For the Children
“I figured if he was there, I’d make sure he wasn’t there [again],” Harlan Drake, a 33-year-old truck driver, told Det. Sgt. Scott Shenk of the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department. But on the morning of September 11, 2009, James Pouillon was there, sitting across the street from Owosso High School as he had on so many other mornings. And so Harlan Drake stopped his car, pulled a .45 out of a bag, carefully took aim, and shot Pouillon. “He was still moving so I shot him one more time. I aimed under the ribcage going up toward the heart.”
Alana Beamish, who had just dropped her son off at school, attempted to save Pouillon’s life, but it was too late. The 63-year-old died on the ground.
Drake murdered another man, Mike Fuoss, that day, and went in search of a third, James Howe, intending to kill him, too. Caught a few hours later, Drake told Detective Sergeant Shenk that “he was going to make our job very easy.” He confessed to both murders, and from then until his trial ended in a guilty verdict on March 11, Harlan Drake expressed no remorse.
Mike Fuoss’s name was little more than a footnote in most media coverage of that fateful day in Owosso, Michigan. It was the murder of Pouillon that captured the nation’s attention. As Drake told Detective Sergeant Shenk, “I asked [Pouillon] over the years not to do that in front of the kids. A little kid shouldn’t have to look at that.”
Was Pouillon a pervert, an exhibitionist? No: Through his decades-long stakeout at Owosso High School and numerous other places throughout the city and county, Pouillon intended not to victimize children but to save them from the horrors of abortion. Harlan Drake claimed that he had no problem with that message; it was the medium that Pouillon used that convinced Drake to put an end to Pouillon’s life: “I’m not against anti-abortion. I’m against showing little kids those pictures.”
Those pictures were three- and four-foot-high graphic photographs of bloodied, dismembered unborn children—the “product” of abortions. Drake wasn’t the only resident of Owosso who objected to Pouillon’s tactics. In a community that is largely pro-life, Pouillon found few defenders. Why? Because, as the Associated Press reported on February 23, Pouillon “was everywhere—the farmers market, City Hall, the county courthouse, football games—with verbal taunts that were as shocking as his signs.”
As Pouillon’s barber told the AP, “I had no problem with his message. He was just overboard with it. He knew how to push buttons on people, but Jim didn’t deserve to be executed on the sidewalk.” A local woman interviewed by the AP went even further: “I don’t agree with someone taking someone’s life . . . But I don’t miss the man on the corner or his foul mouth. He would chase you, call you names. He was evil. His pictures were so gross.”
One does not have to draw a moral equivalence between murder and a pro-life protest, no matter how unsettling the tactics used, to see a disturbing parallel between the two men. Their shared conviction that extreme measures are justified “for the sake of the children” left one man dead and the other in prison for life. But what, in the end, did either man accomplish?
Those of us who oppose abortion and support pro-life measures need not give Harlan Drake a second thought, except perhaps to utter a prayer for his conversion. But can we learn any lessons from James Pouillon’s tragic end?
The images that Pouillon used are being increasingly adopted by pro-lifers—a sign, perhaps, of desperation, as the years since Roe v. Wade continue to tick by, with only minor and occasional declines in the number of abortions in the United States, from 1.4 million to 1.2 million per year, every year, for over 37 years.
Thus the excitement in the pro-life movement in early October 2009 when the New York Times published an article on its Lens blog by reporter Damien Cave, who had covered the murder of Pouillon and attended his memorial service in Owosso. “Behind the Scenes: Picturing Fetal Remains” is the first serious and extended examination in the mainstream media of the use of such images in pro-life protests.
Cave interviewed Monica Migliorino Miller, the director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society and a theology professor at Madonna University, a Franciscan school in Livonia, Michigan. Mrs. Miller estimates that half of the images of aborted children that are used in pro-life protests are pictures that she took, starting in 1987.
What is most interesting about Mrs. Miller’s story is her understanding of what she hoped to accomplish. From the beginning, she told Mr. Cave, her purpose was “journalistic”: “We felt it was very important to make a record of the reality of abortion.”
Yet “Over time,” Cave writes,
her views on which images are appropriate have evolved. She no longer sees gory pictures showing blood or organs as acceptable. She has tried harder to shoot younger fetuses, because that’s when most abortions take place, and she said she also believes that the most graphic images should not be deliberately directed at children because “they can’t intellectualize what they’re seeing.”
And yet an increasing number of pro-lifers who use such images justify deliberately targeting children by arguing that it is too late for adults (we have already made up our minds about abortion), while children are (as one put it) “not yet in that horrible fog.” And some even defend the use of such images by attacking the moral character of teenagers en masse. Because some teenagers engage in premarital sex, and some portion of those who do have sex get pregnant, and some portion of those who do get pregnant have abortions, all children—including those who would not have an abortion if they were to get pregnant from the sex that they are not having—should be exposed to these terrifying sights.
As parents, we have an obligation to protect our children from the violence of abortion. But confronting them with such images accomplishes exactly the opposite: It draws them into the reality of abortion in a way that can do great damage to developing minds and souls.
