The delicacy of freedom cannot be explained without recourse to the realities of good and evil. Freedom is both universally sought and everywhere in jeopardy because of the imperfection of human nature. We are beings who seek what is good, but are tempted by what is evil. Freedom–the capacity to know and choose what is good–is the path to fulfillment, but reason is clouded and the will is compromised by our inclination to pursue what is base.

This is why liberty blooms only in a mature civilization, a culture in which the discipline to act virtuously is widespread. It requires a political order in which the proclivity to acquire power is checked by constitutional limits and, more critically, by the moral formation of electorates and officials alike.

Yet the temptation to trade liberty for other apparent goods is ever-present. Radical equality appears as a desirable goal; lurking behind the veil is power for a few and lowered status for the rest. Financial security without personal cost similarly appeals; but it too will be revealed in time to be illusory, material prosperity finally failing along with the freedom of self-direction.

Such deceptive allures permeate our policy debates. The promises of government-run social security, having undermined the duty-in-freedom to provide for ourselves, our families, and our neighbors, are perched on an increasingly unstable base of a shrinking proportion of workers. Abdicating our responsibility to provide for and direct the education of our children, a government system has raced to a lowest-common-denominator approach devoid of moral or religious content–and often enough not very effective in conveying skills or knowledge either. Faced with the daunting prospect of taking charge of the cost of medical care for ourselves and our families, many are willing to cede control over value-laden health care decisions to government agencies.

Pope Benedict XVI understands the paradox of freedom. “Since man always remains free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitively established in this world,” he wrote in Spe Salvi. Yet we are called to battle, nonetheless: “Freedom must constantly be won over for the cause of good.”

The link between freedom and goodness is unbreakable, but it is always in danger of being forgotten. The notions that free means “carefree” and that liberty entails no limits are now deeply rooted in our politics and in our culture. But while we may deny who we are as human beings made in the likeness of God, we cannot overturn nature. There is no true happiness in reaping the rewards of someone else’s labor, in wielding power over the decisions of others, or in following every urge and impulse regardless of the consequences for ourselves or for those around us.

The vigilance demanded to protect freedom is watchfulness over the potential abuses of powerful institutions: political, commercial, and even religious. But it is first and foremost a conscientious scrutiny of our own motives and actions. For it is only when large numbers of individuals become complacent and indolent that those who seek power are able to attain it. July Fourth is a fitting time to recommit ourselves to acting toward the genuine good of ourselves and others–in other words, to remind ourselves always to conform our freedom to what is true. This fundamental connection was articulated long before Phillips, Acton, or Benedict drew breath: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

The progressive version goes like this. Fifty years ago, in the time of Pope John XXIII and Vatican Council II, ecumenism was going great guns. Indeed, the speedy reunion of separated Christians was a real possibility. But soon after the council things stalled, and under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI a reaction set in. Due to foot-dragging by Rome, the ecumenical movement is now at an impasse.

The traditionalist story is hugely different. Starting with Vatican II and continuing since then, it holds, Catholic ecumenism has been a mistake. There’s been no significant progress, there’s been no reunion, and the practical result of it has been mainly to encourage the relativistic notion that one religion is as good as another. Better we admit our mistakes, cut our losses, and concentrate on encouraging people to convert.

Neither in theology nor in matters of fact is either the progressive or the traditionalist account correct. It’s the great merit of Kenneth D. Whitehead’s helpful new book, The New Ecumenism (Alba House, 2009), to show in concrete detail why that’s so.

Writing from the perspective of an eminently orthodox Catholic, Whitehead argues that the formal commitment of the Catholic Church to the ecumenical movement which began some four decades ago conforms to Christ’s will for Christian unity as well as to the Church’s own solemn teaching. Individual conversions to Catholicism are much to be desired and should be encouraged. But the “new ecumenism” of ecumenical dialogue in a search for common ground isn’t merely permissible but necessary.

