When being constantly outraged and on the attack is how you make your living, you’re bound to get a little sloppy with the details now and then. We’ve seen before what happens when the Catholic League’s William A. Donohue, PhD, starts out with a complaint and then has trouble backing it up with actual evidence, and it isn’t pretty.

When it comes to the church’s sex-abuse crisis, Donohue’s got his reactions all set, regardless of the facts. Is a bishop being criticized for mishandling accusations against an abusive priest? The bishop must be defended; he’s done nothing wrong; the media (and/or leftist Catholics) are plainly out to get him.

Sometimes, though, the facts just don’t line up with Donohue’s interpretation. The recent case of Newark’s Archbishop John J. Myers and Fr. Michael Fugee was a tough one; to maintain that Myers was a good guy getting an unfair rap, Donohue was forced to play lawyer — a lawyer who doesn’t know what the word “or” means. Thus, as Mark Silk explained yesterday, Donohue resorted to insisting that the New Jersey Star-Ledger had smeared Myers by calling for his resignation “because he allegedly did not hold Fugee to the terms of the agreement. As will soon be disclosed,” Donohue said, “this accusation is patently false.” And therefore “the entire editorial board of the newspaper should resign immediately.”

But Donohue’s argument that the accusation was false rests on an obviously erroneous reading of the archdiocese’s court agreement to keep Fugee away from minors. Donohue insists that “the court agreement expressly allowed Father Fugee to have contact with minors, provided he was supervised.” Here’s what the court order actually says:

It is agreed and understood that the Archdiocese shall not assign or otherwise place Michael Fugee in any position within the Archdiocese that allows him to have any unsupervised contact with or to supervise or minister to any minor/child under the age of 18 or work in any position in which children are involved. This includes, but is not limited to, presiding over a parish, involvement with a youth group, religious education/parochial school, CCD, confessions of children, youth choir, youth retreats and day care.

Now, we know Donohue sometimes has trouble understanding things he reads through his fog of resentful fury. But he wants to insist that the above plainly states that Fugee is permitted to do any of the itemized activities as long as he’s being “supervised,” when in fact there are a number of “or”s after that initial phrase about “unsupervised contact” that make it very clear the restriction is not thus limited. Is it even possible to read it that way in good faith?

Let’s say Donohue really did think he was making a good argument. He knows now how wrong he was, not just because people like Silk have carefully, patiently explained his errors to him, but also because the Archdiocese has now admitted that yes, Fugee was in violation of that agreement. (Previously they had said he wasn’t.) So here was what should have been a moment of truth for the Catholic League: in trying to protect a bishop from calumny, they have actually smeared an entire newspaper editorial board and muddied an important issue with a lot of false assertions and bad arguments. And that document in which Donohue’s argument was so totally wrong? He’d bragged about how widely he’d distributed it — he didn’t just send it to “every bishop in the nation”; he also bothered “over 200 employees at the [Star-Ledger], including those who cover ‘food news’ and ‘soccer.’” A big-time screwup like this could really hurt Bill Donohue’s credibility, right? And it could really embarrass the bishops he’s so eager to defend — especially the ones who’ve gone out of their way to cheer him on without reservation. It could make them all look like they’re much more invested in playing identity politics and stoking Catholic persecution complexes than they are in being honest and living up to their promises to protect children from abuse. So the only thing to do is issue a straightforward retraction and apology, right? Read the rest of this entry »

Not awkward. Catholic Memes has the poster.

John Thavis has the analysis:

None of this consultation should cause a crisis in the church. On the contrary, I think it will help the church better understand the papacy, more as an office and less as a sacred status. Benedict set that office aside and is no longer pope, and whatever advice or reflections he may offer today come from a “private citizen,” so to speak.

So why Pope Benedict’s insistence that he will be “hidden from the world”? Because I think he also understands that whatever his working relationship with Pope Francis, he’ll have to greatly limit his other encounters, his public statements and even, perhaps, his published writings.

Benedict is keenly aware of how information travels through back channels at the Vatican and through electronic media around the world. Even an offhand remark by the retired pope – say, to a group of German Catholics or to a cardinal over tea – could echo within the hierarchy or across the blogosphere, and possibly be construed as criticism or divergence from the current pope.

Allegiance to Benedict still runs strong in some church circles, and there are those who would not hesitate to invoke the retired pope’s supposed opinion to impede or slow the projects of Pope Francis. Precisely to cut off that possibility, I expect Benedict to be true to his word and maintain a prudent silence.

What’s intriguing is that there is still no attempt to codify any of this, and no official job description for a retired pope. Benedict is doing it his way, but the next time may be quite different.

Yeah, interesting, as far as it goes. But Andy Borowitz has the inside scoop:

A lot of talk over the past couple of weeks about what President Obama can or can’t do or should or shouldn’t do given the mainly obstructionist agenda of the opposition party (there was this from Maureen Dowd, which sort of kicked things off, and there was this and this from Charles P. Pierce, who is, well, Charles P. Pierce).

