Picking up on an issue that seems to move to the foreground in presidential election years, the archbishop of Kansas City, Kans., has told Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic, not to receive communion. He was reacting to her recent veto of anti-abortion legislation. The Kansas City Star reports that Archbishop Joseph Naumann told the paper he expects a confession, a public apology and a promise to undo the damage done by the veto, which was barely sustained last month.

Sebelius, a Democrat, vetoed a bill designed to aid in enforcement of the state’s restrictions on late-term abortions. Anti-abortion activists, a strong force in Kansas, have been frustrated that a particular doctor in Wichita has eluded the law. The bill proposed that a broad range of relatives of a pregnant woman be permitted to sue to prevent the abortion of a fetus past 21 weeks of gestation. Sebelius said that since there was no provision to protect the mother’s life, the measure was unconstitutional. She also objected that it would lead to excessive litigation.

T he Kansan controversy could have implications for the presidential race. Gov. Sebelius has endorsed Barack Obama, who has Kansas roots, and is being mentioned here and there as a possible vice-presidential candidate. Her father, John Gilligan, was governor of swing-state Ohio in the 1970s, making them the only father-daughter governors in U.S. history. And she’s been successful in getting votes in a heavily Republican state. And she would conceivably help Obama by connecting with women and Catholics.

The Star makes the point that another local bishop had a much different take on this issue during the last presidential campaign: “Bishop Raymond J. Boland of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph told a Star columnist, “I don’t think I have any right to invade another person’s conscience when they come to me.” For more, and a copy of the archbishop’s statement, check here.

I hope that others who are more acquainted with Kansas politics will add more.

Chicago approves. How can he lose? Here’s the story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/us/politics/11chicago.html?hp

Update: NYT’s subhead: Pragmatic Politics Forged on the South Side   That’s why he can win!

About 10,000 feet below the posting of Veni…., Joe K. asked about historic times; I briefly mentioned May ‘68; but here in today’s Times is a fuller account. Seems like only yesterday.

40 Years Later, an Uprising in Paris Is Still a Puzzle

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/us/10beliefs.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Peter+Steinfels&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Veni, Sancte Spiritus, known as the Golden Sequence, is the sequence for the Mass for Pentecost. It is commonly regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of sacred Latin poetry ever written. The hymn has been attributed to three different authors, King Robert II the Pious of France (970-1031), Pope Innocent III (1161-1216), and Stephen Langton (d 1228), Archbishop of Canterbury, of which the last is most likely the author.

Veni, Sancte Spiritus,

et emitte caelitus

lucis tuae radium.

Holy Spirit, Lord of light,

From the clear celestial height

Thy pure beaming radiance give.

Veni, pater pauperum,

veni, dator munerum,

veni, lumen cordium.

Come, thou Father of the poor,

Come with treasures which endure;

Come, thou light of all that live!

Consolator optime,

dulcis hospes animae,

dulce refigerium.

Thou, of all consolers best,

Thou, the soul’s delightful guest,

Dost refreshing peace bestow.

In labore requies,

in aestu temperies,

in fletu solacium.

Thou in toil art comfort sweet,

Pleasant coolness in the heat;

Solace in the midst of woe.

O lux beatissima,

reple cordis intimatuorum fidelium.

Light immortal, light divine,

Visit thou these hearts of thine,

And our inmost being fill.

Sine tuo numine,

nihil est in homine,

nihil est innoxium.

If thou take thy grace away,

Nothing pure in man will stay;

All his good is turned to ill.

Lava quod est sordidum,

riga quod est aridum,

sana quod est saucium.

Heal our wounds, our strength renew;

On our dryness pour thy dew,

Wash the stains of guilt away.

Flecte quod est rigidum,

fove quod est frigidum,

rege quod est devium.

Bend the stubborn heart and will,

Melt the frozen, warm the chill,

Guide the steps that go astray.

Da tuis fidelibus,

in te confidentibus,

sacrum septenarium.

Thou, on us who evermore

Thee confess and thee adore,

With thy sevenfold gifts descend.

Da virtutis meritum,

da salutis exitum,

da perenne gaudium.

Amen. Alleluia.

Give us comfort when we die,

Give us life with thee on high,

Give us joys that never end.

Amen. Alleluia.

