bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • How does a CO detector work? Maybe you’d better not ask us.

    Oscar asked about the "smoke detector" mounted low on the living room wall in our new house.  You know, the one that emits a piercing shriek when you press the test button, conveniently located at toddler eye-level.

    "That’s a carbon monoxide detector."  Mark explained that it will go off if a certain poisonous gas builds up in our house, to warn us that we need to leave.

    "How does it work?"

    "Um, it…" I said.  Then stopped.  Then looked at Mark.  "How does it work?"  He didn’t know either.  Google to the rescue!

    Turns out there are three types of CO detectors, all of which rely on chemical reactions within the detector.  Metal oxide semiconductor detectors contain heated tin oxide or platinum oxide, which reacts with CO.  Biomimetic detectors contain gel-coated disks that darken in the presence of CO, triggering an alarm.  Electrochemical CO detectors react with CO to generate electric current, again triggering an alarm. 

    What piqued my interest:  This chemistry forum discussion describes the two competing reactions in a common platinum-oxide detector:

    [1]    PtO + CO —-> CO2 + Pt   (exothermic)

    [2]    2Pt + O2 —-> 2 PtO

    According to the forum, the heat liberated in reaction [1] raises the temperature of a sensor which in turn triggers the alarm.  Reaction [2] is the regeneration reaction.   They would exist in equilibrium in any given atmosphere.

    I’m guessing that the detector contains a high-surface-area sample of platinum, perhaps the sensor itself, on which there’s normally an oxide coating.  If the CO concentration in the air rises, reaction [1] speeds up relative to reaction 2, the oxide coating starts to disappear, and the platinum gets warmer.  If it falls again, reaction [1] slows down and reaction [2] speeds up, and the oxide coating reappears.

    It looks at first glance that high levels of CO2 might tend to drive the first reaction back, but if the reaction is indeed very exothermic, then only a slight concentration of CO would drive it forward while it would require a large level of CO2 to drive it backward. 

    Seems to me that the humble CO detector would be a great basis for a textbook problem in kinetics, surface chemistry, or physical chemistry.  Given the free energy tables and a few pieces of data, it should be straightforward to calculate (for example) the sensitivity of the reactions to the relative concentrations of CO, CO2, and O2.  Why, you could even bring mass and energy transport into the picture.  How fast can the molecules of CO diffuse from the bulk atmosphere to the surface?  And how fast does the reaction generate heat, compared to the rate at which the sensor dissipates heat?

    And what did Oscar think about it?  I don’t know. He wandered away while his dad and I were discussing this very interesting problem.

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  • “No more dropping pianos onto the heads of infidels, alas.”

    Amusing screen shot.

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  • Whither just-war?

    Herb Ely writes that, because of the rise of terrorism and the ability of terrorists to commit acts of mass destruction, the just war doctrine may be out of date. 

    The end of the cold war and the lethality of large scale mechanized warfare make big wars unlikely. Capitalist democracies avoid war with one another. They are unwilling to put their people and economies at risk. Other countries and groups lack to conventional military power to challenge the Western Democracies. Fueled by zeal, they mount unconventional threats to conventional power. In military terms this is known as an asymmetric threat….

    Due to the changing nature of conflict, traditional just war criteria are not easy to apply. Terrorists do not recognize the just war principle of non-combatant immunity. The specter of a terrorist attack with Weapons of Mass destruction has led the Bush administration to a posture of pre-emptive attack, calling into question the just war criteria of last resort.  Of their very nature, preemptive attacks must be launched in secret, calling into question both the just war criteria of legitimate authority and constitutional questions of separation of powers.

    The significant new development isn’t that terrorists don’t recognize or respect some or all of just-war doctrine.  (After all, no wars or very few would break out if every nation respected just-war doctrine throughout history.)  Nor is it the seriousness of the threat of mass destruction:  we have had that since World War II.  No, the significant new development is the nebulousness of the identity of the "aggressor."

