Very funny Saturday Night Live skit
On some level, you’d think he was an insurance salesman- not a rock legend, wouldn’t you!
The Vatican issued a statement Saturday calling a new leak of its internal documents “a criminal act” that must be prosecuted. The statement called for prosecution not only of the leaker but also “those who received stolen property” – that is, evidently, Gianluigi Nuzzi, an Italian journalist who came up with a trove of papal records for his new book, Sua Santita, or His Holiness.
The Vatican said it will seek “international cooperation,” which I assume means that it will press Italian authorities to prosecute even the journalist. The publication of the leaked documents is not a “journalistic initiative,” the Vatican insists, but a crime.
I don’t know what protections Italian journalists have; Nuzzi seems to be reveling in the attention, as any author might.
One imagines that only a fairly small circle of people would have access to the private papers of Pope Benedict XVI. Despite what the Holy See says about the vile nature of these leaks, I continue to suspect that the leaker is taking the only available avenue to reform a bureaucracy that treats corruption too casually. Who is the leaker? Someone with a conscience, is my guess.
The great baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died yesterday in Germany and today’s Times has a wonderful appreciation (two in fact). Here’s part of the front page story:
Mr. Fischer-Dieskau had sufficient power for the concert hall and for substantial roles in his parallel career as a star of European opera houses. But he was essentially a lyrical, introspective singer whose effect on listeners was not to nail them to their seat backs, but rather to draw them into the very heart of song.
The pianist Gerald Moore, who accompanied many great artists of the postwar decades, said Mr. Fischer-Dieskau had a flawless sense of rhythm and “one of the most remarkable voices in history — honeyed and suavely expressive.” Onstage he projected a masculine sensitivity informed by a cultivated upbringing and by dispiriting losses in World War II: the destruction of his family home, the death of his feeble brother in a Nazi institution, induction into the Wehrmacht when he had scarcely begun his voice studies at the Berlin Conservatory.
His performances eluded easy description. Where reviewers could get the essence of a Pavarotti appearance in a phrase (the glories of a true Italian tenor!), a Fischer-Dieskau recital was akin to a magic show, with seamless shifts in dynamics and infinite shadings of coloration and character.
Aside from Lieder and opera he was a splendid interpreter of Bach. Here he sings the opening aria from Bach’s Cantata #82: “Ich habe genug,” based on Simeon’s “Nunc Dimittis” in the Gospel according to Saint Luke.
May he indeed see the salvation of the Lord!
Two pieces bring the question of “hate speech” back before us. In the latest NY Review of Books and under the title “Should Hate Speech be Outlawed?”, Justice John Paul Stevens reviews Jeremy Waldron’s The Harm in Hate Speech. While Waldron admits that it is very unlikely that laws banning hate speech “will ever pass constitutional muster in America,” he does believe that “we have overprotected speech that not only causes significant harm to the dignity of minority groups but also, more importantly, diminishes the public good of inclusiveness that is an essential attribute of our society.” Waldron’s general description of the kind of speech under discussion is expansive:
The use of words which are deliberately abusive and/or insulting and/or threatening and/or demeaning directed at members of vulnerable minorities, calculated to stir up hatred against it.
The Justice faults him for not addressing the differences in the statutes in several countries where certain kinds of hate speech are outlawed. At the end of the essay, Stevens confesses that he has not been persuaded “that it would be wise to outlaw the entire category of hate speech that Waldron describes,” and it would appear that it will remain true that “Americans are freer to think what we will and say what we think than any other people.”
The only point which gives me pause is when the Justice seems to imply that the exchanges once common between rival ethnic groups might classify as “hate speech,” and cites (quite unnecessarily) an ethnic joke against Poles. I myself found the Festrunk Brothers of Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd offensive, even demeaning of my ethnic background, but I would never characterize it as “hate speech”.
Peter Berger, the brilliant social theorist who brought European perspectives of the Geisteswissenschaften to sociology in the U.S. (a counter-balance to the positivism of the “How many freckle-faced left-handed Catholics go to Mass every week” tradition), has a weekly blog here. In one of his essays he refers to a case before a district court in Texas in which the judge ruled that an imprecatory prayer uttered against a man who opposes religious activities in the U.S. military could not be considered to have caused harm and fell within the boundaries of freedom of speech. Berger comments:
There are a few things to be noted about this episode. As far as I can tell, Judge Hoffman’s ruling follows an established tradition in American law: Speech, no matter how offensive or hurtful, is protected under the first amendment—unless it directly threatens or harms the targeted individuals. A classical case for this legal doctrine was the 1977 incident in Skokie, Illinois, where the United States Supreme Court ruled that a group that called itself the National Socialist Party of America had the right to parade with full Nazi regalia through the streets of this largely Jewish suburb of Chicago—despite the fact that one in six inhabitants was a Holocaust survivor. The same doctrine was invoked when the Supreme Court ruled that a Protestant fundamentalist group had the right to demonstrate at military funerals with the message that God was punishing America for its sins—despite the fact that this action inflicted great hurt to the grieving families. I wonder whether this doctrine will come unglued, as the new concept of “hate speech” makes its way through the courts: Could not an atheist claim that a ceremonial curse constitutes “hate speech”? There is also the delicious irony in the fact that, if Weinstein had stipulated that a curse in the name of God could have real effects in the empirical world, he might not have won in a Texas court in 2012, but he would surely have won in a Salem, Massachusetts court in 1692—though thereby implicitly denying his atheist worldview. (Of course both defendant and plaintiff might have been hanged eventually, the former for witchcraft, the latter for atheism.) Needless to say, he would also have won for many centuries in any court in so-called Christendom.
