Always love Jean’s posts but “not sure even we understand why we’re like we are” brought me back up here but don’t blame Jean. I KNOW I don’t understand why we’re like we are and that must be editorial ‘we’ since no persons of Irishness have authorized me to speak for them while a number have urged me over the years to zip it (OK it’s true an “Irish nun”–that was like official title– in first grade SS. Simon and Jude School Pittsburgh did tape mouth shut but please hear this: I LOVED Catholic school; it was Catholic home I struggled–that’s home-home not Catholic Home–and yestdy’s post actually cited guy that thanked nun for smacking him; that was all). I promise a clear hypothesis will be introduced in the body of this post.

         Now decades after having ‘made peace’ with Catholic home various circumstances mostly grounded in autism school placement issues plus some concerns for care of elders brought us (Catholic home) back together only this time Chinese-American wife (professional blogger Kristina Chew see www.autismvox.com) is in mix in addition to 10 y.o. Chinese/Irishman squarely located on autism spectrum. I’m still hoping my wonderful cousin and friend Bobby Fisher (of Wedding Crashers screenwrite fame) will play this for comedy someday: take a third generation Ivy League-educated Bay Area Chinese American woman…let’s just say heavy steady diet of Brian Friel plays have maybe helped just a tad beyond that K. can tell her story; as for me, my mind is like that proverbial bad nabe; it should not be entered alone perhaps that’s why God invented the blogosphere.

        I worked on a project for 8 yrs it was not til yr 7 I understood it was about violence on the Irish-Catholic waterfront; it was under this portable dispensation I was born and raised. Enough about me, let’s turn to my good friend Jim G. who prefers I use his melodious surname but I’ve demurred. Jim G. is world’s leading if unpublished ‘On the Waterfront’ expert; years after we met from common interest we were driving down the Jackie Robinson (formerly Interboro Pkwy; we were definitely inter-boro) when religion issue suddenly arose and just as quickly I knew the Conversation was near. It’s a conversation I’ve been party to at regular intervals since the late 70s–no tears folks, then or now–that in Jim G’s case begins and ends in late 60s at large RC high school in one of the boroughs where students that were sent to detention could barter there way out of two hours standing within a narrow square by playing game called ‘Tea-Time” (I still wonder if it was Tee-Time) in which detainee was free to go once having run a gauntlet of male/lay teachers wielding those long pointer sticks as clubs. Whack whack whack and on your way son. (Now this was what we might call an ‘industrial’ model of RC school: your finer religious orders would rarely subject charges to such treatment both from principle and in the interest surely of future donor-relations.) 

        All this is just so much boo-hoo stuff, of course, were it not for fact that for next, say, 3-5 hundred years historians and others will be mulling events in US Catholic life to discern just what went awry (beginning with question: why was sex abuse–so widely reported by early 90s–largely treated as so much boo-hoo stuff by lots of us for full decade let’s face it: if not things would be different no?). But Jim G. wasn’t sex-abused though a good friend was by the bros. that ran his school. Decades later Jim G. read newspaper account of sex abuse charges against a bro. from that same community at school in a different state and discovered M.O. was totally identical: the bros. would bring guys in one at time for queries that might begin ‘how do you get along with girls’ etc…Jim G. is one street-smart guy knew just what to say to get out; friend not so lucky.

      Jim G. has thesis about detention: those most likely to be sent up were guys that showed inordinate interest in outside-culture (Jimi Hendrix; Citizen Kane) at time when inside-culture was really straining to hold itself together. He also believes violence/sex abuse was of a systemic piece. I have but a mere hypothesis: to really understand sex abuse issue we must start with something over which no one will be sued, no dioceses bankrupted if only in part because it was so pervasive: not an ‘event’ or ‘action’ but an ethos in which a kind of routinized low-intensity dull brutality was sustained by a code of silence whose inviolability worked as a given.

