‘Virgin Mother, daughter of your Son,
more humble and exalted than any other creature,
fixed goal of the eternal plan,
‘you are the one who so ennobled human nature
that He, who made it first, did not disdain
to make Himself of its own making.
‘Your womb relit the flame of love –
its heat has made this blossom seed
and flower in eternal peace.
‘To us you are a noonday torch of charity,
while down below, among those still in flesh,
you are the living fountainhead of hope.
‘Lady, you are so great and so prevail above,
should he who longs for grace not turn to you,
his longing would be doomed to wingless flight.
‘Your loving kindness does not only aid
whoever seeks it, but many times
gives freely what has yet to be implored.
‘In you clemency, in you compassion,
in you munificence, in you are joined
all virtues found in any creature.
‘This man who, from within the deepest pit
the universe contains up to these heights
has seen the disembodied spirits, one by one,
‘now begs you, by your grace, to grant such power
that, by lifting up his eyes,
he may rise higher toward his ultimate salvation.
‘And I, who never burned for my own seeing
more than now I burn for his, offer all my prayers,
and pray that they may not fall short,
‘so that your prayers disperse on his behalf
all clouds of his mortality and let
the highest beauty be displayed to him.
‘This too, my Queen, I ask of you, who can achieve
whatever you desire, that you help him preserve,
after such vision, the purity of his affections.
‘Let your protection rule his mortal passions.
See Beatrice, with so many of the blessed,
palms pressed together, joining me in prayer.’

(The translation comes from the Princeton Dante Project, which I have used in every post.)

If Jesus is the mediator between God and humanity, the Spirit is the medium in which God’s transforming action takes place.

The Love in which the Father and the Son are united is the divine We. Yet it reaches beyond itself to include the we of all believers in its embrace. As the last breath of the Crucified (John 19:30) and the first breath of the risen Lord (John 20:22), the Spirit is Christ’s gift of the divine Love-life he has come to share.    (Anthony Kelly, God is Love: the Heart of Christian Faith)

One of the by-products of the refining process is something called “petroleum coke,” left when the oil is released from the tar-like substance that is heavy oil. Where does that petroleum coke end up?  At the moment, a huge pile of it is sitting in Detroit, the leavings from a nearby refinery that began processing Canadian heavy oil last winter. According to a story in the New York Times, the pile will eventually be shipped to China and Mexico where it is burnt in lieu of coal. Who owns that pile? The Koch Brothers (yes, those Koch Brothers). The stuff makes a hefty contribution to the pollution in both countries. And how many U.S. refineries will be sitting on piles of it. Detroit today! Tomorrow???  Story here. Picture below.

Idle and aimless chatter (chiacchiere) and gossip (pettegolezzo) poison the spiritual environment.

“We all chatter in the Church! As Christians we chatter! The chatter is hurtful? We hurt one another. It is as if we want to put each other down; instead of growing one makes the other feel small while I feel great. That will not do! It seems nice to chatter … I do not know why, but it looks nice. Like sweetness of honey, right? You take one and then another, and another, and another, and in the end you have a stomach ache. And why ? The chatter is like that eh? It is ‘sweet at first and it ruins you, it ruins your soul! Rumors are destructive in the Church, they are destructive … It’s ‘a little’ like the spirit of Cain who killed his brother, his tongue; it kills his brother!”

Clearly, not the tongues of Pentecost. And in a passage of the homily not reported by Vatican Radio, Francis added: ” il diavolo vuole quello!” — “it’s what the devil desires!”

When President Obama was invited to give the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame in 2009, more than eighty bishops condemned the university. That a duly elected president of the United States should be regarded as a moral monster unworthy of being given a hearing—especially at a school as steeped in American patriotism as Notre Dame—is bizarre. The uproar and the bitter recrimination that followed Obama’s speech revealed how deeply divided and directionless the once formidably cohesive American Catholic Church has become. And if George Weigel’s new book is any indication of where the church’s hierarchy is headed, the divisions promise to grow deeper. Indeed, a good deal of the blame for the bishops’ belligerent public posture can be laid directly on the desk of the author of Evangelical Catholicism. …

