Astronomers talk about the beauty of the galaxies and solar systems. Naturalists talk about the beauty of the woods and mountains. But parents don’t talk about the beauty of children and parenthood. Why is this?

I don’t exempt myself from the question. On Thursday night, my wife gave birth to our second child, and at the hospital neither of us invoked the word beautiful to describe Lucy Clara Stricherz; “cute” and “perfect” and “calm” somehow made the cut, though. When my elder daughter Grace was born, I recall us saying pretty much the same thing.

Yet those words and lack of words sell them short. As a relatively new parent, I am struck when Grace sways and claps and dances on her own to a song on the radio or computer; by the expression on her face as she goes down for a nap, the tiny eyebrows and pink cheeks and ethereal expression; and catching the light in her eyes as she shares a laugh or joke or game with me.

Nothing in professional life or the workaday world offers comparable joys. It is nice getting raises, promotions, and awards. It is fun and exciting to have challenging work and stimulating colleagues. But it is impossible to replicate the innocence, whimsy, and delight of a child.

Any parent who reads this post will recognize my sin of omission: 98 percent of parenthood has nothing to do with sipping the sweet nectar of life, as most of it involves responsibility, self-sacrifice, and hard work. Yet in this country at least, 100 percent of parents’ conversation avoid the smiling aspects of their charge.

Indeed, parents seem to talk about everything else. Our adult friends, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, talk about the physical and emotional travails and amusing nature of parenthood. My parent’s friends talk about the financial costs of parenthood. Mainstream authors talk about the moral necessity and health imperatives of parenthood. And the pious, especially Catholics, talk about the devotional aspects of parenthood.

Of course, we Americans mention the “joys of parenthood.” But the phrase usually is tossed out casually, as if its speakers realize it is tinny and false. What rarely happens is a discussion about the beauty of parenthood, an elaboration of the concept, the forms that this particular beauty takes.

Sure, artists and poets write and sing about it. In his obscure but powerful song “Valentine’s Day,” Bruce Springsteen limns the theme:

A friend of mine became a father last night
When we spoke in his voice I could hear the light
Of the skies and the rivers the timberwolf in the pines
And that great jukebox out on Route 39

In “Those Winter Sundays,” the late American poet Robert Hayden hints at the love a father has for his son:                                                                                                                

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

The relative silence of Christians on this topic is curious. Of all believers, Christians should affirm the beauty of God’s creation more than anyone. After all, our God didn’t stay put in the heavens, is not some disembodied figure. Our God became man, flesh and blood like us.

Yet Christians should discuss parenthood’s joys, not just for social and emotional reasons but spiritual and evangelistic ones as well. To affirm parenthood is to affirm the goodness of material things. Or as the catechism puts it, “The beauty of creation reflects the infinite beauty of the Creator.” In discussing the new evangelization, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in December 2000 said that expressing a love of joy and beauty was essential:Tdeepest poverty is the inats that devastate the life of indivi

The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice -- all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world.

The Christmas story illustrates Benedict's point. Our Savior was born not in a palace or temple with glass and wood and diamonds, but a barn with straw and piss and hay. No matter the quality of the material, God made it good.

I interviewed Rod Blagojevich in person once. As a reporter who helped the Chicago Tribune cover the Illinois delegation, I talked with him about some state-related matter for a few minutes. While his reputation was that of a grandstander and media hound, he struck me as genuine and friendly; if I recall correctly, he stuck to some of his talking points but not all of them, a quality which is much appreciated and valued by reporters.

How different the appearance was from reality, or as his father-in-law Dick Mell suggests, the later reality. Blagojevich became such a jerk that he didn’t return the phone calls of Mell, a powerful Chicago alderman, and sent Mell a cease-and-desist letter for putting Blagojevich’s name on Mell’s stationery. Yet he identified as Eastern Orthodox and went to church reportedly.

Distinguishing between appearance and reality is of course reporters’ main job and while one Chicago reporter has detailed Blagojevich’s corruption, I think that reporters need to dig deeper into this story. Not just because a federal prosecutor broke the story of Blagojevich’s alleged crimes, but also because the story of Rod Blagojevich is not really known. Why would the governor of a powerful state risk his career and a cell in the big house?

Here’s my tentative answer: he sought not the One and True God, but rather the characteristically American bitch goddess of Success. I have read many stories about Blagojevich, and they all paint the same picture of the man. He wasn’t an egomanical corrupt pol like Huey Long, a sexually corrupt one like Eliot Spitzer, or a power-mad, vengeful one like Richard Nixon. No, he is a political version of Clyde Griffiths, the main protagonist of Theodore Dreiser’s great novel (or for classicists and Great Gatsby devotees, Trimalchio). 

