David Ignatius has a column in the WashPost (Feb. 2) that lays out various scenarios for attacks-no attacks on Iran. He quotes Defense Secretary Panetta predicting an Israeli attack on Iran in the late Spring. There’s a strong note that they’d have to do it on their own, but….

A lot of leaking is going on including by Ignatius. So what is going on? Campaign season? Republican fodder for attacking Obama? Mere saber rattling? Preparing the U.S. for war?

UPDATE: Leslie Gelb, former Times reporter and former president of the Council on Foreign Relations ends a  piece on upping the diplomacy with this: “And here we Americans are in a presidential election year. At these times, the straps of restraint on tough talk and tough action are almost always loosened. That’s especially true when Democrats hold the White House—Democrats who are quadrennially scared stupid by the prospect of Republicans accusing them of being lily-livered liberals and selling out the nation’s security. I’d like to see President Obama show the courage of offering a solid peace proposal instead of just drawing chest-thumping red lines. Meantime, he doesn’t have to withdraw any sanctions or any “red lines.” Just cut the usual diplomatic and political baloney, and try. With so much pressure now being applied on Iran, it might work. In the midst of a barrage of economic and military pressures, it is not a sign of weakness or lack of resolve to offer peace. It is classic negotiating from strength.”  Daily Beast

The second phase of the unfolding of Vatican II was the Preparatory Period which ran from November 1960 through to the very eve of the Council’s opening on October 11,1962. During it ten commissions prepared texts for discussion and approval when the fathers assembled in St. Peter’s for the Council proper. It was also the period when the rules for the conciliar deliberations and decisions were drawn up.

I have discussed the preparation of the Council in a long chapter in the first volume of the five-volume History of Vatican II, under the title, “The Struggle for the Council during the Preparation of Vatican II (1960-1962).” My title indicates that in the course of the preparation distinct and even contrasting views of what the Council should do and should say became clear and, after revealing themselves here and there in the work of the commissions, openly confronted one another during meetings of the Central Preparatory Commission which had the task of supervising the preparatory work, of reviewing the documents prepared by the various commissions, of recommending emendations, and of judging whether the texts should be submitted to Pope John XXIII for his approval as an agenda for the Council.

Although the preparatory commissions had been encouraged to form joint subcommissions to deal with matters that fell under the competence of more than one commission, not much collaborative work was undertaken. The Preparatory Theological Commission (PTC) in particular resisted the idea that it had to collaborate with other commissions, particularly not with the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity (SPCU) which the PTC dismissed as a mere “information-bureau” for non-Catholic bodies. The PTC reserved all doctrinal matters to its exclusive competence and pledged, in turn, not to involve itself in practical matters. Only the preparatory Liturgical Commission and the SPCU refused this separation and did not hesitate to engage the doctrinal issues that underlay their work.

You can find here several texts that illustrate contrasting views of what the Council should do and say that became clear as the preparatory commissions went about their work.

The plan for the Council drawn up by the Holy Office;

The questions proposed to the preparatory commissions;

Four brief outlines of documents to be written by the PTC;

Fr. Yves Congar’s counter-proposal for a conciliar agenda;

An unpublished paper of mine on the initial work of the PTC;

An essay of mine originally published as “The Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and the Preparation of Vatican II,” Centro pro Unione Semi-annual Bulletin, 50 (Fall 1996) 11-17.

The great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska died yesterday in Krakow. Here’s a poem from her 1976 collection, A Large Number:

IN PRAISE OF FEELING BAD ABOUT YOURSELF

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they’re light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.

This commentary from CNN.com is the latest I’ve seen to ask  whether Barack Obama is in the process of losing the Catholic vote. I think there is something to it.

His administration’s decision requiring Catholic institutions to pay for contraceptives through employee health insurance plans is reverberating in Catholic circles. It’s disturbing to many Catholics, regardless of whether they accept or disagree with church teachings on birth control.

The bishops have responded by encouraging a nationwide campaign of grassroots opposition to the health insurance mandate, framing it as a First Amendment issue. To the extent it comes from the grassroots rather than top-down, I think it’s effective.

From pulpits, in parish bulletins and letters to Congress,  the Obama administration’s decision is being assailed by Catholics, probably in your neighborhood. You don’t have to be versed in the writings of Saul Alinksy to realize that this could be politically damaging to Obama, especially in the swing states that have large Catholic populations.

There is a risk for the bishops: Many a Catholic has walked away from the church after being turned off by the political partisanship of not a few bishops. But as head of the U.S. bishops’ conference, Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan may be seeing to it that some of the blunders of the past are avoided.

One more point: Mitt Romney showed a strong ability to win over Catholics in the Florida primary. He picked up 56 percent of Catholic votes, significantly better than the 46 percent he received overall, according to exit polls analyzed by Pew Research Center. Two candidates who have made much of being Catholic – Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum – fared poorly in attracting Catholic votes.

Romney still lacked strength among evangelical Christian voters. If that continues to be the case, he’ll need the Catholic votes all the more.

Mitt Romney’s latest fit of cluelessness:

A few points.

