Global terrorism.

Everyone here is familiar with the phrase, "male chauvinist pig." You may even know one-"ecce homo." ("Behold the man!") The appropriation of the word "chauvinism" by the feminists has, however, robbed it of its original meaning, a meaning that we do well to reflect on.

"Chauvinism" means "exaggerated patriotism" or, following the OED, "bellicose patriotism:" "My country right or wrong!" sums it up pretty well. Today it runs rampant.

What better word is there than chauvinism--"bellicose patriotism"--to describe 9/11 or the suicide bombers in London, Israel, and Iraq? It is patriotism run wild, a loyalty not only to a nation but to a whole culture that would condemn any other simply because it is different.

Chauvinism takes a good thing, viz., patriotism--the loyalty and affection that people have for the place and way of life they have known from birth--and corrupts it into hatred for anything different. Like all evil, therefore, chauvinism is parasitical, feeding on the nourishment that should serve a healthier end. Essentially, chauvinism is a failure of imagination. The chauvinist simply cannot imagine another way of thinking or another approach to reality than his own.

As I describe it, I am sure you recognize that chauvinism is not limited to Islam. I recently ran across a striking instance of it in a newsmagazine. The writer of the article, Robert Lee, in describing the botched second attempt at bombing in London, showed a complete lack of insight into the mentality of Islam-or for that matter of any religiously-minded person. He focused on the report that one of the bombers had tried, unsuccessfully thank God, to detonate his lethal device beside a woman holding a baby. Lee writes, "I believe there is no point in trying to understand the mindset of someone who would try to blow up a baby, unless that understanding helps to capture, contain, or kill him" (Maclean's, Aug. 1, 2005, p. 16). In writing a sentence like that, a man signs his own death warrant, for in effect he says that anyone who would consciously, in cold blood, kill a baby should himself be killed.

The terrorist bombers of London agreed; and, given that the entire Western world is intent on killing its own babies, and is doing so by the millions, those bombers simply effected what the article said: anyone who kills a baby should himself be killed. I am not so naive as to look for an anti-abortion screed in our mass media. But Mr. Lee could have mentioned that a few hundred yards away, in pretty well any hospital or clinic in England, babies were under the knife. Consequently, that Muslim bomber might well have thought that the last concern of any European would have been whether or not a baby was killed in the bombing.

Education is supposed to broaden our outlook, giving us a sharpened awareness of the good and the evil of cultures different from our own. If we persist in touting the virtues of America and the failures of, e.g., Islamic countries, we are chauvinists. Let me note, parenthetically, that the reverse--a sort of loathing for one's own country and an idealization of the other--is another form of chauvinism, like a negative where everything black is white and everything white is black. G.K. Chesterton got it right when he compared the slogan "My country right or wrong!" to "My mother drunk or sober!" For each of us loves his mother, even when she is lying dead drunk on the kitchen floor; but we want her to dry out, to reform.

Saint Thomas Aquinas informs us that grace builds on nature. The manifold gifts of the Holy Spirit-wisdom and understanding, counsel and fortitude, knowledge and piety, and fear of the Lord-are available to us through the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation. But without a natural basis they will not attain full growth.

There is a heavenly wisdom, a counsel and understanding, a divine knowledge, fortitude and piety that can confirm natural counterparts as they surpass them. But we will not be fully Christian if we neglect the natural order for some imaginary direct access to divine inspiration. To do so with regard to patriotism merely deepens the depravity of chauvinism by rendering it fanatical. When the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, "Here we have no lasting city, but we seek a city that is to come" (13:14), it puts a natural, a sensible limitation to any merely human allegiance, reminding us that the only valid patriotism, as kindly as it is profound, is for the City of God.

Ft. Daniel Callam, C.S.B., teaches theology at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas.