At least the rationalization hamsters are fecund

Natural, un-mutilated heterosexual intercourse has – qua kind of behaviour – an intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.  This is easily demonstrated by the fact that if all natural, un-mutilated heterosexual intercourse (as a kind of behaviour) ceased then human life would cease to procreate.  There is an intrinsic relationship between this specific kind of behaviour^[1] and procreation of human life.

Mutilated sexual acts (including but not limited to masturbation, sodomy, condomistic sex, and masturbation into a deliberately poisoned womb) do not have – qua kind of behaviour – this intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.  If all instances of this kind of behaviour ceased it would have no effect on the procreation of human life (except to the extent that people would substitute natural sex for unnatural sex: the cessation of unnatural sexual behaviours would certainly not impair procreation).

The Catholic Church teaches that all sexual acts must of necessity – in order to be morally licit – retain their intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life, in just this sense.

Whatever one may think of the moral implications of this particular distinction in kinds of behavior, it is certainly both intelligible and entirely consistent with scientific facts.  Substituting a different meaning into the words “intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life” does not actually alter the consistency of the original and actual meaning; let alone does such substitution falsify Catholic moral doctrine as a “empirically observable fact.”

In other words, in an “average” 28 day cycle, there is no potential for procreation in roughly 22 of the 28 days present. Sexual activity during this period has no “intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.” This is not my opinion, it is an empirically observable fact, like the Earth’s rotation around the Sun.

This kind of nonsense on stilts might make one wonder where the rationalization is coming from.

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[1] Knowledge about human fertility, or its lack, obviously does not alter the nature of the kind of behaviour itself. If all instances of (e.g.) sodomy (both by people who know lots about human fertility and those who know nothing about it) ceased, that would not impair procreation of human life.  If all instances of natural heterosexual intercourse (both by people who know lots about human fertility and those who know nothing about it) ceased, human procreation would cease.

Dubia

It is asked whether, following the affirmations of Pope Pius VIII and Gregory XVI, and additional rulings by the Sacred Penitentiary, it has now become possible to grant absolution in the Sacrament of Penance and thus to admit to Holy Communion a person who, while bound to observe the Church’s categorical and infallible condemnation of usury, deliberately and unrepentantly contracts for profits from a mutuum loan.  Can the expression “in certain cases” found in note 351 (n. 305) of the exhortation “Amoris Laetitia” be applied to unrepentant usurers and contraceptors?

A future “conservative” Catholic blog post

Some folks are getting all breathless about Pope Arius’ decision to officially recognize the dignity of homosexual marriages.

Is he going beyond his authority? Is he changing the catechism and breaking with centuries of church teaching? Is it true that if he does this he can do most anything? Rod Dreher over here seems  to think so.

I’m not so sure.

The classic example is the Catholic teaching against usury. In the Middle Ages the church taught that usury was a sin. It was argued that it was a sin because it was un natural. It used money to make money rather than honestly selling goods and services. Furthermore, it was invariably seen as a way for rich people to oppress the poor through high interest rates.

However, in the modern world the practice of lending money is far more complex and it is arguable that the money lender is indeed honestly selling a service–making loans. Furthermore, with loans being available to everyone, rather than oppressing the poor it is arguable that the poor are empowered by being able to borrow. They can get an education they could not otherwise afford and purchase things on credit to improve their lives. Is money lending still abused? Of course, but that’s not the main question.

When it comes to the death penalty the real change happened not with Pope Francis, but with Pope John Paul II.

Euthanizing papal credibility

He that is not with me, is against me: and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth. – Jesus Christ, second Person of the Holy Trinity

Addressing the announced changes to the Catechism on the death penalty, changes categorically asserting its ‘inadmissibility^[1],’ Joseph Shaw writes:

If [the Holy Father’s theological advisers] are not bound by past popes, there is no reason why future popes should be bound by this statement, and indeed the authority of Pope Francis over Catholics today is called into question.

