My take on the new documentary on clergy sexual abuse.

Update: Apparently, you need to login. You can use the following to gain access:

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Update 2: I’m getting some reports that the link isn’t working right. Here is it in full and live, if you have to copy-and-paste: http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/living/religion/15904276.htm.

Ted Haggard gave the keynote at the Religion Newswriters Association conference in September. He opened the talk by discussing his early interest in journalism. (Audio can be found here. The following transcriptions are mine.)

“I was excited about telling the truth, and helping people to be more truthful in public.” One of his tactics as a reporter for his high-school paper was to place a microphone in the teachers lounge and publish what the faculty said about students.

“If they were going to stand up in public and say how much they loved students…and then they’d get in the teachers lounge and talk about trying to put some of them in bed with them, and they would comment on their intellectual capacities, and comment on their bodies, then we thought that was newsworthy.”

But Haggard’s father wasn’t too taken with this passion for journalism. He offered Ted a car to bribe him into attending Oral Roberts University. Ted, never having heard about the school, did some research, and decided that matriculating there would be a unique opportunity to bypass journalism school by investigating Oral Roberts himself.

“I can skip journalism school if I can find out that Oral Roberts is sleeping with someone other than Evelyn, or if I can catch him in a lie, or if I can catch him faking miracles…stealing money or something like that. And so I went to Oral Roberts University fully intending to expose Oral Roberts in order to advance my career.”

This turned out to be great fun during his freshman and sophomore years, but finally disappointing.

“I can’t tell you the dismay I felt when I became fully convinced he slept with his own wife….It was the killer spike of my journalistic career when I found out Oral Roberts did not steal money. So because of that…I ended up in ministry…encouraging people to live a better life, and to live a life that was honorable, to keep their promises and keep their word.”

Last week, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago delivered a homily at the Catholic Theological Union in which he candidly explained why he thinks the world casts a suspicious eye on the United States. Cathleen Falsani reports:

“The world distrusts us not because we are rich and free. Many of us
are not rich and some of us aren’t especially free. They distrust us
because we are deaf and blind, because too often we don’t understand
and make no effort to understand,” he said.

“We have this cultural proclivity that says, ‘We know what is best
and if we truly want to do something, whether in church or in society,
no one has the right to tell us no.’ That cultural proclivity, which
defines us in many ways, has to be surrendered, or we will never be
part of God’s kingdom.”

Persuasive stuff. Here’s a link to the full homily.

The New York Times reports.

And from the BBC story:

As the judge began reading the death sentence Saddam
Hussein shouted out “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Great) and “Long live Iraq!
Long live the Iraqi people! Down with the traitors!”

The former leader looked shocked and furious as the
sentence was passed, and continued to shout, denouncing the court, the
judge and the US-led occupation force in Iraq.

But the BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson said
that after his tirade, which was clearly deliberate, Saddam Hussein
seemed to have a small smile of triumph on his face as he was led away
from the courtroom.

“It was as if he was thinking ‘I’ve come here and done what I intended to do,’” our correspondent said.

Update: Cardinal Martino says don’t do it.

CNN is reporting that a 1999 Pentagon simulation projected that the United States would need at least 400,000 troops to secure Iraq after an invasion. Even then, the simulation suggested that Iraq could descend into chaos.

There wasn’t any mention of the results of this simulation in Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, nor did I find any reference to it in Ken Pollack’s The Threatening Storm (which recommended both invasion and stabilization forces of about 300,000.) 

Margaret, was there any mention of this simulation in Fiasco? 

I’d be curious as to why the results of this simulation weren’t more influential within the Pentagon planning process.  I know, I know, the question almost answers itself, but if I was Tommy Franks and I had the results of this in my back pocket, I might have been inclined to argue for a much larger force than he apparently did.

So what’s the “Catholic angle” on this?  Goes to the just war criterion about likelihood of success and also whether the moral actors were invincibly ignorant of the probably outcomes of their actions.  Satisfied?

Bill McGarvey, editor of BustedHalo, interviews blogger-in-chief Andrew Sullivan.

Within moments of its posting, Catholic World “News” blogger Diogenes offered his (their?) predictable response.

The San Diego Civic Theater is home to the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Tony-winning play by John Patrick Shanley for just four days, so act fast. Here’s Welton Jones’s review of the production, which includes two of the original cast members, the fantastic Cherry Jones and Adriane Lenox. And here’s my review of the original Broadway production.

Citing the women-priests’ planned eucharistic celebration at the Call to Action (CTA) conference this weekend, the officers of Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) have decided to withdraw the from the meeting. Here’s the full text of the letter from VOTF President Mary Pat Fox explaining the withdrawal:

Dear Friends,

It is with deep regret that Voice of the Faithful must withdraw from the Call to Action Conference this week. We had a productive association last year with CTA. And
back in the Spring when we agreed to participate in the conference this year we were focused on the goals we have in common. Since that time VOTF’s participation in the CTA conference has been discussed on and off the list serves. These discussions along with recent newspaper articles highlighting the women priests’ planned celebration of the Eucharist, and more media attention expected in the coming days, has led the Officers to this decision.

