You know, he’s right!

Scott P. Richert makes a really persuasive case and I have to confess, I was wrong about lying for Jesus.  What won me over was the unassailable logic of this passage:

Our Lord said that “the truth shall set ye free.” But what does freedom mean, if not the right to do anything that we think is morally justified in order to advance the truth?

Following up on this ironclad logic, Richert leads us to a brilliant insight:

Granted, the idea that we should be free to do anything that we think is morally justified has been misused by others, even by those who support abortion. But since we know the truth—abortion is wrong—we don’t have to worry about whether any action taken on behalf of that truth might be wrong. We’ve been set free to act in whatever way we need to, in order to bring the scourge of abortion to an end.

And first and foremost among our actions, I’ve now become convinced, should be depriving those who have no right to the truth of that truth—even if we have to go out of our way to create opportunities to do it. Pro-lifers—no, even more broadly, Christians—have made a grave mistake. We have spent far too much time trying to convince others of the truth regarding abortion, not to mention the Truth of Christianity. And what has been their response? An obstinate refusal to acknowledge the truth!

Seriously—how many times can we be expected to try to convince the same person of the truth? Our Lord said we had to forgive our brother seventy times seven times; but He said nothing about the number of times that we have to expose our brother to the truth. That silence, as any Straussian knows, is significant. Clearly, it was Our Lord’s way of signaling to those of us who know the truth that we have no obligation to expose those in error to that truth. They have chosen to deny the truth; who are we to deny them their moral freedom?

Moreover, it is at best naive to think that exposing inveterate sinners to the truth would make any difference. That’s the fundamental difference between them and us, after all. We know the truth and act on it; they know untruth and act on it. Thus the best way to stop them is to play along with them, to respond to their untruth with untruth, so that they will continue to persist in their untruth, and we can then expose them to the world (or at least to those who know the truth).

Go ahead. Try to argue with that. I came up empty. The wisdom is unassailable. I’m a convert.

Though, as Richert points out, there remains a troubling moral difficulty with the proposition that we are only bound to tell the truth to those who have a right to it. He expresses concern about

that pesky line from Saint Paul—Romans 3:23, to be exact: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” I’m not sure why, but every time I read it, I begin to wonder whether anyone, including those who do know the truth, has the right to know it. Surely, either Saint Paul was wrong, or Christ came to reveal the truth to a world filled with sinners who had no right to it, and that would have pretty radical implications for how we should act toward those who do not yet know the truth, or even toward those who have rejected it.

From there, Richert goes off on an irrelevant tangent, but I thought this insight was brilliant. For it points out the simple fact that not only was I wrong, I was *dead* wrong. It’s not the case that some deserve the truth and others can be lied to with impunity in the service of the greater good. In fact, nobody deserves to be told the truth. Therefore, the best thing we as Catholics who know the truth can do is make sure to fool people as convincingly as possible for the kingdom of God and so achieve the greater good.

Please accept my apologies and felicitations of the day.