The news that the birth of “white” babies has fallen below 50 percent has created quite a media stir. Watching the Newshour last night I kept wondering if Ray Suarez, he of Puerto Rican descent, thought he was white or not white? A completely muddled discussion went on about how the U.S. was going to respond to this new factoid.
A little study of American immigrant history demonstrates that many of our immigrant forebears only became white as time passed: Irish, Italians, Jews, and Poles were not white when they landed on these shores. In fact, the Irish were often regarded as sub-human and portrayed with simian features (See cartoons by Thomas Nast).
Juan Cole gives a brief history of being and becoming white. Read it Ray!
UPDATE: Apologies: Margaret Warner did that segment according to the video. Sure looked like Ray Suarez on my TV…..
Strong words from a prosecutor in the trial of Monsignor William Lynn foreshadow what promises to be a hard-charging closing argument. That, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer:
In a preview of what could be a closing argument for the commonwealth, Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington told the judge that Lynn’s actions reflected a broader conspiracy within the church hierarchy.
“It was all about the good of Mother Church,” he said, after jurors had been released for the weekend. “They cared about money, they cared about the business of the church, not the flock and not the parishioners.”
Lynn is charged with endangering children by failing to crack down on predator priests he knew about while vicar for clergy for the Archdiocese of Philadephia. He scored a victory when the judge dismissed one of four counts for lack of evidence – a charge that he conspired with his co-defendant, Rev. James Brennan, who is charged with attempted rape of a 14-year-old boy.
While prosecutors brought in close to 50 witnesses and submitted 1,900 documents over the course of eight weeks, journalist Ralph Cipriani reports that no evidence was presented for the conspiracy charge, and suggests prosecutors should have charged Lynn instead with conspiring with his superiors. The D.A. seems to be going in that direction now, even without that formal charge.
Prosecutors have rested their case, so the question now is whether Monsignor Lynn will testify when the defense portion of the case begins on Tuesday.
Garry Wills, so adroit at parsing Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation,” so subtle in his analysis of Verdi’s Shakespeare operas, loses all nuance when he tackles intra-Catholic issues. Then, like the Verdi of the early potboilers, it’s all villains and heroes.
So in the June 7th New York Review of Books their regular bishop-basher is at it again. The full article is available only to subscribers, but they give you enough material to get the drift. However, passing strange is the photo that serves to dress up the diatribe. I wonder whether the Dominican Sisters of Mary will appreciate being the poster girls for Wills’ harangue. Check their website.
During the Republican primaries, we saw the effect of Citizens United on our politics: independent unlimited money used to attack candidates. The 2009 Supreme Court decision essentially ended campaign finance limits by ruling that contributions (in the form of money) were protected speech.
I have always been curious about how right-to-life advocates, especially attorney James Bopp became involved; how Chief Justice John Roberts, a vowed conservative, presided over the thorough dismantling of a century of precedent; and why the Obama Administration did such a poor job of defending McCain-Feingold (the legislation under immediate scrutiny), and the many laws restraining campaign contributions.
Now I know. Jeffrey Toobin (New Yorker, May 21) gives a detailed account of how Chief Justice Roberts engineered the arguments and the decision to favor unlimited money. Toobin’s assessment: “The Roberts Court, it appears, will guarantee moneyed interests the freedom to raise and spend any amount, from any source, at any time, in order to win elections.”
That outcome was manifest in a New York Times story today describing an anti-Obama campaign strategy on offer from political consultants that took the low, low road in racist politicking. The sponsor has repudiated the strategy. And so has the Romney campaign.
On Tuesday the Franciscan University of Steubenville announced that it would stop offering students health coverage at the end of the summer. Why? Contraception coverage and cost:
The Obama Administration has mandated that all health insurance plans must cover “women’s health services” including contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing medications as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Up to this time, Franciscan University has specifically excluded these services and products from its student health insurance policy, and we will not participate in a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.