The son of an immigrant steelworker and clerk typist, Blagojevich worked odd jobs his whole life to make ends meet. Never an exceptional or promising student, he acquired power by marrying into the right family and forming the right connections. Despite few political accomplishments, he contemplated running for president in 2016.  In short, Blagojevich rose to power in the same fashion as Griffith – hard work, good connections, and soaring ambition.

Blagojevich’s fall is attributable to many reasons. He was a corrupt narcissist, watching a Blackhawks hockey game while state lawmakers took a tough vote on his legislation. He broke his word, vetoing money for a children’s hospital he promised to spend money on.

And he was greedy. In one call tapped by the feds, Blagojevich talks about selling for the highest bidder the Illinois senate seat vacated by Barack Obama:

"I've got this thing and it's [expletive] golden and uh, uh, I'm just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing," the governor told an unnamed adviser in a Nov. 5 call the government taped. "And I can always use it. I can parachute me there."

Blagojevich operated under mounting financial pressure and sought a way for him and his wife, Patti, to profit by making as much as $300,000 a year, the documents said. The couple have two young daughters.

Blagojevich’s story is a testament to the disjuncture between appearance and reality. In public, he was hard working, ambitious, and likable. In private, he was lazy and vain, dishonest, and egotistical. He appeared one way in person and another behind closed doors.

In a morally and spiritually robust society, institutions identify such characters as rascals and discipline them accordingly; they can separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. The federal government so far has done this. So have church leaders? As far as I can tell, they did not and have not. 

For example, in 2005 Blagojevich issued an executive order mandating that pharmacies sell contraceptives, including the so-called morning-after pill. Pharmacists, including Catholic pharmacists, were not given a conscience-clause exemption. Blagojevich’s order was met with little response from the state’s bishops. A search on Google of the terms "Blagojevich" "Catholic" and "contraceptives" yields nothing.

Corrupt, two-faced politicians will always be with us. So should be the response of our institutions, especially the Church.

Progressive Catholics say that the nation’s bishops should stop crying wolf over the possibility that the dreaded Freedom of Choice Act will become law. The legislation (here and here) would eliminate all legal protections for unborn infants and may prevent medical personnel from invoking a freedom-of-conscience clause to not have to perform abortions. Commonweal's editors described the bishops’ focus on the threat posed by FOC as “disconcerting.” Michael Sean Winters advised them to “keep still and be quiet” about the matter. David Gibson said FOCA is a “phantom” issue.

Progressives argue that because FOCA is such a radical measure, it stands little or no chance of being enacted and therefore should be largely ignored; when bishops made dire pronouncements about the measure, they betrayed at best a lack of faith in the incoming Obama administration and at worst a pro-life absolutism.

This line of argument is not outlandish. It is true that at present the chances of FOCA becoming law are slim. Even moderate Democrats support some restrictions on abortion, not their wholesale evisceration. It is also unclear that if FOCA were enacted, medical personnel unwilling to perform abortions would have to do so. But the unlikelihood that the bill will pass is not comforting, nor is the ambiguity about the bill’s constitutionality. As Rick Hertzberg wrote once, it is a 99 percent certainty that a nuclear bomb will never detonate, but the 1 percent chance that it will is terrifying.

If FOCA were enacted and fulfilled its supporters’ expectation, the legislation would be the cultural equivalent of a nuclear bomb. The Church operates 573 hospitals, which served 84.3 million patients. Surely the vast majority of these would shut down. In addition, hundreds of state and federal abortion restrictions would be struck down. Thirty five years of pro-life efforts would go down the drain.

And it is possible to imagine scenarios in which FOCA became law. Suppose Obama did become another FDR and help his party add dozens of seats in the off-year congressional elections. The Democrats might have the votes to pass FOCA. Or suppose after withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and righting the nation’s economic ship, Democratic leaders used their political capital to whip FOCA hard, pressuring moderate Democrats and liberal Republicans for their votes. (As things stand, Democrats effectively have at least 58 votes in the Senate and 257 in the House).

Obama would have to sign the legislation. While it is true that Obama has not discussed FOCA since July 2007, at the time he said it would be his first priority as president and continues to endorse the bill on his website.

It is also possible to imagine scenarios in which Catholic physicians would be unable to invoke freedom of conscience to not have to perform abortions. One of the five socially moderate or conservtive justices on the Supreme Court could step down and be replaced by a socially liberal justice. This scenario is unlikely. Then again, even Planned Parenthood's president expressed shock that Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton had invalidated almost all of the nation's abortion restrictions.