A wonderful version of the Gregorian chant followed by the polyphonic adaptation by Palestrina is found on this recording: Palestrina, “Missa Dum Complerentur / Veni Sancte Spiritus” with the Westminster Cathedral Choir (Hyperion)

Bishop William Murphy of the Diocese of Rockville Center on Long Island released a pastoral letter today [beware: PDF file] ending the fairly common practice of communion services in the absence of a priest–an “extraordinary” form that came into being because of the priest shortage. According to this Newsday story the pastoral letter seems to have been pegged to a too-common recourse to these services at some diocesan schools. But barring them altogther will also mean more work for already overburdened priests, as well as fewer masses for Catholics who the pope wants to be nourished by the Eucharist. So no priest, no eucharist. No eucharist–no church? There seems to be an effort to “tighten up” on liturgical practices in keeping with Vatican wishes. And this does cause us to reflect deeply on the meaning of the eucharist–a significance Bishop Murphy clearly thinks is being diluted (his language about the eucharist is almost identical to Benedict’s). But there is also no discussion of the larger problem behind this pastoral provision–the decline in vocations. I haven’t heard of other instances of this rollback–has anyone else? Is this a one-off for Long Island, or part of a trend?

Barack Obama’s Catholic National Advisory Council responded late yesterday to Bill Donohue’s charges a week earlier that they are dissident Catholics with more in common with Jeremiah Wright than Pope Benedict. (The Obama advisors include a number of “Commonweal Catholics.”) Now Donohue has come firing back, playing not just the Nazi card, but the Hitler card. From Obama as friend of Hamas (according to John McCain) to the reincarnation of Hitler (Bill Donohue), the GOP campaign is going low road fast. Then again, Hillary is giving them the map. Read all about it here…

From the WSJ:

In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, “found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? “Even Richard Nixon didn’t say white,” an Obama supporter said, “even with the Southern strategy.” If John McCain said, “I got the white vote, baby!” his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Here’s the Daily Show’s take on Hillary’s comments:

Mark Sticherz notes on the GetReligion blog, that daily exposé of how the news media doesn’t “get religion,” that news organizations did not give much attention to the Catholic vote in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. For the record, exit polls showed Catholics went for Clinton 61-39 in Indiana and 51-48 in North Carolina.

The political reporters may have Catholic vote fatigue by now, but I think the big news organizations participating directly in the exit polling - the TV networks and The Associated Press - need to make more creative use of the exit-poll data available to them. For example, there’s been a lot of talk about whether race is a motivating factor in the Catholic vote in Hillary Clinton’s favor. But no one has looked at whether there is a disproportionate number of Catholics among those who told the pollster that race was a factor in their vote. Nor have I seen any analysis of the Catholic vote based on income, age or education.

The company that is doing the exit polls, Edison-Mitofsky, would have that data and could probably also pool together groups of states if the total number of Catholics surveyed in any one state is too small to be meaningful. The data is available only to the consortium paying for it. It’s up to the networks or The AP to ask  their pollster for the cross-tabs. So how about it?

One other point on the last round of primaries. It’s being treated as a given, but Barack Obama’s ability to attract above 90 percent of the black vote is extraordinary. Polls early in the campaign indicated that Clinton would be able to get a significant portion of the black vote. It’s rare for a politician to win any group above that 90 percent mark and, as far as I can recall, this was the best Obama has done to date with black voters. For all that was said about Obama and Rev. Wright, there might still be something more. Obama, who had said that Wright did not reflect the black church, emerges a tad more popular than ever among black voters.

Following on an interesting discussion in a previous post about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his view of the relationship between his Catholic faith and his rulings–or rather the lack of said connection–John Thavis over at the CNS blog picks up the thread and expands on it greatly. After summarizing Scalia’s conversation with Tim Russert, Thavis notes the Vatican’s take on this. He writes:

Not everyone thinks the distinction between a legislator and a judge is so clear-cut when it comes to the responsibilities of Catholics in public life.

In 2000, Pope John Paul II told the International Union of Catholic Jurists that Catholic magistrates share in the mission to build a society that conforms to the demands of the Gospel. He warned against considering the law as something uninformed by faith:

“There are even cases in which the magistrate and the legislator take decisions independently of any moral value, as if positive law could serve as its own foundation and prescind from transcendent values.”