First, what makes this sound so bad is not just the sentence I quote in the title of this post. It’s the combination of this sentence and the one before it. “By the way, I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned with the very poor.” The suggestion, surely unintended, is that the poor are not really Americans — or are, at any rate, less American. They are exotic creatures, for whom real Americans must make some minimal provision — hence the next sentences: “We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.”

Second, Romney seems to think that the problem of unemployment and the problem of poverty are separate ones: “My campaign is focused on middle-income Americans. You can choose where to focus. You can focus on the rich — that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor — that’s not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans: retirees living on social security, people who can’t find work, folks that have kids that are getting ready to go to college.” The suggestion, surely unintended, is that the very poor are not people who can’t find work, but are people who are unwilling or unfit to work. Romney is also implying that when middle-income Americans lose their jobs, they remain middle-income instead of becoming poor. Of course he knows this isn’t necessarily the way it works, but he can speak this way because he himself is not “middle-income”: he comes from a class in which people can lose their income and remain quite comfortable because of their wealth. Most middle-income people don’t have a lot of wealth; they run out of money not long after their paychecks stop arriving. And then they’re poor, even very poor. (Romney could have saved himself some trouble by using the word “middle-class” instead of “middle-income,” but conservatives aren’t supposed to believe in class.)

Third, the conservative response to Romney’s gaffe is telling. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t fault him for saying he’s not concerned with the very poor. (Who hasn’t lapsed into imprudent candor from time to time?) No, Limbaugh’s upset because Romney said he’d fix the safety net if it needed fixing, when he should have said he’d tear it up and get the government out of the way so the poor could find jobs. But Romney’s conservative critics shouldn’t worry too much. After all, Romney had nice things to say about Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which would shrink the safety net considerably. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it” is a wonderful Romneyism. The unabridged version of this statement is: “If it needs repair — and I’m not saying it does — I’ll fix it.”

Finally and most obviously, very poor Americans don’t vote as much as middle-income Americans.

This bit of news has been bouncing around the Interwebs for a few days, and justifiably so, if you have a sense of history: two grandsons of President John Tyler, 10th president of the United States, born in 1790, are still alive.

It is not quite Abraham and Sarah territory, and it makes sense once you break it down: President Tyler had a son in 1853 when he was 63, and that son (and his wife, ahem) had sons when he was 71, in 1924, and four years later at 75. Both of those men are still living, and doing fine, according to New York magazine’s interview with Harrison Ruffin Tyler.

But this story still gives me that enjoyable frisson of historical proximity, that sense of the intervening years collapsing the mind’s eye. I am easy in this regard: I get that charge from walking a 2,000-year-old Roman road, or viewing the relic of a saint.

I wonder if this sensibility didn’t come from sitting at my grandmother’s knee and listening to her recall stories that her own father would tell of fighting in the Civil War (for the North — phew). She’d pull out his letters, and souvenirs, like old mini balls, some of which wounded him. (He lost his leg three days before Appomattox.) It seemed so immediate, so close, and was, though I’m not sure everyone shares that view. (Not with today’s media-induced amnesia.)

My great-grandfather was born in 1841 — the year Tyler became president — and he had two sons with his first wife, who died, then a daughter in 1888, my grandmother, with his second wife, who survived him. (He worked in the customs house here in Brooklyn, and spent a year in Havana after the Spanish-American War.)

My grandmother then had four children, and along came my mother at 45, a “change-of-life” baby, as they apparently said then. Hence my relatively few degrees of separation from the nineteenth century. But we got nothing on the Tyler dynasty.

Michael Klare has a brief and terrifying analysis (one of his sub-heads, “Every option on every table”) of the Straits of Hormuz, the world’s favorite choke point. On the alarmist side of the discussion, but well worth thinking about. Here: Tomgram

The topic came up twice during today’s White House press briefing — first at minute 14:37 and again at minute 25:45 (transcript below):

Q Second topic — the Catholic Church. It was a pretty extraordinary situation on Sunday in parishes all across the country, individual priests were reading letters from their bishops in that particular parish that were pretty much denouncing the Obama administration about these provisions dealing with contraception, Catholic hospitals and whatnot in connection with the Affordable Care Act. I guess my question would be, how does the administration justify having the federal government institute a law that basically forces people to violate their religious beliefs?

MR. CARNEY: Well, that misrepresents actually what the –

Q How so? Read the rest of this entry »

There’s much to leave you gobsmacked in the news about the bookkeeper accused of defrauding the Archdiocese of New York to the tune of $1 million. She had done it twice before! She was still on probation from the last arrest when she was hired by the archdiocese to work in accounts payable! She spent it on designer dolls! From Sharon Otterman and Russ Buettner’s story in the New York Times:

When Ms. Collins was hired by the archdiocese in June 2003, it did not perform criminal background checks on prospective employees, as it does now, Mr. Zwilling said. So church officials were unaware until recently that she had been convicted of grand larceny in one case and had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in another.

Those criminal background checks pay off in more than one area, apparently.

[Archdiocesan spokesperson Joseph] Zwilling said the scheme diverted money “designated for the purpose of helping to provide Catholic education.” The archdiocese has been closing churches and schools for lack of money, and asking for more than $15 million in an annual charity appeal.