According to Weigel, the evangelical Catholicism of his book’s title represents a necessary departure from the “Counter-reformation” or so-called tribal Catholicism of recent centuries. In his view, a Catholicism held together by ethnic affinities possesses neither the fervor nor the missionary commitment needed to meet the challenges of postmodernity. In place of the bricklayer bishops who built a Catholic subculture of schools, hospitals and civic associations across America, what’s needed today are bishops like the late John Paul II, men who speak of their faith in compelling, adamantine and fearless ways. These bishops will be disciplinarians, unabashed in demanding doctrinal obedience from priests, women in religious orders and those in the pews. Theologians and politicians who publicly dissent from church teaching must be told that they are no longer Catholic in “any meaningful sense.” Catholics who do not believe everything the church teaches should leave. (It will be interesting to see how this “new breed” of priests and bishops responds to the leadership of the recently elected Pope Francis, who seems to take a less confrontational approach to secular culture than Weigel does.) …

Why would Weigel assume that the “deep reform” of the Catholic Church is relevant to the political and cultural life of most Americans? Because he thinks that, as with Poland under communist domination, America’s fate is now intimately linked to that of Catholicism. “The Catholic Church is now the world’s premier institutional proponent of human rights and democracy,” he claims—by which he means that the church’s “social doctrine offers a principled framework” for the preservation of the West’s failing democracies. As far as Weigel is concerned, no other options are available.

What to make of these grandiose claims? In one sense, Weigel is repeating what the Catholic Church has always taught. Conversion is what Christianity is about, and so Catholicism, often married to Aristotelian and Thomist notions of natural law and natural rights, remains a vital force in the American political tradition. But the resources of that tradition are broader than the abstract and self-evident truths, invoked by the Declaration of Independence, on which Weigel places such emphasis. The tradition has made use of a variety of philosophical resources, including Enlightenment rationalism, civic republicanism, secular liberal rights theory and pragmatism. It is unlikely we will succeed in forging a more perfect union if we do not make use of all the political resources at our disposal.

You can read the whole thing here. (Update: We earlier noted the inclusion of a link at the end of The Nation‘s online version of the review; that link has since been removed.)

The problems with the IRS extend beyond playing politics with conservative groups seeking a tax-exempt status. I have never made this public before, but given the heightened interest in the way the IRS has conducted itself, the time has come to disclose what happened. 

Just weeks after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I was notified by the IRS that the Catholic League was under investigation for violating the IRS Code on political activities as it relates to 501(c)(3) organizations. What the IRS did not know was that I had proof who contacted them to launch the investigation: Catholics United, a George Soros-funded Catholic organization.

The IRS was contacted on June 5, 2008, to launch a probe of the Catholic League, and the letter sent to me was dated Nov. 24, 2008.

Does the Obama administration have no shame? Are there no depths to which it will not — wait, what’s that? Obama wasn’t inaugurated until January 2009? So this actually happened under George W. Bush? And Catholics United never made a secret of its concerns about the Catholic League’s tax status? Nor is the group really funded by George Soros? And Donohue has a history of complaining to the IRS about liberals?

Oh. Never mind.

It was a follow-up (“Disgrace“) to a longer piece about the role that perceived abuse of religious items and symbols played in the memories of former Guantanamo detainees (“The Secret Weapon“). To my knowledge, those two articles still remain the most thorough treatment of the place of religion in U.S. detention facilities during the so-called war on terror. (A version with footnotes can be found in this excellent volume affiliated with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.)

Unfortunately, the false perception that the United States has some kind of official, national anti-Muslim stance has persisted, despite the efforts of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Just like the detainees I wrote about in 2008, the hunger strikers at Guantanamo — eighty-six of whom were cleared for release years ago — have claimed that the event catalyzing their activism was the mishandling of a Qur’an. And before you say So what?, recall, as I and many others have argued, that the proper Christian analogy of the Qur’an is not the Bible, but the person of Jesus Christ.

And now today CBS News reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left a note in the boat where he was hiding.