Additionally, the PPACA increased the mandated maximum coverage amount for student policies to $100,000 for the 2012-13 school year, which would effectively double your premium cost for the policy in fall 2012, with the expectation of further increases in the future.
It’s strange that the university would cite the contraception mandate as one of its reasons for dropping student health coverage now. First, the mandate doesn’t kick in until August 2013. And second, there’s a good chance the school will qualify for an exemption. Remember, the Department of Health and Human Services regulations exempt religious employers that primarily employ and serve co-religionists, and whose purpose is the inculcation of its religious values. If any Catholic college fits that bill, it’s Steubenville, whose student body is 95 percent Catholic. How do you think the school’s insistence that it’s not exempt will play at HHS when it applies for an exemption?
So if the contraception mandate doesn’t take effect until 2013, why rush to dump student health coverage?
Cathy Kaveny last week wrote about a new Vatican investigation of more sexual abuse inside the scandalous Legion of Christ, and this week it emerged that one of the Legion’s most telegenic and best-known priests, Father Thomas Williams, in fact had at least one affair and fathered at least one child. All this while he was a media presence telling others how they should be holier Catholics — like him and his order.
What’s more, not only did the Legion know about the scandal and do nothing, but Father Williams himself was holding himself out as a pious preacher while living a double (or triple or quadruple) life. (John Allen’s report is here, lest our resident papalists think this is Rome-bashing.)
This really is astonishing, and I don’t think we have unpacked the psychology and spiritual peril of all these scandalous figures — Thomas Euteneuer, John Corapi and the rest — holding themselves out as the guardians and icons of orthodoxy while rallying their fans to defend them and their agendas against their enemies. That fosters cover-ups — scandals — when these holier-than-thou types are found to be less-than-holy, because so much is invested in protecting a hero and promoting an agenda.
Cathy’s point is worth revisiting:
What the Legion and RC did so well is LOOK GOOD. They seemed holy, they seemed attractive. They came out of central casting. Maybe we should take Jesus’s injunction about praying in private as a cautionary sign: we ought to be suspicious of those who try too hard to be SEEN as holy.
And they were enabled by self-proclaimed “good Catholics” who wanted always to give this group the “benefit of the doubt,” casting personal aspersion on those who had the courage to speak out.
In that thread, Alan Mitchell pointed to the summer boys camp website of Regnum Christi, an affiliate of the Legion, which features a video that would be a joke — the product of too many LOTR movie marathons — if it weren’t so typical of the regnant mindset among church authorities today. It might also be funny if it weren’t betrayed by facts. Self-proclaimed saints are instead snake oil salesmen, the self-proclaimed persecuted are in fact the powerful, and those who declare themselves courageous are in fact cowardly.
From a homily on the Ascension by Hans Urs von Balthasar:
The Lord Jesus Christ shares in God’s mode of presence; but he is not only God, he is also man for all eternity, with a human body and a human soul. Now this humanity explicitly participates in the new mode of Christ’ s presence and indwelling. And this is the really astonishing and baffling thing: that this finite soul and this limited body can share in the limitless omnipresence and intimacy of God. His wisdom and love have brought this miracle about: it is called “Eucharist.” It is not only a spiritual being-together in which the parties think of one another, nor is it simply the kind of presence whereby man is in God. It is an indwelling of the divine-human being of Christ, soul and body, in the whole person, body in body and soul in soul. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.” Read the rest of this entry »
In the course of certifying a class action, a federal judge in New York has made some devastating remarks about the NYPD’s massive Stop and Frisk program, which has prompted hundreds of thousands of street searches that almost always target blacks and Hispanics. It’s an important ruling with ramifications for law enforcement across the country.
“Suspicionless stops should never occur,” Judge Shira A. Scheindlin wrote. “Defendants’ cavalier attitude toward the prospect of a `widespread practice of suspicionless stops’ displays a deeply troubling apathy toward New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.”
In her ruling, the judge outlines how the NYPD has used its much-praised and often-copied CompStat system for tracking crime reports to set “performance goals” for the number of searches each precinct should do. Commanding officers are assailed by their superiors in police headquarters if the number of searches drops. Ultimately, police officers are evaluated in part for the number of searches they conduct on the street. Some have reported being threatened with loss of overtime or transfer to a lesser post. One officer taped his supervisor ordering wholesale illegal searches.
Police are required to document each stop but, according to the judge, in at least 170,000 cases the report failed to establish even a superficial basis for the search. In 4,000 cases, the official reason given for a search was “high crime area.” In more than half a million stops, the judge said, “officers listed no coherent suspected crime.”
That is, dehumanizing violations of the Fourth Amendment are routine in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New York.