Now, on the Commonweal homepage, two new pieces that take a more considered approach to the question of how the president might proceed for the rest of his term. First, from “Great Exhortations,” James T. Kloppenberg:

It has been particularly fascinating to watch the seesawing of opinion on Obama in the past year. Often it seems that every day presents a new avalanche of commentary on the president’s performance, much of it devoted to sleuthing out backroom maneuvering in an attempt to explain what is happening. And yet perhaps because the cynicism that dominates contemporary political discourse militates against taking any politician’s words at face value, surprisingly little analysis is devoted to what the president actually says in his principal public addresses. Americans are so busy figuring out Obama, they have stopped hearing him. …

In American history, as in the Catholic tradition, the individual freedom prized by contemporary conservatives and liberals alike has always been bounded by the duties that democratic citizens owe one another. Only if the president insists that liberty still obligates every individual—from the wealthiest to the poorest, from opponents of fracking to hunters paying dues to the NRA—to shoulder the burdens we share in common, and only if he is able to translate that pledge into legislation, will his second term nudge the nation toward fulfilling its ideals. “Government in a modern civilization,” FDR reminded the nation in 1936, “has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens,” including “protection of the family and the home” and “the establishment of a democracy of opportunity.” Recent events have shown that the insecurity FDR targeted has returned to the United States—and not only to our vulnerable populations, clustered in cities, but to suburban cinemas and schools and the impoverished populations of America’s reddest states. Inequality has so constricted opportunity in the United States that citizens in most European nations now enjoy not only greater safety but also greater economic and social mobility than do Americans. The dramatic decision of Switzerland, hardly a hotbed of socialism, to adopt the Minder Initiative limiting executive compensation indicates the distance separating European from American social democracy.

The president in his first term often talked about his easy working relationship with his young chief speech writer, Jon Favreau, a Jesuit-trained political activist committed to Catholic conceptions of bounded liberty, community, and justice. Now that Favreau has left the White House, we shall see whether the president’s references to these themes persist. In a moving passage in Dreams from My Father, Obama recalls telling the devout Catholics with whom he worked as a community organizer in Chicago that his motives were not much different from theirs, a revelation that may help explain why he and Favreau worked together so seamlessly for so long. But the president is now at a crossroads. Will he continue fighting against the Republican creed of individualism, confronting plutocracy with the principles of democracy?

Read the whole piece here.

Then, E. J. Dionne Jr. encourages Obama to ditch the cool and clinical analysis and get back to what got him here:

When President Obama was asked by Jonathan Karl of ABC News at his Tuesday news conference whether he still had “the juice” to get his agenda through Congress, I wish he had replied, “Lighten up. This is the country where hope lives.”…

[Obama] really is dealing with a novel situation. The GOP has moved far to the right. The Senate no longer operates on the basis of majority rule. The strong presidents with whom Obama is often compared, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, did not face these obstacles. In his heyday, LBJ had huge Democratic congressional majorities. The Gipper could always count on winning votes from conservative Southern Democrats who had joined Republicans regularly for many years before he took office. Obama has every right to be frustrated: When Republicans obstruct, he takes the blame.

But getting an “A” for analysis is not the goal here. In the areas he does control, Obama has to talk less about the hurdles he faces and more forcefully about what he’s doing to get over them.

Read it all here.

Over the past few days, several limbs of conservative media have been vibrating with the fear that the Department of Defense was about to hatch a dark plot to persecute military personnel — including chaplains — for “sharing their faith.” Some critics found those claims unpersuasive. But yesterday, news outlets began reporting a new Pentagon statement allegedly banning “proselytizing,” under threat of court martial. And those who predicted the military was about to bar Christians from obeying Jesus’ command to “preach the gospel” declared that they were right all along. Today, however, in response to my queries about the earlier statement, the Department of Defense has clarified that there is no ban on faith-sharing in the military.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Wisconsin congressman with national ambitions has apparently evolved, and I don’t think that bodes well for the hierarchy’s efforts on these issues. From Roll Call:

In a town hall meeting with constituents in Wisconsin on Monday, the House Budget Committee chairman said he has changed his mind on the adoption issue, even though his opinions on other aspects of gay rights have remained unchanged…

…“Adoption, I’d vote differently these days. That was I think a vote I took in my first term, 1999 or 2000. I do believe that if there are children who are orphans who do not have a loving person or couple, I think if a person wants to love and raise a child they ought to be able to do that. Period,” Ryan said in a video posted by the liberal website Think Progress. “I would vote that way. I do believe marriage is between a man and a woman, we just respectfully disagree on that issue.”

…In the past, Ryan has opposed almost every equality measure, getting a “0″ on the Human Rights Campaign’s most recent Congressional scorecard. He opposed the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” supported the Defense of Marriage Act and voted against the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Protection Act, which expanded federal hate crime laws to protect the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

In his remarks Monday, Ryan said he has “always supported” civil unions. Though there is no evidence to support that, it’s a clear sign that the politics of the issue have changed and that even the most conservative Republicans need to appear more hospitable to gays and lesbians in order to expand their voting bloc.

So if you lose Paul Ryan, who’s next? Then again, a lot of Catholics said he’d lost them with his Randian version of subsidiarity.

Sadly enough, it’s true:

PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona cities and counties that hold community gun buyback events will have to sell the surrendered weapons instead of destroying them under a bill Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law Monday.

The bill was championed by Republicans in the GOP-controlled Legislature who argued that municipalities were skirting a 2010 law that was tightened last year and requires police to sell seized weapons to federally licensed dealers. They argued that destroying property turned over to the government is a waste of taxpayer resources.