“We are continually reviewing how money is handled, our financial controls,” Mr. Zwilling said, “because we want to be good stewards of the money entrusted to us.”

That is the part that lingers, at least for me, when I get past the sensationalistic, sad details of the crime. I’ve trusted the archdiocese with my donations — more so since Cardinal-designate Dolan started releasing an annual account of how those donations are used. And, of course, like any other Catholic, I depend on services those funds support. This revelation has to give a prospective donor pause. Imagine the possibilities for promoting next year’s Stewardship Appeal: “Give! We are no longer employing convicted embezzlers in our business office.”

Honestly, the official statement from Joseph Zwilling doesn’t do a whole lot better. No “We deeply regret…” or anything like it, and it ends, “Sadly, there will always be individuals who seek to exploit and circumvent whatever system is established, but we will remain vigilant in our oversight.” Yes, fraudsters we will always have with us — but while we can’t prepare for every thief that comes in the night, maybe vigilance requires doing a better job of not hiring those who’ve already got a rap sheet?

I missed this story last December, but perhaps many of you did too.  The advocacy group Catholics United, who had in October taken the phrase “idolatry of the market” to heart and manufactured a “golden calf” to resemble the famous Wall St. bull, brought the golden bull to Washington.

Their application of the term “idolatry” to some mechanisms of a disordered market was not new (e.g., Blessed John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, no. 40), but the prophetic action with a symbolic idol was certainly innovative.  After the group took the golden bull to Wall St. last October, they processed it to Speaker Boehner’s office, along with a petition in support of a financial transaction tax (H.R. 3313). They presented the petition to an aide.

I confess not knowing enough at this time about the bill to know exactly how it would affect the financial sector.  But as a biblical scholar, I have to admire the tactics.  Ezekiel would be so proud.

Imagine a large institution that provides free meals to the poor, and imagine that the institution is run by Jains, who are vegetarians. None of the meals offered by this institution include meat, though many of the people to whom the meals are offered are neither Jains nor non-Jainist vegetarians. Now imagine that the federal government (never mind under which agency) issues a rule that requires any organization that offers the poor free meals to include meat on its menu, with the single exception of religious organizations that offer only coreligionists free meals. In the statement announcing the new requirement, the government points out that most people do eat meat, and that most doctors believe meat is good for you in the right amounts, since it provides important nutrients that are difficult to find in other foods. The statement does not mention that most people find the Jains’ arguments against eating meat bizarre and irrelevant (it doesn’t need to). Like other vegetarians, Jains are eager to point out that it ’s possible, though more difficult, to get the proteins meat provides from other foods, and that eating meat involves other health risks. Defenders of the new rule insist the government is being asked to indulge a sectarian scruple at the expense of public health.

Now, does one have to believe it’s wrong to eat meat — for the reasons adduced by Jains or for any other reason — to believe that the government should not force Jainist soup kitchens to offer it? I don’t think so. I don’t agree with Jains about vegetarianism (though I do think there are formidable moral arguments against eating meat), just I am not persuaded by the reasons offered by my own church for its teaching about contraception (though I think there are formidable non-moral arguments against the pill). But I also don’t believe it’s the federal government’s job to decide whether Jainism’s arguments for vegetarianism or the Catholic Church’s arguments against artificial contraception are worthy of respect or accommodation. Nor does it matter how small a part of the general population is vegetarian, or even how many Jains quietly ignore their religious community’s doctrine. (Let us stipulate, for the sake of this imperfect analogy, that Jainism teaches not only that Jains shouldn’t eat meat, but also that it is wrong for them to be complicit in the meat-eating of other people; perhaps it doesn’t.)

If the only permissible expressions of religious freedom are those that do not conflict with the surrounding secular culture, then religious freedom is an empty phrase. If religious freedom means only that everyone is free to have different religious reasons for doing what the state expects everyone to do anyway, whatever they believe — or if it means only that one may worship a god of one’s choosing however one likes so long as one serves one’s chosen deity in a way that neatly corresponds to the priorities of the state — then the principle of religious freedom is no more than decorative.

By not serving meat, the Jainist soup kitchen isn’t forcing anyone to become vegetarian, or withholding something to which the people they serve have a right. The right to eat meat does not entail the right to be served meat by Jains. The Jains’ willingness to serve hungry people food that will keep them alive and healthy does not oblige them to serve them every food approved by nutritionists, even if the nutritionists are confident that the people the Jains serve would be healthier at less expense if the Jains expanded their menu. If the government thinks the free provision of meat is an urgent public good, the government must arrange for that provision itself, and not simply mandate that other institutions provide it (or provide nothing).

Long ago Americans decided that education was something that all children in this country were entitled to, whether their parents could afford to pay for it or not, and so we created a public-school system. Call it the default public option for education. The government also regulates private schools, but it does not insist that they have exactly the same curriculum as public schools; it doesn’t need to, precisely because public schools are available to everyone.

If we are going to speak of health care as something to which all are entitled, no matter how much money they have (and I believe we should speak of it this way), then we need to make sure a default public option for health care is available to everyone. This option could cover whatever the government believes health insurance ought to cover — including, perhaps, some things that certain religions disapprove of. People could still get private insurance that covered a little less or a lot more, just as people can still send their children to private schools. But the government would no longer be in the awkward position of demanding that other institutions offer some public good only on the government’s terms while failing to provide this good itself.