During his apostolic visit to Tuscany last Sunday, Pope Benedict hoped to ascend to La Verna where Saint Francis received the stigmata. The weather did not permit this. But here is the reflection the Pope prepared for the pilgrimage:
The contemplation of the Crucified has an extraordinary efficacy, for it causes us to pass from the order of things thought, to that of experience lived; from hoped-for salvation to the sweet and blessed homeland. St. Bonaventure affirms: “He who gazes intently [upon the Crucified] … makes the Passover with Him – that is, the passage (Itinerarium, VII, 2). This is the heart of the experience of La Verna, of the Poverello of Assisi’s experience here. On this Sacred Mount, St. Francis lived in his own person the profound unity of sequela, imitatio and conformatio Christi. And so he tells us, too, that it is not enough to call ourselves Christians to be Christians, nor is it enough to seek to perform good works. We need to conform ourselves to Jesus through a slow, steady commitment to the transformation of our being to the image of the Lord, so that through divine grace, every member of His Body, which is the Church, might show forth the necessary likeness with its Head, Christ the Lord. And we begin this journey — as the medieval masters teach us on the basis of St. Augustine — with self-knowledge, with the humility of looking within ourselves with honesty.
To bear the love of Christ! How many pilgrims have climbed and continue to climb this Holy Mount in order to contemplate the love of the Crucified God and to allow themselves to be enraptured by Him. How many pilgrims have ascended in the search for God, which is the true reason for the Church’s existence: to be a bridge between God and man. And here they encounter you as well, sons and daughters of St. Francis. Always remember that the consecrated life has the specific task of bearing witness — through words and by the example of a life lived in accordance with the evangelical counsels — to the enchanting love story between God and humanity, which transcends history.
I couldn’t help but think of that often-used tabloid headline when I read the news today of Rebekah Brooks’ arrest, along with her husband and four others, in the British newspaper phone-hacking scandal.
For Brooks is now on the receiving end of what she once dished out as editor of the News of the World. Photographers chased after the BMW in which she drove away from the police station where she was charged, putting their lenses up against the car’s tinted windows, their flashes firing away in her face. Even the charge in the case has a faintly lurid sound: conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
Or, to put it another way, “it’s always the cover-up.”
Brooks was not charged in connection with the phone hacking, but rather with trying to obstruct the police investigation during a 13-day period last July. The Crown Prosecution Service underscored the gravity of the case in its news release, noting, “All these matters relate to the ongoing police investigation into allegations of phone hacking and corruption of public officials in relation to the News of the World and The Sun newspapers.”
Brooks played her assigned role by responding to the charges with a show of anger, particularly over the prosecution’s decision to charge her husband Charlie, a horse trainer. Brooks’ feeble criticism that the investigation was a poor use of government money ought to embarrass her mentor Rupert Murdoch.
Then again, if this were some similar scandal in the Democratic Party, the Murdoch media would be linking it to the man in charge and calling for heads to roll. Regardless of what Murdoch knew and when he knew it, he is responsible for the atmosphere that made the scandal possible. Ultimately, he’s responsible.
This one hasn’t gotten the attention of the Cardinal Newman Society, but there’s another Catholic campus controversy you might want to know about. Fordham University’s commencement speaker this year is John O. Brennan, currently Deputy National Security Advisor to the White House. Some students and faculty at Fordham have protested, circulating petitions arguing that Brennan (who served as chief of staff to CIA director George Tenet under President George W. Bush) is tied to War on Terror policies including the use of torture in ways that clearly violate the teachings of the church and the values of a Jesuit institution.
Here’s one petition; here’s another. Here’s a letter of protest published in the campus paper The Ram from retired CIA officer Ray McGovern.
In April 2009, Scott Horton noted that Brennan had intervened to stop the Justice Department from releasing the “torture memos” written by Bush-administration advisers John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Stephen Bradbury. “Brennan is a protege of former CIA director George Tenet,” Horton wrote, “and although he expressed some reservations about waterboarding, he was a defender of other Tenet-era torture programs. Now ensconced as a senior counterterrorism advisor, he has become the principle advocate of the ‘don’t look back’ mantra with respect to the misdeeds of the Bush years.”
That expression of “some reservations” makes it difficult to mount a short and sweet case against Brennan on Catholic-teaching terms. He has said that he was–yes–”personally…opposed” to waterboarding, as noted by the Washington Post’s useful WhoRunsGov bio, but he didn’t let it stop him from being part of other CIA activities that he “felt good about.” The WhoRunsGov bio adds,
But Brennan has previously defended the CIA’s tactics. In a 2005 interview with Jim Lehrer, Brennan called extraordinary rendition “an absolutely vital tool.” Critics of the practice, which involves arresting detainees in one country and transporting them to another (often without any public notice of the arrest), charge that it is used to move suspects to countries that are willing to use torture. On CBS in November 2007, Brennan said that enhanced interrogation techniques have generated “a lot of information that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists.”
