I had been intending to write something about Lawrence Auster and his declining health.  (CHT) I do disagree with him on many points, and intend to write at least one post in response to him regarding paleoconservatives. Today he writes:

Last night I was reading in the Catholic Catechism. I’m reading it because I am preparing to enter the Catholic Church. I know, that’s pretty surprising, given my long-time, extremely critical views of the Church, though mainly in its political capacity, not its spiritual capacity. But I have been unchurched for ten years now, ever since the Episcopal Church USA unambiguously ceased to be a Christian body, which was a very painful loss for me. Now that I am facing death, it’s high time for me to become a full Christian again.

Kyrie eleison. Please pray for him.

"The Constitution is dead" again.

How many times will we have to repeat this before we act accordingly, instead of appealing to it as a defense of our proscriptions (and prescriptions)?

SCOTUS: Digging the corpse of the Constitution to spit on it.

L. Auster:

Since the Congress can now command citizens to do anything the Congress wants, since America as a republic under a government of limited powers is now officially dead, therefore conservatism, which if it means anything means support for that republic of limited powers, is now also dead. For conservatives to continue to support the constitution means supporting a leftist government with unlimited powers. Therefore the only meaningful form that conservatism can now take is counterrevolution, which means: opposition to the lawless regime that America now is, and the declared intent to overthrow it. Any “conservatism” short of counterrevolution is simply subscription to, loyalty to, patriotism to, obedience to, a leftist unlimited state.

Robert M. Peters:

The U.S. Constitution has become and has been since 1865 a whore. The Constitution was ratified by the former colonial and freshly independent republics as an instrument to articulate a compact among them and to create for their mutual benefit an agent, namely the general government, framed and limited by the Constitution itself.


In 1865, two unions of constitutionally federated/confederated republics were destroyed: the Unite States of America and the Confederate States of America. In their place emerge an abstract corporation with a monopoly on coercion and with the ability to define the limits of its own power, animated by ideologues, bankers, stock jobbers and paper aristocracy. The union of which the Constitution was a handmaid was dead; she became the consort of the Hobbesian state. She has been pimped out to various factions and has been presented to the masses as a goddess to be worshiped in direct proportion to her ever waxing meaninglessness.


This fiat amending of the Constitution which Dr. Fleming cites is but the most recent assault on the hapless compact document, having been ripped from her principals and would-be protectors, the states.


It will continue, until like the Levites concubine in the Book of Judges, she lies utterly ravished and dead at the threshold, there perhaps to be dismembered and sent to the tribes, thereby inciting a war.

Lawrence Auster agrees with this proposal

VFR: "And that is an example of what I would call a rational and practicable approach: not trying to remove Obama from office, but putting proper procedures in place which, if he did not conform to them by producing proper documentation, he couldn't run for re-election."

More on the atomic bombings

Mr. Auster responds (and even mentions my post at his blog):

I had forgotten that the Church has an official position denouncing the use of the A bomb on Japan in World War II. When did it announce this position?

Is it also the Church's official position that if a doomed hijacked airliner were about to crash into the U.S. Capitol, the U.S. authorities could not shoot it down to save the Capitol and the thousands of lives on the ground, because it would be immoral to kill the innocent passengers on the plane, even though they were about to die anyway? I ask, because the same reasoning that the writers at 4W use to arrive at that position, they also use to denounce the dropping of the A bomb on Japan. Indeed, by the same logic the WWWW writers also argue that if a hijacked airliner with 50 people aboard and armed with an atomic bomb were about to crash into Washington D.C., the U.S. authorities could not shoot it down to save the city and tens of thousands of people who would be killed by the atomic blast, because it would be immoral to kill the 50 innocent passengers on the plane, even though they were about to die anyway.

I just want to be sure which positions one must have in order to be a traditionalist. I didn't know that traditionalism requires a society to accept the destruction of a city and the deaths of ten thousands in order to killing one innocent person who is about to die in any case.

I found something through Opinionated Catholic -- a collection by Dave Armstrong of various statements by Popes Paul VI and John Paul II on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mixed with texts by popes, bishops, and Catholic theologians on the limits of aggression during war. The judgments of particular acts by individual popes may not be infallible, but like their judgement of the Iraq War, they should be respected and considered. These judgments are the application of Church teaching, and the Church teaches that to indiscriminately destroy whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is wrong (see CCC 2314).

Is the shooting down of a hijacked airplane permissible under the principle of double effect? It seems like it might be. (With the proviso that all other options to prevent the airplane from being used as a weapon have been exhausted or do not exist?) Zippy apparently does not understand what the object of an action, relying upon Veritatis Splendor instead of a treatise of moral theology. At least this is his state of mind in August of 2007. I have not looked through his blog but I would assume that his posts from 2007 are representative of the best in Catholic moral theology. Consult instead Stephen Brock's explication of the relevant passage of VS on moral object. See also his Action and Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action on the principle of double-effect. (Chris Kaczor's Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition is a good reference comparing consequentialism with the Natural Law tradition. I still have to read through Tom Cavanaugh's Double-Effect Reasoning [Google Books].)

If Zippy is wrong about whether it is permissible to shoot down a passenger airplane, he may still be right (and I think he is) about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I believe that the moral objects of the shooting of the plane and the bombing are different, but I will not attempt to argue for this here.

(Regarding the dropping of pamphlets prior to the bombing of Hiroshima, someone links to this statement by a group of historians denying that it happened. Even if it did happen (with the expectation that the city would be mostly or completely deserted) , the bombing would probably still be wrong according to Catholic teaching since it is wrong to target and destroy civilian infrastructure.)

Related:
WWWTW discussion in August 2007
Jimmy Akin's article for the National Catholic Register
Atomic Anniversay by Allen Mendenhall
National Catholic Register editorial from a few years ago
SSPX FAQ
Hiroshima
Nuclear Weapons and Morality: An Unequivocal Position
Catholic Answers

Lawrence Auster calls himself a traditionalist but defends the atomic bombing of Japan and consequentialism, against Edward Feser. With no Magisterium, Sacred Tradition, or moral theology with a significant history to ground it, what sort of traditionalism is it really?

Mr. Auster explains his conservatism in this post, but if he is pursuing truth, isn't he the ultimate arbiter of whether truth has been attained? But the Catholic Church has received from Christ the authority to teach on Natural Law and morals. He doesn't accept the authority of the Catholic Church (no doubt he would reject its denunciations of the atomic bombings), but to whom does he turn for assurance that he has received Christ's teachings in their completeness? How can he defend consequentialism, especially when its development and strength is an effect of liberalism?

Lawrence Auster draws a line in the sand

Here:

But I have said the same thing: that if Obamacare is not repealed, and if the Arizona decision is not overturned or successfully defied, then we will have gone beyond the grey area of questionable legitimacy that our system of government has occupied for the last 40 or 70 years of overreaching Congress and federal courts and crossed a definitional line. Just as the Episcopal Church definitively ceased being a Christian body in 2003 with the ordination of an openly practicing homosexual as a bishop, we will have definitively ceased being the country that our Constitution and our political creed tell us we are: a limited government under the rule of law founded on the sovereign will and identity of the American people. We will have become instead a leftist dictatorship under the rule of anti-American elites. And then the only recourse, for those who still truthfully consider themselves Americans, will be rebellion against or secession from the perverted thing that is now called America.

And here.