I’m spending my sabbatical in New Delhi, where my wife is working on a  Fulbright project.  While here, I’ve been attending mass at St. Alphonsa Church, in Vasant Kunj, a neighborhood on the southern edge of New Delhi, very close to the airport.  It’s a large, beautiful new church, named after India’s first Indian-origin saint, St. Alphonsa Muttathupadathu, who was canonized in 2008.  Appropriately enough, given the church’s name, the Catholic church here feels genuinely Indian, although it lacks some of the more Hindu sensibilities I noticed when I visited Goa many years ago, where Catholic culture seems even more fully integrated into the landscape.

Since English is one of the principal languages in India, the Delhi Archdiocese is also dealing with the new missal.  They rolled it out on the Epiphany, which also happened to be the weekend I arrived in India. The archdiocese had printed out very nice cards to go in the pews, similar to the ones we had used back in Trumansburg, to help people learn the new responses.

The confusion the first week was palpable, and a little worse than at home perhaps because English is typically a second language here and because the priest did not offer much by way of explanation for the changes.   Read the rest of this entry »

We just posted E. J. Dionne’s latest column, in which he takes issue with Obama’s decision to force certain religious institutions to pay for employee health plans that include contraception coverage:

One of Barack Obama’s great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health-care law.

His administration mishandled this decision not once but twice. In the process, Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus, strengthened the very forces inside the church that sought to derail the health-care law, and created unnecessary problems for himself in the 2012 election.

This might not have mattered if Obama had presented himself as a pure secular liberal. Before he was elected and after, he held himself to a more inclusive standard, reassuring many religious moderates.

Read the rest right here.

Update: New York Times tries to write an editorial applauding the HHS ruling, ends up writing about abortion instead.

And Martin Marty asks if we can have a do-over in this controversy.

And Cokie Roberts weighs in here (about 3 minutes in):

One of the first steps in the preparation of Vatican II was the Vatican’s soliciting of recommendations for the conciliar agenda from the world’s bishops, from the heads of clerical religious orders, from Catholic universities and faculties, and from the offices of the Roman Curia.

I published two articles on the responses of the U.S. bishops, first a lengthy one published as “U.S. Bishops’ Suggestions for Vatican II,” Cristianesimo nella Storia 15 (1994) 313-71, and then in summary form in Commonweal under the title “What They Said Before the Council: How the U.S. Bishops Envisioned Vatican II,” Commoweal 117 (1990) 714-17. I have made them both available here.

The “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” (the smallest state with the longest name), the “Ocean State” (I think they got that by arguing that the state has the highest percentage of coastline per square mile) is a bundle of contradictions on the question of religion.

On the one hand, the state was founded by religious free thinkers, who did not feel bound by the Puritan orthodoxy in CT and MA. The first synagogue in the US is in Newport. On the other hand, the state is now heavily Catholic–the most Catholic state in the union. But, as Bishop Tobin knows, that does not mean RI Catholics “Pay, Pray, and Obey.” I tend to think of RI Catholics (it’s my home state) as Roger Williams Catholics.

At any rate, I was sad to see this scuffle arise in Cranston. Whatever you think of her cause, it’s hard to deny that the young woman has a tremendous amount of courage–and she lost her faith for reasons that are the hardest to address existentially if not theoretically–the problem of suffering.

In a letter to the Catholics of the Diocese of Phoenix, Bishop Thomas Olmsted promises not to obey the “unjust law” requiring certain Catholic institutions to include contraception coverage in their employee health-care plans. “Unless the rule is overturned,” Olmsted writes, “we Catholics will be compelled either to violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer penalties for doing so). The administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.” Olmsted closes by calling on Catholics to “commit ourselves to prayer and fasting that wisdom and justice may prevail” — and to contact their elected representatives “in support of legislation that would reverse the administration’s decision.” (Read the whole letter here.)

Update: The letter, according to USCCB spokeswoman Sr. Mary Ann Walsh, is part of a coordinated effort to inform Catholics about the bishops’ opposition to the mandate. The bishops conference “provided a template [letter],” Walsh told me, “at the request of several bishops.” (Of course, each bishop is free to adapt the letter, or not issue one at all.) Is it the policy of the USCCB to engage in civil disobedience when the contraception mandate goes into effect next year? “At present, no decision on strategy has been reached,” Walsh said.

Olmsted fails to mention that some Catholic institutions are exempt from the mandate — the parishes where his letter will be read, for example. He also asserts that the HHS ruling forces Catholic organizations to pay for “abortion-inducing drugs” — that is, the so-called morning-after pill. That talking point has been made by several critics of the ruling, including Archbishop Dolan, who calls them “abortion drugs.” Is it true? Do morning-after pills really cause abortions? As William Saletan and Ross Douthat have pointed out, while Plan B could theoretically cause an abortion, there is no evidence that it does (here’s one study showing it does not).

This debate isn’t going to get any easier. But it might get less confusing if those involved lowered the rhetorical heat in favor of dealing in actual facts.