     I am continually amazed at how much ink is spilled over what somebody else might think about Catholicism while we still rarely ponder, well, what does Brando/Terry Malloy scream down to Johnny Friendly on the plank leading to the ‘Hoboken Yacht Club’…”and you did it to Charlie, one of your own!” And as Father Pete Barry reminded Terry the previous evening: done it to a hundred guys better than Charlie. And the thesis–amazing I’m making a straight assertion!–of this waterfront book I did is that the real-life social-justice-crusading ‘waterfront priest’ John Corridan, S.J. was almost wholly rejected by ‘his own’ on the Irish waterfront; it was only thanks to Budd Schulberg and other non-Catholics (and I know Budd will not concur in this judgment) with whom Corridan worked that his powerful message covered the waterfront even as the dockworkers to whom he devoted his apostolate voted not once but twice to re-certify their mobbed-up union; a crew that enforced a code of silence like no other and was militantly backed by powerful West Side monsignor/Port Chaplain.

   Now, there are also plenty complicated historical reasons for Corridan’s travail. I always figured that’s what historians do: complicate issues. These issues above are complicated issues. When I was in grad. school I liked to poke fun at theorists of gender/sexuality that talked about things like power relations, violence, codes of silence etc. I’m making very very modest amends here: I acted like an idiot. I’d be most grateful to learn of discussions/treatments of Catholic/clerical/hierarchical sex abuse issue (only one of course among many institutions facing such issue) that takes seriously questions of violence, brutality, codes of silence as factors in prolonging terrible ordeal. 

A few people have asked me how my read of the finale of the Sopranos fits in with the themes I explored in “Salvation and the Sopranos,” which argued that season five (and the first part of season six) can be fruitfully considered in terms of redemtion and fate.

I don’t think there’s a neat fit–and I don’t think there has to be. Dramatically, in “Made in America,” Chase wrapped up the overarching theme of the show: the tension (and sometimes the surprising similarity) between old world mob values and the values of the striving middle class. That episode in the life of the Sopranos is over.

But he also wrapped up his series–his baby–also “Made in America.” And in so doing, he gave a gift to the audience who loved the show, and the characters– as constituting its own dramatic world, which parallels in some ways our world. Chase reminded us that it was a dramatic creation, coming in some sense to an end, in that bit on the television about the “talented director looking for a new job.” But he didn’t destroy the parallel world–he just pulled the shades on the window into it.

In my view, his ending was benevolent, toward the audience, the characters, and the fictive world that they inhabited. He told a good yarn. In ending it, he gratified our immediate desire for some moral judgment without foreclosing the bigger questions. Tony isn’t a good man, but he isn’t as bad as Phil. And we had a very satisfying end for Phil, not only did he die, but he was really and grossly squished–almost like a cartoon villain. We cheered. But precisely because it was a cartoonish ending, it didn’t address (and in my view, didn’t mean to resolve) ultimate questions of justice or injustice.

We are like Agent Harris–we like Tony, despite ourselves. And dramatically, we want him and his family to go on– in their world (not in ours, that would be too dangerous). So what does that mean? What are the requirements of that parallel world continuing? Well, it means that Tony can’t die. Then he’s dead in that world, and since he’s the fulcrum, the world dies too. It also means Tony can’t be reformed– otherwise, the dramatic basis of the world implodes. To redeem the major characters is to destroy them, as well as the narrative. It would become something else, something completely different, which nobody would watch.  At the same time, there needs to be a way for him to be a good bad guy-maybe cooperating in the government’s battle against terrorism.  Finally, for their world to go forward, there has to be both family and Family, intimately intwined. That’s what bringing Meadow and AJ in the business does. After all, he’s killed off nearly everyone else.

So Chase’s ending means these very real fictional characters are continuing their lives in their parallel universe, as we go about living ours. That parallel universe is still, imaginatively, intact. But that means that the questions it raises for our consideration are still there –including my questions about redemption.

Chase lets us abide with our ultimate questions. But in the immediate term, life goes on, both in the real world ( the great director needs a new job) and in the Soprano’s parallel universe. I don’t view that going on as making a nihilistic, or tragic statement about reality. I view that going on as Chase not destroying that parallel world that he created. What he won’t give us, however, is answers to the questions about reality that his constructed, parallel world raises– or, better, that we raise in conversation with his constructed, parallel world. We need to work those out ourselves.

Some of you nonsubscribers out there (for shame!) may have noticed that we had placed Eugene McCarraher’s review of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great behind the subscriber-only firewall. Well, we decided that it was far too good to hide under a bushel, so now the piece is free to the masses. Have a look. This is also a great opportunity for those who haven’t yet come into the Commonweal-subscriber fold to see what they’ve been missing. So what are you waiting for? Sign up now for our risk-free Web-only offer, which includes both hard copies of the magazine and complete Web access–just $17. Cheap!