“Basically, the note says … the bombings were retribution for the U.S. crimes against Muslims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and that the victims of the Boston bombing were ‘collateral damage,’ the same way innocent victims have been collateral damage in U.S. wars around the world,” said CBS News reporter John Miller, who is a former spokesman for the FBI. … The note summed up with the idea that “when you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” CBS News reported.

As I pointed out in my previous articles, there were several ways in which the United States did intentionally abuse the symbols and ritual practices of Islam in the early years of the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” These abuses were later cited by others as justifications for retaliation against U.S. troops and citizens.

Granted, those who engaged in such un-American activities are no longer in charge of detainees, and as far as we know, the worst of the practices has ceased.  But the wars of perception go on much, much longer. History has shown that the collective memory of religiously themed violence endures for generations.

The very notion that a country could be at “war” with a religion of over 1 billion people that takes diverse forms and covers most of the globe is absurd. But we must continue to fight against that perception — if not for a noble reason, then only for self-interest.

Full video here.

Constantine himself, however, certainly favored the Church with his patronage; and before the year 313 was over, he would be asked by Donatist bishops in northern Africa to intervene in their disputes with Catholic bishops, and he showed no reluctance to include arbitrating such disputes among his imperial duties and rights. A fatal entanglement ensued.

 The “Edict of Milan ” (313)

When I, Constantine Augustus, and I, Licinius Augustus, fortunately met near Milan and were considering everything that pertained to the public welfare and security, we thought that, among other things which we saw would be for the good of many, regulations pertaining to the reverence of the Divinity ought certainly to be made first, so that we might grant to Christians and others full authority to observe that religion which each preferred so that any Divinity whatsoever in the seat of the heavens may be propitious and kindly disposed to us and all who are placed under our rule. And thus by this wholesome counsel and most upright provision, we thought to arrange that no one whatsoever should be denied the opportunity to give his heart to the observance of the Christian religion [and] of that religion which he should think best for himself, so that the Supreme Deity, to whose worship we freely yield our hearts, may show in all things His usual favor and benevolence.

Therefore, your Worship should know that it has pleased us to remove all conditions whatsoever, which were in the rescripts formerly given to you officially, concerning the Christians, and now any one of these who wishes to observe the Christian religion may do so freely and openly, without molestation. We thought it fit to commend these things most fully to your care that you may know that we have given to those Christians free and unrestricted opportunity of religious worship. When you see that this has been granted to them by us, your Worship will know that we have also conceded to other religions the right of open and free observance of their worship for the sake of the peace of our times, that each one may have the free opportunity to worship as he pleases ; this regulation is made so that we may not seem to detract from any dignity or any religion.

Moreover, in the case of the Christians especially we esteemed it best to order that if it happens that anyone heretofore has bought from our treasury from anyone whatsoever, those places where they were previously accustomed to assemble, concerning which a certain decree had been made and a letter sent to you officially, the same shall be restored to the Christians without payment or any claim of recompense and without any kind of fraud or deception. Those, moreover, who have obtained the same by gift, are likewise to return them at once to the Christians. Besides, both those who have purchased and those who have secured them by gift, are to appeal to the vicar if they seek any recompense from our bounty, that they may be cared for through our clemency. All this property ought to be delivered at once to the community of the Christians through your intercession, and without delay. And since these Christians are known to have possessed not only those places in which they were accustomed to assemble, but also other property, namely the churches, belonging to them as a corporation and not as individuals, all these things which we have included under the above law, you will order to be restored, without any hesitation or controversy at all, to these Christians, that is to say to the corporations and their conventicles: providing, of course, that the above arrangements be followed so that those who return the same without payment, as we have said, may hope for an indemnity from our bounty.

In all these circumstances you ought to tender your most efficacious intervention to the community of the Christians, that our command may be carried into effect as quickly as possible, whereby, moreover, through our clemency, public order may be secured. Let this be done so that, as we have said above, Divine favor towards us, which, under the most important circumstances we have already experienced, may, for all time, preserve and prosper our successes together with the good of the state. Moreover, in order that the statement of this decree of our good will may come to the notice of all, this rescript, published by your decree, shall be announced everywhere and brought to the knowledge of all, so that the decree of this, our benevolence, cannot be concealed.