Nor is it reasonable to put the blame for slow progress on the Vatican. Take the Catholic relationship with the Anglican Communion. Generally speaking, the gulf between Rome and Canterbury hasn’t been widened by the Vatican’s words and deeds but by the Anglicans’ well publicized inability to put their house in anything approximating even a semblance of order.

The Orthodox? Recall that Orthodoxy isn’t one body but a grouping of autocephalous — independent — national churches, each with its own historically-conditioned relationship to the Church of Rome. Among these bodies, the prickly nationalism of the largest, the Russian Orthodox Church, remains an especially serious huge obstacle to entente with Catholics.

To be sure, in some cases Rome hypothetically might gain an appearance of unity by abandoning one or another dogma or authoritative teaching. Progressive voices in Catholicism sometimes urge that. But this kind of political compromise would be, Whitehead notes, a dishonest way of handling substantive differences about doctrinal truth. It contains the seeds of its own collapse.

As matters stand, Rome has gone pretty far. In 1995 John Paul II reached out to the Orthodox in the encyclical Ut Unum Sint (That They May Be One), inviting suggestions on how to exercise papal primacy of jurisdiction in a way they would find more congenial. If there have been significant responses to date, it’s a well-kept secret.

Yes, half a century ago there were expectations that unity would be quick and easy. “We wanted to do ourselves what only God can do,” Pope Benedict says. Now we know better. When and if unity comes, it will be in God’s good time.

Meanwhile, the Pope says, “we have to be prepared to keep on seeking, in the knowledge that the seeking itself is one way of finding….[It is] the only appropriate attitude for the person who is on a pilgrimage toward eternity.”

Older readers and Americana buffs will remember that “The Star-Spangled Banner” won the title of national anthem in a close Congressional vote, nipping “God Bless America” at the wire in 1931. Since then, the anthem — which ranges over an octave and a half and is thus unsingable by anyone beside children, virtuoso sopranos, and castrati — has been vocally mangled by patriotic Americans from, er, sea to shining sea. The severe difficulty of singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” properly is the strongest argument in favor of replacing it. (That the tune to which Key’s poem was set, “To Anachreon in Heaven,” was originally a London drinking song is not a disqualification for right-thinking Catholics, although it might vex some of the evangelical brethren…)

Veterans of the Baltimore Catholic schools of the 1950s once knew three stanzas of Key’s lyrics; I venture to guess that less than 1/10 of 1 percent of my fellow-countrymen know anything beyond the first stanza today-if even the full first stanza is widely known. It would be a shame if it weren’t, though. For the “Star-Spangled Banner”’s best claim to canonization is that the stanza we all (try to) sing ends with a question, which is an appropriate way to end the national anthem of a democracy. Why? Because democracy is always something of an experiment. “Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” — the question poses itself today, just as it did under the rockets’ red glare in 1814, and just as it will pose itself in every future generation.

“America the Beautiful” would, arguably, be a better national anthem, not because it’s less bellicose — it isn’t, with its paean to “heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved and mercy more than life” — but because it’s eminently more singable. Moreover, Katherine Lee Bates’s lyrics acknowledge that the wonder of America is a gift of God’s grace, while reminding us that to be a nation “under God” means being a nation under judgment. Thus the fine second stanza — the one you get to after extolling “purple mountain majesties” (please note: not “purple mountain’s majesty”) — teaches us the always useful lesson that faith, reason, freedom, and the rule of law go together in a national experiment that also has the character of a pilgrimage:

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America, America, God mend thine every flaw;
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law!

Bates’s unapologetic linking of the American democratic experiment with divine providence, divine guidance, and divine judgment probably renders “America the Beautiful” unacceptable to today’s secularist thought-police and their allies in the federal courts; one can easily imagine the ACLU contesting “America the Beautiful”-as-national-anthem on the grounds that singing about God shedding his grace on the United States violates the First Amendment (just as one can imagine certain parties deploring the notion that God’s grace is “his” grace).