For her second thoughts, Mrs. Miller is now being criticized by some of those who have used her pictures the longest. Flip Benham, director of Operation Rescue/Operation Save America, told Cave that Mrs. Miller’s current stance is “a nice sentimental argument. What’s important is truth to us; that this is the truth.”
There is something to be learned from the difference in the language that Mrs. Miller and Mr. Benham use. Perhaps it can be ascribed to Mrs. Miller’s training in theology, but her description of her photos as a “record of the reality of abortion” is accurate, while Mr. Benham’s claim that “this is the truth” is not.
This is not a mere semantic quibble. In the modern world, we often use the word truth as if it were synonymous with reality, but in Christian theology, as in classical philosophy, truth has a more limited, and more elevated, meaning. Abortion, by definition, is untruth; it is the destruction of the truth of human nature and of the created order. It is a direct assault not only on the child who is being torn apart, limb from limb, but on the God Who declared to the prophet Jeremiah, in that verse so familiar to pro-lifers, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5, RSV).
What happens when we dwell on untruth, when we constantly expose ourselves and others to it, even with the best of intentions? We become inured to the reality of that untruth. The shock and the horror that we experienced when first confronted with pictures of aborted children dissipate; we need even more graphic images in order to excite the same feelings of revulsion.
We can see this in an anecdotal way in a picture that the New York Times ran alongside a front-page story, also by Mr. Cave, in the October 9, 2009, print edition. At a prayer vigil for Mr. Pouillon in Owosso in September, in front of a camper plastered with signs that read “Mommy, why do they want to kill me?” and “Abortion=Murder: The same by any name,” several young girls stand talking. One, a pretty blond-haired girl perhaps 10 or 12 years old, has a broad smile on her face—while a foot or so behind her hangs a four- or five-foot image of a bloodied, mangled baby on a white sheet stained with more blood.
Mrs. Miller is right: “[T]hey can’t intellectualize what they’re seeing.” What they can do, what they will do, is compartmentalize it, become desensitized, confuse the reality of evil with truth.
That very confusion today afflicts the broader pro-life movement—even those who would never dream of using these graphic photos. Abortion has become a moral “issue”; a political “question”; a cultural “problem” to be solved. It has taken on a life of its own, separate from Christian teaching. Indeed, when pro-abortion zealots claim that opposition to abortion is simply an attempt to impose Christian morality, the usual response of Christian pro-lifers today is to point to Jewish and Muslim and even atheist pro-lifers, to declare that abortion is a matter of “civil rights” or “human rights,” to compare it to slavery and point out that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s niece is a pro-lifer, to decry the unequal impact that abortion for sex selection has on unborn baby girls and to argue that any true feminist must, for that reason alone, be pro-life.
What few will do is simply say, “Yes. And what of it?” At the time of Christ, both chemical and mechanical abortion were practiced in the Roman world; by the time that Constantine the Great issued the Edict of Milan, and for well over a millennium afterward in the Western world, such practices were shunned. How did that change come about? Through graphic representations of Flip Benham’s “truth” of abortion? By petitioning the Roman Senate to outlaw such practices? No: It occurred through the widespread conversion of Romans to Christianity.
The Didache, the first-century document known to early Christians as the teaching of the Twelve Apostles, declared that “There are two Ways, one of Life and one of Death”; those who would follow the Way of Life that Christian converts had embraced “shall not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide.” Why? Because such practices violate “universal human rights”? Because they are akin to the slavery that was commonplace in the ancient world? Because they make women no more than sex objects for men?
No. Such actions were to be avoided because they are the Way of Death, not of Life; they are untruth, and thus opposed to the Truth that will set us free.
Some may object that the civil-rights and human-rights and slavery and feminism arguments carry weight today, while Christianity does not. How can we expect to win the fight against abortion if we cannot even get people to listen to us?
But what exactly is it that we are fighting against? Better yet, what exactly is it that we are fighting for? Abortion is not simply a cause of our civilizational decline, though it is that; more importantly, it is a symptom—a symptom, first and foremost, of the increasing destruction of Christianity from within.
In Casti connubi, his 1930 encyclical on Christian marriage, Pope Pius XI speaks of the proper role of the state in upholding the teachings of the Church, but he never loses sight of the fact that “the family is more sacred than the State and that men are begotten not for the earth and for time, but for Heaven and eternity.” That is why there can never be a purely political solution to a cultural problem; if we put our trust in princes who have forgotten that God is the source of their authority, then our trust is likely to be betrayed when the teachings of the Faith threaten to bridle their passion for political power.
The solution is for the Church to play the role that She played in the conversion of the Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages. As Pius XI writes,
For the preservation of the moral order neither the laws and sanctions of the temporal power are sufficient, nor is the beauty of virtue and the expounding of its necessity. Religious authority must enter in to enlighten the mind, to direct the will, and to strengthen human frailty by the assistance of divine grace. Such an authority is found nowhere save in the Church instituted by Christ the Lord.
But surely the hour is too late; the day is too dark; we cannot spare the time necessary to convert the masses. Every year, 1.3 million children are murdered; are we simply to throw them to the wolves?
Of course not. But our time and attention are necessarily limited, and we need to focus on preventing abortions where they actually occur—not in the halls of Congress, or the Oval Office, or the chamber of the Supreme Court, but in the abortuaries and hospitals of our hometowns.