    There’s a pretty good primer on just war doctrine here at Catholic Answers.  It’s a good philosophy, dating back to Augustine, and has served mankind well for many centuries in the moral analysis of war.  The analogy to the right of a person to commit proportionate violence in the direct defense of self or of an innocent other has always been obvious to me.  Just-war doctrine is concisely described in the Catechism (par. 2309) as follows:

    The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

    • the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
    • all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
    • there must be serious prospects of success;
    • the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

    These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine. The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

    Here’s the problem.  The common understanding of just-war doctrine, to my knowledge, has always envisioned the issue in terms of a "community of nations," with well-defined identities and territories.  The idea goes like this:  if the army of Alphaland invades or attacks the territory of Betaland, then Betaland may legitimately defend itself against Alphaland by the proportionate use of force.  Or, if Gammaland sympathizes with Betaland, Gammaland may lend its own armed forces in the proportionate use of force in the defense of Betaland.  (There is some room for debate as to what "proportionate" means, of course.)  Just-war doctrine says that Alphaland is not supposed to attack Betaland in the first place, and that Betaland cannot continue fighting once Alphaland’s offense has been neutralized, and that Betaland cannot use Alphaland’s attack as an excuse for attacking Deltaland. 

    Up till now, it’s generally meant that Betaland cannot "pre-emptively" attack Alphaland.  War is a war of defense.

    What’s changed?  What about the rise of terrorism makes just-war doctrine trickier to apply?

    Well, for one thing, the "aggressors" are no longer, strictly, sovereign nations that have definite territory.    It’s true that sometimes they operate with the explicit or implicit assistance of sovereign nations, but it’s hard to prove, hard to be sure. Historically, some terrorist groups have behaved more like armies — the ones that have identifiable, if underground, militia organization and strike repeatedly, such as the IRA — and so just-war doctrine was a little bit more applicable.  Other "domestic terrorists" have been essentially local, so the proper response has been to treat the perps as the common criminals they are and were — think the Klan.  But that’s not true about the threats on the table today.  So when a terrorist cell strikes us — whom do we strike at, to "defend" ourselves against further attack?   Terrorist organizations can be tiny, or they can be trans-national.  Can we attack with military force a nation that has not, exactly, attacked the U. S. (or an ally), but has merely provided indirect assistance to groups that might have supported terrorists?  Would that be "proportionate" or not?  I can see arguments for both sides, and one thing is clear:  just-war doctrine does not extend very well to a world community that includes trans-national aggressors without easily identifiable leaders and armies. 

    Another assumption inherent in just-war doctrine’s details is that it is fairly straightforward to distinguish between members of the aggressor’s armed forces — "enemy combatants"— and civilians.   The reason this is important is that legitimate defense is generally taken to include any reasonable act that takes a combatant out of combat:  killing him if necessary, wounding him, or taking him prisoner.  The distinction is widely recognized as important:  that’s why it’s "against the rules," so to speak, to attack hospitals (the people in them are wounded and thus already out of combat) or to mistreat prisoners of war (they are already out of combat), even though it’s perfectly okay to use deadly force up to the point of capture.  And in a just war you are supposed to avoid killing civilians when possible, and you are never supposed to attack civilians on purpose.  That’s why soldiers are supposed to wear uniforms — to protect their own civilians against being mistaken for combatants.  And that’s why it’s dirty pool to cache weapons in hospitals or to arrange for civilians to chain themselves to armaments factories.

    But it’s not so obvious with terrorism.  Who’s a combatant?  It can’t just be "whoever the current administration says."  Conversely, it’s obviously not limited in real life to people who wear uniforms and draw paychecks from a national government’s military. 

    (This  isn’t the first time, by the way, that the perception of a gray area between civilians and soldiers has muddied the waters.  At least some people still claim that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified (doesn’t work, btw.  See: ends, means)  because the Japanese supposedly trained civilians to resist physical invasion.  If you want to read some of those claims, Google "japanese civilians sharp sticks" or something along those lines.)

    The third disconnect between just war and modern-war reality has to do with a big difference between traditional concepts of warfare and modern terrorism:  escalation.    Just-war theory imagines that Alphaland invades or attacks Betaland, and that said attack is a process — it starts when the first Alphaland soldier steps across the border, or when the first Alphaland plane enters Betaland airspace.   Some destruction or threat ensues, which increases and threatens to increase further;  according to the doctrine, Betaland is permitted to use force to "[put] an end to it."   The point is to physically defend the Betaland civilians, their sovereignty, and their land and other assets.    But a terrorist attack, by its very nature, relies on surprise:  the sudden strike, as fearsome as possible, on the civilians themselves and/or on the physical infrastructure — buildings, bridges, roads — of the country.   Before the armies stir and waken, the attack is complete.  No military defense can "put an end to it" because it is already over.  The only effective defense is civil defense, security measures, police work, that kind of thing.  And civil defense is not the provenance of just-war theory. 

    We — I don’t mean just the U.S. here, any nation is at risk, the whole "community of nations" mentioned in the doctrine is at risk — live under an existing implicit threat of lasting, grave damage by an unknown aggressor — specifically an attack without warning from some group that has managed to get its hands on a great deal of nerve gas, or a suitcase nuke.   The damage is not certain, it is only feared.  Ordinary application of just-war doctrine therefore forbids the use of military force.    But we’re talking about an extremely serious threat, one there comes from a worldview that doesn’t follow "the rules" at all.  The temptation to jump ahead to pre-emption is therefore very strong.  And maybe it is justified.  I don’t know.  The point I am making is that traditional just-war theory doesn’t seem to cover the current situation.

    The only logical way to justify military force in this situation, short of revising just-war theory somehow — which is probably called for, since at the very least the doctrine requires clarification — is to redefine aggressor.  (And even if logical, it still may not be morally right.  This is why we need a clarification.)  Instead of being a single sovereign group, containing individuals who may be enumerated according to a simple rule, "aggressor" becomes the community of aggressors, perhaps by analogy to the community of nations. 

    To use force, the damage must be lasting, grave, and certain.  Under this scheme, this part is drawn from a particular attack or series of attacks that was completed in the past.  9/11 is sufficient:  the effects have lasted, the damage was grave, the damage has already happened and thus is certain.  But also, there must be serious prospects of success.  Obviously, there is no prospect of success at preventing an attack in the past.  But there are prospects of success at preventing future attacks via pre-emptive strikes against other terrorist groups, or against nations that may help them or harbor them, even if they were not involved in any previous terrorist attacks against us.

    The novelty here is that the different requirements for military force, according to just-war theory, are said to be fulfilled in total if all aggressors or potential aggressors are lumped together as a single threat.   It is nearly as if Betaland had claimed, "Alphaland has invaded me in the past; therefore we will invade Gammaland and destroy their armaments before they can invade us."

    This is how we get a bizarre concept like a "war against" an -ism, in this case terrorism.  We can’t get away with naming any specific group, because the group that surprises us with an attack tomorrow may be one whose name we never knew.  The whole thing is a stretch, a rationalization, relying on emotional appeal instead of careful moral analysis.  It is an understandable one, because all our theories — on which the moral analysis is based — are out of date.  It is a sort of stop-gap measure, made by people whose intentions are, I believe, good. 

    But it would be better to re-engage our minds and consider how to apply moral principles to the existing situation.  It would not entail throwing out just-war doctrine, just backing up to the underlying principles, considering the new conditions under which it plays out, and then re-deriving "just war" under the new circumstances.  The whole thing sounds like a fertile ground for many Ph.D. theses at Catholic think-tanks.  I would be willing to bet I’m not the first person to have posed this question.  Does anyone know of any attempts to answer it? 

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  • Layer upon layer.

    So how was Saturday?