So swapping Keys for Bates is an idea whose time may not yet have come — and the shades of Baltimoreans past can rest easy. Still, both anthems, with their stress on sacrifice for the common good, give us something to think about, come the Glorious Fourth.

According to the Times, the recent Gallup Poll showing that a majority of Americans are pro-life is faulty at best, and downright sinister at worst.

The poll, conducted May 7-10, found that 51% of Americans are now “calling themselves ‘pro-life’ on the issue of abortion and 42% ‘pro-choice.’ According to Gallup, this is “the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.”

Not only did Gallup find these results to be consistent in two other surveys (the details can be found on Gallup’s web site here), they also gave a rather forthright opinion as to why they thought this shift was occurring. President Obama’s radical policies, Gallup said, are actually alienating many Americans who would consider themselves to be “pro-choice,” causing them to shift over toward the pro-life position:

It is possible that, through his abortion policies, Obama has pushed the public’s understanding of what it means to be “pro-choice” slightly to the left, politically. While Democrats may support that, as they generally support everything Obama is doing as president, it may be driving others in the opposite direction.

This sounds quite reasonable to me. Having a president who is radically pro-abortion might well cause the significant shift in opinions concerning abortion that Gallup detected.

Liberal opinion leaders, however, have been quick to condemn the poll as faulty, irrelevant, or simplistic.

“Young people are not suddenly turning pro-life,” scoffs Ruth Coniff of The Progressive. “They just view the abortion issue differently. The fact that we grew up in the era of safe, legal abortion makes women under the age of 50 a bit complacent about the issue.”

Mark Mellman of The Hill agrees, saying that “typically, after some useless result escapes into the ether, reporters and interest groups proceed to spin some new theory of public opinion based on faulty analysis of a meaningless question.”

Dalia Sussman of the New York Times goes even further. She first says that it “does not necessarily indicate a marked shift in Americans’ views on this highly complicated issue.” Then she cites other polling data done by different agencies to show how the numbers vary. She concludes by insulting the people Gallup polled, saying that “there is no way of knowing whether people being asked the question even know what the two labels mean.”

The shift in polling data — and the liberals’ efforts to discredit it — is cast into sharp relief by President Obama’s recent address at Notre Dame. The President, in his speech, expressed the hope that pro-life and pro-choice advocates could find “common ground” on the subject of abortion.

“Let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term,” said Obama. “Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women.”

This speech, which is full of such glowing, hopeful rhetoric, rings hollow when compared with Obama’s record. What in the world does he mean by a “sensible conscience clause”, given that he has already struck down existing conscience provisions?

Obama’s rhetorical flourishes are cited ad nauseam by the media as evidence of “bipartisan progress,” but they are actually little more than deceptive propaganda.

Pro-lifers have not, and will not, be lulled to sleep by such mouthings. We realize that human life is at stake. We agree that women should have better gynecological care; that there should be fewer teen pregnancies, that there should be more adoption. We agree that women should be happy and safe and free. But we will not willingly allow anyone to take a human life, which is what an abortion does.

It is thus ludicrous to suggest that the two sides “work together” on the issue of abortion. There can be no common ground on the morality of abortion.

I believe that, contra the New York Times, those surveyed by the Gallup poll knew exactly what they were being asked when they were questioned on whether or not they were “pro-life” or “pro-choice.” The terms outline positions that have existed on our political landscape for more than 30 years. To suggest that somehow, the idea of the pro-life movement is shifting, becoming more oriented around issues that “really matter,” like women’s health or reproductive freedom, is naïve.

And to President Obama: it’s our movement, you can join us if you like, but the terms of the debate are already well defined, and are not subject to redefinition.

After she had given birth and was in the hospital recovering from her caesarian section, she was struck by the fact that even though the maternity ward seemed to be full of women, there were no other newborn babies around except hers. In fact, her infant son was all alone in a room full of empty incubators. It was a strange and almost eerie site.