Perhaps the main objection to my argument is that bishops should be worried not about FOCA but rather other pro-choice measures, such as federal restrictions on embryonic stem-cell funding and the so-called Mexico City policy. But what are their odds of success? ESCR has commanding support in the Congress and is almost certain to become law regardless of the bishops’ efforts; rescinding the Mexico City policy will be even easier, as it requires nothing more than a stroke of Obama’s pen. A more promising path, one suggested by this magazine's editors is, that Obama should seek to reduce the number of abortions.

On balance, however, I think the bishops got it right. Their position is reminiscent in some ways of their stand in the early 1980s against the build up of nuclear weapons. They hooted and hollered against the build up; they were criticized by some Catholics (conservatives, in this case) for doing so; it was very unlikely that nuclear weapons would ever be used; but their stated opposition and witnesss probably made it more unlikely that the bomb would ever go off.

Over at his great blog at The Atlantic, Ross Douthat expresses sympathy for Catholics who voted against the war and economic meltdown rather than against Roe v. Wade:

John McCain did not lose this election because the Catholic clergy failed to anathematize Barack Obama loudly enough, or because Pennsylvanians and Michiganders thought they were voting for Roosevelt or Truman. He lost it because his party flat-out misgoverned the country, in foreign and domestic policy alike, and because of late the culture war has mattered less to most Americans than the Iraq War and the economic meltdown.

As an empirical matter, Ross is surely correct. And he is right to chide George Weigel and other Catholic conservatives for not offering more constructive criticism of the Iraq War, not to mention torture. But as a normative matter, Ross seems to sanction Catholics who voted on “several issues” not just one. This view strikes me as wrongheaded. Overturning Roe (and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton) should have been the top priority of Catholics this election and should still be.

For one thing, nothing in American life is as hidden, brutal, and pathetic as abortion. It is true that war is evil and poverty and economic distress are ills. Yet at least each occurs generally in plain sight. As the late Gov. Robert Casey pointed out, the same is not true of what happens in the nation’s abortion clinics: “on this issue, the media spare us the details.”

To grasp what occurs in abortion clinics, watch the acclaimed 2007 movie “Lake of Fire.” Twenty minutes into the film, a doctor is shown performing an abortion on a young woman who is 20 weeks pregnant. “Splat!” goes the glass case, filled with blood. Inside a steel pan are the contents of the fetus, and not just blood and bone and tissue. As the doctor shows for the camera, there five fingers on a tiny hand; an inch-long foot with five toes; and in the last image, a bulging eye exposed with a dark pupil.

So brutal is abortion that even staunchly pro-choice doctors don’t want to perform first-trimester abortions. In The Washington Post magazine this weekend, a young female doctor decides not to enter the ob-gyn field partly because after witnessing abortions being performed, she found them to be “barbaric,” “jarring,” and “surreal.”

The doctor gave a short lecture on first-trimester abortions. Then she showed the students how to grip the papaya with the scissors to hold the angle of the "cervix" straight on. With one hand, the doctor demonstrated how to administer a local pain killer, at 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock positions. She picked up different sizes of dilators used to widen the cervix and advised against pushing them in too hard, because in a soft-skinned papaya, the dilators might come out the other side. In a woman, more pressure would be needed to slide the dilator past the cervix and into the cavity of the uterus.

The doctor next picked up the suction instrument, a manually operated vacuum suction syringe. It was attached to a cannula, or thin tube, that she inserted into the papaya. She rotated it around the fruit's cavity, pulling and pushing the syringe, suctioning the papaya's contents.

"This is the most important thing and the hardest to learn," the doctor said as she pulled out lots of seeds and juice, what in a real abortion she called the "products of conception," or POC. "You put the POC into a bowl, repeat if necessary, and examine them under a microscope to make sure you got everything," she advised.

There was silence as she passed around photos of a dish with a light under it from a real abortion. It contained something that looked like a cotton ball, a yolk sac, and some blood and tissue. It was hard to make out any parts of a fetus under 3 months old, which, she said, is when more than 90 percent of all abortions are performed.

Granted, many soldiers back off from killing the enemy. But rare is the soldier who in cold blood kills a helpless enemy. Yet killing a helpless, not to mention innocent, human is inherent in the act of abortion, or at least when the mother’s life is not at stake. Bernard Nathanson’s famous 1984 video is instructive on this point.

And last, no disease, accident, or war kills more Americans than the abortion regime sanctioned by Roe. Every day, more than 3,000 unborn infants are killed.

