May his soul and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Grant all who love him grace, peace, strength, consolation and hope.  Mother Mary, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.  We ask all this through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

A relative of mine suffers from a mental illness and is undergoing unusually severe inward turmoil lately. We have no idea why. It may be related to changes in his medication, but since these have had other, positive results as well, like weight loss and greater activity, we would hate to change it back again. If anyone could say a prayer or two for his peace of mind, my family would deeply appreciate it.

Father, grant your servant complete healing of mind and body through Christ our Lord. Mother Mary and St. Dymphna, pray for him. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Another reader writes:

My wife is 8 months pregnant with our first child, a boy. We have a lot of (most likely regular) day to day trials and are hoping to find a steadiness and balance in our home life with one another and with our child. In addition, we are looking to have her transition from her job to a stay-at-home one and, God willing, we eventually plan to buy a home. I’m humbly asking for prayers as a new husband/provider/father as I can be a little high strung and hard to live with when pressures come along. Any prayers for any of our intentions are very much appreciated and please know that you and your readers will remain in ours.

Father, hear our prayer for a smooth transition, a safe birth, and a good house, and sufficient provision for their financial needs. Mother Mary and St. Joseph, pray for them. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen!

And finally, a reader writes:

Hi Mark, a prayer request for your readers. We had the anatomy ultrasound for our fifth child today, and s/he was diagnosed with bilateral club feet. It could be a LOT worse and we’re grateful that it’s not (the condition is 100% treatable and 95% of cases don’t require surgery) but we’re still reeling from the shock of being told our baby has a problem. Prayers for strength and courage for the journey ahead would be appreciated.

Father, hear our prayer for a safe delivery and for complete healing for this child. Grant mother and child good caregivers full of grace, knowledge, understanding, wisdom, skill, and compassion. Mother Mary, St. Luke, and St. Gerard, pray for them. We ask this through Christ Our Lord. Amen!

Obama’s IRS continues to look better and better. Meanwhile, even the Onion is starting to notice the stench.

At the very least, this is a spectacular failure of oversight for Obama, with whom the buck stops. What remains to be seen is how far up the command chain this stuff goes.

I would really appreciate if you could ask for prayers for myself, my husband and our six children.  Within 24 hours I have found out that I have stage 2 breast cancer, and I am several weeks pregnant.  I am so overwhelmed, I don’t know what to think.  Any prayers people could offer would be so helpful.  I haven’t been able to tell all our family yet, so if you could leave off my name, I would appreciate it.

Father, hear our prayer for her swift healing and for the safe delivery of her baby.  Give her caregivers grace, wisdom, understanding, knowledge, skill and compassion and give all who love her grace, peace and strength.  Mother Mary, St. Luke, and St. Peregrine, pray for them.  We ask this through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Another military reader of mine strove to break through Disqus and failed, so she wrote me:

I hope you don’t mind my emailing a comment – disqus and my organization’s firewall don’t seem to like each other.  One of the things the young prospective officer should look at is the length of the obligation incurred by the ROTC scholarship. (Also, how much do you have to pay back if you don’t accept your commission – or for that matter, what happens if you get hurt your junior year are physically dq’d – but I’m sure they’ve looked at that.) So, okay, is the obligated time short enough that you’d get out as a first lieutenant or junior captain and not necessarily have been in a position to enforce policies that you found morally impossible to live with?  If it’s longer than that, is it because you’re looking at a flight contract, wherein you’re possibly not responsible for much more than yourself and your aircraft and its crew?  And then, what are your red lines?

- You’re taking the risk of being ordered to an unjust war, in the first place – that possibility is always there.  Is it a moral obligation for someone under a contract to trash his career and possibly end it in the brig – over a matter of prudential judgment?  We had two popes oppose the Iraq war, but neither of them suggested that Catholics had to leave the US military – nor did any of our bishops.

-Equal opportunity policies – with respect to post-DADT.  You’re going to have to treat your gay troops and their lovers as human beings (which is easy, because they are). They disagree with the Church on at least one issue concerning eternal life, just like most of your other troops and colleagues.  Evaluate them on their professional capabilities without letting those disagreements color your judgment.  This shouldn’t be that hard, if you’re fair-minded and know how to think clearly, and make distinctions between personal and professional.