Later, Brennan started making anti-torture noises — as in this speech from September 2011, which ended, “As a people, as a nation, we cannot—and we must not—succumb to the temptation to set aside our laws and our values when we face threats to our security, including and especially from groups as depraved as al-Qa’ida. We’re better than that. We’re better than them. We’re Americans.” As Glenn Greenwald wrote (in the course of protesting Brennan’s possible appointment as CIA head under Obama), Brennan has been called a “supporter” of the CIA interrogation and detention program and credited with anti-torture views. (Andrew Sullivan: “They can’t both be right.”)
The petitions protesting Brennan’s appearance at Fordham also call attention to his support for extrajudicial killings via drones under the current adminstration. No bishops have taken up the alarm, as far as I know. Should they? Can any politician or government official ever speak at any Catholic University? Should they?
Update (5/17): I see Franciscan University of Steubenville invited Michael Hayden, CIA head under George W. Bush, to deliver its commencement speech earlier this week. Hayden’s connection to the issues that were cited regarding Brennan — defending torture and attempting to obstruct its exposure, endorsing drone strikes that could kill civilians, and overseeing broad violations of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties — is much more direct. I wonder if there were any protests from the Steubenville student body?
As soon as Georgetown announced that its roster of commencement-weekend speakers would include Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, the orthodoxy cops at the Cardinal Newman Society were all over it. The move “can only be interpreted as a direct challenge to America’s Catholic bishops” — isn’t it obvious? After all, she’s “the lead architect of the Obama administration’s assault on religious freedom through the HHS contraception mandate.” How could a Catholic university bestow an honorary degree on such a person? What’s that? She’s not receiving an honorary degree? She’s one of eleven people who will be speaking over commencement weekend, and several others are receiving honorary degrees? Oh. Well, then how could a Catholic university “honor Sebelius by granting her a prestigious platform at its Public Policy Institute commencement ceremony”?
Worry yourself no longer. Robert P. George has the answer:
It’s relatively simple: The left-liberals who run the show at Georgetown have found a way to signal to the world that the nation’s oldest Catholic, and most famous Jesuit, university stands with the Obama administration in its war (to use, if I recall correctly, Kathleen Sebelius’s own word) against the Catholic bishops and others who oppose the HHS mandate as a violation of religious freedom and the rights of conscience (you know, the enemies of women’s “reproductive health”). By honoring Secretary Sebelius, they can help to undermine the bishops’ credibility and blunt the force of their witness as leaders of the Catholic church. I get it. It’s a bold and clever move. Although I find its substance appalling, I can’t help but admire its shrewdness.
Eureka. What a brilliant play. Maybe the CIA should start recruiting these lefties for psy-ops. Certainly, one must acknowledge that it’s not always easy to discern the motives of large institutions. But, as William of Ockham taught, all things being equal, the most presumptuous hypothesis must be true.
Unless it isn’t. Over to you, John DeGioia, president of Georgetown:
Last fall, public policy students expressed preferences for potential speakers who could participate in the program. Given her role in crafting the landmark legislation that will make health care more accessible to 34 million Americans who are currently uninsured, Secretary Sebelius was identified by students as a leading policy maker in our country who could contribute to this event. Secretary Sebelius has a long and distinguished record of public service, including two terms as governor of Kansas before beginning her service in April, 2009, as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. She is also the spouse and the mother of Georgetown graduates.
In early January, an invitation was extended to Secretary Sebelius and she accepted. In the weeks that followed, elements of the legislation, specifically terms covering contraception, dominated our public discourse and impacted our Georgetown community very directly.
In different contexts over the past three months, including a March 14 “Statement on Religious Freedom and HHS Mandate,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops expressed strong opposition to the position put forward by the Obama Administration. Some have interpreted the invitation of Secretary Sebelius as a challenge to the USCCB. It was not. The invitation to Secretary Sebelius occurred prior to the January 20th announcement by the Obama Administration of the modified healthcare regulations.
The Secretary’s presence on our campus should not be viewed as an endorsement of her views. As a Catholic and Jesuit University, Georgetown disassociates itself from any positions that are in conflict with traditional church teachings.
We are a university, committed to the free exchange of ideas. We are a community that draws inspiration from a religious tradition that provides us with an intellectual, moral, and spiritual foundation. By engaging these values we become the University we are meant to be.
Ah, but one question remains. President DeGioia claims the idea for inviting Sebelius came from students. But he doesn’t explain how that idea got into their heads in the first place, does he?
(Full disclosure: Commonweal is honoring DeGioia with the Catholic in the Public Square Award in September. Rest assured, we’ll get to the bottom of this.)
The literary critic William Deresiewicz has a good eye for flimflam. In an article titled “Capitalists and Other Psychopaths,” he trains it on the phrase “job creator”:
There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about “job creators,” a phrase begotten by Frank Luntz, the right-wing propaganda guru, on the ghost of Ayn Rand. The rich deserve our gratitude as well as everything they have, in other words, and all the rest is envy.