    Very nice! I only managed part of the “first Saturday” devotion over the weekend — I made it to Mass on Saturday morning, and I spent the extra fifteen minutes afterwards in meditation. I couldn’t easily get to confession over the weekend, and I doubt I’ll get to do it this coming weekend either, for a variety of boring and mundane reasons. So: I half accomplished what I set out to do. But I regard that as a good first step, and certainly better than not doing it at all.

    Based on the reading I did about the first Saturdays, I planned to spend the fifteen minutes meditating on one single mystery (rather than, say, one per minute or one set of five). Which one? “Let’s just be optimistic and take them in order — maybe I’ll actually do this fifteen or twenty times.” So: the first joyful mystery, the mystery of the Annunciation. As I drove to the church, I wondered how I was going to find anything new or interesting enough within that single mystery to hold my attention for a whole fifteen minutes!

    (I always think things like that, before starting a rosary, before an hour of adoration: I pick it up grudgingly with a hint of “Not this old thing again, I’ve done it countless times.” You would think I would have learned better by now.)

    So after Mass, as the lights clicked out and the last parishioners left, I checked my watch and tried to enter into the scene. I stepped forward bit by bit through the well-known mental images, holding each before my mind, listening.

    Young Jewish girl, the virgin betrothed to the carpenter, at her prayers and alone. And then not alone: someone is with her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you…

    I stepped through that, thinking about the bare text and about what makes this story a unique story. “Full of grace” is something unique; if the angel had not used those words, we surely would never have said them of living man or woman. After all, elsewhere we have “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” — so none of us brims with all the grace we can hold. Except this girl, according to the angel.

    But this is a path I’d been down before, so I moved on through the brief exchange between girl and being, up to: How can this be, since I know not man?

    It’s a strange question on the face of the text, in the absence of our tradition, which provides an explanation for it. You’re going to have a baby, says the angel to the betrothed girl. Why ask “How can this be?” Wouldn’t most girls be thinking: well, of course I’m going to have a baby; I’m getting married. Betrothal, marriage, sex, babies — that’s the normal order of things. How strange that she would react as if … as if she wasn’t expecting pregnancy in her future.

    So our tradition does provide an explanation for it: reading past the bare text. She obviously wasn’t expecting pregnancy and babies. Conclusion: she wasn’t expecting to get married at all, to have intercourse with a husband. Inference: she’d vowed lifelong virginity, privately. That much I know, the traditional explanation for Mary’s confusion. I’m willing to agree that it’s the most likely explanation for a perplexing text.

    But wait. There’s got to be another level: Even given that Mary had vowed virginity, it’s still a strange question… She hadn’t had the option of refusing to marry, apparently, but instead had submitted to whoever had told her she was going to marry Joseph the carpenter. She was already betrothed. Why not simply assume that God had released her from her vow, that God had called her (through her betrothal) to some other way to serve him? And if she were to get married, she must have known she would be expected to have intercourse with her husband. It’s still not all that clear why she persisted in being certain that she wasn’t going to have the chance to have a baby, i.e. that she was going to remain a virgin.

    The only explanation that makes sense, I thought, is to add a third layer: a layer of complete trust in God, in some promise she felt sure God had made to her that she would remain a virgin. Even in the face of a knowledge that she was going to get married, she must have believed God would hold her to her promise, or else to keep a promise made to her. She would go through with the wedding, and somehow, of course, she would remain a virgin. (Which is why the announcement that she would have a baby came as such a surprise.)

    I immediately thought of Abraham, who had been promised that his descendants would number as the stars, and then who was given a task to perform that appeared to annihilate the promise. Sacrifice the only heir? Well, he went through with it, or tried to, anyway. In a way he did sacrifice the son, must have in his heart, and must have been confused and wondered how the promise and the command would ever be reconciled.

    And here was Mary, in the same kind of situation: her vow of virginity apparently about to be annulled by a vow of marriage, but both apparently ordained by God, who makes possible the paradoxical.

    So that was the connection that came to me in fifteen minutes on the Annunciation. One of these days I will learn to stop underestimating the newness that can be found in the mysteries of faith.

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  • Missing mass times.