I asked one informed Vatican official whether the church viewed the moral responsibilities of a Catholic judge as significantly different from those of a Catholic legislator. He said no, not in the case of a constitutional court, which is often called on to make political decisions.

“If we’re telling politicians to respect the natural law, the obvious conclusion is that this would apply to a judge even more. The Constitution is not supreme over natural law,” he said.

John went on to recount Scalia’s 1996 address at the Gregorian, which he reproduces, and notes Scalia’s reluctance to invoke natural law claims that are becoming very much a theme of this pontificate. Interesting stuff. Thoughts?

David Ignatius, who always sounds well-connected though not necessarily prescienct, writes in today’s WashPost

“Saber rattling from the Bush White House may seem almost routine, but pay attention to the comment last week by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ‘Iran is not going away. We need to be strong and really in the deterrent mode, to not be very predictable.’

“The risk of a U.S.-Iranian confrontation is growing in part because Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies in the Middle East are so eager for it. ‘Behind closed doors, we are praying that the Iranians will make a mistake so that you will have a reason to attack,’ one Saudi told me this week. Another prominent Arab official said he hopes the United States will strike Iranian training camps just over the border from Iraq.”

I wonder if this is the price for bringing down oil prices?

Read the whole column here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/07/AR2008050703189.html

Update: This informative post about part of the origins of the obliterate Iran policy of Hillary Clinton by Gary Sick is worth a read.

Guest Op-Ed: More on Hillary Clinton and Obliterating Iran
Link: http://www.juancole.com/2008/05/sick-guest-op-ed-more-on-hillary.html

I know this is not really on topic, but I’ve always been interested in the connections between memory and intelligence, perhaps because I’m so absent-minded.  And I never like to miss an opportunity to plug a Borges short-story.  (Borges is the Simpsons of literary reference, since virtually any topic of conversation can be connected in some way to one of his stories.)  This story in USA Today about a woman who can remember every day of her life since age 14 is terrifically interesting, particularly because of the trouble she has with abstract concepts.   It calls to mind the Borges story, Funes el memorioso (Funes, the Memorious), about Irineo Funes, a young man who, after a fall from a horse, remembers every detail of everything he experiences.  Borges talks about how Funes, who is bed-ridden after his fall, passed the time.  On several occasions, he recalled his memories of particular days in the past, a project that, each time, took an entire day.  On another occasion, using his powers of memory, he created a numbering system in which every number had a different name (names like “Luis Melian Lanifur” and “Agustin de Vedia”).  At the end of the story, Borges ventures some comments on the connections between memory and thought.  Describing Funes, he says:

He had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin.  I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking.  To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract.  In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes, there was nothing but particulars — they were virtually immediate particulars.

The comment about about ignoring is interesting (and additional proof of Borges’s perceptiveness), because the USA Today story talks about another person with a prodigious memory who has no trouble with abstract concepts.  The difference between the man with perfect memory who can abstract and the woman who cannot seems to be the control the man has over his memories.  The woman describes them as crowding in on her even when she doesn’t want them, while the man talks about his ability to call them up at will.  So Borges is correct in suggesting that perfect memory may not be fatal to the ability to generalize and abstract if one has sufficient control over his thoughts to be able to ignore the memories when they’re not useful.  In any event, the possibility that a certain degree of forgetting is actually helpful for thinking has always given me some hope.

Recently a new Archbishop for the Military Services was installed.  While I certainly support the role of military chaplains, there is much in the special issue of Salute, the magazine of the Archdiocese of the Military Services, that is troubling.  Those who have spoken of a military-ecclesiastical complex will find fodder here.

This would now be thirty-five years ago, I guess. In one summer issue The Village Voice decided to forego reviews of recently published books and instead invited a few reviewers to pick a classic work of literature and to review it as if it had just appeared. Someone whose name I forget simply reproduced the first paragraphs of Dicken’s Bleak House, as follows;

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

The reviewer then remarked simply: “If this is not enough to move you to go out immediately and buy this novel, may God have mercy on your soul!” It was enough for me, and that started my practice of reading through at least one of Dickens’ novels each summer, eventually reading again some that I had read in high school. I had liked them well enough then (certainly more than the ineffably boring Thackeray!), but I think that one has to grow up some really to appreciate him.

