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, \u201cMake your own damn sandwiches.\u201d<\/p>\n
The congregation gasped at the profanity, and the priest telling the story remarked, \u201cThe irony is that you\u2019re more upset that I said \u2018damn\u2019 than that hundreds of people are without food on the streets of Portland.\u201d<\/p>\n
I think of that story when I read elaborate, Pharisaic parsings of how to square \u201cTorture is intrinsically immoral\u201d with \u201cWe waterboarded a prisoner 183 times\u201d which invariably wind up on the side of \u201cWaterboarding is something Americans can be proud of\u201d. I refer to people who reason this way as \u201cmoral idiots\u201d, just as I refer to people who say \u201cAbortion is a blessing and our work is not done\u201d as moral idiots.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cmoral idiocy\u201d. 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*?<\/p>\n
Here are some some mean words: \u201cWoe 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!\u201d (Matthew 23:2-24)<\/p>\n