Democrats who argued against the bill said it usurps local control and goes against the wishes of people who turn over their unwanted weapons to keep them out of the hands of children or thieves.

One of the most memorable seminars I ever attended as a student was in a political philosophy course, in which one week covered debates about wealth stratification in ideal and real societies. We students were to submit short position papers about what we thought would be the ideal ratio of income inequality in a society. That is, how much gap would be necessary to inspire innovation, excellence, and risk-taking, while also not being so large that it would lead to societal breakdown, unjustifiable poverty, dangerous concentrations of power, or, at worst, armed revolution.

“No, no, dear. It’s only 20 times more than yours.”

As I recall it, the most left-wing students in the class were in the 10-to-1 range (200K income vs. 20 K income), and the more libertarian students rejected the very notion of an ideal ratio (“let the market do its thing, and let the people revolt if necessary”). There were lots of folks in the middle (20-to-1 or even 100-to-1).

The real ratios of income inequality in the U.S. have become basically unimaginable since then (as in, I have real trouble imagining the fact that the one Walton family has as much wealth as the bottom 35-40% of our country). Discussion of these ratios has recently focused instead on individual companies.  The data is easier to imagine and is, I think, more meaningful, since all the members of a company are, in some sense, working toward common goals and have very clear rewards for working toward them together.

Yesterday Bloomberg news put out an excellent story and data infographic of current CEO-to-worker pay ratios. (Fortune did a smaller graphic last year.)  In short, the ratio has grown by 1,000% since 1950. Many of us already knew that.  What I did not know was that it has even grown since the financial crisis and Great Recession — up 20% since 2009.

The attention-grabbers are the top ratios, with J. C. Penney winning the inequality award at 1,795-to-1. (That’s one loaf of bread vs. the Empire State Building, to help you imagine it.) The story profiles a sales employee as contrasted to the ousted C.E.O.

But it’s the overall picture that is worth pondering. Most real people do in fact retain drive for innovation, excellence, and risk-taking with much lower ratios than companies currently have. I have no doubt some of CostCo’s employees are working hard to innovate and excel, even though they only have the “low” ratio of about 50-to-1.

For those who often pine for the 1950′s, the relatively low income inequality of that era should be remembered as a central aspect of overall stability. And the unprecedented income equality in our own era should be considered a bellwether of further instability.

Just posted to our homepage, the editors on the plight of the Guantánamo prisoners:

Reviewing the establishment and operation of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which was intended to keep detainees outside the reach of U.S. law, the report [released by the bipartisan Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment].finds that Guantánamo became “a symbol of the willingness of the United States to detain significant numbers of innocent people (along with the guilty) and subject them to serious and prolonged privation and mistreatment, even torture.”

President Obama has resisted attempts to expose government wrongdoing in these matters, saying he prefers to “look forward” and not back. Even looking forward, however, requires acknowledging the plight of those still held at Guantánamo, many of whom have been there for more than a decade without facing any charges. In that time, the prison has changed from offshore interrogation site to warehouse for those swept up in the post-9/11 panic. Of the hundred sixty-six people currently held in the prison, the government has said it plans to hold forty-six indefinitely without charges: a review ordered by Obama found that they are dangerous but cannot be tried, often because abusive treatment has tainted the evidence against them. Another eighty-six have been approved for release since 2010 but remain in custody—the report calls them “victims of the complex legal and geopolitical politics the detention situation has produced.”

Read the whole thing here.

Commonweal contributor Eugene McCarraher has a great piece in the most recent issue of Books and Culture. Here’s a taste:

In his magnificent sermon, “Poverty and God,” the late Father Herbert McCabe reminds us that God is our Creator, not our creditor, nor some demanding investor in our earthly pursuits. “God makes without becoming richer … it is only creation that gains by God’s act.” (As Henry Miller once put it, “God doesn’t make a dime on the deal.”) Thus, God is literally poor because he “has no possessions … nothing is or acts for the benefit of God.” We can’t “give back” to God, or win his love with an impeccable credit history. His delight is to be with, not hound his children, like a rude collection agent; what parent thinks of a child’s life as a loan to be repaid or a debt to be squared?

Come to think of it, the God of Jesus Christ has no business sense at all, and violates every canon of the Protestant Ethic. He pays the same wage for one hour of work as for ten, and recommends that we lend without thought of return. (Finance capital could not survive a day with this logic, which is one excellent reason to recommend it.) He’s an appallingly lavish and undiscriminating spendthrift, sending his sunshine on the good and the evil. He has a soft spot for moochers and the undeserving poor: his Son was always inviting himself into people’s homes, and never asking if the blind man deserved to be cured. How can you run a decent economy this way?

He calls us his friends, and friends share all things; as Thomas Merton knew, “to be a Christian is to be a communist.” And divine friendship is to live without debts by “throwing ourselves away”—giving (not charging) according to our ability, and receiving according to our need. “To aim at poverty,” McCabe said, “to grow up by living in friendship, is to imitate the life-giving poverty of God, to be godlike.” By comparison, the American Dream is a shabby hallucination. As the American Empire totters and slides into history’s graveyard of hubris, the glorious poverty of friendship will be our only hope of moral renewal. It’s a model of another, very different empire, one innocent of creditors and debtors: the people’s republic of heaven, the realm of divine love’s utterly unearned, unarmed, and penniless dominion.