The unabashedly Christian 40 Days for Life campaign, held in towns and cities across the United States the past three Lenten seasons, is a perfect example of the kind of pro-life action that can and does make a difference. Volunteers take turns holding vigil, praying the rosary and offering other prayers of intercession for the women entering the abortuaries, the men who brought them there, the children whose lives are being snuffed out before they even see the light of day, and even the “doctors” and “nurses” who perform and assist in the act of murder. The faithful offer sidewalk counseling, directing women who have doubts about their actions to crisis-pregnancy centers and even, in some cases, opening their own homes to frightened women and girls who thought they had nowhere else to turn.
Political measures can be undone, but every child whom we save becomes a living witness—an icon—of the love of God and a testimony that we Christians live what we preach. Focusing on what we can accomplish, rather than on what we have failed to accomplish over the course of 37 years, will allow us to begin to turn the debate around.
Remembering that our opposition to abortion is not separate from our belief in Christ is but the first step. Simply urging mothers to “Choose Life” will not end abortion on the mass scale that we see it practiced today; bringing them to the One Who is the Way and the Truth and the Life will. Rome wasn’t converted in a day, and the United States will not be, either. But she will never be converted as long as our actions lead others to believe that we value the cause of life more than the Way of Life.
On the last day of His earthly life, Christ stood before Pontius Pilate and declared, “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” Beholding the Creator of the world and the Savior of mankind, His body bruised by the blows of the servants of the high priest and His face covered with their spittle, Pilate responded, “What is truth?”
The bruises and the spittle were reality, but they obscured the truth that Pilate sought. And in the end, he sent that Truth away to be crucified—the same Truth Who, through His Resurrection, wrought the conversion of the Roman Empire and even, some traditions say, of Pontius Pilate himself.
We can end abortion in the United States in the same way that Christians ended abortion in the Roman Empire: by finding our hope in the Truth of the Gospel, rather than despairing in the reality of evil.
This article appeared in the May 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Portions of this article previously appeared in the Wanderer and on the About.Com GuideSite to Catholicism (Catholicism.About.Com).
Entries(RSS)
I have been involved in the pro life movement for over 2 decades. I have met Monica Miller on several occasions. I think Scott has written a powerful testimony to what should be done. We need a lot of prayer, witness, and attempt at loving conversion. There are many different people and ideas to spread the pro life message. The use of the pictures does stop some abortions. I think the proper place to use them is outside abortion clinics and hospitals. It also can be used effectivly on internet webbsites. They never stop showing pictures of the Holocaust. This far worse crime certainly should be shown as well.
Is there proof that abortion statistics decrease in proportion to the use of graphic pictures?
I know one girl who had an abortion who was heavily effected by them. Many sidewalk councilors say they have stories of girls turning away from the clinics when they see the pictures. I have also heard women at prolife dinners say the pictures at the clinics turned them away and saved their babies.
I belong top Wisconsin Right To Life. We don't use graphic pictures in our adds but we have an agresssive and professional television campaign against abortion. In our statistics and polling we have cut the amount of abortions in our state in half. Our polling also shows that adds help the prolife movement change minds. Our statistics are far better than our neighboring states where there is no such add campaign. The McCain Finegold act was in part passed to surpress such issue adds before elections. WIsconsin Right to Life in a landmark discission had that part of the bill thrown out in the US Surpreme Court.
I've had this discussion with Mr. Richert and others for the past 40 years or so; it is not new. There is only one side in this which favors self-censorship, the side which objects to negative images of abortion. No one objects to presenting positive images of the unborn. My personal experience, which dates to before Roe v. Wade, when only some states had easy abortion laws and hence were meccas of abortion tourism, is that both types of images have their place. Joe Scheidler, probably the greatest pro-life advocate of our time, has described how he uses both types of images in contrast to dissuade people from getting abortions. When I and others were sued by an abortion clinic, now out of business, for our demonstrations against it, part of the complaint was our use of graphic negative images and the allegation that these were deceptive. They were not deceptive; they were in fact the truth.
I fear Mr. Higdon and Mr. Marino are skewing the argument into one based on consequences, that is, judging an action only by its results or as tactics. I entirely share their distaste for Christians who shy away from the truth, but there are other considerations.
Consequentialist arguments present many problems, not the least of which is that they are so hard to prove. Anecdotes of girls changing their mind can be offset by anecdotes of people so revolted by certain demonstrations that they turn entirely against the anti-abortion movement. Nothing can be concluded from such anecdotes.
There is a far more serious problem, and that is with the nature of these depictions. If they are wrong, then they are wrong,regardless of the consequences. While it is true that some actions, neutral in themselves, should be viewed mostly in the light of their effects, there are other actions that are either good or bad in themselves, regardless of the consequences. If you save a child from drowning, and he grows up to be Hitler, you were still performing a good action. If you murdered that child because you somehow knew he would grow up to be Hitler, you would still be guilty of murder. Can it be right to instrumentalize human corpses in this way. The Catholic Church has always been suspicious of cremation not because of any superstition but because mistreatment of the body can indicate or influence a contempt for the human person. In times of plague, bodies must be burned but dissection of corpses, for example, although aimed at a human good, was frowned upon.