One morning, Laura was awakened by screaming and moaning coming from down the hall. Thinking it was simply the labor pains of other women giving birth, she asked the nurse why someone didn’t help them. The nurse replied matter-of-factly: “Oh they’re not in labor. They’re having abortions. They didn’t think it would hurt.”

It turned out that the hospital Laura was in specialized in providing abortions, and following the 1973 Supreme Court decision, their business was booming.

The image of that ghostly maternity ward, devoid of all but one, solitary child; devoid of all the happy sounds of crying, newborn babies, with only the agonized sobbing of post-abortive mothers echoing through the empty corridors, reminded me again of how much emptier our world is because of all the abortions that have taken place since this most horrible of all atrocities was legalized.

And make no mistake, it is the most horrible of all atrocities. Sometimes people in our own Church attempt to trivialize abortion by lumping it together with the other evils of the world — by comparing it with poverty, disease, war, etc. But as the numbers clearly demonstrate, there is no comparison. Since 1973 there have been 50 million abortions in the United States alone. Worldwide, there are 42 million abortions every year. That means that in the last thirty years, there have been over 1.5 billion abortions!

1.5 billion! That’s the equivalent of approximately one quarter of the entire population of the planet! One quarter of the earth’s population, murdered; snuffed out; gone.

There’s a famous poem about Jesus that concludes with the memorable lines: “All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as that One Solitary Life.”

Unfortunately, we can say about abortion:

All the wars ever fought,
All the holocausts ever perpetrated,
All the plagues that ever raged,
All the bombs that ever dropped,
All the famines that ever laid waste to the land, put together, have not killed the number of human beings wiped out by abortion.

And yet, hope endures, because God’s grace abounds, even amidst such devastation.

And what ever happened to Laura’s baby? As she proudly related to me, her son, Fr. Sal, just celebrated his one year anniversary as a priest of the Catholic Church!

How ironic, then, that voices in Russia and China are mocking our current Big Government policies. Those whose countries took the tragic, impoverishing detour through Big Government hell now react with scorn and derision as we Americans charge headlong down that same path. What an amazing spectacle it must be for them to see the victor of the Cold War borrow many pages from the losers’ playbook.

To read a startling indictment of the American predicament, Google the words “American capitalism gone with a whimper,” the title of an article by Stanislav Mishin. The author writes, “the American descent into Marxism is happening with breath-taking speed.”

This decline has happened because, according to Mishin, “the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education” that produced millions of Americans who “know more about their favorite TV dramas than the drama in D.C. that directly affects their lives.” Mishin also faults the widespread abandonment of Christ’s religion in America, our loss of faith. This is the cultural backdrop for a political system that has culminated in Barack Obama’s unprecedented “spending and money printing.” Mishin believes that, under Obamanomics, “America at best will resemble the Weimar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.”

Earlier this year, reports Mishin, “Prime Minister Putin … warned Obama and UK’s Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster.” Mishin has concluded that we are ignoring Putin’s warning—based on 70 years of suffering during the nightmarish Soviet experiment in central planning—and he concludes, “The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world how free he really is. The world will only snicker.”

When I first read this astounding diatribe, I thought perhaps it had been written as a satire, almost as a spoof of what some libertarian writers in the United States have written. After consulting with a Russian friend, I have concluded that Mishin wrote in complete earnestness. Either way—satire or grim analysis—what Mishin wrote is no laughing matter. Mishin’s is one of many voices, foreign and domestic, warning us of the dangers of faith that government can be omnicompetent and can meet all our economic needs.

Adding to the irony of a Russian warning the United States about the dangers of Marxism is the fact that this article appeared in the online publication Pravda.ru—the contemporary version of the Soviet-era newspaper Pravda that served as the official Communist Party channel for pro-communist, anti-American propaganda.

Another harsh indictment of our ill-advised embrace of Big Government occurred on June 1, during Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s official visit to China. Speaking at the University of Beijing, Geithner assured a large audience of students that China’s large holdings of U.S. Treasury securities were “very safe.” The students laughed out loud. This reaction might have been unusually rude, but it was brutally honest. They didn’t believe Geithner for one second.