 

Edict of Theodosius (380)

It is our desire that all the various nations which are subject to our Clemency and Moderation, should continue to profess that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter, as it has been preserved by faithful tradition, and which is now professed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic holiness. According to the apostolic teaching and the doctrine of the Gospel, let us believe in the one deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity. We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians; but as for the others, since, in our judgment they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give to their conventicles the name of churches. They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation and in the second the punishment of our authority which in accordance with the will of Heaven we shall decide to inflict.

So this is how Francis handles bishops who engage in inappropriate sexual conduct. Still waiting to see how he deals with bishops who fail to handle their own priests’ misdeeds.

Only the most unrepentant advocates for the invasion of Iraq think the United States has the tools and the knowledge to fundamentally change the course of events in Syria. U.S. intervention might be warranted if there were a reasonable prospect that it would bring the killing to a quick end, but almost no one thinks that would happen under the current conditions.

Still, there are many eloquent, morally serious advocates calling for intervention, and their views should not be dismissed lightly. Most of them urge the United States to supply the rebels (but somehow not the jihadists) with advanced weapons, establish a no-fly zone, and create “humanitarian corridors” where refugees can be protected from Assad’s murderous militias. Even the administration’s most vocal critics, however, do not advocate sending in ground troops. Yet what if these partial measures were to fail, as they are likely to? At that point, the pressure to commit ground forces will be nearly impossible to resist, especially if U.S. military personnel are at risk. Containing Assad’s large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons presents an even more daunting problem. Bombing those facilities is not an option, and the best-case scenario for securing the weapons would require at least seventy-five thousand U.S. troops and would most likely result in significant civilian and U.S. military casualties. 

Read the whole thing here.

Changes in the way we think about the world are not “news” in the classic sense — they occur gradually, without discrete events to signal them. But they matter. Two such developments have come together recently, both reported in the New York Times. The first is the collapse of intellectual support for the notion that immediate austerity can boost economic growth. The second is a growing consensus that health-care-cost inflation is slowing for deep structural reasons, rather than having undergone a mere temporary dip from the recession. These trends have something in common: They blow to smithereens the intellectual foundations of the Obama-era Republican policy agenda.

Peter J. Leithart: “What’s Wrong with ‘Family Values’“:

The most penetrating conservative analysts of family life have always recognized the cultural contradictions of capitalism and of technological society. They have always recognized the costs (as well as the gains) of separating work and home; of geographic, vocational, and social mobility; of the indisputable wealth-generating power of capitalism. On the ground, though, conservatives look the other way when told that our economic system or our technological progress might inhibit the formation of what [Wendell] Berry describes as an economy that “exists for the protection of gifts, beginning with the ‘giving in marriage.’”

The editors of n+1: “Cultural Revolution“:

Local symptoms of the unfolding global crisis aren’t just the further destitution of the American poor, the culling of the middle class, and the somehow uninterrupted concentration of wealth among parasitic financiers. Inside the general disaster, a crisis in the principal institutions of intellectual life — academia and publishing — has been deepening. One tenure-track opening exists for every four new PhDs; the figure is worse for the social sciences, and still worse for humanities. Hundreds of applicants vie for jobs at third-tier colleges paying barely middle-class salaries; the losers end up as adjuncts or “course managers,” tossed two or three grand per semester-long class. Many a promising young person goes to graduate school in flight from a brutal labor market — only to encounter the same beast, grown more ferocious during the interval, a few years down the line. Now you’re well qualified to teach “Insecure: The Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism” (a course offered by the CUNY English Department in the spring of 2011), if only they would let you. Tenure-track professors meanwhile fear that cost-free MOOCs  — massive open online courses — will before long administer the coup de grace to the professoriate that a thousand right-wing screeds against tenured radicals could never quite accomplish.

Cardinal O’Malley released a statement over the weekend explaining he would not deliver his traditional benediction at BC’s commencement because the university is conferring an honorary degree on Irish taoiseach Enda Kenny.  Boston College is honoring Kenny in recognition of his commitment to social justice, most notably his “emotional apology in the Dáil on behalf of the state to the Magdalene Laundry survivors”.  O’Malley’s decision follows a campaign by the Catholic Action League (kind of a local version of William Donohue’s Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights) against BC’s decision to grant Kenny an honorary degree.