– DOMA may go away soon, so you may have to help gay couples get their ducks in a row to get family housing on base.  I personally don’t see this as a red line, because people need a place to live. People will commit mortal sins within their dwelling; that’s called being human.  That you know, in particular, the nature of one mortal sin that will undoubtedly take place doesn’t mean you are cooperating with evil by putting them in a house. Your mileage may vary, however, and if you’re looking at possibly being an admin officer, you’re going to be helping people get their BAH with dependents, or base housing, etc.

-Life issues – the way I see it, if my sister gets an abortion, she’s still my sister.  If one of my Marines gets an abortion, she’s still my sister.  The fitrep I write on her will reflect professional capabilities, not her error, as I believe it is – even on a matter of life and death.  But nobody, silver oak leaves, birds, stars, congresscritter, whatever, has the power to make me drive somebody to the clinic.  Nor would they, if I were still a second lieutenant.  Nor would they, if I were a sergeant, and a squad leader, and it was my job to take care of my people a much closer level than officers do.

As far as the religious liberty environment – I see gay marriage eventually taking away dedicated Catholic chapels (there are a few) and maybe chaplains.  I’ve heard that Mikey Weinstein and the Atlantic think that the Army and the Air Force have a huge problem with ‘Christian Fundamentalists’ pressuring subordinates to go to Bible study.  I have heard at second hand of one such incident in the Marine Corps, and I’ve seen a senior officer, at a unit event, say grace before a meal without seeming aware that maybe not everybody there thought there was Somebody to be grateful to.   Nobody has a right to tell you to go to Evangelical Bible study; nobody has a right to tell your people who put NO PREFERENCE on their dogs tags to go to Bible study, or Mass, or any kind of services.  You should try to make sure that people who stand weekend duty rotations have the opportunity to go to church if they so desire.

On the other hand, I haven’t seen a DOD message, or ALNAV or MARADMIN yet saying that because Mikey Weinstein says so, all believers have to keep their mouths shut about their beliefs, and religious speech will be treated like racism.  I haven’t seen anything that makes me feel threatened – except on the internet, which is just the cloud storage for everybody’s id, anyway.   It IS unprofessional and unfair to evangelize your subordinates in a way that puts pressure on them – which might mean, in any way at all, because you can’t tell how somebody is going to react.   Many people believe that nobody should ever know your beliefs (including a retired Viet Nam vet SgtMaj I know who goes to Mass every Sunday, and says he examines his conscience and makes an act of contrition every night).  Again, YMMV.  My office colleagues know I go to daily Mass when I have the opportunity – which I’m grateful to have!

I did send out an all-hands email once, letting people know about Ash Wednesday Mass times on base.  I got a lot of thank-you replies from people who later showed up for Mass; I also got a concerned note from the SJA, who worried that the command might thus be made to appear to endorse the Catholic Church…so  sent out another all hands, noting that the base and the tenant commands didn’t share an email domain, so the chaplains relied on parishioners to get these things out, but that if anyone from any other group that met in the Chapel had a similar off-schedule event, our help desk could send out an all hands for them (I was in the comm section at that command).  My boss was good with it, and it satisfied the lawyer.

So – Air Force climate is going to be a little different from the Marine Corps climate; but so far it still basically boils down to accepting the fact that we live in a really pluralistic society, with a lot of different points of view about personal morality, so treat everybody like a human being, hold people accountable for failings with respect to commonly-agreed upon morality (eg, adultery is still illegal under the UCMJ, and I’ve know 2-3 Marines to be dismissed from the service after non-judicial punishment for it – at least one was still given an honorable discharge, and the others, probably no worse than general, under honorable conditions – so there’s an attempt at balance, and at punishing wrongdoing, but not so that it follows you for life), overlook sins that aren’t sins in the mind of the sinner, judge professional capabilities honestly and dispassionately…  the way the Marine Corps says “love your neighbor” is “know your Marines and look out for their welfare.”  It can’t be much different in the Air Force.  Mission accomplishment is first, troop welfare second – but you’re not going to accomplish your mission if you haven’t seen to troop welfare all along.

In other words, it’s a serious question that deserves serious thought; it’s not an absolute No.  Looking at the comments just now, I think I agree with Skylarke and Laura most – both make very good points about not giving the store away to the secularists (Skylarke) and everybody’s vocation being different (Laura).  I have faith that Stu came by his pessimism honestly, but I don’t share it – for the most part. Knowing what we now seem to know about sexual assault cases, I would discourage a daughter, if I had one, from enlisting in any service.  Commissioning is a different ballgame.

