Denver, Colo., May 21, 2015 / 04:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- New York Times columnist, best-selling author and all-around pundit David Brooks has made headlines recently for his bold new book making the case for a societal return to morality.   Perhaps lesser known, however, is some of the inspiration behind the work – a humble priest described by Brooks as an “insanely joyful” man who sparked a nagging, internal question. Why was this cleric so happy and fulfilled? What followed was a meticulously researched and engaging book which poses a provocative thesis: we as a modern society are cultivating outwardly impressive but ultimately superficial “resume virtues” – not character. And it's costing us dearly, the author says, both personally and communally. In a conversation with CNA editors, Brooks recounted his experience with the priest along with his thoughts on why his book – “The Road to Character” (Random House/2015) – is so important, and how it speaks to everything from politics, to religion to education. He also gave a hat tip to Pope Francis, whom he called “the embodiment of being a Christian.” Below is the full Q&A, edited for clarity.You're very brave – all of your recent headlines explicitly touting the need for “morality.” Your book's glaring reference to “sin.” Has there been any fallout from this? What's the reaction been from your peers? A friend of mine who is an editor at another publishing house – a really good editor – called me and said, you know, I love the way you talk about your book, but I wouldn't use the word “sin” – it's just such a downer, so you should use the word “insensitive.” I of course think that “insensitive” is very paltry substitute for the word “sin,” so there has been some pushback on that. And, there’s some hostility towards religion in general. The book is not super religious, but it does have religious characters, and certainly religious words and religious context. But I'd say the main reaction has just been welcoming. People are hungry for a conversation. And so, whether people are Christian, Jewish, atheist – I've been sort of surprised by the general desire to be in this general field of conversation.When did you realize in your own life that you'd been building “resume virtues” instead of forming your character? There wasn't one big thing – but there were certain moments in my life when I saw people who had spiritual and moral gifts that I lacked. One of them was a guy named Monsignor Ray East, who is a priest in the Anacostia neighborhood in D.C. – a very poor neighborhood. He was part of a lunch I do every year for Catholic Relief Services, which I do with my friend, Mark Shields. And every year, Monsignor East would give the benediction. He was just insanely joyful – such an insanely joyful man, and I was just so struck by him. Just being in his presence would lift me up for a few weeks. I had the realization that whatever I had achieved in career terms, I haven't achieved the inner joy that he possesses. And I was just curious: how do you get that?In your book, you talk about a cultural shift over the last 50 plus years away from humility – and a natural sense of self-effacement people had – into the notion of the “big me.” What caused this? There are many aspects, of course. One of them derives from the consumer society, that teaches that you have these desires and you should satisfy them, and so you should just go around satisfying your desires. And so I think you come to believe that your desires are good and to have tremendous trust in them – and that is a shift away from what people thought in previous centuries. Second, after WWII, people had been through deprivation and had seen a lot of darkness, from the Holocaust and just the death that WWII created. (A series of books from the time promoted the idea) that when we look inside ourselves, we see that our nature is beautiful and full of good and that we need to love ourselves more. That too is a sharp break from the biblical tradition which says that we are broken – so there was both a commercial and philosophical shift that happened.A recent Pew survey documents the rise of “nones” – religiously unaffiliated people – in the U.S. With the general decline of those who identify as religious, would you say this correlates to a general lack of emphasis on character? They go along together – character is the ability to commit to things outside of yourself, whether it is a political movement, or faith, or friendship, or a love affair, or a cause. I think people have a harder time committing. They are more autonomous, more individual, they have FOMO (fear of missing out) so they don't want to ruin any option, and that leads to a general era of de-commitment. People are walking away from political parties, from organized faith – they are just living more individually. And I think that's due to our inability to commit to things.What about education? How does the school system help or hinder your concept of the need for more virtuous people? I think obviously Catholic schools can teach us specific code, specific theology, but public schools really can't. I do think that they can familiarize students with the religions and the faiths and the philosophies that are out there. So what I do when I teach a course is say: here are a bunch of moral ontologies, different systems that people have come up with. There is a Greek system favoring honor and courage, the Jewish faith favoring obedience and law, the Christian