We are a mainstream, centrist, Catholic lay organization with our mission and goals focused on working within the Church to gain the laity a voice in the governance of the Church, supporting survivors of clergy sex abuse and priests of integrity. Our obligations to our membership, to survivors and to priests of integrity require us to maintain our sense of purpose and not to be associated with issues that go against the teachings and doctrines of our Catholicism.

As we have recently with Future Church on the vibrant parishes initiatives, our hope is that we can collaborate with CTA and other church reform groups on issues where we have common ground. This requires a very delicate balance. We will continue to seek that balance and common ground.

Sincerely,
Mary Pat Fox
President, Voice of the Faithful

You won’t believe it. You really won’t.

In the last issue of Commonweal, my fellow columnist Barbara Whitehead wrote about the ambivalent reactions of now-grown children conceived by artificial insemination -donor. The Linacre Centre, a Catholic bioethics institute in England, has just announed the publication of a book entitled Who Am I?, which also outlines the largely negative reactions of people who came into existence in this way.

Whitehead suggests that this data may give us reason to “hit the breaks” –. It’s not clear what she means, but it may include banning such procedures.

I understand the concern with AI-Donor, but I am also concerned with the form of the argument. These children have problems with their lives — but the alternative for them isn’t life with both their natural parents –it’s non- life — non-existence. They wouldn’t exist if these procedures hadn’t been performed. In essense, to run this particular argument against AI-D, we’re running something that looks an awful lot like a wrongful life argument.

This argument based on experience is a dangerous argument. Not necessarily incorrect , but dangerous. It’s something that can easily be turned in directions that I don’t think the Linacre Centre would endorse, nor Whitehead. What would they say if someone gathered together a collection of people who lived with various disabilities, who said that they found life difficult — as a means of arguing that women over 35 should be discouraged from having children? What would they if someone talked to a bunch of people who came from big families, who said that they missed unique parental attention? More prosaically, what would they say if they gathered together a bunch of teenagers who said that their lives were diminished because they weren’t at the socio-economic level of their peers?

Furthermore, in a society that counts abortion as one of the morally available options, finding out you’re pregnant under one of those conditions may give you a good reason to have an abortion.

My view: Arguments are like snakes. Unless handled carefully, they can come around to bite you.

When I got off the train from work the other day, there were
a couple of people sitting at a card table registering voters for the upcoming
election. I had to fight a sudden urge
to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction.

Ten years ago, I would have been those people behind the
card table. At this time in 1996, I was in
New Hampshire
doing GOTV work for the state AFL-CIO. I
spent two weeks eating cold pizza and doughnuts and telephoning as many union
members as I could

Politics was something I learned literally at my mother’s
knee. One of my earliest memories is my
mother taking me to an envelope stuffing session at a campaign office. The day I turned 18, she slapped a voter
registration card into my hand and said “fill this out.” I eventually followed in her footsteps, and
from 1988 through 2000, I dutifully volunteered for (or was assigned to) a campaign
every two years. For most of that
period, I lived in Washington,
DC, where we followed poll
results the way that baseball fans follow box scores.

So what happened? There was no single cause. The deepening of my faith in my 20s led me to
feel a greater tension between some positions taken by my political
party—positions that at one time I had shared—and those of my Church. But I felt no attraction to the opposition
either. I began to feel a sense of
political homelessness that many Catholics seem to share today.

But it wasn’t only that I had changed my mind on a few
things. I was also growing increasingly
disenchanted with the way that politics was being practiced, and at my role in
enabling that. Two decades of advocacy
for a variety of causes and candidates had turned me into a person who cared
more about winning than the truth. I
found myself writing talking points I no longer believed in and finding ways to
discount evidence that didn’t fit my preconceived worldview. I’d become an ideologue and after a campaign
where I was depressed after my candidate won,
I realized that it was time to get out.

As Lemony Snicket might say, this is not a story with a
happy ending. I’ve become so cynical and
suspicious of advocates for causes and candidates that sometimes I’m paralyzed
with indecision. I tend to assume that I’m
not getting the whole truth, and all too often I can find evidence to back that
up. Even when I see candidates and
elected officials embracing the things I believe in, I tend to grimace. I am certainly not recommending this as a
moral stance; it’s an emotional cul de
sac in which I seem to be caught.

In their statement Faithful Citizenship, the U.S.
bishops argue that participation in the political process is a “moral
obligation.” This may be true, but there
are moral dangers here too. You can get
so caught up with a cause, a candidate, or a party that you start shaving small
bits off the truth and sanding down the sharp edges of the Gospel.

In an election where issues of great moral
import—abortion, war, torture, poverty, marriage—are at stake, it may seem absurd
to suggest that there is something more important than who wins this November
or how these issues are dealt with in the months to come. But there is.
First and foremost, we need to be faithful and we need to be
truthful. We need to preach the fullness
of the Gospel, even if—perhaps especially if—it embarrasses our comrades and
gives comfort to our opponents. We need
to remain committed to the search for truth, even if the truth we discover
undermines our arguments. We need to
trust enough in eternal victory to risk temporal defeat.