When the ability of the United States government to repay its debts (or at least, without doing so in significantly depreciated dollars) is perceived as a joke, it is anything but a laughing matter for our country. The Chinese gave us a wakeup call, although we appear not to have heeded it.

The Chinese students see what is plain for anyone with eyes to see. For years, fiscal discipline has been eroding in Washington, but President Obama has increased government spending with reckless abandon as the leviathan government absorbs more and more of the private sector. As I wrote in “Into the Fiscal Abyss,” <http://www.visandvals.org/Into_the_Fiscal_Abyss.php> with Uncle Sam’s total financial obligations totaling approximately five times our GDP, there is no way those debts and promises can be honored. The most likely outcome will be Uncle Sam—the largest debtor in human history—paying off those debts in greatly depreciated dollars. Indeed, our one-trick Federal Reserve (Motto: When there’s a bump in the economic road, inflate) already has begun to create vast sums of new dollars through the mechanism of “quantitative easing”—the direct purchase of the bonds that the government issues to finance its massive spending agenda.

The Chinese students laughing at Geithner told us implicitly what Stanislav Mishin told us explicitly: It is runaway government spending, stemming from the socialistic error that the government can be all things to all people, which threatens us all with financial cataclysm, national bankruptcy, and the loss of our prosperity and our freedoms. From the perspective of the Russians and the Chinese, the joke is on us. But for all of us, America’s plunge into the Big Government trap is no laughing matter.

Last week, the United States Senate passed the “Cash for Clunkers” bill — they tucked it into an emergency war-funding bill — and President Obama will soon sign it into law.

Here’s how the clunker bill works:

If your current car averages 18 or fewer miles per gallon, you’ll qualify for a $3,500 voucher toward the cost of a new car — so long as the new car averages at least 4 mpg more.

Better: If you buy a new car that averages 10 mpg better than your current car, the government will give you a $4,500 voucher.

That is why I’m torn.

I own two vehicles: a 2001 Nissan Maxima SE and a 1992 Chevy S-10 truck, both in excellent condition.

My Maxima gets 19 mpg in the city — it averages 22 mpg — so it doesn’t qualify for government dough.

But my truck surely does. It only gets about 10 mpg.

Of course, that isn’t a problem. The truck sits in my father’s garage most of the time. It goes out only when someone in my family needs to pick up a piece of furniture or some mulch.

I love that truck.

Its dated two-tone silver-and-maroon paint job, white-letter tires and red velour interior scream “1992.” It’s the kind of vehicle somebody like Bill Clinton might have used to pick up someone like Monica Lewinsky.

Despite its coolness — despite its near-mint condition — the truck is 17 years old. In the real market — the free market — it is worth only $2,500.

Which puts me in a troubling position.

Once President Obama signs the clunker bill into law, my truck will instantly be worth $4,500. All I have to do is find a new vehicle that gets 22 mpg — not hard to do.

Of course I don’t need or want a new vehicle. I love my Maxima. And my truck is perfect for what it is intended to do.

And I can’t bear the thought of what will happen to my beloved truck if I take the deal. All vehicles traded in under the clunker program will be crushed into a block of steel and smelted. Not even the transmission or the motor can be salvaged.

But then again, one must keep emotion out of financial decisions. Only the government is dumb enough to pay me $4,500 for a $2,500 vehicle — and only a dummy would walk away from a $2,000 gain.

Sure, I know what the critics are saying: The program’s $1 billion price tag is a waste of money at a time when we’re bleeding red ink. I know we’ve already squandered some $30 billion meddling in the private auto industry and have likely made things worse, not better.

I know the unintended consequences of the government’s clunker program will hit the poor and middle class the hardest. Even with government perks, many people can’t afford a new car. Because the program will take thousands of used cars out of service, it will cause the cost of used cars to go up.