Speaking personally and after years of reflection, I am deeply disturbed and offended by the depictions of aborted fetus. I am also very reluctant to endorse much of the behavior, tactics, and arguments of some pro-life activists. First there is the self-righteousness. Some, on the fringes of the movement, do not seem to be concerned that they violate good laws to protect property, violate good manners by making themselves public nuisances, rob and even kill in the name of life; nor are some of them troubled by the hysterics who declare all government invalid if it does not protect the unborn or by the shall we say questionable life-styles of pro-life leaders until their sins reach scandalous proportions. Every sunday mass, we are given the abortion numbers--as if crimes were suitable focal point of the Mass--and asked to pray for the end of abortion. What this boils down to is the very comforting prayer that other people will quit sinning while I am free to get drunk, eat like a glutton, lust after my neighbor's wife, cheat my laborers and customers.
There is never going to be an end to abortion. Even the Medieval Church could not stop abortion or infanticide, and post-Christian America is going in the other direction. The horror of abortion does not consist in the death of unborn children. This happens spontaneously all the time. Nor does it consist in the death of small children, which is also a common phenomenon. The horror lies in a mother's decision to kill her own child. It is not at all clear to me that the pro-life movement's leaders understand this.
There is no warrant and Scripture or Tradition for any universal or generic "right to life"--the language and argument is borrowed from anti-Christian liberalism--and there is no warrant in Scriptures or Tradition for movements aimed at changing secular laws passed by non-Christian governments. Christians before Constantine did not protest infanticide. They led Christian lives and tried to set a good example to their pagan neighbors. They did not stage demonstrations and denounce the sins of other people if only because they could read I Peter's admonitions against self-righteousness.
We all die in the end, whether at three months in utero or after 80 years outside the womb. The Christian's duty is not to prevent pagans from doing what pagans do but to lead Christian lives and convert the pagans. This is not going to be done by any television commercials or demonstrations. I am in entire sympathy with the defense of life, and I do not at all condemn pro-life activists who may be confused by modernity into acting like leftist revolutionaries, but it is our role here at Chronicles to look at fundamental principles. I must tell you that the most learned and profound Catholic theologians I have met agree entirely with this argument and regard it is simply normal not original or unusual.
I certainly agree that intrinsically evil tactics cannot be justified by good consequences, but is it really intrinsically evil to display graphic depictions of atrocities? If so, then any but the blandest crucifixes should not be displayed by Christians and Christians should have refused to go to the movie The Passion of the Christ rather than going to see it by the tens of millions.
Mr Higdon writes,
"If so, then any but the blandest crucifixes should not be displayed by Christians and Christians should have refused to go to the movie The Passion of the Christ rather than going to see it by the tens of millions."
Okie,dokie-- have a nice day.
The commonly used statement that "all life is sacred" always sounded suspect to me. This is used by anti-death penalty advocates. How do you respond to this statement?
Mr. Higdon and I have indeed discussed the use of graphic images in abortion protests on more than one occasion, but I fear the discussion is now at an impasse, as indicated by the final line of Mr. Higdon's comment at #5:
My article, like the speech at the last John Randolph Club meeting from which it was drawn, was not about the graphic images themselves, but about what they represent: the increasing tendency to mistake "reality" for "truth." Mr. Higdon, quick to defend the use of these images on consequentialist grounds, seems to have missed that point altogether.
And so, I would argue (and indeed have argued above), have all too many Christians. This is, it seems to me, a fundamental point. When we mistake "reality" for "truth," we lose sight of the truth—and, indeed, of the Truth.
In January, I attended a pro-life dinner here in Rockford at which various young people spoke of their "conversion," not to Christianity (all were cradle Catholics), but to the "pro-life movement." We've all heard such testimony many times in the past, but I wonder how many of us have thought about what it means to say that, as a Catholic, we have "converted" to the pro-life cause.
I don't simply mean that truly being Catholic means that one is pro-life (because Christians "shall not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide"), but the increasing sense that the pro-life movement has become something separate from Christianity—for many people, including self-identified Christians, deliberately so.
The effect, then, is to give "conversion" to the pro-life cause higher priority than conversion to Christianity. Indeed, some pro-lifers who defend the use of these images have argued exactly that point with me: We cannot afford, they argue, to try to convert women to Christianity, because that takes too long, and they might kill their baby before they convert. Better to "convert" them to the pro-life cause and hope that such a conversion might also, somewhere down the road, bring them to Christ.
But the problem with that strategy is that it, too, is consequentialist. We can use this argument against any sin—better to turn the man into a crusader against pornography, for instance, than to convert him to Christianity. At least then he will have shed his addiction to pornography and be less likely to do harm to himself and others. And that might lead him to Christ.
But which conversion is more likely to last?
This inversion is very much a modern phenomenon, like Ben Franklin trying to uproot his bad habits without changing the core of his being. That tendency of Christians to fall for it, I have come to believe, stems from this confusion of "reality" with "truth."
For those who believe that bloody images of children torn limb from limb represent the "truth of abortion," ask yourself this: Which phrase makes more sense to you, "the truth of sin" or "the reality of sin"? "The truth of evil" or "the reality of evil"?
