maybe you haven’t paid much attention to Keystone XL, the pipeline destined to bring Canadian heavy oil through the U.S. to refineries and ports in Louisiana (where some of you do live) and Texas (anyone there?). Nebraska rose up to prevent the pipeline from running through a major aquifer and stalled its construction while President Obama thinks about it.

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.

Like most Italian words they roll off the tongue and sound great; but they disguise destructive fruit. Or so says Pope Francis in this morning’s homily, the latest example of his “sermo humilis” style.

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!”

Commonweal editor Paul Baumann’s review of George Weigel’s Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21^st Century Church is now available at the website of The Nation. Excerpts follow:

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.)

Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse for the Obama administration, Dr. Donohue drops another bombshell:

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.

“Nothing threatens America’s national security more than the perception that we are at war with Islam,” I wrote four years ago in this magazine.

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.

Today Attorney General Eric Holder enjoyed a relaxing day on Capitol Hill, where he engaged in mutually enriching dialog with the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing on “Oversight of the United States Department of Justice.” During a particularly warm exchange with Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), the two got into a friendly disagreement about the quality of the FBI’s work in its investigation of the Boston Marathon bombers. When Holder claimed that Gohmert might not have full command of the facts, the gentleman from Texas didn’t take it very well, and he accused Holder of casting aspersions on his…well, just watch:

Full video here.

A brief story from Vatican Radio notes that a meeting of Catholics and Orthodox will take place this week in Istanbul to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the so-called Edict of Milan in which the emperors Constantine and Licinius ordered that all citizens be permitted to worship God as they saw fit. The instruction freed Christianity from the threat and reality of persecution and ordered that confiscated Christian buildings be restored. A translation is provided below. It will be noted that the toleration is granted to all religions. It does not represent an establishment of Christianity, which would come later in the century with the edict of Theodosius I, also given below.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning the Vatican released a curt statement announcing that Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who recently resigned as Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh — before the mandatory retirement age of seventy-five — after admitting improper sexual conduct, will be leaving Scotland for a while to think about what he did. Weeks before the conclave, you’ll recall, three priests and a former priest accused the cardinal of sexual misconduct, including a long-term affair — allegations he initially denied. O’Brien skipped the conclave. It was thought he would skip town too, at least for a spell. But then he was seen moving into a seaside home about thirty miles east of Edinburgh. “It’s a nice little place,” he reportedly said. “My plan is to move here ultimately to relax and enjoy my retirement.” Pope Francis had other ideas. Not only will O’Brien be leaving Scotland to do penance for his admitted “sexual conduct [that] has fallen below the standards expected of me,” but, as the Vatican statement makes clear, the pope will be keeping tabs on him. “Any decision regarding future arrangements for His Eminence shall be agreed with the Holy See.”

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.

Just posted on the homepage, the editors on the paucity of options in Syria, where fighting has killed seventy thousand people over two years and driven three million from their homes:

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.

Jonathan Chait: “The Facts Are In and Paul Ryan Is Wrong“:

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.

It’s graduation season at the nation’s colleges and universities, so it must be time for another round of Catholic Commencement Controversy.  Here in New England this year, the most prominent entry thus far features the region’s most prominent Catholic school and bishop:  Boston College and Cardinal Sean O’Malley.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Investigating journalists who expose a secret CIA war; auditing the tax returns of political opponents; retaliating against whistleblowers: It sounds like 1972 all over again, no? Perhaps the constitutional lawyer who is president of the United States can come up with a response to each of these current controversies. Cumulatively, it suggests a frightening instinct at various levels in the federal government to control the message at all cost – and a president who is allowing it to happen.

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.

Margaret Sullivan, the Public Editor of the New York Times, has a blog post in which she addresses readers’ complaints about the Times’ coverage of the  targeting of conservative groups by the IRS. She writes:

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

Stephen Walt is calling Barak Obama a buck passer when it comes to foreign policy. Is this a criticism in a country where presidents are supposed to announce “the buck stops here!” or is it, as Walt argues, a sound policy that has been undermined by what he consider “self-inflicted wounds” in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Walt writes: “[Obama] is a buck passer. And despite my objections to some of what he has done, I think this approach reveals both a sound grasp of realpolitik and an appreciation of America’s highly favorable geopolitical position.”

