The moral theology of niceness – and anger
Can you be too friendly, or not angry enough? According to St Thomas Aquinas, yes, wrote Edward Feser on his blog. Anger, Feser said, is “nature’s way of prodding us to act to set things right when they are in some way disordered. “The absence of anger in cases where it is called for is, for that reason, a moral defect, and a habit of responding to evils with insufficient anger is a vice.” To quote St Thomas, while too much anger is a vice, “lack of the passion of anger is also a vice”. As for being friendly and affable, St Thomas “notes that just as one can be deficient in this trait and thus difficult for others to get along with, it is also possible to go too far in the other direction.” Always being amiable and eager to please becomes a vice when it stops someone from pursuing some good or avoiding evil. Since it’s sometimes necessary to be less than affable, St Thomas wrote, “if a man were to wish always to speak pleasantly to others, he would exceed the mode of pleasing, and would therefore sin by excess”. Today, Feser writes, Catholics can easily forget these truths. “The stern gravitas of the fathers, Doctors, and saints has with many churchmen been replaced by a back-slapping, glad-handing affability.” Even when there were threats to the faith, they tried to be as friendly as possible – but this “appeasement” had only intensified opposition to the Church. If bishops face more serious persecution in the near future, it will be “precisely because they did not speak and act boldly and consistently enough when bad press was all they had to fear.”
What McAleese missed about baptism
The canon lawyer Dr Edward Peters responded on his blog to Mary McAleese’s recent remarks on baptism. McAleese, the former president of Ireland, declared that canon law on baptism “flatly contradicts” a child’s “freedom of belief, thought, expression and action”. McAleese assumed that membership of the Church was imposed for life – but, though baptism is irreversible, a mechanism for a Catholic’s official departure from the Church “does exist”, as the Church has recently clarified. Meanwhile, “state-mandated obligations” were enforced far more harshly than Church-mandated ones – though both were unchosen. “Would, say, a Catholic child’s failure to show up for Mass on Sunday,” Dr Peters asked, “result in the dispatch of Church officials to the home to inquire what sort of religious upbringing the child was receiving, along the lines of a state truancy officer investigating a child’s absence from school?”
In Japan, the Pope is an emperor too
What is the Pope’s official title in Japanese? From 1942, documents used the term “Ho-o”, which literally means “king of law”. But in time for Pope Francis’s visit, the government has adopted “Kyoko”, which literally means “emperor of teachings”. According to Associated Press, “Catholics also used both titles but adopted the new title ‘Kyoko’ following the 1981 visit to Japan by St John Paul II.”