I hate to interrupt the orgy of pop-culture commentary, but in case you weren’t able to access our Web site yesterday, don’t forget to check out the home page, which was updated on Monday–especially Luke Johnson’s and Eve Tushnet’s pieces on homosexuality and Scripture. Read, digest, discuss.

P.S. If you were unable to access the Web site yesterday afternoon and evening, would you raise your hand, and tell me where you’re from? Much obliged.

While blogsite was down last night I wondered if anyone would note return of ‘Rescue Me;’ thanks Michael Higgins and thanks to John Schmalzbauer the great young sociologist of religion and former Worcester guy (Denis Leary’s hometown) for reminding me show was back. I’ve only seen bits as with everything but Mr. Higgins has it down; plus this Denis Leary is funny! and author of greatest single one-liner re the Irish-Americans: “What is it about the Irish and paneling?”

    BUT and ok I’m sure this is strictly my problem what is about the Catholics and violence? Or do I mean ‘representations’ of Catholics and violence? Lookit the poster for new ‘Rescue Me’ season: it’s been in-your-facing NYC area commuters for weeks now; the curve of the neck, fire-eating/breathing evoke Thomas Nast’s Civil War era cartoons of Irish savagery no? (with a splash of Richard Avedon/Robert Mapplethorpe).  From the mayhem wrought of the ‘nominally’ Catholic Sopes. families to the issue with violence/sexual violence that apparently figures in ‘Rescue Me’s’ past; we like it especially red and bloody it seems (there’s an essay for someone on Mink the very un-Catholic gangland lawyer and his struggles with ketchup bottle in penultimate scene on Sopes. Sunday night; that David Chase is one stone genius) .

     But in all the talks about redemption/salvation via this violence etc we often overlook basics: getting smacked or worse really hurts! I was tossed through a wall or two as kid but more routinely lived under a regimen we like to call ‘The Irish Waterfront.’ Now I’m not selling books here since it won’t be out for way long but it was ‘sobering’ doing historical research on NY/NJ waterfront to discover how much the ol’ neighborhood (West Side Manhattan, Hudson County NJ et al) was dominated by violence, brutality, and a version of Catholicism that equated an ’intimacy with violence’ with spiritual authenticity and cultural authority. The Irish guy that ran the NY waterfront rackets from 1920s-50s was the most highly honored layman in the NY Archdiocese and, as the curmudgeonly columnist Westbrook Pegler once wrote, he was a much more menacing figure than the ‘secularized’ Prime Minister of Organized Crime, Frank Costello (Francesco Castiglia); AND he had the West Side’s most powerful Monsignor on hand to remind nosy outsiders this waterfront was a special Catholic place.

     Do Catholics demonstrate their freedom from this one-time bondage by making of it art? Could be. I know too there’s whole school of theology/thought that says these poor folk were simply ‘uncatechized’ thus not really Catholic and another school that says everybody did it get off it will you please?  But I’m also thinking we’ve not even started examining this stuff in real hard ways using real evidence grounded in real experience. In Peter Quinn’s wonderful new book on Irish-America, for example, he writes: “The use of corporal punishment in schools like St. Raymond’s [of his Bronx boyhood] has been covered to the point of parody.” I used to believe that too but can someone refer me to an actual historical study of violence/punishment in Catholic schools?

      This hang-up started at Fordham’s autism and advocacy conference in October when a wonderful guy, prez. of a Catholic high school, responded to wisecrack that while I may be ambivalent about my Catholic education I wished my autistic son could have at least the chance to be ambivalent about his. Speaker said his friends that run other Catholic high schools lament that grads won’t return for reunions ‘just because we beat the hell out of them;’ speaker then remarked that he was grateful that his 7th grade nun cared enough to hit him so hard ‘her false teeth flew across the room.’ I laughed; the other Catholics in room seemed to laugh; others didn’t laugh and that’s led to an ongoing conversation with someone that’s been struggling to understand this unique cultural/religious tradition.