He goes on, “the greatest risk we face as a nation are self-inflicted wounds like the Iraq and Afghan wars or the long-term decline arising from a failue to invest wisely here at home. Recognizing these realities, Obama has reacted slowly and in a measured way to most international events. He takes his time, remains calm, and prefers to pass the buck to others whose interests are more directly affected. Unrepentant neocons and liberal imperialists scorn this approach, because they never lose their enthusiasm for new and costly crusades, but most Americans don’t seem to mind. Why? Because they recognize what the foreign policy establishment can’t admit: What happens in Syria, Mali, most of Central Asia, and even the Korean peninsula just doesn’t matter that much to the United States, and the outcome in most of these places won’t make Americans poorer or less safe unless Washington does something stupid (like intervening with military force).” Read it here.

So what do you unrepentant neocons and liberal imperialists think?

UPDATE: Apropos of a discussion about Libya in the comments below, take a look at the David Brooks column today in the NYTimes. In defending Victoria Nuland, State Dept. spokesperson, in the Benghazi matter, Brooks points out how much this was a CIA operation for which the State Dept. is taking the hit. Interesting, if true.

Remember how in January, after nearly a decade of legal filibustering, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles finally made public the priest-personnel files it agreed to release as part of a 2007 settlement with abuse victims, except the files were heavily redacted, and remember how those files contained damning memos detailing the lengths to which archdiocesan officials — including Cardinal Roger Mahony — went to shield abuser-priests from civil authorities, and how soon after those memos made news, Archbishop Jose Gomez garnered praise for announcing that Mahony would “no longer have any administrative or public duties,” and how several media outlets reported that Mahony had been “barred from public ministry,” except he really hadn’t, and then he took to his blog to dress down Gomez for “not once over these past years…[raising] any questions about our policies, practices, or procedures in dealing with the problem of clergy sexual misconduct involving minors,” yet, as Mahony’s then-spokesman explained, he had “cleared his calendar of confirmation appointments this year”? Well, he’s doing them again.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Since Easter, he has officiated at eight services, including one last week in which he anointed more than 120 youths at a Wilmington parish.

His presence has caused controversy, with some parents threatening to pull their children from the liturgies and at least one parish priest asking that Mahony not attend. It has also raised questions about why Gomez’s rebuke of Mahony, an unprecedented move that won him praise from victims and their supporters around the world, had so little lasting effect.

You don’t say. Gomez’s letter did not include anything specific about the alleged change in Mahony’s status. And, as an archbishop, Gomez does not have the authority to restrict the ministry of a cardinal. (Only a pope can do that.) But he does have the authority to say who presides over confirmations in the archdiocese. Have a look at the letter. Sorry, is that link broken? It seems the letter is no longer available on the website of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. (The L.A. Times cached a copy here.) Odd that the archdiocese’s archive of press releases includes a January 22 apology from auxiliary Bishop Thomas Curry, who played a part in archdiocesan efforts to conceal accused priests from the law (and who really did cancel confirmations this spring), along with Gomez’s statement on the release of the priest-personnel files, dated January 31 — the same date on his statement on Mahony. Did that document disappear down the memory hole?

Perhaps amnesia is going around the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. When an L.A. Times reporter approached Mahony after a confirmation he presided over, the cardinal claimed he didn’t know that his former spokesman had said he was done doing confirmations for the year: ”‘That’s news to me…. I’ve been doing them every week and I’m going to be doing them every week,’ he said, adding, ‘So go home.’”

Strange that Mahony would be so confused, considering the pains he took to defend himself after Gomez published the letter promising that the cardinal would no longer have any public duties. Certainly the cardinal could not be surprised that some parents would not be pleased to have him confirm their children — not after his series of blog posts cataloging his Lenten challenge to love his enemies, which, oddly, included a meditation on the virtue of remaining silent in the face of false accusations, and a promise to pray for God to forgive those who have expressed anger over his role in the sexual-abuse scandal.