There is a reason why, even in these days of poor catechesis, most of us would still say that "the truth of evil" is an oxymoron.
So why, then, do we insist that "this [bloodied, dismembered body] is the truth"?
For man, truth and reality diverged when Eve convinced Adam to eat the apple. Christians used to understand this. Because of Original Sin, we are forced to live in a world where truth is all too often hidden by the reality of evil and sin.
The life of the Christian is to embrace the Truth, and to bring the Truth to others. It is not to deceive others into thinking that the reality of sin is really the truth.
I am largely in agreement with Dr. Fleming (#6)about this. In addition, I've long had reservations about calling abortion "murder." It is unjustifiable killing; murder requires mens rea, which seems to be absent when the abortionist and the pregnant woman believe, not on spurious or irrational grounds, that not all humans are persons, and so not all humans necessarily have a right to life. That's not a position I hold, but I think it's a position that a perfectly reasonable person can take, operating of course from non-Christian premises.
To address Mr. Ezzo's question, which takes the consequentialist argument on on its own terms, there are no such statistics.
What supporters of the use of such images can point to are anecdotes. I do not doubt Mr. Marino's anecdotes, for example, nor Mr. Higdon's account of the lawsuit by the abortion clinic against him and fellow protestors who used such images.
But such anecdotes, even in the limits of the situation that they are describing, do not prove that the images "work." At best, they show that the images were the proximate cause of women turning away from an abortion clinic.
Or rather, they were one of many things that could be the proximate cause. Because the mere presence of pro-lifers could be another. For those of us who believe that prayer is not vain mumblings but actually has power, the prayers of those pro-lifers present, and even those not present, could be another.
At abortion clinics where such signs are not used by protestors, some women turn around, too. And they point to the presence of the protestors, or the fact that the protestors are praying for women whom they do not know, or an unease that they had for some time, that grew as they approached the abortuary, as the reason for their decision.
Indeed, Mr. Marino's comment at #4 is a very good example that other methods that don't involve the use of such signs can and do work. And the methods that Mr. Marino outlines have the additional advantage of demonstrating quantifiable results, not just anecdotal ones.
Moving beyond the proximate cause of the mother's decision not to abort, we have, of course, the workings of grace and the Holy Spirit. Indeed, I find the moral certainty of some of those who use these images—certainty that the images, and only the images, prevented the abortion—to be near-blasphemous. It is as if they believe that, when the signs go up, God vacates the scene, leaving only the signs, and those waving them, to change the hearts and minds of the women considering abortion.
I think Dr. Fleming is right about conversion to Christianity. But how are people to know the consequences of their actions if they are given false information? The abortion industry routinly tells women that this is not a human being, just a clump of cells, like a tumor. In fact they preach that removing this clump of cells is a positive good. All Christian conversion depends on truthful education and discussion. That should be the aim of all pro life education. There are massive movements in the public and even private schools to propagandize about the Holocaust. They have no problem using graphic images. Graphic images do have their place in antiwar, and prolife activities. The whole cuture of death preaches against us. Whe have to use the tools we are given. Where the line is crossed is the problem.
I did not for one second consider going to see The Passion, first because I have no interest in the Gospel according to Mel Gibson--not the most stable of men. We have four Gospels and do not need additional accounts, especially when they are sensationalized. The best film version is by Pasolini who takes Matthew as the script and while he does not include everything he does not add anything. We do not live in a Christian Age, when peasant dramatizations of the passion could be done with a naive and good spirit like a Sunday School play.
Second, because Gibson's previous films wallowing in gore and suffering left me with a permanent sense of revulsion. The graphic depiction of evil, even in a good cause, may well affect adversely the conscience and character of those who are subjected to it. Aristotle was absolutely correct about this. (And, yes, there is a distinction between what may be done in verse, what in prose, what in drama, and what in film) And, while I am at it, let me say I find much Baroque religious art and architecture of very questionable taste. The straining after impressive effect, the attempt to overawe the spectator, the drooling over suffering and the depiction of impassioned women cannot be wholesome. That Evangelical churches filled the theaters is hardly encouraging since many of these people treat church as an entirely theatrical experience. The passions are an important part of our moral existence, but the passions must be held in check by reason and disciplined by the Church. Enthusiasm is a phenomenon which the Church exists to repress.
Whe have to use the tools we are given. Where the line is crossed is the problem.
Not all tools "we are given" should be used—a point which should be obvious when we think of, say, nuclear bombs, or even guns that can be used to murder abortionists.
Indeed, the use of these signs bears more than a passing resemblance today to the use of a nuclear bomb. Whenever I have pointed out that these images are increasingly aimed not just at women considering an abortion but at children (as James Pouillon used them), I have had multiple people defend this use by saying that "children need to know the truth."
As I mentioned in the article, one such commenter specifically told me that he no longer targets anyone but children, because children are "not yet in that horrible fog." And so he deliberately confronts children with such images, because he refuses to trust parents and churches to do their job.
How, exactly, is such an attitude different from "Kill 'em all, and let God sort 'em out"?
Indeed Dr Fleming. Mel Gibson cant decide if hes an Eastern Catholic, a sedeprivationist, or a universalist.