O’Malley’s reasons for boycotting Kenny are, in the cardinal’s words, that “the Catholic Bishops of the United States have asked that Catholic institutions not honor government officials or politicians who promote abortion with their laws and policies”, and that the prime minister “is aggressively promoting abortion legislation”.

(Side note: Kenny is from County Mayo, from whence comes the word “boycott”, arising from an Irish Land League protest in 1880.)

Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen speaks, I suspect, for a sizable faction of Boston-area Catholics in a long, scathing, as-much-in-sorrow-as-in-anger essay today.  Since it’s behind the Globe’s paywall, I’ll quote it at length after the jump, because it’s a good summary of the exasperation many Catholics feel in these situations.

O’Malley accused Kenny of “aggressively promoting abortion legislation,” which is an odd way to describe a democratically elected leader of a republic following the mandatory legal advice of the highest court in the land.

I would be the first guy to defend the cardinal’s right to skip the BC graduation. But his reasoning is embarrassingly flawed and his selectivity in whom he deems ­worthy of his presence is breathtaking in its hypocrisy.

Enda Kenny, as the duly elected prime minister of the Republic of Ireland, has a duty to respond to court decisions ordering his government to find an exception to ­Ireland’s strict prohibition against abortion so that doctors and other health care workers can take steps to save the life of a ­woman in a troubled pregnancy.

Women in Ireland have died because there is no exception to the law. Most recent­ly, it was a 31-year-old woman named Savita Halappanavar, a native of ­India who was working as a dentist in Ireland while her husband worked in Galway for the Natick-based firm Boston Scientific. When her husband learned the 17-week-old fetus his wife was carrying was non­viable, he begged the doctors to terminate the pregnancy to save his wife. The doctors pointed at the law, threw up their hands, and said there was nothing they could do.

When Praveen Halappanavar expressed exasperation that no one was lifting a finger to save his dying wife, someone tried to explain it by saying, “This is a Catholic country.”

An inquest last year found that Savita Halappanavar would most likely still be alive if the law in Ireland allowed for an abortion in that circumstance.

I am sure Cardinal O’Malley is sincere in his point of view that abortion is wrong, but I’d like to see him try to convince Praveen Halappanavar that non-Catholics like the Halappanavars have to abide by the Catholic Church’s edicts even if it means the death of a mother carrying a fetus that had no chance at life.

OK, enough of the Kafka­esque stuff. Let’s get back to the hypocrisy stuff.

To read the rest, click here.

The latest development is that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of records for 20 phone accounts belonging to the Associated Press and various of its reporters and editors in three cities. This, in an effort to learn how a story got out about a CIA  operation in Yemen. Further details from The AP:

The May 7, 2012, AP story that disclosed details of the CIA operation in Yemen to stop an airliner bomb plot occurred around the one-year anniversary of the May 2, 2011, killing of Osama bin Laden.

The plot was significant both because of its seriousness and also because the White House previously had told the public it had “no credible information that terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida, are plotting attacks in the U.S. to coincide with the (May 2) anniversary of bin Laden’s death.”

The AP delayed reporting the story at the request of government officials who said it would jeopardize national security. Once officials said those concerns were allayed, the AP disclosed the plot, though the Obama administration continued to request that the story be held until the administration could make an official announcement.

The message control is out of control.

In essence, these readers believed The Times gave too little prominence to the story initially in Saturday’s paper and placed emphasis on the wrong aspect of the situation – the apology and the politics rather than the problem itself.

Her conclusion:

I agree that The Times seemed to play down the story originally, placing it inside the paper and emphasizing the second-day angle of the apology rather than the misconduct itself. In Monday’s paper, the headline, as Mr. Greenfield noted, emphasized the Republicans seizing on the issue rather than the widening problem. A Wall Street Journal front-page headline, by contrast, read, “Wider Problems Found at IRS.”

Many on the right – as noted last week in my blog posts about Benghazi – do not think they can get a fair shake from The Times. This coverage won’t do anything to dispel that belief.

WSJ 1 NYT 0