Update: Bishop Jenky of Peoria gets into the act. And Archbishop Aymond of New Orleans offers his more measured response. And Bishop Zubik of Pittsburgh offers his less measured response. And Bishop Sheehan of Santa Fe weighs in, sounding a lot like Olmsted (almost word for word), and revealing that Archbishop Dolan has asked “all bishops to address this issue locally.”

For those able and willing to follow this contentious subject, Glenn Greenwald has an account of the most recent flare up:

“Also strictly prohibited, according to the ADL, is “minimizing or rationalizing the Iranian threat.” This means that not only are the American intelligence agencies which produced the 2007 and 2010 NIEs guilty of anti-Semitism, as are Israeli officials who believe Iran “has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon,” but so too is Tamir Pardo, the current chief of the Israeli Mossad, who recently rejected the claim that Iranian nuclear weapons would pose an existential threat to Israel; ex-Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy (“[Iran is] far from posing an existential threat to Israel“; instead, domestic radicalization in Israel “poses a bigger risk than Ahmadinejad” because “ultra-Orthodox extremism has darkened our lives”; he added: “The State of Israel cannot be destroyed. An attack on Iran could affect not only Israel, but the entire region for 100 years”); ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan (“a future Israel Air Force attack on Iranian nuclear facilities was ‘the stupidest thing I have ever heard”); and Israeli Defense Minister Barak (“Iran does not constitute an existential threat against Israel”).

“But remember: as an American citizen whose country may be involved directly or indirectly in a war with Iran, you are not allowed to express any opinions that constitute “minimizing or rationalizing the Iranian threat.” You’re presumably also not allowed to question the wisdom and justness of sanctions against Iran even though their principal Congressional sponsor has acknowledged, proudly, that they will “take the food out of the mouths of the citizens.” If you do question any of that, then you are an anti-Semite, pronounces the ADL.”

Whole analysis here: Greenwald at Salon.

As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, it might be helpful to keep in mind developments after Pope John’s announcement of an ecumenical council on January 25, 1958. In my files I have a number of essays that provide some background, and I am making them available on my blog here. There may  be more detail than many feel is necessary, but others may find them illuminating.

The first discusses proposals for a council that were briefly entertained during the reigns of Popes Pius XI and Pius XII.

The second discusses where Pope John may have gotten the idea of a council.

The third discusses initial reactions to the announcement of a council, both in Rome and elsewhere.

The fourth describes some features of the first stage of the whole conciliar event, the antepreparatory period that ran from May 1959 to November 1960 when the preparatory period began.

The fifth are the simple notes I distributed to undergraduates and expanded on in a lecture on the movements of renewal in the Catholic Church earlier in the twentieth century, which made the Council possible.

Finally, there is a very brief outline of the principal dates and events from the announcement of the Council to its conclusion.

I have now added here two other essays on the more remote background to the Council.

From the report on East Haven, CT, Mayor Joseph Maturo’s self-inflicted troubles in today’s New York Times:

Asked what he was doing for the Latino community in light of the indictments and accusation of harassment, illegal searches and seizures and assaults on Latinos, Mr. Maturo responded on camera: “I might have tacos when I go home. I’m not sure yet.”

Facing a blizzard of criticism — Gov. Dannel P. Malloy called his comments “repugnant” and said they represented “either a horrible lack of judgment or worse” — Mr. Maturo apologized, at first grudgingly and then with a long statement offering his “sincerest apologies” for what he called an “insensitive and off-collar comment.”

It’s not the most important part of this story, not by a long shot, but what I want to look at for the moment is the mayor’s coinage in that final quote. “Off-collar”! I’m always fascinated by the weird things people do with language and the ways the news media respond. In this case I could not find an original of the statement of apology, but I assume it was a written document and is rendered faithfully by the NYT, which does not remark on the novelty. The New Haven Register likewise let it stand; CNN silently changed it to “off-color”; the Hartford Courant added “[sic].” I think the Courant’s approach is the right one, and CNN made the wrong call. It’s not clear that “off-color” is what Maturo meant, or at least not all of what Maturo meant. I’m guessing “off-the-cuff” was the expression he really had in mind, but that, too, may not capture all of what he was trying to say. His remark was off-the-cuff, but that’s not what he needs to apologize for. And while it wasn’t “off-color,” it was offensive. So to say it was both spur-of-the-moment and wrong, Maturo comes up with a different part of the shirt — off-collar. The “refudiate” of 2012?

After a lecture Tuesday evening on “Law and the Gospel of Life” at Fordham Law School, I asked New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan about his reaction to President Obama’s decision on the contraception mandate — a decision which seemed to run decidedly counter to the impression Obama had left with the archbishop after their Oval Office meeting last November. From my RNS write-up:

“The president seemed very earnest [in November], he said he considered the protection of conscience sacred, that he didn’t want anything his administration would do to impede the work of the church that he claimed he held in high regard,” Dolan recalled on Tuesday. “So I did leave a little buoyant.”