    (Formatting will be uneven for the next few posts. I’m using a friend’s computer, and apparently Safari can’t handle Typepad’s formatting functions.)

    Over the weekend I used http://www.masstimes.org to find the nearest parish that offers Saturday morning Mass. I found one, quite close, and drove there at 8 AM Saturday. What I found interesting: The church has a sign out front that says, “Mass Times: 5 PM Saturday/10 AM Sunday.” That is, it advertises the Sunday services — but there’s no mention of the daily Mass offered there.

    Now why is that? There’s plenty of room on the sign. And the daily mass schedule is perhaps even more useful than the Sunday services on a church’s front sign, where the people who, you know, drive by regularly can see it. I’d wager that people who attend weekday masses tend more often to attend at a place and time that’s convenient to work into their schedule: it’s on the way to work and offers Mass during rush hour, or it’s near work and offers Mass at noon, or it’s near the children’s school and offers Mass at nine-thirty, or something like that. And the easiest way to know is to see the daily mass schedule posted on the sign outside the churches that you actually pass every day. Besides, not every parish does offer daily Mass, so it’s good to know which ones do.

    I just don’t know why they wouldn’t advertise it. The same argument goes for scheduled Confessions, by the way.

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  • More freedom of speech quandaries.

    The European parliament passed a resolution on "homophobia in Europe" last week.  The text can be found here at ILGA.org.

    The European parliament sez, among other things:

    whereas homophobia manifests itself in the private and public spheres in different forms such as hate speech and incitement to discrimination, ridicule, verbal, psychological and physical violence as well as persecution and murder, discrimination in violation of the principle of equality, and unjustified and unreasonable limitations of rights, which are often hidden behind reasons of public order, religious freedom and the right to conscientious objection…

    Did you catch that?  Homophobia, which is irrational, includes hate speech that is hidden behind… religious freedom.

    So the EU says that it

    Calls on Member States to ensure that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are protected from homophobic hate speech…

    At the same time, bizarrely, it

    Urges Member States and the Commission … to ensure that freedom of demonstration – guaranteed by all human rights treaties – is respected in practice.

    But how can this be?  How can any group be protected from speech it doesn’t like, when freedom of demonstration is respected in practice?

    I have a sneaking suspicion — supported, I think, by an earlier whereas in the text that has to do with the banning of gay pride marches — that the Parliament is only thinking to ensure the freedom of people to demonstrate their support of positions that are acceptable to the European Parliament.

    This is not how it works, people.

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  • Singled out?

    Both of these come via Bettnet:

    1.  The New Hampshire legislature is discussing a bill that would require priests to report to the state if a penitent confesses child abuse during sacramental confession.   Hmm, the lawyer-client privilege and the doctor-patient privilege wouldn’t be affected.   Do you think the legislature just forgot?

    2.   The Colorado legislature is considering bills that would eliminate the statute of limitations in sexual abuse cases.  On its own, this may or may not be wise; but the point here is that these bills are limited to private institutions.  There’s no effect on the statute of limitations for abuse committed in public institutitions — such as public schools.

    Do you think the legislature just forgot?

    Quick quiz.  If a public school teacher sexually abuses a little boy in Colorado, how much time does the little boy have to report the abuse, after which he and his family may no longer file a claim?

    a.  Seven years after the little boy turns eighteen

    b.  Seven years after the abuse

    c.   Five years after the abuse

    d.   180 days after the abuse

    The answer is (d).  (Link is to a pdf)

    SESAME is an organization that raises awareness of sexual abuse by educators.  Here is their website.  They quote a few numbers that are alarming, to say the least.

    My point isn’t to minimize the problem of sexual abuse within private institutions, particularly the Church.  It’s a serious problem, a rot that goes all the way to the top in many dioceses (including "rings" of abusers, apparently, according to this post at Mere Comments).  Point number one is that the public, civil, legal response to institutional sexual abuse, if it is to succeed at protecting children and punishing perpetrators, can’t  be allowed to get away with sheltering the perverts who happen to work in large, popular institutions with powerful lobbyists.