Ross probably agrees that overturning Roe should be Catholics’ top priority. Yet as far as I know, he has not explained why this is so.

My argument does not excuse conservative Catholics who wish to do nothing more than reverse Roe; abortion is the single greatest evil in American life, but it’s not the only evil. Yet I think of our situation as comparable to Americans in the late 1850s. War and poverty and economic distress needed to be fought. But slavery and the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott needed to be fought most of all.

Few doubt that anti-Catholicism in America has declined; in the 1930s, my paternal grandfather’s friend in South Dakota found on his front lawn a burning cross, a warm greeting from the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet even if a Bill Donohue press release had never crossed my eyes, I am struck by the wobbling persistence of outright bias directed against Catholics.

Liberals engage in it. In South Carolina, a Catholic parish was denied a zoning permit because a council member objects to the Church’s stand against female ordination and abortion (tip o' the hat to Rod Dreher); in Chicago, an opponent of Proposition 8 carried a sign with the brilliant slogan, "Catholic fascists stay out of politics."

Conservatives engage in it. After the Papal Mass in Washington, I saw evangelical or fundamentalist Protestants standing outside the stadium carrying signs that, in a witty and original remark, called the Church the Whore of Babylon.

My question of the day is directed at In All Things readers. Have you experienced anti-Catholicism first hand or know someone who has? Whether you know about the new anti-Catholicism or the old anti-Catholicism, it doesn't matter to me. Just please confine your remarks to particular incidents.

Thomas Reese, SJ and Peter Steinels both conclude that in the aftermath of Tuesday’s elections results, the U.S. Catholic bishops’ political prestige suffered greatly, not least because the very pro-choice Barack Obama won a majority among Catholic voters. Fr. Reese said the bishops’ “episcopal authority took a major hit,” while Steinfels declared the bishops to be one of the night’s “big losers.” Without getting into the merits of whether the bishops should prioritize certain issues, I think their conclusion is overstated.

For one thing, Fr. Reese and Steinfels imply that abortion was the lone issue this election on which the bishops sought to influence the votes of the laity. In fact, the legalization of homosexual marriage was another issue this fall, and the bishops’ influence seems to have been felt at the polls.

A good example was Proposition 8 in California, a constitutional measure that sought to overturn the state Supreme Court’s decision in favor of same-sex marriage. Mark DiCamillo, the director of the Field Poll, the state’s most respected poll, noted that Catholics voted heavily for Prop. 8 not only in terms of percentage but also in numbers:

When comparing the findings from The Field Poll’s final pre-election survey of likely voters (n-966) to the Edison Media Research exit poll in California, the biggest differences relate to the turnout and preferences of frequent church-goers and Catholics. The Field Poll, completed one week before the election, had Catholics voting at about their registered voter population size (24% of the electorate) with voting preferences similar to those of the overall electorate, with 44% on the Yes side. However the network exit poll shows that they accounted for 30% of the CA electorate and had 64% of them voting Yes. Regular churchgoers showed a similar movement toward the Yes side. The pre-election Field Poll showed 72% of these voters voting Yes, while the exit poll showed that 84% of them voted Yes.

The same kind of phenomenon occurred when the first same-sex marriage ban was voted in California in the March 2000 election (Prop. 22), although because of the size of its victory( 61% Yes vs. 39% No) it didn’t matter much back then. In that year The Field Poll’s final pre-election poll, also completed about one week prior to the election, had 50% of Catholics on the Yes side, and accounting for 24% of the vote. Yet, the network exit poll conducted that year by Voter News Service showed them to account for 26% of the electorate with 62% voting Yes.

My take is that polling on issues like same-sex marriage that have a direct bearing on religious doctrine can be affected in a big way in the final weekend by last minute appeals by the clergy and religious organizations.

How much the bishops influenced the outcome is difficult to say. For all of the talk about the Bradley effect, there also seems to be what might be called a Gay-Marriage effect – a reluctance by voters to tell pollsters that they oppose same-sex marriage. So it is fair to conclude that some Catholics were unwilling to state their preference for traditional marriage but vote for it in the ballot booth. And I cannot determine whether any of the state’s bishops’ mandated that statements in favor of Prop. 8 be read at Mass the weekend before the election; for what it is worth, my parents heard a sermon against gay marriage at their parish in the Bay Area. Yet Catholic bishops did more than the minimum in favor of Prop 8: issue statements and put out position papers. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops donated $200,000 to the major group in favor of Prop. 8. The state’s bishops also made a competent video in support of the measure, which I can no longer find on YouTube.