       I know I tend toward the personal in these posts but what surprised me in conversation with this individual was their observation I have not, in fact, been very forthcoming about my experiences on ‘the Irish waterfront.’ It also occurred to me that this ‘intimacy with violence’ that was so dominant along that highly portable waterfront is discussed in ways that are themselves deeply intimate and rarely shared on the outside.   

Gone are the days when Catholic themes on either a network or specialty channel, television drama, or sitcom series would have garnered a measure of respectful fascination, bemused interest, or benign mystification. The brilliant and brutal prison drama series, Oz, put an abrupt end to that, although the Catholic “substance”–errant priests, anguished if not confused penitents, and prison staff extraordinaire–was both, well, substantive and enlightened. Rescue Me, the bold and in some ways iconoclastic post-9/11 NYC firefighters series by Denis Leary and Peter Tolan, is a different matter.
Leary is a tough, sardonic, occasionally arch but always evisceratingly funny Boston-bred, Irish-American comic and actor who takes no quarter when it comes to Catholic subjects. He spares no one and nothing. The series–beginning its fourth season–is ostensibly about a dysfunctional firefighter–Tommy Gavin–and his firehall mates, his bedmates, his family, his struggle with alcoholism and other addictions, his guilt (there is a superabundance of this pointedly Catholic burden), and his frequently anti-PC opinions. He is a younger and more attractive priapic and vestigially Catholic Archie Bunker.
But how vestigial? As it happens, the Catholic “thing” is not so easily exorcised nor does he want to escape the faith and culture that has shaped him. He needs his Catholicism to rail against. Gavin/Leary has stocked the series with Catholic matter and mocks it ceaselessly. In the first three series alone we have had: Gavin’s brother, a priest of the Archdiocese, leave his ministry in disgust; a young, charismatic priest-paedophile forced to confront the consequences of his predatory behaviour against a backdrop of stomach-churning violence; Tommy himself having numerous conversations with Himself (Jesus), and these are not inner locutions; Tommy’s friend, Lou, having regular commerce–the sexual not the spiritual kind–with an endearing if seriously befuddled novice; and numberless references to Catholic bric-a-brac, devotional practices, moral prohibitions, and cultural accoutrements that define the Catholic sensibility in all its NYC iterations–Italian, Irish, or Puerto Rican.
The series is deeply Catholic, neither reverential nor antagonistic, although some might think it the latter with its occasionally visceral rage against Catholic mores and institutional hypocrisy with its accompanying sense of betrayal. But such rage really is an indicator of the post-Second Vatican Council, the post-patriarchy, the post-culture war, and most significantly, the post-clerical sex-abuse pandemic lens through which most Catholic feeling in the United States is now filtered. Rescue Me has its soap-opera-ish qualities, its adolescent delight in pricking adult rectitude, its daring explicitness in handling all the taboos (are there any left?), its self-pleasuring defiance and insularity that allows it to thrill to the sound of its own gnostic-tinged script, and its brazen disregard for all authority. All of these contribute to its cultish appeal.
But it is also a universal moral drama played out in the world of a cynical, sex-besotted, love-craving and smart-assed firefighting anti-hero caught in an endless maelstrom of ever-accelerating moral and emotional velocity. Gavin needs rescuing, Like us all.
If that isn’t Catholic, I don’t know what is.

David Brooks recentlyhad a characteristically stimulating column on a paper by Lisa Keister of Duke University on “The Roman Catholic Advantage” in “wealth mobility.”

Having just failed (again) to balance my checkbook, I hurried to get a copy.

Keister argues:

Non-Hispanic White Catholics are now among the wealthiest American subgroups and this wealth has dramatically increased in the last generation. (Her larger academic point is that this change might tell us something about inequality, wealth creation and stratification.)

Why have Catholics (again, non-Hispanic white Catholics) hit it big?

1. They get married later in life, like other highly educated people (see #3) and have fewer children. Catholic fertility used to far outpace non-Catholics, when controlling for class etc., but is now no different. (My neighborhood would suggest this isn’t true but I think Keister is in fact correct.) I gulped in agreement, as the father of four children, when I read the following: “wealth declines precipitiously after approximately two children.” (The non-sociologist in me loves that “approximately.”)

