Ouroboros

The ouroboros is the image from ancient mythology of a snake consuming its own tail. I note it here because I can never remember it.

Fr. Longnecker on the Immigration Act of 1924

Fr. Longnecker, the South Carolina priest and convert from evangelicalism who writes the Standing on My Head blog (which apparently has been absorbed by the internet amoeba of vapid religious prose, patheos.com), has not technically voiced his support for the Johnson-Reed Act. But he doesn't particularly care for your grubby, knuckle-dragging, Romish ancestors with their bad genes and undemocratic racial dispositions.

The comment boxes at the Internet Amoeba of Vapid Religious Prose are onerously regulated by software I dislike, so I'll make a note on Fr. Longnecker's point here. To wit:

Fiddlesticks. Catholics in every age have abjured the Faith because the prince of this world tempted them to do so through his assorted allurements, of which wealth, social acceptance, and worldly interests are but notable examples. They did so in unprecedented numbers in the West during the twentieth century because their priests, bishops, and school teachers stopped telling them to do otherwise. The role that the relationship between their culture and the Faith played was merely that they continued (and in some cases still continue) to call themselves "Catholic" long after they ceased to be such in any but the strictest canonical sense.

These people who Fr. Longnecker thinks were so misguided---these Poles, Irishmen, Slovaks, Czechs, Italians, and Irishmen---were the faithful. There never was any Catholicism other than the Catholicism that they, and their confreres in other societies, lived out within the milieu of their cultural experience. Of course the faith shaped their culture and became a part of it: the cultural expression of the faith, in immigrant communities in the U.S. and back in Europe, was the residue of a civilization that had been transformed by the Church. This is precisely what the Faith's role vis-a-vis the world is supposed to be: if the Church is something to which we belong on days other than Sunday, it must play a seminal role in defining our other activities, our meals, our celebrations, and our mourning.

The decay of cultural Catholicism proceeded along with the decay of Catholicism in the United States and the West generally. The demise of those communities was a feature of the self-immolation of American Catholicism. But they were not the cause of the disaster, nor even the differentia of the occurrence. They were merely victims, along with the rest, of worldliness and foolishness.

The sweeping criticism of the way in which an entire civilization lived the Faith is absurd. It is beyond absurd when contrasted unfavorably with the supposed virtue of assorted bands of Dutch heretics. And coming from a WASP convert, who lives in a part of the country (one, mind you, of which I am quite fond) that has about as many yak farms as old ethnic Catholic enclaves, it resembles nothing so much as mere chatter from the peanut gallery. Fr. Longnecker has gained wide respect for his often insightful commentary. But his foray into internecine warfare on a topic on which he appears poorly equipped to comment---and in which his rhapsodic praise of his heretic ancestors raises all manner of questions---is lamentable.

For another critique, may I recommend The Bellarmine Forum.

Inconceivable

There is some confusion about whether this subsection begins, “A corporation shall have power to indemnify ...” or “A corporation may indemnify ...”. As originally enacted, § 145(a) contained the phrase “shall have power”. 56 Del. Laws 50, § 1 at 170 (1967). According to the annotations in the Delaware Code Annotated (and confirmed by a review of the legislative records since 1967), § 145(a) has never been amended. See 8 Del.Code Ann. tit. 8, § 145(a) (1991 & 1995 Supp.).

Nevertheless, the Delaware Code Annotated, a private compilation by the Michie Company of all Delaware legislative acts, at some point began using the phrase “may” in place of “shall have power”. See 8 Del.Code Ann. tit. 8, § 145(a) (1974). We have not been able to explain this non-legislative change in statutory language. The Delaware Corporation Law Annotated, published by the Corporation Trust Company, continues to use the phrase “shall have power”. Del. Corp. L. Ann. § 145(a) (20th ed. Corp.Trust.Co.1991).

One treatise uses the phrase “shall have power”, see Ernest L. Folk, III, et al., Folk on the Delaware General Corporation Law at 145:1 (3d ed.1994), while another uses “may”. See 5 R. Franklin Balotti & Jesse A. Finkelstein, The Delaware Law of Corporations and Business Organizations at 100 (1990 & 1993 Supp.) (“Balotti & Finkelstein”). The parties to this appeal perpetuate the confusion: their joint appendix contains a version of § 145(a) that says “shall have power”, but one of the briefs quotes a version that says “may”.

When there is a conflict between an original enactment of the Delaware Legislature and the codification of the law, the original enactment controls. Elliott v. Blue Cross & Blue Shield, 407 A.2d 524, 528 (Del.1979); Kimmey v. Farmers Bank, 373 A.2d 569, 570 (Del.1977). We therefore employ the Legislature's version of § 145(a), which says “shall have power”.

Waltuch v. Conticommodity Servs., Inc., 88 F.3d 87, 90 n.6 (2d Cir. 1996) (discussing what 8 Del.Code § 145(a) actually says).

"Bargain and Sell"

One invariably sees the phrase "A bargains and sells to B" in deeds. Equally invariably, nobody handling such a deed can explain why the deed says "bargain and sell." Because they do not understand the words, having never bothered to learn the nature, purpose, or origin of their presence, people simply assume they are superfluous. It is fashionable in many circles to deride such phrasings as merely an abundance of surplusage.