My oldest sister died of breast cancer in 1977, at the age of 46. Among the tortures she was put through in the vain attempt to halt the spread of the disease, was an adrenalectomy. I brought her The Pickwick Papers to read while recovering in ths hospital from this very painful procedure. She said she had had to put the book down because it was making her laugh too much–very painful. But when she was recovered a bit more, she read it with great joy and she told me: “I have never read a book that it saddened me so to finish. I didn’t want it to end.” So Dickens, and that glorious book are very precious to me.

Someone said that Shakespeare and Dickens are the two great giants of English literature. Everyone else is on a lower level.

There is some discussion on a post below about “liberal” or “progressive” Catholics. Dot-Commers, as one would expect, are of different views, and there seems little common ground even as to the meaning of the labels.

Meanwhile a video is making its way around Boston College, providing frazzled students with momentary surcease from end-of-semester labors.

Indeed, it seems to be creating common ground among a variety of student types: wonderment at the way some grandparents carry on.

You may care to check it out.

The Washington Post today (I can’t find it online) analyzes exit polls of the voters in Indiana, and some of the results should give Democrats pause.

Whites voted 60-40 for Clinton, blacks 90-8 for Obama. Voters between 18 and 29 voted for Obama 61 to 39; those between 30 and 44 voted for Obama 56-44. Clinton’s majority she owes to voters between 45 and 59 (52-47) and over 65 (66-34) There is a big generation-gap here, it seems.

Voters with no college degree went for Clinton 53-47; those with a college degree for Obama 56-44).

At the end, voters were asked for whom they would vote if the choice in November were between Clinton and McCain: 73% for Clinton, 17% for McCain. If the choice were between Obama and McCain, the results were Obama 69%, McCain 19%. For both nine percent said they would not vote.

But when the same question was broken down between supporters of Clinton and supporters of Obama, here was the startling result: Of Obama supporters, 59% said they would vote for Clinton, 21% for McCain; Of Clinton supporters, 48% said they would vote for Obama, and an astonishing 33% said they would vote for McCain. For both, seventeen percent said they would not vote.

It looks as if it is the present Obama supporters who would retain their party loyalty if Clinton were nominated, whereas a full third of present Clinton supporters would desert the party for John McCain.  And look at how many would stay home on election day.

Arguably the most identifiably Catholic (for the wrong reasons, many would argue) justice on the Supreme Court is Antonin Scalia, and he spoke to Tim Russert in an MSNBC interview Sunday about the impact of his faith on his jurisprudence. It ain’t much, apparently, and ought to be enough to get him tossed out off any self-respecting Catholic campus. No?

RUSSERT:  And we are back talking to Antonin Scalia, justice of the Supreme Court.  He‘s co-author of his new book, “Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.”

You went to Villanova University in Philadelphia recently and said there‘s no such thing as a Catholic judge.  You happen to be Catholic.  Explain why there‘s no such thing as a Catholic judge.

SCALIA:  The same reason there‘s no such thing as a—you know, in my estimation, no such thing as a female judge.  I mean, a good judge is a good judge.  And at least if you have my judicial philosophy, which is to give the fairest possible meaning to the text that you‘re dealing with.  And when you‘re dealing with the Constitution, you ask the question, what did it mean when the people adopted it?  And once you find that, the case is done.  How does my religion have anything to do with what those words mean and what they were understood to mean by the people who ratified them?  Obviously nothing at all.  So the only—I may have said that at Villanova the only part of my faith that has any play in my judicial enterprise is whatever commandment it is—sixth—Thou Shalt Not Lie.

[Snip]

RUSSERT:  You describe yourself as an originalist. 

SCALIA:  Originalist.

RUSSERT:  Which means?

SCALIA:  Which means I give the Constitution its original meaning.  And what it prohibited then it prohibits now.  And what it permitted then it permitted now. So, you know, for example, the death penalty.  If you‘re an originalist, the issue of whether the death penalty is unconstitutional is really a non-issue.

RUSSERT:  Why?

SCALIA:  Because it is—it was—it was the only penalty for a felony at the time the Constitution was adopted.  Nobody ever thought that the Constitution branded the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment.  It just didn‘t.