That optimism ended last Friday, however, when Obama phoned Dolan to tell him that he was not expanding the conscience exemption to include religious institutions — such as Catholic hospitals, universities and social service agencies. In a bid to appease critics like Dolan, the White House gave church organizations an extra year to find a way to comply with the mandate that all health insurance plans provide free contraceptive coverage.

“I had to share with him that I was terribly let down, disappointed and disturbed, and it seemed the news he had given me was difficult to square with the confidence I had felt in November,” Dolan said.

Understandable, I think, given the grief Dolan could now face from bishops who want to take a harder line with the administration.

But not to worry! As my RNS colleague, Lauren Markoe reports, the White House yesterday honored Catholic teachers. All good. Right?

“Irony is the word of the day,” said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Ouch.

UPDATE: BTW, the nine educators (one of them a student and educator) got shafted as their stories and their cause got swamped by the political controversy. I have a blog post on them over at RNS.

“I will recover and return.”

Now up on the homepage is Unagidon’s reply to Hadley Arkes’s recent First Things article about the Affordable Care Act. According to Arkes, any law that forces all citizens to enter into a private contract is not only unconstitutional but also a violation of natural rights. Unagidon explains:

[Arkes argues] that the Affordable Care Act’s “individual mandate” will force people to enter into insurance contracts against their will, and that “imposing on people a contract that they do not want would be quite as wrong as dissolving, without their consent, a contract they had knowingly made.” How strong is this argument?By mandating that everyone buy health insurance (or pay some kind of penalty), the Affordable Care Act would seem to violate the principle that contracts must be entered into freely. The actual content of a contract is not supposed to have any bearing on this principle. What matters is only that the signer of a contract had the choice to take it or leave it.

But is the content—and the social context—of a contract really irrelevant when we are talking about natural law? Are current insurance contracts unencumbered in the way that Professor Arkes suggests?…

[T]o really get to the bottom of the health-care crisis—and to see what’s wrong with Arkes’s argument—you need to understand more than the dynamics of the market. You must also understand the social contract that underlies it. As it happens, this contract actually has a name. It’s called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), which was passed in 1986 under President Reagan. With that law, the nation decided that it wouldn’t allow health-care providers to toss indigent patients into the street. Hospitals have to treat anyone who comes to them, whether or not the patient can pay. Because of this law, there is no longer a neutral market space, of the kind imagined by Arkes, in which people can choose either to have health care or to forego it. Those who pretend to be taking their own chances by not buying insurance are really doing no such thing. If they show up at an Emergency Room before they are eligible for Medicare,  they will be subsidized by tax-payers and those with private insurance. In other words, EMTALA is—in addition to being a very humane piece of legislation—an unfunded mandate. If Arkes believes that hospitals should be allowed to deny care to sick and injured people without health insurance (or without enough money to pay for services out of pocket), he should say so outright, for this is one of the consequences of his argument about contracts. That hospitals cannot do this now is one of the things that makes health insurance different from all other forms of insurance.

No surprise, it’s by Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic:

Last week a record store in Dupont Circle announced that it was closing. The immediate cause of its demise—it had outlasted national and regional chains—was Price Check, Amazon’s new idea for exterminating competition. It is an app that allows shoppers to scan the bar code on any item in any store and transmit it to Amazon for purposes of comparison, and if it compares favorably to Amazon’s price, Amazon’s special promotion promises a discount on the same item. In this way shoppers become spies, and stores, merely by letting customers through their doors, become complicit in their own undoing. It will not do to shrug that this is capitalism, because it is a particular kind of capitalism: the kind that entertains fantasies of monopoly. For all its technological newness, Amazon’s “vision” is disgustingly familiar. (“Amazon is coming to eat me,” a small publisher of fine religious books stoically told me a few weeks ago.) Nor will it do to explain that Amazon’s app is convenient, unless one is prepared to acquiesce in a view of American existence according to which its supreme consideration must be convenience. How easy must every little thing be? A record store in your neighborhood is also convenient, and so is a bookstore. There is also a sinister side to the convenience of online shopping: hours once spent in the sensory world, in the diversified satisfaction of material needs and desires, can now be surrendered to work. It appears to be a law of American life that there shall be no respite from screens. And so Amazon’s practices raise the old question of the cultural consequences of market piggishness. For there are businesses that are not only businesses, that also have non-monetary reasons for being, that are public goods. Their devastation in the name of profit may be economically legitimate, but it is culturally calamitous. In a word, wrong.

Read the whole thing here.

David DeCosse in NCR offers this deft analysis of the reasoning underlying recent episcopal (and other) cries about infringements on religious liberty.

Money quote:

At present, the model of conscience used by most bishops is problematic in two ways. First, it emphasizes obedience, law, and hierarchical authority and thus departs from the Catholic tradition’s close linkage of conscience, practical reason, and freedom. Second, on account of this departure, these bishops needlessly lapse into using a sectarian model of the Catholic conscience ill-suited to the Church’s mission in a democratic pluralist society like the United States.

—

[T]he bishops have raised a hue and cry because they are defending the rights of conscience. But, for them, the conscience should be free to adhere to the truth of the universal moral law articulated by the hierarchical teaching office of the Church….But what about the freedom of conscience to adhere to a truth not identical with the moral law defined by the hierarchical authority of the Church? And what about the freedom to allow one’s practical reason to consult empirical data and a wide range of values in determining what conscience should do in a complex matter? Especially if that determination differs from one put forward by the bishops? The model of conscience favored by the bishops in the current disputes has little room for such obvious and significant scenarios.