I loved the 'Passion of the Christ'. It was the most moving and best, movie I ever saw. It was only a passion play which was, done in a movie, made by a man with extraordinary skill. It was really a remake of DeMille's great work, the silent epic King Of Kings. Thats why the movie was in Latin and Aremaic. It was really a silent movie you had to depend on the pictures. Gibson was brilliant in doing this. DeMille studied great art works of the passion and used dipictions of these in his movie. Gibon did exactly the same thing in his movie. The scenes were posed art work. There is a scene in Gibson's movie where a crow plucks out the eye of the bad thief on the cross. The exact same image image was in DeMille's film. Gibson used it as a tribute to the master.
Both movies were heavily condemned by Jewish groups. DeMille made some minor changes at the end. Gibson refused to be cowered and left his final product alone. At the time this movie came out TCM played a lot of movies about Christ, including DeMille's. The other ones I saw were under the control of Jewish run studios, and in my opinion had some bad flaws, because they didn't want to offend the powers that be. These comments are as far as I know original.I read many reviews of the Passion and never saw the connection with Demille's movie. I also read the Gospel verse on the Passion many times. This movie relly had an effect on me. The priest of the church I attended said there was a great upsurge in Confessionas and mass atendedence after the movie came out by the way.
Gentleman: The Church has been using grapic images to spread Christianity since the beginning. There are the graphic stories of the martyrs. There is the veneration of their relics. There is the graphic art work of their executions. There is, of course, Jesus on the cross and all the art about that. Then we have all the depictions of hell, icluding works by Dante and Michelangelo. Then there are passion plays and readings every Easter. Aren't we getting a little delicate here at this late date?
Surely, Mr. Marino, you're not comparing iconography and oral traditions with photorealism.
Scott: The Church used the most graphic images that it could use, with the technology of the times, to make a point and as a tool of evangelization. I have no doubt that they would use photography if they had it back then. Remember I said graphic images should be used with the proper motivation and discretion. 2 other graphic religious items, used by the Church, I left out of my previous post, are the Shroud Of Turin and the Stations of the Cross.
Mr. Marino, the Church has access to the same technology as the secular world today. I don't see anyone rushing to replace the Stations of the Cross with stills from The Passion of the Christ.
And I can't even begin to comprehend how one could compare the Shroud of Turin to a photograph of a bloody, dismembered child.
Rather than go back and forth on the use of graphic images, however, I wish Mr. Marino and Mr. Higdon would address the larger point of my essay—namely, the conflation of "reality" and "truth."
Mr. Richert has created pretty much of a straw man to argue against here. No one claims that only graphic signs or literature are effective and the people who use these tools also use others, such as praying, handing out positive literature, etc. As I said before, only one side is calling for self-censorship here. And trying to persuade a woman not to kill her child is not trying to turn her into an anti-abortion crusader.
Dr. Fleming takes a far more extreme position. According to him, it is wrong to pray for an end to abortion and indeed is the sin of self-righteousness unless one is personally free of every other possible sin, wrong to demonstrate against abortion, wrong to raise any social or political objection to it, wrong to even speak of unborn children having a right to life, wrong to do anything other than try to convert pagans by setting a good example. In other words, it is not a matter of what kind of literature the pro-life movement uses; the problem is that the pro-life movement exists at all.
No straw man, Mr. Higdon. Perhaps I could have phrased my example better—one doesn't have to turn the pornography addict into a crusader against pornography, but could still argue that it's more important to end his use of pornography than to convert him. That, as I mentioned, is a very modern approach, and not at all a Christian one. That, unfortunately, is where too many pro-life folks are headed (or simply are) now—especially those who justify using these signs on the grounds of expediency.
You have twice now said, "only one side is calling for self-censorship here." I'm afraid I don't understand why you seem to see this as some sort of freedom of speech issue. One cannot be a Christian at all without constantly engaging in self-censorship. What makes this situation any different?
Mr. Richert, thanks for this great article, the raw force of which rests upon the subtlety of the distinction you make that apparently is not clear all around; truth and reality. How we are all stuck in this culture and gasping for air, so often being claimed victim by it or by the material opposition to it.
It is discouraging to continually rediscover the importance of prayer, since I have never been any good at it.
"Surely, Mr. Marino, you’re not comparing iconography and oral traditions with photorealism"
Mr. Richert, do you believe would be possible for a Christian to create a film that qualifies as an icon? Is such a thing conceivable?
I do not mean to suggest anything about Mr. Gibson's movie, which I have not seen.
Mr. Toddard, I think that different media serve different purposes. And by that, I don't simply mean painting versus film. I believe that the trajectory of religious art in the West from the end of the 13th century on took it in a very different direction from iconography. As sweet as a 19th-century portrait of Saint Joseph holding the Christ Child might be (and we have one that my grandmother gave to our second son), it does not seem like an object of veneration and an aid to prayer in the same way that an icon is.
More specifically on the case of the religious use of film, Aaron Wolf's talk on the same panel as mine at the San Antonio meeting of the John Randolph Club was quite insightful. I'll defer to him, if he has a free moment to offer some thoughts.