RUSSERT:  Is it different for Catholic legislators when the church will say you should not be voting for abortion rights, or the church feels this way on the issue of stem-cell research or the death penalty than it is for a Catholic judge?

SCALIA:  It may well be.  I‘ve always been happy that I‘m a judge.  And all I have to do is look at the law.  What does it say?  Tell the truth about what it says, and that‘s my job.  It would be harder for me as a legislator.

I didn’t realize the bench was a zone of amorality. Makes it easier to sleep at night.

Voter ID laws, the Notre Dame edition:

Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.

The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn’t get one but came to the precinct anyway.  “One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, ‘I don’t want to go do that,’” Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.

The dateline “Indianapolis” on a news-program this morning made me recall the one time I’ve been in that city. I was attending Sunday Mass, I believe in the cathedral, at which a priest read the Gospel in which Christ indicts the hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees. Where the priest should have read: “They have widened their phylacteries,” he said instead, “They have widened their prophylactics”–which gave quite another image!

This led me to recall another memorable moment in the pulpit, only this was in my seminary days, in what passed for a course in homiletic. (”Tell a story!” our mentor would repeatedly admonish us; “Long after they’ve forgotten what you had to say, they’ll remember the story!” Advice I didn’t and don’t agree with and have happily ignored for forty-five years.) Anyway, one of my classmates was giving a practice-homily for the feast of the Circumcision of the Lord, the name then given to the regularly changing feast celebrated on January 1^st. The classmate, who has since gone on to greater things, began by giving us a little lesson in liturgical theology, to the effect that the liturgical feasts give us an opportunity to participate in the mysteries of Christ. “Today is the feast of the Circumcision,” he went on somewhat solemnly, “and it reminds us that we must cut off the old man!” Well, the whole audience–males only, of course–winced and instinctively covered our vital parts.

After we had stopped laughing, the priest-mentor said that we had to be careful in our use of language, as also in our pronunciation. He described one priest who spoke of Peter, during Christ’s trial, warming his hands at the brassiere.

Anyone else have malapropisms to share?

An article appearing in today’s Boston Globe states that yesterday, Cardinal O’Malley and Mayor Menino announced the reconfiguration of several Boston Catholic schools.  Seven local Catholic schools will be closed next fall and will be replaced by the Pope John Paul II Catholic Academy which will have five campuses in different neighborhoods. 

The Globe reports:

A group of businesspeople, led by retired adman Jack Connors Jr., has raised $25 million toward the $67 million they are pledging to spend to consolidate, renovate, upgrade, and, in one instance, rebuild aging parish school buildings in Dorchester and Mattapan. 

“Change can be hard - it can make people nervous - but I think we are moving in the right direction, continuing to strengthen the neighborhoods of Dorchester,” Menino said.

The archdiocese says it already has 1,370 applicants for the five campuses of the Catholic academy, an increase from 1,290 students at the seven parish schools in existence today. The archdiocese says that 250 of the students who have signed up are new to the Catholic schools.

Saving the Catholic schools has become a priority for O’Malley. There are now just 99 Catholic elementary schools in the archdiocese, down from 250 in 1965, and the archdiocese continues to close several failing schools each year.

It sounds like people are pretty excited about this new plan.

Never thought you’d see that headline, huh? Well, that seems to be the upshot of this Politico report that National Right-to-Life is making robocalls in Indiana asking Democrats to vote against Obama. I guess, as Tim Roemer surmises, they think Clinton would be easier to beat in the general election.

Via Casting Stones.

Wheaton College and divorce.

Sometime back, someone asked about McCain’s Catholic Committee, here’s a list:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/05/mccains-catholic-committe_n_100277.html

A Friday night ritual where I live is to catch Mark Shields and David Brooks on the Lehrer “News Hour.” The segment is always entertaining, sometimes enlightening, and, on occasion, David even manages to get a word or two in. In recompense, David writes a column for the New York Times.

Today he compares the styles of Hillary and Barack as, respectively, “Combat and Composure.” Here’s his summing up:

They are imperfect messengers for their creeds. Clinton rails against “Wall Street money-grubbers,” but her policies are often drawn from the Wall Street wing of the party. Obama talks about postpartisan compromise in the abstract, but rarely in the particular.