Today the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced that it has hired Kim Daniels to be a spokeswoman for Cardinal Timothy Dolan, whose term as USCCB president ends in November. (This is a new position, and Sr. Mary Ann Walsh remains director of media relations.) “Daniels brings to the USCCB her experience as director of Catholic Voices USA,” according to the press release, “an organization of lay Catholics that works to bring the positive message of the Church across a broad range of issues to the public square. She is also an attorney whose practice has focused on religious liberty matters.”

The press release does not mention two of Daniels’s previous employers: Sarah Palin and the Thomas More Law Center.  Read the rest of this entry »

should take the time to read two articles in today’s Ha’aretz (April 29). It might sober them up.

The first by Chemi Shalev invites readers to consider the “Law of Unintended Consequences”: “It doesn’t take long to prove that in the Middle East, the Law of Unintended Consequences reins supreme, and usually for the worse. It was Israel, you will recall, who built up Hamas in the 1980’s so that it would serve as a counterweight to the PLO; Israel who viewed the Shiites as an ally in the Lebanon War; America which imposed its “freedom agenda” on Israel in Gaza; America that built up Iran by invading Iraq; and Israel, when it comes to it, that subjugated itself to 47 years of debilitating occupation in its miraculous victory in the Six Day War.

“So before calling in the U.S. cavalry, perhaps one should take stock of the things one knows that one doesn’t know, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, ever mindful that there are countless other things – usually bad things – that one doesn’t know.” The author enumerates 10 things we don’t know.

In the second, Amos Harel on why the United States should hesitate. He lays out the difficulties of securing Syria’s chemical weapons: Most significant: at least 75,000 troops would be required to secure at least 18 sites with no guarantees that they would succeed.

The second segment of the “Creed in the Mosaics of Monreale” is now posted. It can be viewed here.

Good viewing on the feast of Catherine of Siena!

Just posted to our home page, an interview with novelist Richard Ford, who talks about writing, reading, the place of faith and religion in fiction, and the meditative qualities of authors like Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. Read the whole thing here. 

Also, E. J. Dionne Jr. examines how conservative politicians’ obsession with deficits is smothering economic growth while providing cover for their central goal: “to hack away at government.” Read it here.

A drone strike in Wessab, Yemen on April 18 was discussed at a Senate hearing on April 23 by Farea Al-Muslimi, a man who grew up in the Yemeni village. Now a journalist and activist, he was educated in the United States thanks to a State Department scholarship and the hospitality of an American family in California.

In his testimony to the Senate (Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights), he reported “For almost all of the people in Wessab, I’m the only person with any connection to the United States. They called and texted me that night with questions that I could not answer: Why was the United States terrifying them with these drones? Why was the United States trying to kill a person with a missile when everyone knows where he is and he could have been easily arrested?” Transcript of his testimony.

He asks all the questions the Obama Administration, the CIA, etc., don’t want to address about arresting people instead of killing them, about collateral damage, and about creating more terrorists through anger over the drones. Will the subcommittee with such an august title press the questions?  HT: Juan Cole

Sandro Magister has an interesting post that comments on the homilies of Pope Francis. He quotes the Italian journalist, Stefania Falasca, who had interviewed the then Cardinal Bergoglio. Magister writes:

In an April 23 editorial in the newspaper of the Italian episcopal conference, “Avvenire,” Falasca compared the oratory of Pope Francis to the “sermo humilis” theorized by St. Augustine.

Pope Bergoglio is also introducing this style into his official homilies and discourses. For example, in the homily for the Chrism Mass of Holy Thursday, in St. Peter’s Basilica, he made a very striking exhortation to the pastors of the Church, bishops and priests, to take on “the odor of the sheep.”

Another typical feature of his preaching is interacting with the crowd, getting it to respond in chorus. He did so for the first time and repeatedly at the “Regina Coeli” of Sunday, April 21, for example when he said: “Thank you very much for the greeting, but you should also greet Jesus. Yell ‘Jesus’ loud!” And the cry of “Jesus” in fact went up from St. Peter’s Square.

Magister wonders whether Francis’ popular style leads some to neglect the content of some of his remarks:

The popularity of Pope Francis is due to a large extent to this style of preaching and to the easy, widespread success of the concepts on which he insists the most – mercy, forgiveness, the poor, the “peripheries” – seen reflected in his actions and in his own person.

It is a popularity that acts as a screen for the other more inconvenient things that he does not neglect to say – for example, his frequent references to the devil – and that if said by others would unleash criticism, while for him they are forgiven.

In effect, the media have so far covered up with indulgent silence not only the references of the current pope to the devil, but also a whole series of other pronouncements on points of doctrine as controversial as they are essential.

This time in Newark, NJ. The bishop is Archbishop John Myers, and the offending priest is Michael Fugee, who admitted groping a 14 year-old boy 12 years ago. (He later recanted his confession, saying that he’d only confessed so he could go home sooner.) He was tried and convicted, but the conviction overturned on appeal based on inappropriate instructions to the jury. The appellate ruling did not question the validity of the confession. According to the NJ Star-Ledger, rather than re-try the case,

the prosecutor’s office allowed him to enter pre-trial intervention, a rehabilitation program for first offenders. At the same time, the prosecutor’s office secured an agreement that Fugee undergo counseling for sex offenders and have no unsupervised contact with children as long as he is a priest.