    And point number two is that prosecution of even the most heinous crimes has to yield at some point to certain civil liberties.  There’s room in this country to discuss exactly what that point should be (cf. wiretaps and terrorism), but somewhere it has to yield.  In our churches, state reporting laws extend only as far as the confessional door, and that is as it should be.

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  • Good photos.

    An excellent collection of photographs from this year’s March for Life.

    Look how young the crowd is!  I agree, the high school kids have the best shirts.

    (Though I take issue with the one that says "Satan is a Nerd.")

    Via After Abortion.

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  • Unusual coincidence.

    Last evening, I was sitting on a kid-sized painted chair in the child-care center at the YMCA, waiting for Milo to get settled in before leaving him there to go watch Oscar’s swimming lesson.  I was reading a little booklet I’d gotten at church last week. 

    The booklet was about the "First Saturdays" devotion that Our Lady supposedly requested from the faithful when she appeared in 1917 at Fatima, Portugal to three children (Lucia Santos, Francisco Marto, and Jacinta Marco) and later during an apparition seen by Lucia alone.  The booklet also covered the Fatima apparition more generally.  (This article, published by the same group, appears to be a shorter version of the same booklet.)

    I picked it up because I’ve been thinking about starting to make the First Saturdays devotion, so I wanted to learn more and maybe to read something  that would get me psyched up a little bit.  I had just about finished a chapter that recounted the Fatima apparitions when I distinctly heard a woman’s voice calling out, "Fatima!" and then more urgently, "Fatima!"

    I looked up, startled, for the source of this voice… only to see the "kids gym" attendant calling out "Fatima!"  a third time.  Then a little Somali girl with pigtails and a big grin scampered across the floor and leaped into the arms of her daddy, come to pick her up.

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  • “Free speech obviously includes the right to express the most severe disrespect for anything at all.”

    That’s what Ann Althouse has to say in response to the French government, and I agree. 

    A lot of democracies just don’t seem to get the free-speech, free-press thing.  Take Canadians, for example.  Ask one and s/he usually insists that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the right to free expression.  It does, of course, except when it doesn’t.

    See, for example, this exchange (registration may be required; scroll down to the title Tongue Tied) in the Letters to the Editor section of the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly:

    I read with interest the article by Emily Bazelon ("What Would Zimbabwe Do?") in the November Atlantic. I was, however, taken aback by her comment in the last paragraph, where she refers to laws that "limit free speech in Canada." As a citizen of Canada, I am unaware that my free speech is limited, and I wonder whether Bazelon would care to elaborate. I would not like to continue to voice my opinions so openly if I am contravening legal statutes.

    Sharon Coulter Nichol
    Fairmont Hot Springs, B.C.

    Emily Bazelon replies:

    Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms treats as "fundamental" the rights to free speech and freedom of the press. But the charter makes these rights subject to "such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." In other words, Canadian free-speech rights have a built-in check. In some contexts the country’s courts have interpreted the charter to allow for more suppression of speech than American law permits. In 1990 Canada’s supreme court upheld a law barring hate speech. In 1992 the court adopted a relatively broad definition of obscenity, including material that exploits sex in a "degrading or dehumanizing" manner. And in 2002 a lower court outraged some civil libertarians by finding a man guilty of violating Saskatchewan’s Human Rights Code after he placed an advertisement in a local newspaper. The ad was for a bumper sticker. It cited (without quoting) biblical passages that condemn some homosexual acts and showed two male stick figures holding hands, standing in a circle with a slash through it.

    Some people would like this sort of speech suppression in their own countries, but I’m not one.

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  • Prayers of St. Francis.

    There’s this prayer called the Prayer of St. Francis.  It’s printed on the back of every holy card of St. Francis I’ve ever seen.  There are a couple of hymns that consist of its words set to music.  It goes like this:

    Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
    where there is hatred, let me sow love;
    where there is injury, pardon;
    where there is doubt, faith;
    where there is despair, hope;
    where there is darkness, light;
    and where there is sadness, joy.
    O Divine Master,
    grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
    to be understood, as to understand;
    to be loved, as to love;
    for it is in giving that we receive,
    it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
    and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
    Amen.