…

[Compatibility with the teaching of previous popes, councils, etc] is not the natural reading of the text, but one might argue that since it is purporting to represent the teaching of the Church we must read it if humanly possible in accord with previous authoritative statements of that teaching. On the other hand, bishops and theologians supposedly friendly to Pope Francis are loudly saying that the natural reading is the correct one…

This is no accidental ambiguity: it is a design feature. In this case the mouse-hole of ambiguity conservative Catholics need to crawl through to maintain the continuity between the two editions of the Catechism is humiliatingly small. When they have crawled through it, moreover, they will be ignored.

Indeed.  We are all Jesuits now; and if we don’t unequivocally reject Jesuit excuse-mongering for usury, we ourselves and like-minded people are part of the problem.

Accepting the modernist usury-sodomy paradigm is a categorical, either/or proposition.  We are either for it, or against it.  Be against it.

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[1] It takes a certain skill to effectively make ambiguous categorical assertions.  But that skill is required when the point is authoritative self-immolation of authority.

Neo-Borgia-ism, or, the new pornocracy

I’m not a historian, let alone a historian of Catholicism.  But I know enough to be familiar with what has sometimes been referred to as the ‘pornocracy,’ the rule of medieval Borgia popes more interested in their mistresses and political power than in their often neglected job as appointed guardians of the Faith.

I am not a sociologist either.  But I’ve noticed that when heterosexual sins are condemned, the response of people who indulge in them tends to be something on the order of “Meh.”   By contrast, I’ve noticed that practicing homosexuals tend to find it utterly intolerable that anyone, anywhere, in any context, might slightly disapprove of their sexual behaviors.  As always there will be many individual exceptions; but I think there is enough truth in this observation to create a social gradient.

So I guess it should not be surprising that the thing that really contrasts the old pornocracy to the new, the medieval heterosexual clerical cabal to the Current Year homosexual cabal, is the accompanying internal assault on moral doctrine.

Also, I can’t be the only person to notice that applying a hermeneutic of whatever to moral doctrine makes a nice smokescreen, kicking up dust and hiding the writhing usury-sodomy nest from sunlight.

Why all the negativity?

The negative precepts of the natural law are universally valid. They oblige each and every individual, always and in every circumstance. It is a matter of prohibitions which forbid a given action semper et pro semper, without exception, because the choice of this kind of behaviour is in no case compatible with the goodness of the will of the acting person, with his vocation to life with God and to communion with his neighbour. It is prohibited — to everyone and in every case — to violate these precepts. – Veritatis Splendour

Abstractly speaking an authority can take either a “whitelist” approach to property exchanges (only approved transactions are endorsed and enforced) or a “blacklist” approach (transactions are presumptively endorsed and enforced, but exceptions apply).

As a practical matter though the latter is the only real possibility for actual finite human authorities. Any attempt at the former proposes to actualize a potential infinite, and thus in practice would become a perverse and sociopathic version of the latter.

So blacklists it is. There is good reason why categorical commandments take the form “thou shalt not.”

(Originally a comment here).

Usury is bad business. Usury is good business.

It is worth emphasizing that personal guarantees on invested capital (usury) are indeed very bad business in entrepreneurship, where capital and labor/expertise come together to produce objectively valuable goods and services. Personal guarantees are a huge red flag that the contracts and capital structure are dysfunctional and should be re-worked before a deal is inked, or that perhaps the deal is no good at all on any terms. It is a naive and foolish business practice to give capital to a business partner under a regime of personal guarantees.

Usury is great business though when the objective is to sell things to consumers (e.g. college degrees in grievance studies fueled by five dollar lattes); things that they cannot afford without selling themselves into slavery, at prices massively inflated by the ready availability of usurious loans.

Mowing the bread

Can you licitly contract with a borrower, “I will give you this sack of flour for a sack of the same size plus one dollar, payable tomorrow?”

No you cannot, at least not simply, because this is usury: you are demanding a personal guarantee of more than one sack of flour tomorrow, as payment for exactly one sack of flour today.