I infer that Fugee’s agreeing to this condition means that he, in effect, recants his recantation. Otherwise, it would be a serious infringement on his ministry. A later effort to have his record expunged was denied on grounds of public safety. Subsequently, Fugee has been assigned to significant posts in the Archdiocese. His latest post is co-director of the Office of Continuing Education and Ongoing Formation of Priests.

On the face of it, this is a good resolution. After all, this job would not seem to bring him into contact with children, which is the terms of his deal with legal authorities.

Alas, not so. Archbishop John Myers also permits him to say Mass in various parishes around the diocese, and in 2009 he appointed him to a position as a hospital chaplain. At least in the case of one of the parishes and the hospital chaplaincy, no one was told of the terms of Fugee’s ministry. Noting other cases in which Myers has shown excessive leniency to sex offending priests, the NJ Star-Ledger has called for Myers to resign. Concerning Fugee, the editorial board states:

Fugee was not to work in any position involving children, or have any affiliation with youth groups. He could not attend youth retreats, or even hear the confessions of children. With the full knowledge and approval of Myers, Fugee did all of those things. Look at the picture of him clowning around with children in today’s paper, and it makes you want to scream a warning. The agreement was designed to prevent exactly that.

Details of Myers’ handling of other accused priests may be found here.

Fugee’s is a hard case, and partly done right. His day job does not involve kids. The problem is two-fold:

1. the failure to advise parish and hospital authorities of limitations on his ministry.
2. More significant, however, is that this seems to be in clear violation of the Dallas Charter, under the terms of its zero tolerance policy, viz:

When even a single act of sexual abuse by a priest or deacon is admitted or is established after an appropriate process in accord with canon law, the offending priest or deacon will be removed permanently from ecclesiastical ministry, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state, if the case so warrants (SST, Art. 6; CIC, c. 1395 §2; CCEO, c. 1453 §1).

Read the rest of this entry »

At Mass this morning Pope Francis confirmed forty-four people from around the world. They ranged in age from eleven to fifty-five. Francis based his brief, but rich, reflections on the readings of the Fifth Sunday of Easter. He told the confirmandi:

the new things of God are not like the novelties of this world, all of which are temporary; they come and go, and we keep looking for more.  The new things which God gives to our lives are lasting, not only in the future, when we will be with him, but today as well.  God is even now making all things new; the Holy Spirit is truly transforming us, and through us he also wants to transform the world in which we live.  Let us open the doors to the Spirit, let ourselves be guided by him, and allow God’s constant help to make us new men and women, inspired by the love of God which the Holy Spirit bestows on us!

He went on to challenge them:

Remain steadfast in the journey of faith, with firm hope in the Lord.  This is the secret of our journey!  He gives us the courage to swim against the tide.  Pay attention, my young friends: to go against the current; this is good for the heart, but we need courage to swim against the tide.  Jesus gives us this courage!  There are no difficulties, trials or misunderstandings to fear, provided we remain united to God as branches to the vine, provided we do not lose our friendship with him, provided we make ever more room for him in our lives.  This is especially so whenever we feel poor, weak and sinful, because God grants strength to our weakness, riches to our poverty, conversion and forgiveness to our sinfulness.  The Lord is so rich in mercy: every time, if we go to him, he forgives us.  Let us trust in God’s work!  With him we can do great things; he will give us the joy of being his disciples, his witnesses.

The full homily is here.

Today for the first time since the Boston Marathon bombings I walked past the Arredondos’ house.  On the poles in the postage stamp-sized backyard, the flags (one American, one Veterans for Peace) were at half-mast, waving gently in the breeze above a “War Is Not The Answer” sign.

Carlos’ pickup truck was parked in the short driveway.  Everyone in Roslindale—a quiet neighborhood in the southwestern part of Boston—knows Carlos’ truck.  It’s brightly decorated with flags, peace signs, and the names of his two sons:  Lance Corporal Alex Arredondo, killed in action on August 25, 2004 during his second tour of duty in the Iraq War, and Brian Arredondo, who died on December 19, 2011.  Brian committed suicide, having never recovered from his older brother’s death.

Most people at Sacred Heart (the Arredondos’ parish) and in Roslindale also know that Carlos bears the scars of that war and those deaths on his body, as well as his soul.  When Carlos first got news of Alex’ death, he became distraught and set himself on fire with a can of gasoline and a propane torch, suffering 2nd and 3rd degree burns on 25% of his body.

Since recovering, Carlos has worked tirelessly as a peace activist, reminding us of the horrible costs of war and traveling far and wide spreading the gospel of peace and patriotism.  That’s what he was doing at the Boston Marathon finish line last week when the bombs went off.

There Carlos got to do for Jeff Bauman what he couldn’t do for his sons, what others had done for him nine years ago:  save his life.  According to numerous reports, The Man With The Cowboy Hat (most neighbors know Carlos’ hat too) scaled the barricades, put out the fire burning on Bauman’s shirt, tied a tourniquet around one of Bauman’s legs, and helped rush him to emergency care.