And there’s lots more about a Thomistic understanding of conscience and the role of prudential reasoning. Too often these days Catholics are urged by Church leadership to ignore the breadth of our own tradition in favor of a narrower view. David reminds us otherwise.

So there I was in a spin (studio cycling) class. For those who don’t partake, spin is a form of group exercise in which participants on stationary bicycles are led through a series of “hills”–increasing the resistance on the pedals–and sprints, accompanied by music. The leader’s role is mainly to structure the class (”OK, we’re heading into an 8-minute hill, now, so let’s start on resistance level 5, at about 70-80 RPM!”) but also to exhort cyclists to do their best, to encourage the class, and to remind us of proper form. (”Relax your shoulders, now, and don’t rest your weight on the handlebars!”) The instructor is also cycling, and his/her sharing the workout and his/her visible fitness are inspiring as well. It’s a heck of a work-out.

I’ve done lots of spinning, but a recent class provided an interesting twist. We were down to our last three minutes, and the instructor said “OK, now I want you to think about the last time you told somebody a lie. This sprint is for that–ready, GO!” After the sprint she said, “OK, look, that’s way behind you. Now think about the last time you weren’t as nice to somebody as you should have been. 3-2-1, GO!” And then “OK, this last sprint is for yourself. Ready….GO!”

A number of things caught me about this sudden examination of conscience and penance during my work-out: Read the rest of this entry »

A harbinger of things to come? One of the largest Catholic health care systems in the country has relinquished its formal Catholic identity. I’ve talked to many people who think that the bishops can “make” a hospital be Catholic -or close them. But that’s not the legal reality, at least in most cases.  What will happen, in most cases, is some type of disaffiliation–the hospital will continue, in some form, although not an official “Catholic” facility.  It doesn’t affect tax exempt status, which most hospitals get through their not-for-profit charitable nature, not through their religious nature.

In a succinct, persuasive essay from 2004, E. J. Dionne argued “There Is No Catholic Vote—And It’s Important.” Dionne recounted this story of Al Smith with his campaign advisors in 1928: “Smith was attacked viciously in the nativist and anti-Catholic press. They had, among other things, quoted papal encyclicals, arguing that these pronouncements from Rome were quite inconsistent with American ideals. Smith is reported to have stared across the table at his aides and said: ‘Just tell me one thing: What is an encyclical?’”

I’ve been thinking of this story ever since the story broke of that invite-only evangelical meeting to anoint the appropriate presidential candidate. The 150 or so leaders met to hold a kind of consistory (with Texas substituting for the Vatican), complete with multiple ballots. They ultimately decided on Santorum, though not unanimously. And I keep imagining how this news would have resonated at a gathering of evangelicals who read Relevant and attend the Q events, or who follow the preaching of Joel Hunter, Tim Keller, and Samuel Rodriguez. Might they have said, “Just tell me one thing: Who are James Dobson and Tony Perkins?”

Even if evangelicals were to have recognized the names of their self-professed leaders, those leaders still should have known that they have very little power to influence the coveted “evangelical vote.” Catholic bishops would know this better than anyone, I would think: if a hierarchical Church has little success influencing its members’ voting practices, how would a “free church” tradition pull this off?

More to the point, the evangelical voting bloc seems to be an illusion. If anything, this is an indicator of evangelicalism’s appeal and success. Like Catholicism, evangelicalism has become a completely normal part of American Christianity, to the point that Rick Santorum, a Catholic, was surprisingly listed among the top 25 evangelicals in the country. (Did Joe Lieberman almost make the list?) Evangelicalism became mainstream by adapting to many different parts of American society, emerging in all classes, regions, and races, and in so doing it lost the cohesion of a “voting bloc.” (One can get a great sense of the shifting landscape vis-à-vis politics by reading David Gushee, The Future of Faith in American Politics, among other recent books.)

Other stories from last week help to make the point about evangelical diversity. For instance, if Rick Santorum is the evangelicals’ preferred social conservative (and now the only one left in the race, judging by deeds and not words), how will his negative views on contraception be received by the significant percentage of evangelical Christians that promotes frequent sex with one’s spouse? Besides the bizarre “sexperimental” roof-top sex promoted by Pastor Ed Young and his wife Bathsheba Lisa last week, there was also the release of popular firebrand Mark Driscoll’s new book about marriage sex. Matthew Lee Anderson assesses the new year’s offerings: “It’s too early to call it, but if evangelicals keep their frenetic pace up, 2012 will be the year they self-combust from over-sexual-exposure.”

How to make sense of all this?  Evangelicals are everywhere on the American landscape, which is another way of saying they are nowhere on the map. Their “voting bloc” can’t be influenced because it isn’t there. The combination of the Texas meeting plus the Iowa and South Carolina primaries is just our most recent evidence.