I know the political class is trying to impose a desired outcome on us. They’re eager for us to drive ever dinkier cars. I know they’re bribing us — with our own dough — to make us bend to their will.

But then again, this will surely be my last chance to qualify for a government perk of any kind.

I’m generally on the paying end of government programs — not the receiving end — and all of us will be paying plenty more if Obama succeeds in signing a torrent of big-spending programs into law.

And so I am torn.

I had been happy with my two perfectly good vehicles, but, suddenly, I’m thrust into the throes of a major automotive decision.

I’ve been avoiding my truck lately. Wracked with guilt — I can’t believe I may be bought off for a lousy 2,000 bucks — I can’t look my truck in the headlights.

Such are the peculiar thoughts that only the government can produce.

Jill Stanek — a white, pro-life woman — has been called just that by Keith Olbermann, who is a political commentator on MSNBC. Jill is just one in a string of many white, pro-life women who are coming under attack in ways that are both alarming and increasing in frequency.

When late-term abortionist Dr. Tiller was recently murdered, much of the media — including Olbermann — quickly affiliated all pro-life groups together with the perpetrator of that heinous crime. This, even though countless bishops, pro-life leaders and others condemned Tiller’s murder as an act that did not reflect the ultimate belief of pro-lifers that every life is precious from womb to tomb, even Tiller’s. Olbermann’s incendiary attack on Jill Stanek, labeling her the “Worst Person in the World,” quickly resulted in threats upon Stanek and her church, as she revealed in an interview that aired on Catholic radio.

But the case of Stanek is really only one in a long line of public and private attacks being made upon white, pro-life women. Consider when Sarah Palin came on the scene. By all accounts, Palin should have been embraced by the feminist movement that has so venomously attacked the men who created the “glass ceiling”.

What then, did Palin have, or not have, that the feminist movement chose not to welcome this woman governor as a viable candidate for the vice-presidency? Say what you will, but to claim, after the Biden cat has been let out of the bag many, many times, that Palin was not qualified to be second-in-command is just absurd.

So what was it about Palin that brought the absolute vicious — yet clearly acceptable — attacks upon her as a person and as a candidate? It would seem that her choice to carry to term a baby with Down Syndrome along with her staunch pro-life stand made her public enemy number one.

Enter Carrie Prejean. I admit that I haven’t watched a beauty contest in decades but I can remember well the pageantry of the events and the way in which I would, as a young girl, admire the contestants. I can’t say I paid all that much attention to their bathing suits as much as the way in which they carried themselves and the way in which they answered their questions during the question and answer portion of the event. Even if their answers were “pat” and could easily become fodder, the answers were nonetheless given and received with an air of respect. After all, one of these women would wear a crown and travel the country representing, to some degree, “American” values of home and hearth, hard work and kindness.

For a couple of hours we were all transformed by the fairy tale world of the beauty pageants. And even though I knew, at 8 years old, that the pretty lady couldn’t really end world hunger (if that had been her answer to the question, “Once you are crowned, what would be the most important thing you would like to accomplish?”), I also instinctively understood that ending world hunger was a good thing. The contestants said things that were “American,” even if they were pie-in-the-sky American.

But times have certainly changed. Carrie Prejean quickly became the next white, pro-life woman with a target on her back simply by sharing her personal opinion on marriage.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that we are seeing the emergence of a newly-marginalized group in America. It does not matter from where she hails or how many years she’s been upon the earth; it is open season on every member of this targeted minority: the white woman who supports life and traditional marriage and who dares to speak her mind.

Now, in Reagan’s Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster (Crown), husband-and-wife team Martin and Annelise Anderson shed new light on the Reagan-John Paul II relationship by using previously classified U.S. government files.

The outlines of the story are reasonably well known: John Paul first came to Reagan’s attention when the Pope’s epic first papal pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979 set in motion what eventually became the Solidarity movement—a movement Reagan, an old union leader, instinctively appreciated. Shortly after his inauguration, President Reagan sent his friend (and future Holy See envoy) William A. Wilson to Anchorage, Alaska, where the Pope’s plane was refueling, to greet the pontiff on Reagan’s behalf. We also know of the two leaders’ subsequent meetings in both Rome and the United States, and of Reagan’s determination to push U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Holy See through a U.S. Senate nervous about residual anti-Catholicism in some parts of America.