Bauman, according to the FBI, then played a key role from his hospital bed in identifying the Tsarlaev brothers as the suspected culprits, helping—it seems likely—to save additional lives.

What does this all mean?  I have no idea.  I hope, at the very least, it means Carlos can sleep more easily than he has for the past decade, that he can know deep down in his soul that his living and his ministry of peace has not been in vain.

Is it possible that part of the landing gear of one of the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center buildings has been found? And was unaccounted for? Yes, apparently so. Such a piece of debris was found behind a building three blocks north of the 9/11 site by land surveyors studying the site for an owner preparing to buy the parcel for the Park Place Islamic Center that is being built there. Oh conspiracy theories!!! Or serendipity. Here’s the NYTimes report: “11 Years Later, Debris from Plane is Found near Ground Zero.”

The Boston Globe published today an exclusive interview with the victim of the carjacking by the Marathon Bombing suspects. Not only does “Danny” give a more accurate account of the time-line before the perpetrators were engaged by police, he shows himself to be an amazingly resourceful and courageous young man. His action undoubtedly saved lives.

I hope the interview is still accessible — it’s an extraordinary read.

The jaw-dropping swiftness with which the Senate responded to this week’s flight delays, which were predicted as a result of sequestration, provides a perfect example of plutocracy in action. When sequestration began to affect the quality of life for frequent travelers — an affluent segment of our society — the Senate did all it could to take the pain away.  At The New Republic, Noam Scheiber takes the Senate Democrats to task for unfairly removing the burden of sequestration on just one part of the federal government:

Try to do something about senseless gun violence and you’ll see tumbleweeds blowing across the Senate floor. Try to make life a bit less stressful for the average business traveler and you’ll have no trouble finding backup. Since the sequester forced the FAA to furlough 10 percent of its air traffic controllers this week, leading to average flight delays of roughly an hour, pretty much every senator with a mileage-club departure lounge in her state (and even some without one) had rushed to undo the cuts.

He argues that democracy can’t work when the powerful don’t experience any of the suffering they have caused:

But there’s an even more important principle at work—which is that, once we’ve decided on spending cuts, the affluent must be made to understand that they lead to an increase in suffering. If they’re too insulated from the pain, they’ll be too eager to support more cuts in the future. (And by “too eager” I mean an eagerness to cut more than is justified by any economic rationale. I’m not suggesting that cuts per se are bad.) The logic here is similar to the moral logic of a military draft: The people who sit out the fighting shouldn’t labor under the delusion that wars are relatively costless, or that the costs are far-removed from their daily lives. A democracy can only function if most of us have skin in the game.

Scheiber is right on the mark. The vast majority of our current elected representatives haven’t served in the military, nor have most of their children (that fact led to the only good scene from Fahrenheit 9/11). Many of them don’t send their children to public schools. It seems that one of the last places where our congresspeople do something “normal” is when they board a plane.

Scheiber highlights the continued cuts to programs that don’t serve primarily the affluent, such as Head Start and Meals on Wheels. I would add another to that list: the National Park system, which I believe is the single best manifestation of American democracy. As someone for whom the National Park system is a part of every summer, I have been following the various parks’ announcements closely.  Unfortunately, I had already planned our summer vacation before sequestration happened, and I’m hoping that Wyoming’s parks will be open and serviced in the ways I remember them.

But I worry especially for places like northwest Montana, whose summer tourism industry relies so heavily on the thousands of visitors to Glacier National Park — one of the greatest places on earth. When Going-to-the-sun Road is closed, or its season shortened for a few weeks on each side, it can change a year in the black to a year in the red for middle-class small businesses in the region.

In other words, when the federal government cuts budgets, it’s not just government jobs that get cut. A business traveler in Washington, D.C., can wait a few hours at the airport and not lose his or her job. But restaurant owners in Kalispell or Jackson might not be able to wait a few weeks and keep theirs.

At the beginning of sequestration, I wrote letters to my three elected congresspeople — all Democrats — asking about the effects on the National Parks. None of them wrote me back. I guess they do their hiking and camping — if at all — on private lands owned by their friends.

Definition: a project considered a useless waste of time and money, yet continued due to extraneous policy motivations.

You decide.

The Diocese of Brooklyn has stirred the pot a bit with an ad campaign about “The Original Hipster” – Jesus. It doesn’t specifically identify Jesus, but one quickly gets the idea from the image of a flowing tunic above a pair of red Converse sneakers.

I first heard about the ad when a reporter asked  for a comment on it, and I have to admit that I stumbled a bit. Jesus as a hipster? He wasn’t usually ironic, was he? He wasn’t given to consumerist idolatry of artisanal food and drink. (I know, he changed water to wine, but it was done with little fuss.)

I thought back, though, to the portrayal of Jesus as fun-loving hippie depicted sometimes when I was growing up – the  Jesus of “Godspell” in its original version. “The Original Hipster” is a variation on that, offering a new generation the chance to experience Jesus as counter-cultural. Will Brooklyn’s hipsters respond with a new musical?