Evidently the cardinal feels he’s been unfairly treated by the media, but if his rehabilitation tour is to have any chance of success, he’s going to have to start answering some tough questions. He might start with these: Why did you work so hard to block the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops-commissioned investigation of the sexual-abuse scandal, and why, long after the church knew of the dangers posed by abusive priests, did you attempt to hide accused priests from civil authorities? Was it about church resources? Money? If so, why was that more important than justice for victims of sexual abuse — and the safety of children?

Now on the homepage, E. J. Dionne Jr. assesses the victory of former governor Mark Sanford in South Carolina’s special congressional election:

“I want to publicly acknowledge God’s role in all of this,” declared a victorious Mark Sanford as he celebrated an unlikely political rebirth Tuesday night with a sermon praising the Supreme Being and the many “angels” who helped the once-disgraced former governor along the way.

Perhaps the Almighty did inspire those who drew the boundaries of South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District. They packed it with so many Republicans that Sanford was able to engineer a comeback in the polls by debating a flat piece of cardboard bearing the image of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Voters in the Lowcountry may have been weary of a man who made a national spectacle of himself by covering up an affair when he was chief executive and then hanging around in office. But when called to arms against liberals and spending and big government, they were prepared to forget Sanford’s hike on the Appalachian Trail, the one that never happened but was his attempt at a false alibi for being in Argentina to see his lover-now-fiancée.

Of course, Sanford’s Democratic opponent was Elizabeth Colbert Busch, who ”tried everything she could to shove party and philosophy out of the voters’ minds and keep them focused on the man they had once loathed and laughed at.” Her loss has her brother Stephen thinking of becoming a tar heel:

The Transform Now Plowshares— Greg Boertje-Obed, Sr. Megan Rice and Michael Walli—were found guilty Wednesday on two felony charges for their July 28, 2012 break-in at and protest at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, the nation’s storehouse for bomb-grade uranium.

Embarrassingly for the Dept. of Energy, the three cut through four security fences, scaled a heavily wooded ridge, and held vigil for some time at the “fortresslike Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility” before guards finally noticed and arrested them.

“Sister Rice said her only misgiving was that she had waited so long to stage a protest.  ‘My regret was I waited 70 years,’ she said. ‘It is manufacturing that which can only cause death.’

She was asked why she hadn’t felt obligated to inform the Catholic bishop in her area of her intentions.  Rice responded: ‘I’ve been guilty of many discourtesies in my life.’”

In Sister Rice’s statement one can hear echoes of the humble audacity in Dan Berrigan’s statement written 45 years ago this month on behalf of the Catonsville Nine:  “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, for the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house.  We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”

Some years back I gave my Sophomores the possibility of gaining extra credit if they made the trek from Chestnut Hill to Cambridge to see the movie: “Into Great Silence.”

They arrived, bought the requisite popcorn and drinks, and settled in. The film began. Ten minutes later they became aware that the only sounds in the theater were their munching popcorn and slurping sodas.

After some embarrassment they put the junk food away and began to listen. They heard drips of water, birds chirping, tools hitting hard ground, monks laughing while sliding in the snow.

Our spiritual senses have been atrophied by over-indulgence. We fail to perceive that often silence speaks powerfully, and absence is suffused with presence.

Blessed Feast of the Ascension.

As part of the New Conversation on Marriage Initiative at the Institute for American Values, Peter Steinfels recently joined David Blankenhorn for a discussion on whether liberals will help to save marriage (the Institute’s Amy Ziettlow, an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, also took part). Peter says some nice things about Commonweal, too, before the main event gets underway. You can watch the conversation right here.