2. They stay married, often to each other. Or put another way: the Catholic divorce rate is low, and the Catholic marriage rate to other Catholics is high. Divorce has extraordinarily bad consequences for wealth creation. (This makes sense.) This general finding surprised me since I was under the assumption that the Catholic divorce rate was not much different than the non-Catholic rate, and that Catholic homogamy was declining.

3. Catholic education rates are high. Catholics (again, NHW Catholics) are as educated as mainline Protestants, an achievement of the past thirty years. Attending Catholic schools is a bonus here (associated with high rates of college completion) as is distance from immigration.

Some of the historical background Keister uses in her more general argument is dated and probably of little use. And it’s a pity that she didn’t address how this discussion of Catholic mobility is a sort of inversion of Max Weber, whose experience in late 19th century Germany and anti-Catholicism shaped his own idea of the Protestant ethic.

Still, it’s interesting stuff. Does this ring true to dotCommonweal readers/contributors? (From what we know, after all, you are the people Keister is talking about.) What conclusions should we draw?

One quick one to get us started: this should be a good time to be a fundraiser for a Catholic institution, except that it’s at exactly this moment that the crisis of confidence in institutions like dioceses and archdioceses tainted by the sex abuse scandal is peaking. But I’m guessing schools, Catholic relief services and Catholic universities can do much better, if they can distance themselves from non-transparent Catholic competitors for Catholic dollars.

I wasn’t going to do this, but I think it might be necessary. For those of you who haven’t experienced the wonder of the power ballad, here is a hit from the year 1981. The Sopranos finale ended with the words “Don’t Stop.”

As yesterday afternoon wore on, I was thinking about how sad I would be in five or six hours, after I had seen the series finale of The Sopranos. Whether or not Tony himself died, the world of the Sopranos would have expired. I was wondering whether to email Bob Imbelli and ask if he could say a funeral mass for the fictional characters that had died in a drama created in the minds of human beings –as well for the entire fictive world that world was dying in the series finale. Even the characters who “survived” would be dead. And I would be sad. I was pretty far along in concocting a very creative theological justification for this funeral mass (involving the divine Logos, divine creativity, human creativity, the imago dei and the imago hominis) when it was time to turn on the television to watch the episode.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. I should have paid more attention to the title of the series finale, “Made in America.” Initially, of course, the title refers to the mob – Tony, Paulie Walnuts, Uncle Junior, all of them are “made” members of the Italian mob but made in America, not in Italy. The story of the Sopranos was the story of a family’s assimilation into broader American cultural values and the tensions this caused with the ethnic values that animated prior generations – with the continuing complication, of course, that this family was in the Family. Can a good capo be in therapy? Can you perform a mob hit when taking your daughter on a college visitation trip? Old world values and the exigencies of modern life continued to brush up against each other in the series. And the show found both drama and comedy in the attempt of the characters to negotiate the tension.

In the final episode, we saw the resolution of this tension, in the definitive passing of the old world. We saw this passing in the (very gory, but very gratifying) death of Phil Leotardo (the New York capo who went after the New Jersey crew in part because they didn’t preserve the old ways). We saw it most especially in the descent into senility of Uncle Junior. When Tony’s sister Janice visits Uncle Junior in the grim state facility, he doesn’t recognize her–and in a way, she doesn’t recognize him. She fails to understand the bit of Italian he speaks to her. Her little daughter, who has a traditional Italian name (Domenica), will be raised thoroughly American–like Tony’s daughter, who has a trendy American name (Meadow (!)). When Tony visits Uncle Junior, to effect some form of reconciliation (and to find out where Uncle Junior hid his money before Janice does, so he can give it to Bobby’s kids), he realizes Uncle Junior doesn’t recognize him. With tears in his eyes, Tony reminds his uncle about “this thing of ours.” Uncle Junior asks, with bewilderment, “I was in that?” And Tony tells him how Uncle Junior and his brother Johnny Soprano ran the North Jersey mob. That world is now gone.