It was reported that the Pope loved the movie. Gibson had a fine Catholic scholar, as his advisor and translator of the script. The Pope met with Mr. Gibson before or after the movie was made. Gibson showed the movie in many Catholics before it was released, many were religious, nuns or priests. One was Joe Sobran and he loved the movie. Pat Buchanan also reviewed it and loved it. He said it was nothing less than the Stations Of The Cross made into a movie. I think Mr. Sobran and Pat have some good names around here. The Catholic Church used every tool availible to spread the gospel around the world. Why should it neglect modern technology to reach people with the good news? If anything I question how slow they have been to use it.
The movie was pirated and spread around the world before it even was released. It was the No. 1 pirated movie in Saudi Arabia and in China. It was seen widely in other Muslim countries. The movie had a definite Catholic theological point of view which was avidly embraced by evangelicals. How can this be a bad thing?
I have to agree with Mr. Higdon. How are we supposed to confront such an intrinsic evil as abortion if we can't even use the truth and prayer? We have every right in a supposed free society to use free speech, assmembly, and press to push the truth of our point of view. The other side lies and lies and lies. We have to use the truth. We can argue about tactics but this crawling in a hole is no answer. Roe vs Wade was the most unconstutional and undemocratic thing ever done in this country. It overturned the law in all 50 states, without a vote of the people. By making this a constitutional right they surpressed any way for the a majority of people to modify this without changing the Constitution.
I am interested in reading more on the distinction between truth and reality. Might I trouble any of the posters here for recommendations?
Mr. Richert is right that self-censorhip is often a good thing. My objection is his implication that those who advocate the use of graphic images are advocating that these alone be used, that it is an either/or proposition. Let's take for example the "The unabashedly Christian 40 Days for Life campaign, held in towns and cities across the United States the past three Lenten seasons, .. a perfect example of the kind of pro-life action that can and does make a difference" in the words of Mr. Richert. In my city of Corpus Christi, we hold these twice a year, during October as well as Lent, and graphic images are used in addition to positive images, public prayer, rosary vigils at the local abortion mill, processions, special Masses, etc. I suspect we are far from the only city where pro-lifers use graphic images as part of the mix. By Dr. Fleming's standards, all activities of the 40 Days for Life are objectionable.
On the subject of truth and reality, they are not the same thing, but neither are they opposites nor completely unrelated. Truth is the correspondence of a statement, image or thought to reality. The statement "God exists" is true because God really does exist. An image of a dismembered fetus truely depicts the reality of abortion because dismemberment of the unborn is the reality. Of course neither an image nor a statement can convey the entire reality of what it concerns, but to the extent that graphic images of abortion fall short of the complete truth, it is because they drastically understate the horrors of abortion.
This conversation is going nowhere because it is not a conversation. When rational arguments are made by Mr Richert or myself, they are countered with arguments from consequence, invocations of authority, ad hominem attacks {extreme, strawman) and emotional appeals. As a student of rhetoric, I understand the usefulness of such techniques in swaying an audience, but this is not a mass meeting.
One example: The point was made rather unemphatically that Mr. Gibson has led an irregular life, has acted in movies in bad taste (middle-aged women just adore his bare backside), and has made movies that exulted in graphic violence. What is the response? A Pope met with Gibson. If we cannot agree that the depiction and glorification of extreme violence in films like Braveheart is aesthetically and morally and spiritually mistaken, then there is not possibility of rational argument. On the one side, stand all the wise men, pagan as well as Christian, in our tradition; on the other the consequentialist argument of "It's for the children," a device designed to put an end to all discussion.
To take another example, I think I made my point that in calling for prayers to end abortion, while such appeals are certainly well-intentioned, priests and activists are saying basically nothing. This is like praying for the end of all evil in the universe. Of course, that would be very nice, but rather irrelevant to the human condition as it is since the Fall. If it means prayers to persuade anti-Christians to change the laws they have made, all I can say is good luck. I put more faith in a rabbit's foot than in the conscience of post-Christian American. Then what exactly are these prayers supposed to be for?
As for the 30 Days for Life, now that the question has been raised, I am not at all sure that is a good thing to confuse Lent with anything else, especially not a movement that reminds us how superior we are to other men. We Catholics all too easily become Pharisees without any encouragement.
I did not and do not wish to wound the sensibilities of sincere Christians, but this website is supposed to be a place for rational discussion among mature people. I am all too often reminded of Plato's indirect confession in the Laws of his own mistake in trying to teach the young first principles. In politics, says one of the speakers, it is best not to speak too candidly in front of the young, because it might unsettle their minds. That is a mistake, I believe, that I have made. I beg the pardon of all I have offended and leave the conversation in the able hands of Mr. Richert.
Dr. Fleming many artists had irregular lives. Some of them produced great Christian works of art. I have seen some claim that Shakespere and Michelangelo were homosexuals. Was Leonardo a great Christian? Yet the gave us his Last Supper. The Passion of the Christ' was a great work of art, in my opinion, produced by a very brave artist who had a lot of opposition. That he is a sinner is no doubt, but his work of art remains just the same. I don't think I am being irrational here. Many have complained of excessive violence from prolife people, yet think nothing about what we are protesting.