system favoring grace and humility – I'm not going to tell you which one to pick, but here are a bunch of systems, do what seems true to you. But we don't even give students the words or an education there. I think we have to at least make them literate in spirituality and moral matters.Let's move to politics. Many of the U.S. founding fathers either implied or explicitly said that democracy will only work if we are a nation comprised of people with character. What are the implications of your thesis for the American experiment? I think that our founders were very clear on that. A healthy country requires a decent citizenry. And they also believed that statecraft is soulcraft – that in forming a government we’re helping to shape the character of the people within it. I think as we’ve lost the whole vocabulary and the whole focus, we now focus a lot on economics and economics as really the gateway between all social thinking and government policy. And that’s not true – that doesn’t evaluate what people seek...And so we've kind of neutered the public square. I'm not the kind of person who thinks we're in a state of national decline or anything like that. I think people find ways to behave decently towards one another as best as they can. But I just think we’re inarticulate and that we could be living satisfying and more fulfilling lives if we actually had words and more – greater – self-consciousness and better road maps for how to lead a life of depth and kindness.Is social media to blame for some of our narcissistic, “big me” tendencies as a society? I'm not hugely fearful about it. I don't think Facebook is making us lonelier. I don't think video games are making us more violent. The two things I do think are: first, social media and the desire for likes and attention on Instagram and such is amplifying the self where we are broadcasting ourselves and just sort of being big about ourselves and win fame. And I do think social media damages our attention span. I've certainly noticed that in myself where I have trouble reading for long periods of time without checking my phone. So I do think that's probably the most harmful thing that’s happened to us. Moral reflection takes stillness. You've got to hear that soft voice inside...So I think those are the two things I worry about.What, in a concrete, practical sense can your readers take away from your book? What effect do you want to have on people? First, I just want them to live in this space and think about this world. Second, I think we become better people by copying others. So I hope they’re excited by some of the characters and they just want to live a life like Dorothy Day or live a life like Philip Randolph. I think that’s how we are motivated – by exemplars. As for the practical things, some of them are mundane. I have a friend who when he goes home at night he asks how he did in his struggle against his core weakness that day and he resolves ways to do better. I think you can surround yourself by friends and also by heroes – people you can put on your walls in your room who remind what a decent, good life looks like. I think you can have discussion groups raising the subjects of: how do you turn suffering into a moral occasion? How do you build your relationships? So there's a spiritual component. I think you learn from Samuel Johnson the virtue of reading and how just having a settled philosophy of life is important in having and living a life of character. You can learn from Francis Perkins about a vocation. You can ask, what is the mortal world around me calling me to do right now? I think there are a few different things that can be done. There's no seven step process to doing it but there's a lifelong journey that I'm hoping people find different avenues towards.As a Catholic news entity, we'd be remiss if we didn't ask your opinion on Pope Francis... I have a quote in the book from Dave Jolly, a veterinarian, who says ‘the message is the person’ - the way we communicate, what we value is not necessarily from the theology that we found, but by the way we act, the way we are. And I think Pope Francis is the perfect exemplification of that. I'm not a huge expert in Catholic theology but I like the way he handles himself and I admire the way he behaves in matters large and small. So to me, he simply is the embodiment of being a Christian. He radiates love, radiates joy, shows mercy, shows empathy. That's the way Jesus asks Christians to live and Pope Francis lives that way. And so the message is the person. Read more

Fort Wayne, Ind., May 20, 2015 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Last week, Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles told scholars at the Dorothy Day Conference at St. Francis University that the social activist was not converted by ideology, but by love. ... Read more

Washington D.C., May 19, 2015 / 05:35 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The House overwhelmingly passed a bill on Tuesday establishing a fund for victims of human trafficking and strengthening federal and state enforcement against trafficking. The Justice for Vi... Read more