But the whole world isn’t gone. We need to pay attention to the second meaning of “Made in America.” Here, the phrase refers to the series, not the characters. The series itself is made in America, and we Americans make comedies, not tragedies. The perspective of the viewer, which flirted with being identified with being Dr. Melfi and the therapeutic perspective, settles decisively into identification with Agent Harris–the FBI man with the stomach problems who’s now pursuing terrorists. Tony contacts Agent Harris, giving him some information about the Arabs’ bank accounts in the hopes that the FBI will be able to give him some clues as to Phil Leotardo’s location, so that Tony’s crew can take him out. If they do that, the war will be over – even the New York guys think Phil is too rigid and old school. They won’t kill him themselves, but they won’t stand in Tony’s way.

It turns out that Agent Harris isn’t so different from Tony—they both have stressful jobs, demanding wives, and petulant mistresses. And so, Agent Harris calls Tony from a hotel room (after an unsatisfying assignation with his FBI-agent girlfriend), and lets him know that Phil’s calls to his crew have been traced to a gas station with a payphone on Long Island. So Tony’s crew gets to work. They finally track Phil down, getting out of the SUV that his wife is driving, with his two twin baby grandchildren strapped into car seats in the back. A Soprano operative shoots him in the head, and then again in the chest, but doesn’t touch Phil’s wife or the babies. Significantly, the Soprano crew operated by the rule Tony reminded Carmela of before the Sopranos moved to the safehouse by the beach: they don’t touch family. I couldn’t watch it, but it was perversely morally satisfying when Phil’s wife’s SUV slipped into D and accidentally ran over Phil’s head–the decapitation of the capo–and the squashing of the threat to Tony. When the normally taciturn Agent Harris learns that Phil has been taken out, he raises a cheer, “We’re gonna win this one.” Exactly what the audience feels at the same time.

But will Tony make it? Will we win this one? As many spoilers indicated, the series ends in an old-fashioned ice cream store, with juke boxes on the tables in the booths. We see Tony go in first, waiting for the rest of his nuclear family, and scanning the songs on the play list. With mounting anxiety, we watch a suspicious looking man come in, and sit at the counter. Carmela comes in and Tony smiles at her with affection and relief. Another two men come in–are they dangerous? No, one’s AJ, followed by a random man–he’s ok, we see, he’s wearing a “USA” hat.

Outside, Meadow pulls up to the restaurant, and tries to parallel park her Lexus –with mounting frustration and lack of success (Doesn’t Lexus make a car that parallel parks itself?) Will she be hit crossing the street? We see two other big men come into the restaurant–but they look African-American, not Italian, and there’s no story about a beef with Tony from the African-American community. The first strange guy at the counter gets up to go to the men’s room –Tony throws him a glance. And Meadow runs across the street, and the door to the restaurant opens–AND THE SCREEN GOES BLANK.

That’s it.

How should we read this? The key, in my view, is in the song titles Tony peruses while waiting for his family. They encapsulate various themes the show has dealt with over the years. . He looks at “I’ve Gotta Be Me,” and “A Lonely Place” (Tony Bennett) while “This Magic Moment” and “Since I Don’t Have You” (Jay and the Americans) aand “Crystal Blue Persuasion and “I’m Alive” (Tommy James) are in the background of the shot. He flips the card, and you see “Somewhere in the Night and “My Baby Drives a Buick,” by Sawyer Brown, “Who Will You Run To?,” and “Magic Man,” by Heart, and “Those Were the Days,” and “Turn Turn Turn” by Mary Hopkin, and “Don’t Stop Believing,” and “Any Way You Want It,” by Journey.

He flips back, for a second, to “I”ve Gotta be Me,” and “A Lonely Place,” by Tony Bennet, and then makes his choice: “Don’t Stop Believing,” by Journey.
That’s the key to the interpretation of the end of the series–that’s why it’s a comedy, not a tragedy. The lyrics begin as Carmela walks in, and continue through the rest of the scene:

Just a small town girl, livin in a lonely world

She took the midnight train goin anywhere

Just a city boy, born and raised in south detroit

He took the midnight train goin anywhere

A singer in a smokey room

A smell of wine and cheap perfume

For a smile they can share the night

It goes on and on and on and on

Strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard

Their shadows searching in the night

Streetlight people, living just to find emotion

Hiding, somewhere in the night

Working hard to get my fill,

Everybody wants a thrill

Payin anything to roll the dice,

Just one more time

Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues

Oh, the movie never ends

It goes on and on and on and on

(chorus)

Dont stop believin

Hold on to the feelin

Streetlight people

So. . “the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on.” Don’t forget that first half of Season Six began with this the first episode of the last half of Season Six was entitled “Sopranos Home Movies.” And the first episode of the first half of Season Six was based on William S. Burroughs’s “Seven Souls,” which is about “the film of your life.”