There has also been a lot of nonsense written about the relationship, primarily by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, who for years perpetrated a “Holy Alliance” conspiracy theory, according to which the two men entered into a secret bargain to bring down communism. As the Anderson’s book confirms, this was, and is, pluperfect nonsense, as is the claim (often heard in the 1980s) that John Paul II had agreed not to criticize either U.S. missile deployments in Europe or U.S. policy in Central America in exchange for Reagan administration support of Solidarity.

The new revelation about the relationship in the Andersons’ book is that the Pope and the President had an extensive correspondence, involving dozens of letters back-and-forth, which Professor Martin Anderson told me were by far among the most interesting of all the Reagan letters he had examined. Among the letters referenced in Reagan’s Secret War is a January 1982 letter from the White House to the Vatican in which Reagan shifted the subject of the exchange from events in Poland (which had just been put under martial law) to his hopes for genuine disarmament, not just arms “control,” at the talks about to begin with the Soviet Union in Geneva.

Indeed, the Andersons’ book makes clear that, somewhat to the consternation of many of his close advisers, Ronald Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist: he really did believe, as he often said, in ridding the world of nuclear weapons. His instruments for doing so—ramping up U.S. missile capability to demonstrate that America couldn’t be outmuscled, and the strategic defense initiative as an insurance policy—were bitterly criticized by the liberal arms controllers, whose influence on the deliberations of the U.S. bishops as they prepared their 1983 peace pastoral was, to put it gently, considerable. But as the Andersons demonstrate, it was Reagan who was the true radical in this business: the man who wasn’t satisfied with simply managing an arms race, the man who wanted to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. Historians of U.S. Catholicism will thus be grateful to the Andersons for clarifying just how mistaken some of the policy assumptions underlying “The Challenge of Peace” were.

In my own conversations with the late pontiff, John Paul often asked how President Reagan was doing and was saddened to learn that Alzheimer’s disease had robbed him of even the memory of being president. An extraordinary pair of men; may they both rest in peace.

Having just returned from China, the careful admission, by the authors of the Science article, that in the past, “some Asian policy initiatives incorporated coercive elements” strikes me as risible. I would like to report that in southern Hebei province, according to eyewitnesses that I interviewed, hundreds of pregnant women are being rounded up and forcibly aborted by lethal injection as you read this. It is significant that the authors have in the past applauded China’s one-child policy, revealing both their bias in favor of rigorous “family planning” programs run by the state and — what is the same thing — their utter disdain for the universally recognized right of parents to determine the number and spacing of their children.

It may appear to the members of the British Parliamentary Group that family planning programs in developing countries are “entirely voluntary,” but I assure you that this is not the case on the ground in Asia, Africa and Latin America. We at PRI have documented serious human rights abuses in what should properly still be called population control programs in over 40 countries.ii To bolster their case, the authors point to surveys which purportedly show a high “unmet need for contraception” but these survey instruments, as I have argued elsewhere, are flawed. They are designed and interpreted to prove what they should instead be objectively assessing.iii

Still, I was pleased to see that the authors have been constrained by falling birthrates worldwide to considerably limit the scope of their population control efforts, chiefly to sub-Saharan Africa. To what other continent can they turn to justify their interventions? The developed world is dying, South America is close to replacement rate fertility, and even Asia has seen dramatic reductions in birth rates over the past two decades. Only in Africa does one still find robust birthrates.

This is not heedless breeding, as many assume. Rather, it is a consequence of persistently high infant and child mortality rates on that continent. If you know that one or more of your children will die before adulthood, the prudent thing to do is to have more children. Anyone who is concerned about lowering fertility rates in Africa should focus their energies on lowering the mortality rate. Fertility rates will follow.