    As always, there are alternate versions floating around, too.  I particularly like the middle part of the prayer.  How many of us petition the Almighty for consolation, understanding, and love?  Ought we not petition Him as well for the capacity, opportunity, and will to console, to understand, to love?  How often do we do that? 

    As nice as it is, that prayer doesn’t appear to have been written by St. Francis at all.  Here’s a Wikipedia article on its origins.  Incidentally, if it had been written by St. Francis, we’d probably be aware of it; the Catholic Encyclopedia says, "The literary materials for the history of St. Francis are more than usually copious and authentic. There are indeed few if any medieval lives more thoroughly documented."

    Here’s something that really was written by St. Francis, in 1224 (and was first mentioned in print only four years later, in a biography of him by Thomas of Celano).

    Laudes Creaturum ("Praise of the Creatures")

    Most High, all-powerful, all-good Lord,
    All praise is Yours, all glory, honor and blessings.
    To you alone, Most High, do they belong;
    no mortal lips are worthy to pronounce Your Name.

    We praise You, Lord, for all Your creatures,
    especially for Brother Sun,
    who is the day through whom You give us light.
    And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor,
    of You Most High, he bears your likeness.

    We praise You, Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars,
    in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and fair.

    We praise You, Lord, for Brothers Wind and Air,
    fair and stormy, all weather’s moods,
    by which You cherish all that You have made.

    We praise You, Lord, for Sister Water,
    so useful, humble, precious and pure.

    We praise You, Lord, for Brother Fire,
    through whom You light the night.
    He is beautiful, playful, robust, and strong.

    We praise You, Lord, for Sister Earth,
    who sustains us
    with her fruits, colored flowers, and herbs.

    We praise You, Lord, for those who pardon,
    for love of You bear sickness and trial.
    Blessed are those who endure in peace,
    by You Most High, they will be crowned.

    We praise You, Lord, for Sister Death,
    from whom no-one living can escape.
    Woe to those who die in their sins!
    Blessed are those that She finds doing Your Will.
    No second death can do them harm.

    We praise and bless You, Lord, and give You thanks,
    and serve You in all humility.

    Stylistically, it’s rather different from the other, isn’t it?  Not nearly as tidy.  But… it has a better claim to the title Prayer of St. Francis (although it is not the only one he wrote).

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  • Scrupulosity, good works, etc.

    Jimmy Akin answers a reader’s question about scrupulosity and in the process, I think, clarifies some stuff about the importance of good works.

    Good works, therefore, are not of themselves necessary to remain in a state of grace. They may help you stay in a state of grace by building good habits that steer you away from sin, but a lack of good works IS  NOT A MORTAL SIN. If you are a baptized baby and you die before you are capable of doing good works, you don’t have any, but that doesn’t keep you out of heaven. Similarly, if you’re an adult convert and you get baptized and then run over by a bus so that you don’t have a chance to do good works, you don’t get kept out of heaven.

    The key to going to heaven is our reception of and remaining in God’s grace. It’s his grace that gets us to heaven.

    Good works are a natural outgrowth of his grace working in our hearts, and he rewards us for cooperating with his grace in doing good works, but the thing that would keep us out of heaven is mortal sin, not having an insufficient number of good works.

    Scrupulosity is "a disordered fear that one is sinning or is in danger of going to hell."  Ultimately, it marks a lack of trust in God’s mercy, but I think scrupulosity tends to be involuntary — like obsessive-compulsive disorder, which Jimmy alludes to in his post.

    It’s the sort of problem that might actually be helped by therapy — except that you had better choose your therapists carefully, lest they try to rid you of your "guilt complex" by eliminating every honest impulse toward repentance.  The point is balance and perspective:  Neither scrupulosity, nor presumption.

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