Au contraire. The Georgia Supreme Court explains:

Blackstone says of the deed of bargain and sale, that it “is a kind of real contract, whereby the bargainor, for some pecuniary consideration, bargains and sells, that is, contracts to convey, the land to the bargainee, and becomes by such a bargain, a trustee for, or seized to the use of, the bargainee: and then the statute of uses completes the purchase; or, as it hath been well expressed, the bargain first vests the use, and then the statute vests the possession.” (2 Black. Com. 338.) So, Cruise says; “The proper and technical words of this conveyance, are, “bargain and sell;” but any other words that would have been sufficient to raise a use upon a valuable consideration, before the statute, are now sufficient to constitute a good bargain and sale.”

Dudley’s Lessee v. Bradshaw, 29 Ga. 17, 22–23 (1859). 

Thus, the contract for the sale of land was the bargain, which created (as it still does) an equitable title in the purchasor. The sale was the legal result, created by the Statute of Uses (27 Hen. VIII c. 10), that followed, of the legal title vesting in the purchasor as a result of the bargain. So the words are not surplusage: they describe the conveyance of two different rights, distinguishing a deed from a trust instrument. Once again, our ancestors prove that they were more intelligent than we like to believe.

 

The Vatican Press Office Must Be Abolished

The embarrassing and confusing spectacle of Fr. Frederico Lombardi, S.J., tottering out and issuing bizarre statements about the nature of Church teaching and Canon Law simply must come to an end. What purpose is served by manufacturing mountains of vacuous papers stamped by a Vatican office? Surely the answer is "none whatsoever."

The two Vatican Councils speak at substantial length, if not with astonishing pellucidity, on the various forms in which the Church's Magisterium acts. "Press conferences by Jesuits" are not on the list. The Church has laws. She has liturgical texts. She has papal decrees, encyclicals, dogmatic constitutions, and various concilar documents. She does not need press releases. Publish a schedule of Mass and confession times, a number to call to schedule a baptism, and be done with it. If someone wants to know what the Church says on further matters, let him look to where the Church has already spoken. All the present state of affairs does is make bad situations worse.

The same topic, continued

“If heretics no longer horrify us today, as they once did our forefathers, is it certain that it is because there is more charity in our hearts? Or would it not too often be, perhaps, without our daring to say so, because the bone of contention, that is to say, the very substance of our faith, no longer interests us? Men of too familiar and too passive a faith, perhaps for us dogmas are no longer the Mystery on which we live, the Mystery which is to be accomplished in us. Consequently then, heresy no longer shocks us; at least, it no longer convulses us like something trying to tear the soul of our souls away from us…. And that is why we have no trouble in being kind to heretics, and no repugnance in rubbing shoulders with them… It is not always charity, alas, which has grown greater, or which has become more enlightened: it is often faith, the taste for the things of eternity, which has grown less…”

Henri de Lubac: Further Paradoxes (Newman Press 1958) and reprinted in Paradoxes of Faith (Ignatius Press 1987)

Thanks to Fr. Zuhlsdorf for the quote.

Good Country People

Several people who I respect immensely, notably my former professor Rick Garnett, have recently been advocating the idea that what we really need in this country is to be nicer* to one another. Rick points to a recent post by Robert Miller over at First Things regarding the late Ronald Dworkin. Prof. Miller's thesis is, generally, that one can be a "good person" while holding and disseminating dangerously wrong ideas, and that we should all be nice to people with whom we disagree because, apparently, they're probably good people.

Now, I certainly will not advocate acting uncharitably. But charity demands neither that we be "nice," in a conventional sense, nor that we think that people who spread lies are "good people." Laying aside for the moment the first point, who is a "good person"? That should be an easy question for even the most lackadaisically peeping Thomist. A good person is a person who does good things. And how many bad things must a person do before we agree that he is no longer a "good person" in a conventional sense? Well certainly if he dedicates his life to promoting something evil, it becomes rather difficult to continue to claim that he is nevertheless a "good person." Does a person's wrongdoing "not count" because he refrains from beating his wife, or because he puts a roof over his children's heads? May the saints preserve us from the tyranny of small expectations. This sounds like nothing so much as the classic intellectual-property line: the defendant may not escape liability simply be showing how much of the plaintiff's work he did not copy.

To hold otherwise---that we can say a person, irregardless of the things he believes, is nevertheless a "good person"---is to fall into nominalism and related errors. A person's character is defined by his actions, including his actions of belief and advocacy. So we would never say "Jim believes and advocates the Arian heresy, but is not an Arian," or "Bob vehemently and firmly believes that it is good to barbecue infants, but he's not a barbarian." This makes no more sense than the statement "Steve sleeps with numerous women who are not his wife, but he's not an adulterer."

Granted, "good person" is almost vacuously vague. And even "bad persons," again somewhat vague, deserve love and respect (for themselves, if not for their ideas and actions). But it's stuff and nonsense to say that a person, otherwise guilty of profoundly wrong and destructive actions (such as the widespread propagation of false ideas) is a "good person" because he is not also an axe murderer, or a sociopath, or a burglar. One doesn't get a pass for murder because one says one's prayers at night and gives generously to the poor. One oughtn't to receive a pass on writing vile books because he throws nice cocktail parties.

The advocacy of such passes is Laodicean at best.

* In fairness, the word "nice" does not appear in Rick's most recent post or in Prof. Miller's linked post. It's my gloss, based partly on a prior Mirror of Justice post---to which I don't have a link at the moment---about dinner parties.