I promised to stay out but I will answer this question. You raise a serious question but one in which too many questions are begged. I don't like Leonardo at all, and if the Last Supper was a great painting, we shall never again be able to judge because it has been entirely ruined by restoration. Could the world do without Renaissance painting? Rather easily. Are most Renaissance painters Christian? No. Is it better to study more Christian art? Emphatically yes.
I find it difficult to regard as serious art any form of communication nor depiction that is a vulgar imitation of perceived reality. This includes photography and film. That some film-makers can succeed in making a kind of art, despite the obvious limitations and liabilities of their form, I do not doubt. But in such a case, they are either veering toward some other art, such as narrative fiction (Ford), drama (Sturgess), or painting (Renoir). I have seen many of Gibson's films and seen interviews with Gibson himself, and it is impossible to take him seriously as an "artist." Simply because one likes something does not justify one in calling it what it is not. A big Mac is not good food, Braveheart is not art, much less great art.
While good character and great art are more often allied than is commonly supposed, we live in troubled times. Pasolini, whose film I recommended, was a homosexual communist, but he was, insofar as he was able, an honest man and not a bad poet. He was reaching for the truth and did not import into his film anything not in the text of the Gospel. (Note the singular.) Gibson, on the other hand, has posed as a family-values Catholic while betraying his wife. I have not seen his film and do not wish to under any circumstances. We have four Gospels and do not need a fifth. Besides, the ultra-graphic technique of modern film can only distort the text. That would be enough to condemn the production. Then there is the problem that he picks and chooses from four texts. The most famous attempt at this in the ancient world was done by a heretic, and with good reason. Each version has its own focus, its own vision, and although scholars and theologians are quite right to compare the versions, each is meant to be taken on its own terms. Then there are the things that Gibson has introduced. Where in the world did this sweet-cheeks actor get the idea he could do his own Gospel?
Finally, let me repeat what i have said many times. It is never right for an artist to manipulate and stimulate the passions directly. It does not matter whether the artist in question is Beethoven or Caravaggio or a simple tool like poor Gibson. I do not mean to say there are not fine things in romantic symphonies or mannerist art or Baroque sculptures, but that we have to be on guard against them, lest we fall under their spell. When people tell me that their faith was strengthened by seeing a movie, I am stunned. I would shock them if i told them the truth, which is that they are, in the first place, fools, and in the second place, they are making their faith dependent upon the basest of arts, cinematography. I, who have seen more evil and more bad art than most people and survived, would not willingly undergo this sort of temptation. I would more willingly watch a Korean vengeance film or piece of French pornography. While this junk does work upon our lowest instincts and probably degrades everyone it touches, it is not presented in the guise of religion. It is one thing to look at pornography; quite another to take pornographic pictures of your wife or daughter. If there are Catholics who do not understand this, then my advise is to kick in their TV, never go to movies, get off Facebook and Twitter, and read nothing written in the past 500 years.
"Consequentialist arguments present many problems, not the least of which is that they are so hard to prove. Anecdotes of girls changing their mind can be offset by anecdotes of people so revolted by certain demonstrations that they turn entirely against the anti-abortion movement. Nothing can be concluded from such anecdotes."
What can be concluded from Mr. Marino's anecdote @3 is that some girls and women have changed their minds and saved their babies, and there is no reason to discount their own statements that the images made or helped to make the difference. This is a fact, a blessed fact; these saved lives are also the truth, as true as Our Lord's Resurrection. There is no "offset", from some others being "revolted" enough to "turn entirely against the anti-abortion movement", unless we believe that such a turn involves following up by having an abortion. Every pregnant female who changes her mind from having an abortion saves a life; not every person revolted by graphic images is pregnant, and of those who are pregnant, how are they driven from the image of gore to the gory embrace of the abortionist?
I completely agree with Dr. Fleming and Scott Richert on the primacy of living and teaching the Christian life, and I also second Dr. Fleming's criticism, in his June Perspective article, of the "resort to the revolutionary language of human rights and civil disobedience" even in a good cause. My answer to Dr. Fleming's question "Can it be right to instrumentalize human corpses in this way?" however, is a cautious "yes". This is partly because, even though the images may "stimulate" a passion against abortion, I don't believe they "manipulate"; they don't deny the viewer access to the rest of the truth that lies beyond the fact of horrible death, the truth of the destruction of human nature and the direct assault on God, as Mr. Richert put it. In the case of these images, it seems to me that, rather than putting the viewer under a truth deflecting "spell", they are more likely to prod one to dig deeper into the true nature of this evil.
Girls like the one in Mr. Richert's example who was smiling in front of the dead baby photos may be used to seeing the images, and this acclimatization may have its ill effects somewhere down the line, (which is, I think, a consequentialist argument against their use) but I cannot believe that this will include "great damage to [their] developing minds and souls." For that to happen, a parent would have to abdicate his role in explaining life to his child, in which case she will have far greater problems than becoming used to gory photos.
Reminds me of the time I worked at an Applebee`s on a protest Sunday. A guy came in and had his placard facing the other diners. I walked over and quietly turned it around and told him what my program was as bartender. That my customers didn`t need to be seeing that inside while dining. When I had the chance to glance back over at his table he was at it again.
I walked back over and confiscated the sign while hissing is his ear that his mistake the second time around was F*&^ing with me now as well as my customers... He finished quietly and left.