First of all, if entrepreneurs are job creators, workers are wealth creators. Entrepreneurs use wealth to create jobs for workers. Workers use labor to create wealth for entrepreneurs — the excess productivity, over and above wages and other compensation, that goes to corporate profits. It’s neither party’s goal to benefit the other, but that’s what happens nonetheless.[...]
Most important, neither entrepreneurs nor the rich have a monopoly on brains, sweat or risk. There are scientists — and artists and scholars — who are just as smart as any entrepreneur, only they are interested in different rewards. A single mother holding down a job and putting herself through community college works just as hard as any hedge fund manager. A person who takes out a mortgage — or a student loan, or who conceives a child — on the strength of a job she knows she could lose at any moment (thanks, perhaps, to one of those job creators) assumes as much risk as someone who starts a business.
From Dionne’s latest column, just posted to our homepage:
Recently, a group called the Freedom from Religion Foundation ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post cast as an “open letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics.” Its headline commanded: “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church.”
The ad included the usual criticism of Catholicism, but I was most struck by this paragraph: “If you think you can change the church from within — get it to lighten up on birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, embryonic stem-cell research — you’re deluding yourself. By remaining a ‘good Catholic,’ you are doing ‘bad’ to women’s rights. You are an enabler. And it’s got to stop.”
My, my. Putting aside the group’s love for unnecessary quotation marks, it was shocking to learn that I’m an “enabler” doing “bad” to women’s rights. But Catholic liberals get used to these kinds of things. Secularists, who never liked Catholicism in the first place, want us to leave the church, but so do Catholic conservatives who want the church all to themselves.
I’m sorry to inform the FFRF that I am declining its invitation to quit. They may not see the Gospel as a liberating document, but I do, and I can’t ignore the good done in the name of Christ by the sisters, priests, brothers and laypeople who have devoted their lives to the poor and the marginalized.
And on women’s rights, I take as my guide that early feminist, Pope John XXIII. In Pacem in Terris, his encyclical issued in 1963, the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” Pope John spoke of women’s “natural dignity.”
Read the whole thing right here.
Yes, he does. If you want him to, he’ll keep insulting you the whole hour. Just go to the entertaining “Lutheran Insulter” site, and choose to be insulted as many times as you want. It’s modeled on the popular “Shakespearean Insulter,” also worth a visit.
"You are spiritual scarecrows."
I have been impressed with Luther’s deftness, not only with well-developed, sarcastic insults, such as
Behold, indeed, this little golden work of a golden teacher! It is a work most worthy of golden letters, and lest there be something about it which is not golden, it must be handed down by golden disciples, namely, by those about whom it is said, “The idols of the nations are silver and gold. They have eyes, but they see not.”
but also with the short and smooth style, whose meaning takes a moment to settle, such as:
There you are, like butter in sunshine.
Some of his insults are timeless and apply well to diverse occasions:
Perhaps you want me to die of unrelieved boredom while you keep on talking.
My only complaint: I would love the site in German, so that we can feel the full effect of his repudiation with its original timbre.
So go forth and relish your insults, lest Luther say to you:
My soul, like Ezekiel’s, is nauseated at eating your bread covered with human dung. Do you know what this means?
No, Luther, we don’t! But we like it! May we have another?
Andrew Sullivan published an astonishing memo, dated 5/11/12, from GOP pollster Jan van Lohuizen, who was W’s pollster in 2004, and is generally connected to the GOP establishment. He recommends an about-face on gay issues. Here are some of his talking points:
1. “People who believe in equality under the law as a fundamental principle, as I do, will agree that this principle extends to gay and lesbian couples; gay and lesbian couples should not face discrimination and their relationship should be protected under the law. People who disagree on the fundamental nature of marriage can agree, at the same time, that gays and lesbians should receive essential rights and protections such as hospital visitation, adoption rights, and health and death benefits.”
2. “As more people have become aware of friends and family members who are gay, attitudes have begun to shift at an accelerated pace. This is not about a generational shift in attitudes, this is about people changing their thinking as they recognize their friends and family members who are gay or lesbian.”
3. “As people who promote personal responsibility, family values, commitment and stability, and emphasize freedom and limited government we have to recognize that freedom means freedom for everyone. This includes the freedom to decide how you live and to enter into relationships of your choosing, the freedom to live without excessive interference of the regulatory force of government.”
I wonder if some version of this insight informed Mitt Romney’s lukewarm response to the Obama affirmation of same-sex marriage rights. Instead of hitting back with fire and brimstone, he seemed pretty desultory in response. This from Garrett Quinn at Boston.com: “Not only did Romney answer that question with no passion but he repeatedly called his position on the issue ‘his preference’.”
