There’s a trope out there that orthodox Catholics write out of anger. That’s unfair. I offer a short apologia for what usually motivates me to write.

Take a piece I just published, on the murder of a 20-something Kentucky school teacher in Washington. The killing took place in broad daylight next to The Catholic University of America, as the teacher was bound for the subway. I asked whether the perp used the subway to get there or get away (Metro Police circulated his picture, which ought to be compared against Metro surveillance footage). I also asked if he paid his fare or was another of Washington’s growing crowd of fare-gate leapers. [A link to my article is here.]

If he paid, his Metrocard might help trace him. If he didn’t — which I suspect — that led me to talk about the contemporary indulgence of petty criminals (fare beaters, shoplifters, drug users, etc.) whom woke prosecutors have refused to prosecute, essentially engaging in a modern version of Confederate nullification of valid laws. Social scientists invoke the “broken windows” theory — social decay starts with small things — to explain this. I invoked the Catholic theology of sin: little wrongs pave the way to bigger evil. Venial sin paves the way to mortal sin because it centers the sinner on self to the exclusion of charity.

There’s a whole social discussion about what to do with today’s derelict prosecutors pleading “equity” in law enforcement to not enforce the law. Too many Catholics start with secular explanations and then adopt them, sometimes throwing some holy water and words on them to “Christianize” them.

My intent in writing is to reverse engineer that process. We ought to start with a Catholic understanding of the truth of the human person, an adequate and integral anthropology, not the bilge that masquerades as “philosophy of the person” in secular society.  Starting from a real perspective on man — that he is a sinner and that sin snowballs — we can begin to ask what that means for how we try to staunch sin, especially in its most egregious social dimensions, i.e., as civil crimes.

Let me use another illustration of how the Catholic intellectual tradition can illumine current issues. Catholic moral theology has an anatomy of a moral act, i.e., an act that has moral significance, whether good or bad. Acts consist of the act itself, the intention of the actor, and the circumstances surrounding its performance.

In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action [another article here], America is roiled by the question of using race as a category to allot benefits among a limited pool of potential beneficiaries. Almost everybody would admit that racially-motivated slicing and dicing is wrong, but the question is why is it wrong? Is it wrong because race as a category for divvying up those benefits inherently taints the outcome and, therefore, is wrong in itself? Or is it wrong because the motives underlying a specific use of race as an apportioning category are bad, which inherently implies there might be “good” racially-driven motives? I’d maintain the former; I’d welcome somebody to try to make a case for the latter.

The Catholic intellectual tradition has a lot to offer to illumine this and many other current crises, but it’s often either not tapped or used as window dressing for conclusions really coming from elsewhere. It seems to me this is what Catholic intellectuals ought to be doing.

By the way, on the “anger” question, let me say: I prefer “outrage.” Bill Bennett, former Secretary of Education, was prescient in his 1998 book title The Death of Outrage. Partisans might or might not agree with the book’s political implications — that Bill Clinton’s sexscapades in the White House were morally outrageous — but, at least in title and at root, Bennett was on to something. “Outrage” is a healthy thing: it protects moral guardrails any society needs to function normally. The fact that people are not outraged by scantily clad adults publicly twerking their pelvises in the faces of minor children — some of those kids only single digits in age — is not a sign of a healthy society.

The opposite of “outrage” is the ambivalence of the moral relativist and Gen Z-er: the blase phrase, “whatever!” We see the consequences of a “whatever” society.

In defending outrage, I’m not arguing for feelings. Moral analysis doesn’t start with feelings but with reason considering the natural and Divine laws, i.e., delving into reason and faith. Feelings are important to morality in that morals ought not to be a sterile exercise in “principles” (a la Kant) but a worldview that guides life, in which reason, will (the decision to do something with what the will tells me should be done or avoided), and emotions (the feelings, joy or sorrow, that accompany that choice) are integrated. That process is particularly facilitated, for Catholics, when we start from what our reason and faith tell us about God and man. That’s what the Catholic intellectual’s vocation ought to be.

July 18 is the 700th anniversary of the canonization of St. Thomas Aquinas. The Angelic Doctor is usually held up as the exemplar of reason in philosophy and theology and, while that’s true, it’s also simplistic to reduce Thomas to a man on a head trip. He presented an integral vision of the human person, an “individual substance of a rational nature” who is lead by his head, not his hormones, hopefully to heaven.