In today’s audience in Saint Peter’s Square, Pope Francis spoke of the Holy Spirit. Vatican Radio has the full text. Here is an excerpt [translation modified for the sake of clarity]:

This is the precious gift that the Holy Spirit brings into our hearts: the very life of God, the life of true children, a relationship of familiarity, freedom and trust in the love and mercy of God, which brings also a new vision of others, near and far, seen always as brothers and sisters in Jesus, to be respected and loved. The Holy Spirit teaches us to look with the eyes of Christ, to live life as Christ lived, to understand life as Christ did. That’s why the living water that is the Holy Spirit quenches our thirst because it tells us that we are loved by God as His children, that we can love God as his children, and that by his grace we can live as children of God, as did Jesus. And what of us? Do we listen to the Holy Spirit who tells us: God loves you? Do we really love God and others as Jesus did?

Claire, one of the frequent participants in our dot-Commonweal conversations, teaches catechism in France to eighth-graders, 13 or 14 years old. The other day I sent her a link to a website that specializes in catechesis. She was unimpressed by it and its materials, and, with her permission, I pass on her remarks in the hope that they might prompt a general reflection.

I’ve read a few of the texts and their proposals do not at all match the needs of my kids.

Those texts emphasize the spiritual, experiential and community aspects, but that’s what the Mass (in particular) is for. I try to prepare them so they can get more out of the Mass, but I cannot substitute for it, and I don’t want to.

Those texts downplay knowledge, but my youth are plagued by ignorance.

When last month they had confession (for the first time in several years for most of them), the preparation consisted in giving them a long list of possible actions and asking them to think about whether each was good or bad, sinful or not; and in giving them a print-out of the words to be said by them and said by the priest, like a script of the event. But the words were not really explained and the sacramental aspect not mentioned, so, although they went to confession, they had the experience but not the understanding of what they did. That’s ignorance.

When we studied the Creed, I asked them: ‘When at Mass we read the words “…and was made man”, sometimes at that point the people in the assembly do something. What is it?’, and the only ones who had an answer offered: “Yes, at that point, we beat our chest.” That’s ignorance, too. 

The last but one session, I asked them what mission Jesus had given to his disciples. The more knowledgeable kids answered: “To announce the Good News”. I asked: “And what is the Good News?” – Nobody knew, nobody could suggest an answer, even a wrong answer! That’s profound ignorance. 

So all those texts from that website, with their insistence that the catechist is not a teacher, that the dynamics are different, that there are no lessons to be memorized by the children, that catechism has completely changed and is no longer about teaching facts and doctrines, those texts do not convince me. I have many uncertainties about exactly what to teach and how best to teach it, but not about whether to teach.

Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop Robert McManus was arrested Saturday night at his family’s vacation home in Naragansett, Rhode Island, on charges of drunken driving, leaving the scene of an accident, and refusing a chemical test.

“I made a terrible error in judgment by driving after having consumed alcohol with dinner,” McManus said in a statement. “There is no excuse for the mistake I made, only a commitment to make amends and accept the consequences of my action.”

That’s all well and good…as far as it goes. I don’t want to make more of this relatively straightforward DUI incident than necessary, but Bishop McManus’s terrible error in judgment extended beyond driving while intoxicated.  It also included his decision to flee the scene of the crime after, apparently, causing the accident by rear-ending the other driver’s car.  (A neighbor “noticed minor front end damage to McManus’s dark-colored Honda Accord the following morning.”)

There are far bigger crimes and errors in judgment that occur in the church and the world every day, but it is at least somewhat troubling that neither Bishop McManus nor anyone on his staff seems to have grasped the extent of his errors in the immediate aftermath of his arrest.

The new issue is now live. Featured is a package of essays on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, with philosopher Gary Gutting, biologist Kenneth R. Miller, and physicist Stephen M. Barr discussing what the Guardian named the Most Despised Science Book of 2012. 

