Interesting insight

Todd, over at Catholic Sensibility, remarks that the mentality behind “let’s say that I lose my soul to save innocent lives. Then so be it.” is “a sort of neo-pelagianism”.

I was struck by this since something along the same lines occurred to me yesterday. Pelagianism and neo-pelagianism are both species of the notion that, if you work hard enough, you can earn the forgiveness of sins and the life of the Blessed Trinity. They are both rubbish ideas, of course. You may as well say that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. What forgives our sins is the passion, death, and ressurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. There may be all sorts of praiseworthy things we can do by the grace of Christ won for us on the cross. But the notion that we can wipe away our own sins apart from grace is pure and utter crap.

That’s why Paul says:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

The Church restates exactly the same thing in much more shocking form when it tells us:

It firmly believes, professes, and proclaims that those not living within the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics cannot become participants in eternal life, but will depart “into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels” [Matt. 25:41], unless before the end of life the same have been added to the flock; and that the unity of the ecclesiastical body is so strong that only to those remaining in it are the sacraments of the Church of benefit for salvation, and do fastings, almsgiving, and other functions of piety and exercises of Christian service produce eternal reward, and that no one, whatever almsgiving he has practiced, even if he has shed blood for the name of Christ, can be saved, unless he has remained in the bosom and unity of the Catholic Church.

Readers familiar with my work know that I do not in the slightest believe this commits us to the notion that if you are not Catholic you are going to hell. Rather, I think it means exactly the same thing Paul is saying: if you give your body to be burned but are not united with the love of God (which is normatively sacramentally mediated to us through the Church) then it avails nothing.

Why does this matter? Because one of the human traditions which some Catholics are now buying into is the notion that the blood of World War II veterans taketh away the sin of the world. The astounding Greta, in addition to her theories on the heroism of St. Judas Iscariot, also writes demanding of me:

Does he condemn the use of firebombing cities in WWII, the use of the nuke on hiroshima and nagasaki to end the war before millions died in trying to send troops into Japan, or the fact that our soldiers were ordered to shoot prisoners around D Day so as not to slow them down again in order to gain a foothold so that we could move in to end the nazi regime.

When I inform her that, yes, these things are war crimes and grave sins condemned by the Church and that the logic of firebombing civilian populations is identical to the logic of Osama bin Laden, her reply is remarkable:

As to your statement on those who fought and won WWII, that says a lot about you as a person. You would have had all of them up on war crimes. Firebombing Nazi and jap cities to defeat them, dropping nukes to save millions of lives of our soldiers and the innocent civilians caught in between. You are a weak sister Mark and it shows. Last time I looked they were called the greatest generation and you say they are the same as Osama Bin Laden ..”This include the unequivocal condemnation of the mass murder of nnocent icivilians by terror bombing, which yoiu laud and applaud. Your argument is exactly the same sort of reasoning that animated Osama bin Laden, who likewise targeted innocent civilians.” So according to Mark, the USA did mass murder all through Germany, France, and Japan and should forever be condemned to the same trash heap as Hitler, ToJo, and Osama Bin Laden. Thank God we did not have a lot of you around in our past Mark. Do the other torture whiners agree with Mark on the history of our country in WWII?

Of course, the histrionics mask a number of below the belt punches: attempts to make it sound like I condemn our participation in WWII, attempts to make it sound like I condemn en masse the whole Allied effort, attempts to claim I see moral equivalence between Hitler and the US, the usual bullshit from people who cannot think but can only emote.

But what strikes me most is the moral theory that is ticking away behind it all: the notion that having a just cause for war means that anything we want to do in wartime is therefore morally legit. This theory, alloyed with the present reverence our culture has for the Greatest Generation, basically works out to a moral theory which might be summed up in the hymn, “What Can Wash Away Our Sins? Nothing but the Blood of Our Troops”.

Proposed so nakedly, people see the absurdity of it. But usually it’s not proposed nakedly. Instead, it works by means of Greta’s “HOW DARE YOU!” response to the matter of fact statement that, yes, firebombing Dresden was a war crime, as was the murder of prisoners on D Day and the deliberate slaughter of the civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fact that these crimes occurred does not detract from the fact that WWII was a just war. It only detracts from the claim that it was always fought in a just manner. And the fact that these grave sins occurred cannot be taken away by appeals to the blood of our troops. For the blood of our troops does not take away the sins of the world. Only the blood of Christ can do that.