What you could licitly do is buy equity in the borrower’s lawn mower for one sack of flour. You could then rent your share of his lawn mower back to him until he redeems it by giving you one sack of flour, or, barring that, the lawn mower.

Of course if a piano falls on the lawn mower you both now co-own, you lose what you invested (in addition to being out the profits).  As co-owner of the lawn mower you share in any risks to that lawn mower.

You could buy an insurance bond from Joe against falling pianos, with some of your mower rent proceeds, secured by the product of Joe’s wheat field. But perhaps there would be a drought, etc.

All of which is to say that if the contract is a mutuum, any contractual profit is usury. But if the contract is not a mutuum and in no way contains a mutuum (hidden or otherwise), contractual profits are not usury.

Please don’t eat my car

In the comments to the post below, Bedarz lliachi writes:

I understand and appreciate the point – the lender merely gets the borrower’s pledge. The borrower gets the thing.

But it is unsatisfying that it is necessary to introduce idiosyncratic usages of very well-defined words. Nobody ever says that a lender “sells” the “loan”. Selling is something quite distinct from lending.

Like many words the English word “loan” is multivocal: it has several distinct meanings.  I’ll point out two of them in this post.

In one sense of the term, I loan you my car to drive for a while since your car is in the shop.  The term “loan” here means that I retain ownership of my car while you use it: you are obligated to return that actual car to me when you are finished using it. Because you are using my car, it is morally licit for me to make a profit – charge you rent – for your use of my car.

In a different sense of the term, I loan you some flour to bake into bread and eat.  The term “loan” here means that you now own that actual flour, and have personally pledged to pay me for it later with different flour.  (This is the kind of “loan” which is meant by the Latin term “mutuum“).  As a mutuum lender I no longer own that actual flour, you do: I have agreed that you may dispose of that actual flour however you wish. Furthermore, you have not pledged any collateral: you have not sold me an interest in any specific itemized actual property that you do own: all you have given me is a pledge, not ownership of any thing. In virtue of the agreement itself I now own nothing, I simply have your promise that you will pay me for what you have purchased within some agreed time.

So it is morally illicit for me to make a profit on your use of that actual flour: if I attempt to do so I am attempting to charge you rent for the use of something which I do not own. Charging rent for the use of property I do not own is intrinsically unjust.  I do not own the flour any longer once I have given it to you under a mutuum: if I did, then when you bake and eat the bread you would be stealing from me, as if you had sold the car that I lent to you in the other example.

If it is always intrinsically immoral to make a profit from this kind of lending, then why would anyone lend in this specific manner?  Out of friendship or charity, of course, and in pursuit of the common good.

But it is never morally licit to lend under a mutuum out of financial self interest.

You can buy the wine but I’ll keep the refreshment

A usurer attempts to sell some actual property to a “borrower” while retaining the potential for profit which inheres in that actual property.

The borrower in a mutuum owns the actual property he is “lent”, because the mutuum authorizes him to dispose of or consume that actual property as he sees fit: his obligation to the lender is a personal obligation, independent of what happens to that actual property.  Once a mutuum has been joined the borrower fully owns the actual property and the lender owns nothing at all: the lender merely has the borrower’s personal pledge of some different unspecified property of the same worth, at some time in the future.

But any potential which inheres in actual property is not separable from that actual property.  You can’t sell that wine while retaining that wine’s potential for refreshment.  So another way to think about usury is that it represents an attempt to sell property without really selling it.  The usurer transfers full ownership of the property to the borrower personally, since the borrower’s obligation under the agreement remains however he disposes of that actual property; and simultaneously the usurer insists on guaranteed actual profits (not even just potential profits!) from property he no longer owns.

It is fair to ask, then, if any profits from a mutuum are immoral why would anyone lend under a mutuum?  And the answer is that we should never, categorically, lend under a mutuum in pursuit of financial self interest: mutuum lending is only morally licit as an act of charity or friendship.