Straining at Gnats, Swallowing Camels

Years ago, a priest told a story from our parish pulpit about some priest he knew down in Portland who was making sandwiches for poor people and handing them out. The local news did a story on him and somebody sent him a check so he could buy more sandwich fixings. The priest sent the check back with a notes saying, “Make your own damn sandwiches.”

The congregation gasped at the profanity, and the priest telling the story remarked, “The irony is that you’re more upset that I said ‘damn’ than that hundreds of people are without food on the streets of Portland.”

I think of that story when I read elaborate, Pharisaic parsings of how to square “Torture is intrinsically immoral” with “We waterboarded a prisoner 183 times” which invariably wind up on the side of “Waterboarding is something Americans can be proud of”. I refer to people who reason this way as “moral idiots”, just as I refer to people who say “Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done” as moral idiots.

At this point, what invariably ensues is a series of overwrought posts by sundry people who are all torn up, not by the fact that the government of these United States created a legal rationale for torture and numerous alleged Catholics have gone to the mat trying to square that with Catholic teaching via some of the most ridiculous sophistries ever concocted, but that I was mean and called such stuff “moral idiocy”. O the humanity. Have I never considered the *feelings* of those who advocate drowning, freezing, stress-positioning-to-death and otherwise devising torments for other human beings? What a shockingly un-Christlike witness that I could be so *mean*?

Here are some some mean words: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” (Matthew 23:2-24)