It means, in a word, that giant corporations will now be able to manufacture people for the express purpose of cannibalizing them for parts.  It also is another step on the road to cloning humans–and genetically designing them a la Brave New World.  All are monstrous evils.

May God have mercy on our civilization.

When it comes to actions that harm others, the basic idea of the Church is “Try to limit the harm as much as possible.” So, in war, you don’t *get* to kill, you always kill because you have to and you try your best not to kill.

Just war theory is not a series of hoops you jump through and, if you do so, get a 007 and a hearty, “Kill away, my lad! You’ve earned it by passing all the Just War criteria.” Rather the idea is always that you may have to shoot somebody in order to stop them from harming somebody else, but if this can possibly be avoided, then you have to try to avoid it. Of course, on the battlefield, we are talking about chaos and mayhem as we try to live that out and the Church has nothing but pity for anybody thrust into that.

But for the sake of argument here, the basic principle can be illustrated with a more intimate example:

A thug comes into your store and pulls a gun on you. A customer in the store is packing heat and, unseen to the thug, draws a bead on him from behind the canned vegetables. The customer’s a good shot and has his choice of how he will aim at the guy. He could shoot the gun from his hand. He could fire in the air and tell him to drop it. He could do lots of things. But instead, the customer thinks, “I have always wanted to kill a man just to watch him die and this worthless piece of crap is gonna die.” So he shoots the bandit in the head.

The Church would argue that this was not a “proportional” or “ordinate” use of force. Before the civil law, your customer would undoubtedly be acquitted as “killing in self defense.” But morally, what he did was closer to murder, than self-defense, because it was unnecessary to kill the perp and he shot, not to defend himself, but because he proactively, rather than as a last resort, wanted to take human life.

So the idea is never that you “get” to kill. It is that you “have” to unfortunately kill and that, if you could possibly avoid it, you should.  If we had phasers instead of guns, the Church was say that they had to be set to “stun”.

That’s because always, the emphasis is on reluctance to harm the other, rather than proactive eagerness to harm the other, hiding behind a legal justification for doing so.

Okay. Now here’s where St. Thomas comes in with his weird, counter-intuitive logic. He raises exactly this objection and then answers it here: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3110.htm#article3:

Objection 4. Further, one ought to choose the lesser evil in order to avoid the greater: even so a physician cuts off a limb, lest the whole body perish. Yet less harm is done by raising a false opinion in a person’s mind, than by someone slaying or being slain. Therefore a man may lawfully lie, to save another from committing murder, or another from being killed.

Reply to Objection 4. A lie is sinful not only because it injures one’s neighbor, but also on account of its inordinateness, as stated above in this Article. Now it is not allowed to make use of anything inordinate in order to ward off injury or defects from another: as neither is it lawful to steal in order to give an alms, except perhaps in a case of necessity when all things are common. Therefore it is not lawful to tell a lie in order to deliver another from any danger whatever. Nevertheless it is lawful to hide the truth prudently, by keeping it back, as Augustine says (Contra Mend. x).

The key word here is “inordinateness”. Basically, what Thomas is saying is that you can shoot at somebody without necessarily actively trying to kill them. Like the customer in my example, you can reluctantly shoot to only frighten or injure, or you can, in trying to stop them, unintentionally kill them–or you can go full max kill mode despite the fact that it is not necessary. In short, with killing there is, weirdly enough, the possibility that you are not *trying* to kill. So Thomas grants that those who are forced to kill in battle are doing so, not because they want to kill, but because they are merely trying to stop an aggressor. This is why, once the aggressor is stopped by an injury, you don’t “get” to finish him off with a bullet to the brain and are, in fact, obligated to care for his injuries if he is, for instance, taken prisoner.  The intention is not to kill, but to stop him.

But Thomas does not see how you can lie to somebody and not mean to lie to them. So he cannot conceive of how you can be proportional or ordinate in lying as you can in killing. You mean to stop an aggressor, not kill him (though you might, sadly, end up doing so).  But you either mean to lie or you don’t.

Weird, I know. But that is Thomas’ logic, as near as I can make out and, despite the weirdness, I don’t have a good argument against him. (He’s aggravating that way.)

I would be interested to hear from an actual Thomist if I have done justice to Thomas’ argument.  I think I have, but what do I know?

Wait till I get around to trying to articulate Thomas’ speculation that angels are more or less made of whipped air when they appear in bodily form.  Fun stuff!

If you want to follow up, I’d recommend you talk to an actual Thomist.