Update: I was certainly not intending to criticize the pastor’s wife by my post. Rather, their putting a bed on a roof to promote sex is bound to call to mind David and Bathsheba to a Biblically literate audience. In addition, a pastor’s call for his congregation’s couples to have sex every day is, in many circumstances, going to result in an asymmetrical power relationship. The pastor himself said in the interview that when he announced to his congregation the charge to have sex every day, the men of the congregation cheered with a standing ovation.

In many, perhaps most, respects, the last two movies I’ve seen could not be more different. Over Christmas, I saw Of Gods and Men, the story of the  French Trappist monks abducted from the Tibhirine monastery in Algeria in the mid 1990’s–they were later beheaded.   Over the weekend, I saw Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy- the new movie set in the height of the Cold War about a Russian mole at the top of the English espionage organization. It was based on the John Le Carre novel by the same name.

What struck me about both films was the lack of importance of social, political, and historical context to understanding the film. Yes, Of Gods and Men deals with the religious tensions of Algeria–but the reason why the monks were there, and their relationship with the village, and even the political machinations in which they became trapped was never really fully explained. You don’t come out of this movie with a better understanding of Christianity in Algeria, or the various Muslim factions vying for power.  The movie is about the life inside the monastery–you could have set the same thing in Mexico (with contending drug gangs) or anywhere else.  The political battle creating the problem really didn’t matter to the unfolding of the movie. The themes are courage, fidelity, and loyalty –in the face of great danger.  The source of the danger is really of secondary importance.

The same thing holds true, I think, of Tinker, Tailor.  It’s impossible to read LeCarre’s novel and not get a textured sense of the political and historical context–the very particular battle between two different ways of organizing political and social life that was going on between the West and the Soviets.  But you can watch the movie without knowing any more than that the Russians are the bad guys and the English are the good guys.  Furthermore, any other bad guys and good guys would do. Because the heart of the film is the relationship among the English spies themselves–what counts as loyalty, what counts as betrayal, what counts as fidelity to your job even in situations of danger and disgrace. You could change the clothes, change the villain, and set the movie in the contemporary time, no problem.

Loyalty to one’s commitments is a big theme in both movies. I wonder if we’re seeing a trend.  The contemporary world, and its political currents are so baffling, our bonds of community are so tenuous, we are trying to figure out what integrity and loyalty means–by examining cases that superficially seem very distant, but in fact can be detached from their setting and mapped into the contemporary world quite easily.

Over at the Corner NRO, Mark Steyn has a post about the lessons he draws from the chaos on board the Costa Concordia, which he contrasts with the orderly evacuation of the Titanic 100 years ago.  The difference between the two disasters, he says, tells us a lot about the problems of contemporary society.  (HT John Cole) Like you, my initial reaction to this was to roll my eyes.  Here’s what he says:

On the Costa Concordia, in the words of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboat.” [In contrast, the] men on the Titanic — liars and thieves, wealthy and powerful, poor and obscure — found themselves called upon to “finish in style,” and did so. They had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. They, too, ’oped it wouldn’t ’appen to them, but, when it did, the social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure and across all classes.

Today there is no social norm, so it’s every man for himself — operative word “man,” although not many of the chaps on the Titanic would recognize those on the Costa Concordia as “men.”

Let’s complicate Steyn’s observations with some actual facts about survival rates. On the Titanic, these varied dramatically by social class, even among women and children.  Less than half of the third class women (46% saved) and children (34% saved) survived, compared to 100% of the first and second class children, and 97% and 86% of the first and second class women, respectively.  Second, Steyn says that the women and children first ethic “held up under pressure and across all classes.”  In fact, despite the large number of third class women and children who went down with the ship, a significant number of first class men declined the opportunity to “finish in style” and opted to save themselves instead.  Interestingly, adherence to the norm of women and children first seems to have been most completely internalized by the men in second class, just 8% of whom made it into lifeboats, compared to 33% of the captains of industry in first class.  (At 16%, the survival rate among third class men was higher than among the middle class men riding in second class, but still half that of the first class men.)

So a disaster in which the elites play by their own rules and in which the poor survive at about half the rate of the wealthy and middle class is Steyn’s example of how a well ordered society responds to adversity.  Maybe my initial reaction was wrong.  Steyn’s Titanic praise may actually be a perfect metaphor for contemporary National Review Republicanism.

In our January 13 editorial, we criticized a ruling from the Department of Health and Human Services that would require all employers to include “contraception and sterilization coverage in their health-insurance plans, including those provided to employees of religious institutions.” Only religious organizations that primarily employ and serve co-religionists, and whose mission is to inculcate its values, according to the “interim final rule,” could be exempt from the mandate. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, we wrote,

argues that compelling the church to pay for plans that cover services the church has long held to be immoral violates the religious-freedom guarantee of the First Amendment. Catholic hospitals, universities, and social-service agencies see their mission as caring for people of all faiths or none, and they employ many non-Catholics. Given this understanding of mission, inevitably there will be a degree of entanglement between any large religious institution and the modern state. That should not be an excuse, however, for imposing secular values on more traditional religious communities.

So, we concluded, President Obama ought to expand the religious exemption to include organizations like universities and hospitals. Apparently he was not persuaded. (Bear with me, this is going to be a long post.)

Read the rest of this entry »