But over at the USCCB, where same-sex civil unions (much less civil marriage!) are declared to be “a multifaceted threat to the very fabric of society,” well, what happens now? I imagine the GOP will throw its bishop-buddies under the bus. The bishops have devoted a huge amount of energy and cash–many dozens of millions of dollars, at a time when they’re closing schools and parishes apace–to shoring up a natural law argument that reduces marriage to a matter of procreation. The standard slander from right-wing apologists is that marriage is either about procreation or it’s a matter of mere romance, utterly disregarding the deeper human values of commitment, responsibility, enduring love “for better and for worse,” and all the other non-whimsical values that a marriage at its best can embody.
Gee, let’s see: when the bishops’ “religious liberty” initiative was seen for what it was–an attack on contraception that appeared to lots of folks to be an attack on women, the GOP got suddenly quiet. We’ll see how many high-ranking republicans stand next to bishops in their “Fortnight of Freedom.” And the public credibility of the USCCB takes another blow.
Just for kicks, I explored a case that’s not exactly parallel, but not far off. Bob Jones University ended its ban on interracial dating in 2000, after a political hubbub when then-Pres. Bush visited the school and was roundly attacked by other Republicans, notably John McCain. Here’s what Bob Jones III said at the time: “We’re being defined as a racist school. Thats all the media is talking about, he said….We realize that an interracial marriage is not going to bring in the world of antichrist by any means.”
The USCCB would do well to be careful to think of how its crusade against same-sex marriage is making the Church look to outsiders, and, sadly for many of us, to insiders.
If you know a teenage boy, or have ever been around a group of teenage boys in school, mall, or church, you’ve probably smelled Axe Body Spray. You’ve probably wrinkled your nose, and moved back a step or two. And moved on.
But as this article shows, the phenomenon might be worth more than a thought or two. It’s kind of terrifying, actually.
In the current configuration of Catholic discussions, sexual morality and the morality of capitalism are often thought to be on two different sides of things. But the hallmark of our capitalist society is the generation and manipulation of desires to make money for other people.And there is no desire more powerful, or more subject to manipulation, than sexual desire, except maybe for food. It seems to me that one thing Christianity has a lot to say about is how to think about human desires. And some of that might be helpful in thinking about advertising and capitalism. Manipulating others’ desires to make money ought to be very suspect to both liberal and conservative Catholics. Shouldn’t it?
It’s easy to think, oh, well, that’s just teenagers. They will grow out of it. But if you bought yourself a new iPad without quite knowing why, when your old iPad was still perfectly good (cough, cough, adsum), you might want to consider the problem.
Maybe the relationship of desire, advertising, and ethics would be a conference that First Things and Commonweal could cooperate in putting together. What do you think?
The fourth volume of Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson has appeared to rapturous reviews. Garry Wills joins the chorus in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. Here’s how Wills begins:
Robert Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon Johnson—this is the fourth volume of a planned five—was originally conceived and has been largely executed as a study of power. But this volume has been overtaken by a more pressing theme. It is a study in hate. The book’s impressive architectonics come from the way everything is structured around two poles or pillars—Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, radiating reciprocal hostilities at every step of the story.
Wills gives this stunning reading of Bobby bounding on to Air Force One when it landed in Washington carrying the body of his dead brother and the all too quick Lyndon Johnson: Read the rest of this entry »
Of course and obviously this thing was rotten all the way through. Maciel could never have gotten away with what he got away with without a network of co-conspirators and enablers.
Here’s what worries me:Where did all the ex LC or RC people go, after erasing the letters “L.C.”or “R.C.” after their names?
I assume former L.C. priests are being folded into dioceses all over the country. What processes are used to make sure that they haven’t been warped by the intense formation of a corrupt order? What notification is given to the faithful that they may be dealing with someone whose formation was marked so thoroughly by Maciel’s perverted (and ultimately, diabolical) vision?
Note well: What the Legion and RC did so well is LOOK GOOD. They seemed holy, they seemed attractive. They came out of central casting. Maybe we should take Jesus’s injunction about praying in private as a cautionary sign: we ought to be suspicious of those who try too hard to be SEEN as holy.
And they were enabled by self-proclaimed “good Catholics” who wanted always to give this group the “benefit of the doubt,” casting personal aspersion on those who had the courage to speak out.
God help them–and all of us.
Perhaps the bishops ought to talk to Wednesday Addams about those cookies.
The USCCB, not content with making sure that the LCWR is firmly under the thumb of male authority, is setting its sights on another insidious female-run organization: the Girl Scouts.
David Crary reports.
The new inquiry will be conducted by the bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. It will look into the Scouts’ “possible problematic relationships with other organizations” and various “problematic” program materials, according to a letter sent by the committee chairman, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne, Ind., to his fellow bishops.