Still, amid the storms of the presidency, their basic worldviews would shape their presidencies. Obama is instinctively a conversationalist and community-mobilizer. Clinton, as she says, will fight and fight. If elected, she’ll have the power to take the Hobbesian struggle she perceives, and turn it into remorseless reality.

Grant, do you take that as an endorsement?

Today’s Washington Post has an article about a recent survey of what grade-school and high-school students are reading. Not having any children and being of a certain age, I am not familiar with most of the books mentioned. I was amused by the comment of the man who was reassured that some of the classics he read as a child are still being read. It could seem that “classic” here means “what I read as a child.” It reminds me of the couple who, asked what kind of music they might want for their wedding, replied: “Oh, one of the classics, like ‘On Eagle’s Wings.’” The texts for high-school seemed rather thin to me. Does anyone read Dickens any more?

Just read this in John Allen’s post… an interview with Mary Ann Glendon: U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

Melinda Henneberger in Slate and the Boston Globe in South Bend offer two good overviews and explanations, though Melinda–a Commonweal contributor–takes aim at the race issue that generates much heat. Her analysis is strong, however. “Hillary for Mother Superior?” We’ll see again tomorrow.

An argument for Obama from a pro-life Catholic; he wrote earlier on Slate supporting Obama; here he further explains his reasoning. Worth a read:

http://www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=27820

Here’s his original endorsement in Slate:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/convictions/archive/2008/03/23/endorsing-obama.aspx

Frank Rich points towards a double standard in the media’s treatment of Wright:

None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long relationship with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair to weigh Mr. Obama’s judgment in handling this personal and political crisis as it has repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

I think this is about right. I actually think McCain’s search for the Hagee endorsement is worse than Obama staying in his church despite the views of his pastor. A person remains in a congregation for a number of reasons, the pastor being just one of them. Churches are, after all (or, at least, for most of us), communities of faith, and not just Sunday entertainment provided by the pastor. Someone might stay in a church because of its commitment to service, its connections to a particular neighborhood or ethnic group, bonds with fellow parishioners, etc.  Indeed, those who casually say that Obama should have left his church reveal to me a fairly shallow approach towards life in a church. Perhaps I say this because I’m Catholic. By necessity, we have a uniquely non-pastor-centered approach to Church. But I’d imagine the same is true to varying degrees even for more congregational protestants. (As an aside, it’s at least ironic that so much of the Wright story is being flogged by Catholic journalists O’Reilly and Hannity. Stephen Colbert — who is a weekly mass Catholic — had the right take on this facet of the story.  Continuing to attend mass, he suggested, does not signal agreement with how the Church has handled, say, the abuse scandal.)

In any event, seeking out a pastor’s endorsement is a different sort of calculation than deciding whether to leave a church because of occasionally controversial (even outrageous) comments made by its pastor.  So I’m much more troubled by McCain’s flirtation with Hagee than by Obama’s decision to continue attending his church.

In yesterday’s Washington Post, David Broder had an interesting column. He asked a friend who works in Hillary Clinton’s national campaign, whether her camp sees any realistic way she can deny the Democratic nomination to Obama “without blowing up the party,” that is, “If the superdelegates should decide to take the risk and cast their lot with Clinton, how would she be able to heal the wounds of a fight to the finish with Obama?”

The Clinton camp’s answer comes in two parts. First, they say that the institutional party — the unions, the environmental groups, the abortion rights groups and others that are desperate for victory after losing twice to George Bush and that recognize the potential appeal of John McCain — would exert heavy pressure on the losing side not to sulk or erupt.

And second, the Clinton camp hopes that, if he is counted out, Obama, just 46, would think about his long-term future and secure his own status as heir apparent by reconciling his followers to a bitter but temporary defeat and by throwing all his energies behind Clinton.

In effect, my friend was saying that it may well be beyond Clinton’s power to win the nomination without severely damaging the party. Only Obama can make her winning seem right.

At the Democratic National Convention in 1956, John F. Kennedy made a late run against Estes Kefauver to obtain the vice-presidential nomination alongside Adlai Stevenson. Kennedy lost, but it was widely believed that his effort had won him valuable publicity for a run for the presidential nomination four years later. Is this what the Clinton camp is offering Obama?

So asks Time magazine - quoting Commonweal to help make its point.