I’m not sure how the ad campaign looks to, say, Latino Catholics in Williamsburg who are being driven from their neighborhood by the high rents that the hipsters’ arrival brought. But all in all, I like it. Humor is good, and it’s good that people are talking about Jesus. The ad  has been the subject of many jokes, including on Saturday Night Live. That’s because it’s a talker. So, as the diocese noted, SNL is helping to spread its message.

Her name is Rachel Shtier and she has fully shared her unhappiness with the readers of Sunday’s Times Book Review.  On the front page no less.  Three books were under review, but never mind them. Contempt for her adopted city was what she wanted to share with readers.

I waved the review at my fellow Chicagoan across the breakfast table and we both snorted. “What does she know?” And “she’ll be sorry.”

But first a taste: “…Chicago never ceases to boast about itself. The Magnificent Mile! Fabulous architecture! The MacArthur Foundation! According to The Tribune, Chicago is “America’s hottest theater city”; the mayor’s office touts new taxi ordinances as “huge improvements.” The mayor likes brags that could be read as indictments too, announcing the success of sting operations busting a variety of thugs and grifters. The swagger has bugged me since I moved here from New York 13 years ago.”

Michael Miner of the Chicago Reader   responds and so do many Chicagoans. I am assuming she’ll be moving back to New York soon–or maybe Peoria.

Two items now on our website examine the current real-world implications of prejudicial thinking. First, William Pfaff looks at how the take-your-medicine conclusions reached by economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff in 2010 confirmed the “untutored intuition” of policymakers looking for a reason to slash infrastructure and social spending throughout Western Europe—the only trouble being that the prescription for austerity arose directly from the economists’ questionable methodology. That, and a spreadsheet error that further distorted the calculations (Paul Krugman last week called the resulting effect on austerity-straitened nations “the Excel Depression”). From Pfaff:

The blood runs cold when one fully appreciates how vulnerable Western policymakers are to slogans and magical thinking. The Reinhart-Rogoff case is the latest, and certainly will not be the last, in which the credulity and carelessness of experts wreak havoc among millions of ordinary people. … [B]ecause of austerity policies their paper was supposed to support, Greece sees hardship and political chaos, the Irish and Portuguese economies have collapsed, Spain and Italy suffer serious crises, the French government totters, and everyone hates the Germans for forcing austerity on everyone else.

I am not writing this simply to pile onto the economists whose work was used to justify disastrous policies. What concerns me more is the demonstration of credulity on the part of elected leaders and policy professionals, who eagerly accepted research findings that seemed too convenient to be true.

Next, E. J. Dionne Jr. takes up the issue in the context of the political (and personal) responses to the Boston Marathon bombings, noting that where some were initially eager to pin blame on Islamic terrorists, others saw the hand of right-wing extremists. Once Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were identified as the bombers, however,

[w]e then moved, with dispatch and without pausing for more information, to show how the event proved that our side was right in any number of ongoing debates.

Opponents of immigration reform used the fact that the brothers are immigrants as a lever to derail the rapidly forming consensus in favor of broad repairs to the system. Supporters countered, defensively, that if there is any lesson here, it’s that our approach to immigration needs to be modernized. In truth, this horrifying episode has little to do with immigration reform one way or the other.

We fell back to other familiar ground. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said we should assume these brothers had to be linked with one of our international enemies and that Dzhokhar should therefore be tried by a military tribunal and not in a normal American court, the venue to which his status as an American citizen entitles him. …

I’d acknowledge that none of us can get through the day without making a lot of assumptions. All of us have intellectual, ideological, and moral commitments that we bring to bear upon what we think about almost everything.

But the hyperpolarization of our moment has sped up the rush to (contradictory) judgments, a practice further accelerated by new technologies. We have less patience than ever with the often painstaking task of gathering facts. We are better informed, yet seem more efficient than ever in manufacturing conspiracy theories.

Read Pfaff’s column here; Dionne’s is here. 

A week ago, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, resigned. This was another tragedy for the Palestinianes  in the effort the create their own state. Tom Friedman in the NYTimes (April 24) analyzes the consequences in these “Four Takeaways.”

“1. For Palestinians, particularly Abbas and Fatah, who so easily turned their most effective executive into a scapegoat, if there is no place for a Salam Fayyad-type in your leadership, an independent state will forever elude you.

“2. Hamas and the Israeli settlers are both really happy today. Fayyad’s aim to build a decent Palestinian state in the West Bank, at peace with Israel, was a huge threat to both of them. They both prefer permanent struggle so they both can claim there is no one to talk to on the other side and, therefore, they never have to change policies.

“3. Thanks, American Congress and Israeli government. Your mindless, repeated cutoffs of cash to Fayyad’s government helped undermine the best Palestinian peace partner Israel and the U.S. ever had. Nice job.

“4. ‘There is nothing inevitable about a liberal order emerging from any of these Arab awakenings,’ argues the pollster Craig Charney. Indeed, to produce that outcome takes someone like a Fayyad with the consistent help of external parties as well as a loyal base at home ready to see it through. In the end, Fayyad had neither. Add another nail in the coffin of the two-state solution.”

The obituary for the mother of a (Methodist) female gym teacher at a Catholic high school in Ohio mentions said gym teacher’s female partner.  Gym teacher is promptly fired.  Maybe Cardinal Dolan should get Bishop Campbell on the horn and explain to him that Catholics are supposed to “try our darndest to make sure we’re not anti-anybody.” (HT Balloon Juice)

UPDATE:  Here’s a link to the obit.  It’s just sad.  And, to be honest, I’m sick of this stuff happening in my name as a Catholic.  At some point, doesn’t toothless dissent become complicity?