From our editors’ introduction to the piece:

In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel argues that “the Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly wrong” because it cannot explain the origin of conscious life, much less the human mind’s ability to apprehend scientific truths or objective moral and aesthetic values. In the book’s introduction, Nagel writes that the failure of neo-Darwinian theory to offer a satisfactory account of these things suggests that “principles of a different kind are also at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.” Nagel does not believe these principles are supernatural; as an atheist, he rejects every kind of supernatural explanation. But he also rejects the claim that the natural world is reducible to the material world. Consciousness, he believes, is no less natural than the material world, but is not itself material. Nagel does not propose a scientific alternative or supplement to Neo-Darwinian theory; instead, he presents the problems that such an alternative would have to solve. “Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole. Pointing out their limits is a philosophical task, whoever engages in it, rather than part of the internal pursuit of science—though we can hope that if the limits are recognized, that may eventually lead to the discovery of new forms of scientific understanding.” 

Read the whole thing here. See the full table of contents for the new issue here.

If there’s a word I don’t immediately associate with a for-profit, pre-K-through-nine educational venture that has $85 million in private-equity financing (with another round on the way), that in full-page newspaper and magazine ads has proclaimed its aspirations for expanding around the globe, and that occupies a 215,000-square-foot, light- and art-filled renovated warehouse alongside the High Line Park in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, it’s “humility.” The very nature of Avenues: The World School’s educational mission, if that’s the term, would seem to work against fostering qualities like simple gratitude and modesty. There’s also the $43,000 annual price-tag. 

Fortunately, the executives in charge at Avenues seem alert to the cognitive dissonance, as detailed in a New York Times Magazine story on Sunday:

[W]hile Avenues offers its students every imaginable educational benefit — a 9-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio, a Harvard-designed “World Course” — it has also tapped into an even deeper, more complicated parental anxiety: the anxiety of wanting their kids to have every advantage, but ensuring that all those advantages don’t turn them into privileged jerks.

As Manhattan, and particularly downtown, is transformed by a staggering infusion of wealth, there is a growing market for creating emotionally intelligent future global leaders who, as a result of their emotional intelligence, have a little humility. In fact, when the nearby Grace Church School was researching whether to start its own high school, it asked top college-admission officers what was lacking in New York City applicants. The answers coalesced around the idea of values, civic engagement, inclusiveness and diversity — in a word, humility.

And so Avenues students may run to their “Empire State of Mind: Thinking About Jay-Z in a New Way” “mini-mester” while passing a Chuck Close self-portrait, but they do so with the intent of being “humble about their gifts and generous of spirit,” as the school’s mission statement puts it.

That “there is a growing market [emphasis added] for creating emotionally intelligent future global leaders” is something else to think about. But in the meantime, humble or not, Avenues students are at least assured a menu of diverse and healthy fare, and more of it:

After the first week of classes, a group of parents sent a seven-page e-mail detailing concerns: there were not enough “worldly” snacks like seaweed, zucchini bread with quinoa flour and bean quesadillas (so long as the beans came from BPA-free tin cans). …

In the black-box theater, Avenues’ chief administrative officer helped assure parents that their kids’ diet was sufficiently organic, local and healthful. The regional director of its food-service contractor was on hand to address any fears about carbohydrates. A doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital was ready to answer questions about allergies. A 25-page PowerPoint was presented. … After the PowerPoint presentation concluded … the questions started flying: Why so much bread? What was the policy on genetically modified organisms? Why no sushi? Nancy Schulman, the head of Avenues’ Early Learning Center  … dutifully worked with parents to implement many of their ideas, including more education about nutrition, and more snack time.

If there are any Commonweal readers across the pond, please stop by to say hello!

Burying the dead is among the corporal works of mercy. One brave funeral director agreed to prepare the body for a Muslim burial, but it is Tamerlan Tsarnaev, terrorist number 1. There are protests. So far no cemetery has agreed to take the body. Carry on Worcester, Massachusetts; do the right thing. The man is dead. Story here.

UPDATE: Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, arrived in Worcester on Sunday to wash the body of his nephew according to Islamic custom. After completing this task with friends who assisted him, he had this to say, ” “A dead person needs to be buried — that’s what tradition requires, that’s what religion requires, that’s what morals require.” Yes, indeed.

Still no cemetery available.  Story here.

End of story: He was finally buried on May 9 or 10 in a small Muslim cemetery in Virginia.

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 »