The British Parliamentarians argue that it will be difficult to achieve a number of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) without a “substantial increase” in population control spending. But their justifications in each case seem contorted, even forced. Let me explain what I mean.

They argue that it will be “almost impossible” to achieve the MDG of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger without population control. Does anyone else find it odd that the effort to eliminate poverty and hunger should involve the elimination of the poor and hungry? They ask for bread and we give them contraceptives. They ask for help with malaria and HIV/AIDS and we sterilize them.

Although population control programs are generally justified in terms of helping the poor and downtrodden, other, less presentable, justifications lurk in the background. Consider the following assertion of the UN Population Fund, which is quoted by the authors: “… almost 1.5 billion young men and women will enter the 20-to-24 age cohort between 2000 and 2015, and if they don’t find jobs ‘they will fuel political instability’.” This sentiment echoes that of the infamous National Security Study Memorandum 200, which in 1974 claimed that high birth rates led to Communist insurrections. Thus was population control made a weapon in the Cold War. Are the authors seriously proposing that we control unemployment by means of birth control, pace Nancy Pelosi? And whose interests are we serving if we do?

Like nearly everyone, I applaud the MDG of universal primary school education for girls as well as boys. But there are surely more humane ways to achieve this than by driving down the birthrate. After all, the chief victims of population control programs are preborn and newborn baby girls, who are aborted and abandoned in large numbers to ensure the safe arrival of their culturally preferred brothers. Also note that the authors advance universal primary education principally as a way of keeping girls from marrying and having children. This is a remarkably constrained view of human potential.

Another MDG is to “promote gender equality and empower women,” which the authors argue will be achieved by family planning. It is hard to see how targeting women in foreign-funded fertility control programs in any way empowers them. Instead, it rather treats them as breeding machines to be disabled. We at PRI have carried out surveys in several African countries which show that while women desire many forms of health care, “reproductive health care” is not one of them. If you really want to empower women, health-wise, help them to meet their personal and familial health needs by providing antibiotics, vitamin supplements, malaria tablets, etc.

No one would dispute the importance of reducing child mortality, another MDG goal. It is also one that is, through the provision of primary health care and reasonable nutrition, eminently achievable. Instead the authors take us down the convoluted and indirect path of reducing child mortality… by spacing births. Now it may be true that “an estimated one million infant deaths a year could be prevented if all births were spaced a minimum of 2 years apart,” but it is disingenuous for the authors to claim that this is either their primary motivation or the most efficient means to this end.

Their real goal, quite obviously, is to eliminate the ten million or so babies each year who are born within 24 months of a sibling. Reducing the infant mortality rate is merely a convenient cover story for their real end. This is, as the article admits, further reductions in fertility rates.

As far as improving maternal health, the next MDG goal they mention, the same objection applies. They claim that “family planning saves lives by reducing unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions,” but this is just a side effect of their real goal, which is to reduce the number of children born. As everyone by now knows, if you want to reduce maternal mortality, you address the problem of unattended births. If you do so, you will save not just the 150,000 lives claimed by the authors, but easily 10 times that number.

The report concludes with a breathless plea that echoes back to the original, discredited, population bomb thesis: If population growth is not slowed — in the few remaining countries where it is still a problem — then “hundreds of millions of families will suffer from poverty, hunger, inadequate education, and lack of employment opportunities.”

Better, the authors imply, if they had never been born.

i Martha Campbell, John Cleland, Alex Ezeh, Ndola Prata, “Return of the Population Growth Factor,” Science 315 (16 March 2007): 1501-2.

ii Steven W. Mosher, Population Control: Real Costs and Illusory Benefits (New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 2008), especially Chapter 5.

iii Steven W. Mosher, “‘Reproductive Health Care,’ the ‘Demographic Imperative,’ and the Real Health Needs of Women in the Developing World (Part One),” Linacre Quarterly Vol. 76, No. 1 (February 2009), 38-42.