Washington D.C., May 19, 2015 / 03:42 pm (CNA).- The death sentence for convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a legitimate use of state authority, even if Catholics may disagree with it, said a moral theologian in the nation’s capital. “We accept that the state has done its job, that this is the decision of the state which the state is morally free to make, according to the Church’s teaching,” Fr. Thomas Petri, O.P., dean at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., told CNA. “I think a Catholic response now is to pray for Tsarnaev, to pray that he repent, that he repent and come to the Lord.” Catholics were among the most vocal proponents of sparing Tsarnaev the death penalty. The 21-year-old former student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was convicted in a federal court for his role in the bombings that killed three and injured hundreds at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon. Sister Helen Prejean, a well-known Catholic activist against the death penalty who wrote the book “Dead Man Walking” about her experience ministering to a convict on death row, testified against capital punishment for Tsarnaev. She insisted after meeting with him that he was remorseful for what he did. The Massachusetts Catholic bishops also advocated that Tsarnaev be spared the death penalty, saying in a statement that any threat he posed to society had been neutralized and that “society can do better than the death penalty.” They quoted a 2005 statement by the U.S. Bishops that “no matter how heinous the crime, if society can protect itself without ending a human life it should do so.” Recent months have seen increased discussion on the role capital punishment plays in society, if any. Recent Popes have spoken about the matter. In a March letter to the International Commission against the Death Penalty, Pope Francis emphasized that in present times “the death penalty is inadmissible” and is “an offence against the inviolability of life” since the threat a person might pose to society has been neutralized with his being in state custody. Pope Benedict expressed his hope that more countries will eliminate the death penalty at an international conference organized by the Sant’Egidio Community in 2011. In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Pope St. John Paul II said that “the primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is “to redress the disorder caused by the offence’,” quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He added that the state’s punishment “ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.” “Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent,” he said. The Church has always taught that states have the authority to dispense justice – which includes the penalty of death when an offense is grave enough – Fr. Petri said, and recent Popes have not departed from this tradition. “There's a very important nuance here that Catholics need to understand,” he said, “which is that the Church's tradition and its magisterial teaching, which is unchanged by Pope Saint John Paul II, Benedict, and Francis, is that states and governments have the right to inflict the penalty of death when guilt is absolutely known and when the gravity of the crime rises to the death penalty.” And that prudential determination of when it must be applied is left to the state – in Tsarnaev’s case, the jurors picked by the state to determine his guilt, the priest added. The judgment is ultimately a prudential one, he continued, and this is clear even when John Paul II said in Evangelium Vitae that the need for capital punishment to protect society from offenders is “very rare, if not practically non-existent.” “Protecting society is not the primary purpose of punishment,” he said. “The primary purpose of punishment is retribution, by which we don’t mean revenge but by the society expressing its moral outrage, its outrage at the heinous gravity of a particular crime.” It is here where “prudence” determines the proper response to an offence. Thus, prudential application of the death penalty differs from support for intrinsic evils like abortion and euthanasia, he explained. “So the death penalty, when, if, and how it is applied, is a matter of prudence for Catholics, which means that Catholics can in fact disagree with even papal teaching on this,” he said, while also cautioning that “Catholics really need to take seriously” the papal teaching. “But they’re still free to say ‘well I normally agree that we shouldn’t be doing this, but in this case I can see why it would be merited’.” Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger addressed this topic in a 2004 letter to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C. After reiterating Church teaching that “abortion or euthanasia is a grave sin,” Ratzinger wrote that “not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia.” “While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment,” he stated. “There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia,” he added. What is the role of a Catholic juror in such a case as the Boston bombing case? It’s not entirely clear, Fr. Petri admitted. Catholics opposing the death penalty on grounds of conscience were “effectively disqualified” from jury duty in the case, USA Today reported in April, since they from the beginning would not consider the possibility of a death sentence. “Firstly, I think that if they feel convicted in conscience that they can't vote for the death penalty, then that is a moral duty not to,” Fr. Petri said. However, whether the Church permits or prohibits Catholics from voting for the death penalty on a jury “is not as clear,” he continued, and even if the Church actually does not permit it, “it's not being taught and therefore Catholics will not be culpable for voting for the death penalty.”   Read more