hoary, “What if the Gestapo was at your door?” Because everything always comes back to Nazis. Sure the Church could say lying was bad back in the simple days of marauding and raping Vikings, merciless Saracens, and Romans who would roast people alive on griddles. But when Nazis came along and *our* generation discovered *real* evil for the first time everything changed and it became okay to do whatever we think best without reference to old-fashioned Church teaching (except about abortion and contraception, that’s still binding). But all other moral issues are prudential judgements. So when the Church tells us that lying, by its very nature, is to be condemned, we either call that a “Prudential judgment” (Latin for “screw the guidance of the wussy bishops and do whatever seems best to you”) or we simply resort to euphemism and rename “lying” something else like “acting” or “citizen journalism”.

Euphemism is an infallible indicator of the presence of evil.

Christianity is a *faith*. That means it has nothing to offer if it cannot offer the truth. Christians who imagine they are serving the Faith by establshing a reputation as liars are fools. They are also, by the way, telegraphing that fact that, at the end of the day, they do not trust God, but instead believe they must lie in order to establish the kingdom. It is utter folly.