For another thing, Fr. Reese and Steinfels’ conclusion that the bishops didn’t influence the presidential vote is surely too sweeping. It is true enough that a majority of Catholic voters went for Barack Obama, an unwavering supporter of abortion rights; and that dozens of bishops implied that Catholics should do no such thing. But this dynamic seems to have been exclusive to the big cities and suburbs, a large majority of the electorate admittedly. It does not seem to have applied to small towns and rural areas, including those in the North. Mark Silk’s state-by-state breakdown of the Catholic vote seems to support this conclusion.

Westmoreland County in western Pennsylvania is another good example. Besides a 2-to-1 registration favor of Democrats, the county had except for 1972 voted for a Democratic presidential nominee from the New Deal until 1996. But that changed. As I wrote in Why the Democrats are Blue, the dioceses’ bishops in the past eight years have been vocal in their criticism of pro-choice Democratic presidential nominees. If the county’s Democratic chairwoman is to be believed, their words affected the county’s Catholics. The county voted for George W. Bush twice and heavily for John McCain (57-41) on Tuesday.

Still, Fr. Reese and Steinfels are surely correct to conclude that as a rule, the bishops cannot expect the laity to follow in lockstep with their political wishes. I plan to write about that topic at another date. But for now, let’s have a more balanced assessment of the bishops’ political strengths and weaknesses.

Over at Commonweal’s web site, William J. Gould criticizes the strategy adopted by some Catholics of effectively embracing the Republican Party because of its pro-life position on abortion. A better approach, he argues, is for church authorities to recognize a diversity of approaches for Catholics in the public square:

The kind of pluralism I have in mind would range from radical perspectives such as that of the eminent Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre—who contends that the two major parties are so defective that not voting is actually preferable to voting—to support for antisystem third-party candidates like Ralph Nader, to voting for Obama (as I will) on the grounds that, on balance, his administration will do more to serve the common good than McCain’s, to voting for McCain (as many others will) on prolife or other grounds. That approach comports far better with the situation facing Catholics than anything proposed by bishops like Chaput and Martino.

I agree with his minor point: Catholics should not embrace the Republican Party (or the Democratic Party, for that matter) as presently constituted. Neither party, it is safe to say, reflects Catholic social teaching in its fullness. But I disagree with his major point -- Catholics should accommodate their beliefs to the two political parties rather than reform or challenge them.

Surely accommodation is part of the problem in Catholic America not the solution. For four decades, Catholics have knuckled under to political leaders; with little say so from Catholics, the Democratic Party moved left on cultural issues, while the Republican Party moved right on economics. This remains the case today. Few Catholic conservatives challenge the GOP to do more to help the poor and vulnerable here at home; few Catholic liberals or progressives challenge the Democratic Party to extend legal protections to unborn infants.

How has accommodationism benefited Catholics or Americans? It hasn’t made American life more Catholic, if our me-first public philosophy is any guide. And it has left Catholics more divided, a fact which Pope Benedict XVI lamented in his visit this spring.

A better political approach for Catholics, it seems to me, would be reformist in nature. Catholics should reform both political parties to make them better vessels of Catholic social thought. If this were to happen, at a minimum the Democratic Party would be more culturally conservative, while the Republican Party would be more economically populist or liberal.

Making the two parties won’t be easy, but it can be done. In my book Why the Democrats are Blue, I call for democratizing the party’s presidential nominating system, a reform that would likely reduce the influence of upper-class cultural liberals and empower middle- and working-class cultural moderates and conservatives. (For example, the party should eliminate the gender quotas for delegates and caucus elections and let independents vote in all party primaries). In Grand New Party, Catholic co-author Ross Duouthat argue that the Republican Party should re-orient its concerns toward working-class Americans, especially those under the grip of family breakdown and economic instability.

Contra Gould, Archbishop Chaput calls not for accommodating Catholics to the Republican Party, but rather for Catholics to reform both parties. “The sooner Catholics feel at home in any political party, the sooner that party begins to take them for granted and then to ignore their concerns,” he writes in Render Unto Caesar. “Party loyalty is a dead end. It’s a lethal form of laziness.” This is not a new revelation on his part. For the past several years, he has hosted the annual Bob Casey lecture, which I was honored to deliver in September. If the Archbishop was a Republican, he surely would have named it, say, the Henry Hyde lecture, in honor of the late pro-life GOP leader, rather than a late Democratic politician.

The lecture is well named. A reformer, Casey was a Catholic who happened to a member of a particular political party. But as pluralists, we seem to prefer being Republicans or Democrats who happen to be Catholics.