AJ is bucking up–and it looks like he’s reclaiming his place as Tony’s son from Christopher–he’s got some optimism, a model for a girlfriend, a new BMW, and a an entry-level position as an executive in a mob-funded movie production. Meadow has given up her dream of being a pediatrician, she’s going to be a criminal defense lawyer (she told her dad that seeing him being taken away by the feds has impressed upon her the power of the government to crush the individual–and the rampant prejudice against Italian-Americans). She’ll be the consigliere to replace Silvio (who, unfortunately, is still in coma).

And Tony–well, it’s not all sweetness and light. It looks like one of his crew has flipped, and he’ll be indicted. But I see the possibility of a fruitful cooperation with the feds. Agent Harris noted how the Italian mob had patrolled the Port of Newark during the Second World War in exchange for some freedom to operate–I could see Tony negotiating a similar deal for the duration of the War on Terrorism.

As far as spirituality, well, we leave with a benign agnosticism. Paulie is spooked by a stray cat that keeps staring at the photo of Christopher in the back room of the Bada Bing. It may well be the reincarnation of Christopher. Before taking a lucrative new job as the crew manager, he tells Tony that he’s not sure he wants the job–there may be more to life. Paule confesses to Tony that he was in the Bada Bing alone one time, and he saw the Virgin Mary (maybe a form of Adriana, who was spiritually virginal).

Tony tries to make a joke out of it, but then, when Paulie responds with hurt, says. . . “There may be something out there, but what are you going to do. . .” You don’t know, and you have to live your life. The ultimate American worldview is pragmatism.
Paulie takes the job and goes on.

And so do we. We don’t know. Yet Chase lets us believe that the world of the Sopranos still exists, even if its dynamics have changed. The dramatic tension we followed for six seasons is resolved –the New World won, the Old World lost. What about Yeat’s “rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born”? Even that ominous image is given a comic twist, as AJ mispronounces the poet’s name as “Yeets.” It’s the new form of the family, and the Family, in an era where their Italian heritage is something to be claimed from America’s identity politics, rather than lived in close and authentic connection with Italy.

The screen has gone dark. But even if we have relinquished our window into their world, their lives are still going on, beginning with their dinner in the quintessential American locale, the ice cream shop.
The family and the Family will be okay.

And so it will all be okay. We can go now.

John Allen has put up so many posts on the Catholic Theological Society of America conference that he is essentially “liveblogging” it.  He has a fascinating one up today on an address by the outgoing President of the CTSA, Daniel Finn of St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.  Finn made some comments that are sure to roil the waters:

Public statements by the Catholic Theological Society of America
criticizing the Vatican and the bishops “have done us damage,” the
body’s outgoing president said today, concluding that the prerequisite
to fostering dialogue is “making fewer public statements defending
ourselves against ecclesiastical power.”

“The price has been too high compared to what we have gained,” said
Daniel Finn of St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. “I
wish we were not facing this trade-off, but I believe we are.”

Finn made clear that he was not trying to stifle criticism, but said
that in the future, such statements should come from individual
theologians, perhaps with others signing on, but not in the name of the
CTSA.

One of the interesting points that Finn made was that the public statements have exacted a steep internal cost by driving more conservative theologians away:

“They felt no longer welcome, out of a sense that they’re on the
margins of a group that pokes funs at Vatican shortcomings and puts the
CTSA name on statements they do not endorse. They feel it’s not their
group,” he said.

“I don’t know that we’ll ever get those folks back, but there is a long future of others to come,” Finn said.

Instead, Finn argued, the CTSA “should be the place where Catholic theologians of all perspectives come to do their theology.”

“Our church is wracked by divisions caused by ideological
simplicities on all sides, and we need broader dialogue in the church
than we have today,” Finn said. “In the CTSA, all theologians should
feel respected, and a majority should not employ the mechanics of
majoritarian democracy to produce statements that the minority would
find offensive and leave.”