And they’re guilty by association with some pretty unsavory characters: Read the rest of this entry »
This morning, Thomas Reese, SJ, delivered a keynote address at the conference Clergy Abuse: Ten Years Later, sponsored by Santa Clara University. In his talk, Reese described the “unfinished work in responding to the sexual-abuse crisis.” Some highlights (you can read the whole talk at the bottom of this post):
First, I think the church—and by church I mean both the clergy and the people of God—needs to re-envision its attitude toward the survivors of sexual abuse. In Latin America, liberation theologians developed the concept of the preferential option for the poor. The American Catholic Church needs to embrace a preferential option for the survivors of sexual abuse.
[...]
Second, we need a better system for investigating accusations of sexual abuse. Obviously, all accusations must be reported to the police, but if the statute of limitations precludes prosecution, the police will not investigate. Or the prosecutor may judge there is insufficient evidence to prosecute. Under these circumstances, the church still has an obligation to investigate and determine whether a priest is guilty or innocent, whether he must be permanently removed from ministry or returned to ministry. The charter calls for an investigation of the allegations, but there is no standard operating procedure.
That became painfully clear in February 2011, when a Philadelphia grand jury found “substantial evidence” that thirty-seven priests — all in active ministry at the time — had abused. As the chair of the archdiocesan review board wrote in Commonweal:
The board had reviewed just ten cases involving the thirty-seven priests. None of the evidence we saw concerning the ten led us to conclude they had sexually abused minors. But until the grand-jury report came out, the board was under the impression that we were reviewing every abuse allegation received by the archdiocese. Instead, we had been advised only about allegations previously determined by archdiocesan officials to have involved the sexual abuse of a minor—a determination we had been under the impression was ours to make.
The trial of Monsignor William Lynn on charges of child endangerment for allegedly permitting predatory priests to continue in ministry took an interesting turn today with the testimony of a sister who said Lynn could’ve removed an abusive priest if he really wanted to.
The sister, not named in news accounts because she was herself a sexual-abuse victim as a girl, challenged Monsignor Lynn’s defense, which is based on the assertion that he didn’t have authority to remove a priest from his job.
The sister said Lynn, who was secretary of the Office of Clergy in the Philadelphia archdiocese, had the power to at least suggest removing a miscreant priest, and that given his position, the archbishop would have likely signed off. And besides, she said, there was another choice: “You can also say, ‘I cannot do this.’ … You can walk away.”
That’s the line that grabbed my attention. Leaving aside the legal issues – and I don’t think “following orders” is a good defense to rely on – it raises the moral issue of duty to one’s conscience.
As journalist Ralph Cipriano wrote in a blog post, “It was a simple, but powerful declaration coming from a nun who herself was an administrator down at archdiocese HQ.”
There has been a great deal of discussion in the church lately about freedom of conscience and use of civil disobedience to oppose unjust government regulation. Perhaps this testimony in the Lynn trial can further discussion about how freedom of conscience applies within the church – when it is appropriate or even required to disobey in conscience.
This new poll has some interesting data on how different religious groups are viewing the presidential election. Here’s the summary (HT TPM):
White evangelical voters strongly support Romney over Obama (68%vs. 19%). Catholic voters overall say that they would be more likely to vote for Obama than Romney (46% to 39%), although white Catholic voters favor Romney over Obama by a significant margin (48% to 37%). Obama has an advantage over Romney among white mainline Protestant voters (50% vs. 37%) and religiously unaffiliated voters (57% vs. 22%).
I assume that the Obama lean among Catholics is largely due to the turn away from the Republican party by Latino voters.
The Spring issue of Notre Dame’s new online journal, “Church Life: A Journal for the New Evangelization” is now available here. Aside from regular contributors like John Cavadini, Larry Cunningham, and Virgilio Elizondo, it has some fine articles on the place of art and film in Christian discernment and formation.
One article that I found particularly suggestive and apt in this Easter Season is by Michael Heintz, who is the Rector of Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in South Bend and teaches in Notre Dame’s Department of Theology. In his article “Jesus: Sage or Sacrifice,” Heintz writes:
Jesus does not come to tell us “about” God. He comes to show us God, God-in-action, as it were, the life-giving and dynamic relationship which the Incarnate Son shares with his Father; an eternal relationship whose Love has been termed in the Tradition their Holy Spirit; a life of self-emptying love into which he invites those who follow him to share, but to do so only by losing or forgetting themselves.
And this share, of course, has a significant cost. “Are you not aware,” Paul had rather sternly to remind the Romans, “that you who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” The life of Christians is not fundamentally a morality (though, of course, it is indeed this too), but a personal and corporate configuration into a real, living Person: Jesus, the Crucified and Risen One. This configuration to Jesus, begun in baptism, is expressed fully in Eucharistic communion, where our share in his dying and rising, which Paul tells us we somehow carry about in our own bodies, is made both tangible and personal.