UPDATE II:  Here’s a very moving interview with the teacher. I wonder what impact this firing will have on the young students’ relationship with their church.  I don’t even know this woman and it’s testing mine.

And here’s Bryan Fischer, defending the termination.  My mom has always said you can tell a lot about someone by who their friends are.

Just a month ago, I entered a post on whether the new Pope should retain “S.J.” after his name. It gave rise to a spirited exchange. While arguing that I did not think the Pope (or any bishop) should retain the identifying designation of his religious community, I certainly did not call into question the profound formation the individual had received in his religious community’s tradition. Indeed, I think it constitutes a continuing blessing.

In his homily for today, on his patronal feast of Saint George, Pope Francis shows the influence of Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises on his theological-pastoral vision:

Jesus Himself says in the Gospel:” But you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep.” If we are not “sheep of Jesus,” faith does not come to us. It is a rosewater faith, a faith without substance. And let us think of the consolation that Barnabas felt, which is “the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.” And let us ask the Lord for this “parresia”, this apostolic fervor that impels us to move forward, as brothers, all of us forward! Forward, bringing the name of Jesus in the bosom of Holy Mother Church, and, as St. Ignatius said, “hierarchical and Catholic.” So be it.”

The rest is here.

Rocco Palmo has posted Francis’ actual delivery of the homily this morning. It’s fun to watch his expressivity.

Update:

Cardinal Pell has given an interview in which he says:

What I think we have got in the Pope is the very best of the traditional Jesuit: faithful to Christ, faithful to the Church, going out to people – and not just to the powerful ones but to those on the margins, as Francis is urging us to do now. At its best, I don’t think there is any tradition in the Church to equal that of the Jesuits.

Now that Pope Francis has been said to have approved of same-sex civil unions during his time in Argentina, we begin to see other cautious voices chiming in. First was the “no, I didn’t mean THAT” from Vincezo Paglia, and now Archbishop Piero Marini observes “There are many couples that suffer because their civil rights aren’t recognized.”

Make no mistake: Francis spoke clearly and harshly against same-sex marriage, calling it a “destructive attack on God’s plan.” Francis also is fervently opposed to gay adoption, which he has said discriminates against children. (In fact, however, no reputable data shows harm to children from being raised in households headed by same-sex couples. Some studies show benefits.) It is not unreasonable to see his apparent openness to civil unions as a compromise stance. In fact, such a stance would seem to be in accord with Catholic doctrine in that civil law is answerable not to Church teaching but to the requisites of the common good, manifested in contemporary societies by recognizing the equal rights of all. Civil law neither prohibits all vices nor does it require the practice of all virtues. (This latter from that radical dude, Thomas Aquinas.)

This would be a shift from recent magisterial pronouncements. Pope Benedict spoke against civil recognition of same-sex relationships in 2003, not distinguishing civil unions from civil marriage. If Francis stays the course, it’d mark a sharp change from the views of his predecessor still living just across the way.

Echoing Benedict, the USCCB spoke against same-sex civil unions in 2009, calling them

a multifaceted threat to the very fabric of society, striking at the source from which society and culture come and which they are meant to serve. Such recognition affects all people, married and non-married: not only at the fundamental levels of the good of the spouses, the good of children, the intrinsic dignity of every human person, and the common good, but also at the levels of education, cultural imagination and influence, and religious freedom.

Interesting times. Will the USCCB find a way both to accede to Pope Francis’ apparent willingness to promote civil unions AND to continue to stand by its stated concern that society will fall into ruin as a result? Or will they act in defiance of the current Pope, (assuming, of course, that Francis doesn’t change his tune now that he’s changed his name)?

Or, as some have observed, has this ship sailed? The time to promote civil unions as an alternative to same-sex marriage may have passed. To many, now, it’s civil marriage all the way, with civil unions sounding too much like “separate but equal” to the American Catholic ear. (Indeed, Catholics lead other religious groups in their support of same-sex marriage.)

The latest from Catholic News Service:

LONDON (CNS) — Church leaders have told the British government that members of the royal family who marry Catholics under recently passed legislation will not be obliged to bring up their children in the Catholic faith.

Lord Wallace of Tankerness, speaking on behalf of the government, said he had been assured personally by Msgr. Marcus Stock, general secretary of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, that the canonical requirement of Catholics to raise their children in the faith was not always binding.

“I have the specific consent of Msgr. Stock to say that he was speaking on behalf of Archbishop (Vincent) Nichols (of Westminster) as president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and can inform the House that the view taken by the Catholic Church in England and Wales is that, in the instance of mixed marriages, the approach of the Catholic Church is pastoral,” he said.

Do we all get that “pastoral” out? I’m not in a “mixed marriage” (and the kid does First Holy Communion this Sunday, white dress and all, so we’re clearly the real deal). But I didn’t know how negotiable this pledge to raise the kids Catholic was today. Times change. I wonder how flexible we can be on other things.

In any event, the real reason I posted this is because I couldn’t resist a story that cites Lord Wallace of Tankerness.