✣ Highlights from the week online
When personal attacks aren’t fair At his blog, the philosopher Edward Feser said there was a “fallacy” which had “eclipsed rational public discourse”: the ad hominem fallacy. Not only is it unhelpful, it is often a sin. The ad hominem fallacy does not simply mean calling someone a name. “Sometimes a person merits a nasty description, and sometimes what is at issue is precisely his moral character.” But if you attack someone’s character when what is at issue is truth or falsity, that is a fallacy. “If I call Charles Manson a murderous, sadistic and lying scumbag, I have not committed an ad hominem fallacy, but simply stated the facts. “If Charles Manson gives me an argument purporting to show (for example) that Amoris Laetitia is hard to reconcile with Christ’s teaching on marriage or that immigration laws need to be enforced, and in response to that argument all I do is call him a murderous, sadistic and lying scumbag, then I have committed an ad hominem fallacy.” The ad hominem argument can be a sin against truth; it can also involve “sinful presumption”. “If someone is to all appearances sincerely trying to engage with you at the level of sober rational argumentation, it is, morally and spiritually speaking, very dangerous glibly to dismiss that as a cover for some hidden evil motive.” And it dehumanises one’s opponents by treating them as less than rational beings. Nourishing vocations from an early age The blog Rorate Caeli has asked for vocations stories to help inspire parents. This week it published two. The first, by a Religious Sister in Pennsylvania, recorded that as a child she had read the lives of the saints “over and over again”. “My mother saw to it that we set aside a part of each morning for mental prayer, prayed the rosary daily as a family, and attended Mass several times a week.” The Traditional Latin Mass was especially helpful. After moving to the country, “my attraction to the religious life quickly developed into a love of the contemplative life. There in the rural solitude it was so much easier to pray, and, all of a sudden, the cloister made sense.” The other story was from a priest in Virginia. His mother offered him to God as a priest and prayed for his vocation. “I would say to parents, especially mothers, offer your children to God as priests or religious when they are still infants. Don’t ever put any pressure on them as they grow – my parents didn’t – but let them grow, and nourish them with your own deep love of God.” A hundred thousand pray to Our Lady The news agency CNA Deutsch reported on the annual Polish pilgrimage to the Marian shrine of Jasna Góra, Poland, where the shrine of Our Lady of Częstochowa is located. About 100,000 Catholics made the journey to the site, where Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski celebrated Mass. He told pilgrims that Our Lady could free them from the “moral slavery” and “law of power” which afflicted the nation.