There is an old joke about academic politics being so vicious because the stakes are so low, but Finn seems wise enough to realize that the stakes for Catholic theology are quite high indeed.  There is certainly blame to go around with respect to the estranged relationship between theologians and the episcopacy.  Finn’s willingness, on behalf of the theological community, to be self-critical should be welcomed.  One hopes it will also be reciprocated.

Writer – director Judd Apatow’s funny new comedy, “Knocked Up,” about a slacker guy who gets a talented and beautiful woman pregnant after a drunken one night stand and then decides to raise the baby with her, has been getting a lot of press lately. It’s a very funny movie, raunchy at times, but also strangely endearing.

(You may know Apatow’s sense of humor and style of directing from the brilliant though short-lived TV series “Freaks and Geeks,” or from 2005’s, “The Forty Year Old Virgin.”)

Interestingly, “Knocked Up,” has taken some heat for its premise. Apparently, the idea that a beautiful, talented, upper-middle class woman, would choose to parent rather than to have an abortion is somewhat controversial, even in a comedy.

Check it out.  The reviewers over at Slate and The New Yorker sure seem to think so.

Excellent column by Mark Di Ionno in today’s Star-Ledger on “‘The Sopranos and Stereotypes, Perfect Together’” (nice little play on the famous Jersey tourism ad campaign of 80s in which Gov. Thomas Kean delivered the punch line in his finest over-the-top boarding school dialect). The local debate over past eight years on representations of ethnicity and  violence on the show has been civil, enlightening and generally fine example of shared public discourse.

    The Ledger (best paper nobody outside NJ ever heard of) also has tremendous piece on Rev. DeForest ‘Buster’ Soaries Jr., Central Jersey minister that brokered meeting between the I-Man and players and coaches from Rutgers women’s basketball team. Jim Gandolfini and Rev. Soaries both went to Rutgers (as did Di Ionno who was a friend of the actor’s: I didn’t know him but saw Gandolfini often in his role as bouncer at the Rusty Screw Tavern back in the day when institutions of higher learning doubled in the saloon business): put these stories together you get a good sense of range of issues that have found Italian and African-Americans sometimes linked sometimes divided in context of mass-cultural/ethnic politics. 

Congratulations to America Magazine for its new website, and for its fascinating article, “Lovingly Observant,” by Doris Donnelly and John Pawlikowski. It’s an interview with Susannah Heschel, who holds a chair in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, about her father, the great Jewish rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

I first read his book, The Prophets, a couple of years ago– it’s really a wonderful piece of theology, and a fine way into the complex and compelling world of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. It’s long –very long in fact–but don’t be put off. It’s so engagingly written the pages just speed by!

Jon Stewart, the host of The Daily Show, interviews John Oliver, Senior Campaign Theologian of The Daily Show, about the implications of the lightning accompanying Rudy’s discussion of abortion in the recent Republican debate.

The Economist recently published an interesting article on church and state in Italy.  It probably reflects the traditionally secular outlook of the Economist. Note the assumption that if Italian Catholics take a position agreeing with the bishops they must be doing so not on their own judgment but only because the bishops have told them to. 

The whole article can be found with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=9259081&fsrc=nwlgafree. 

It indicates that Pope Benedict sees the stance of the Italian church as part of a struggle against the kind of secularist politics that has emerged in Spain.  The question, however, is whether what seems like a rather unnuanced strategy (legal opposition to living wills?) is not exactly what produces that kind of politics. 

Commonweal offers summer reading suggestions in its June 15 issue. I’d like to add a book to that list, Cullen Murphy’s Are We Rome? (Houghton Mifflin). Subtitled: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. As usual with Murphy, a lot of nuance, wit, and real knowledge (about the Roman Empire and the American one). The comparisons he makes are complex and fascinating; he does not overplay the metaphor–yet it is sobering. All who love Prince Valiant will find much to appreciate here.

If Phil, Butchie and the gang decide to go looking for Tony Soprano at Satriale’s Sunday night, I hope they first consult today’s Our Towns column in the New York Times. If so they’ll waste sufficient time looking for a non-existent New Jersey city on mapquest for Tony to advance several moves ahead of his dim-witted New York rivals. It’s Kearny, NJ not Kearney; it’s pronounced like the name of the profession of those itinerant guys that install the Whirl-A-Gig for your parish festival. So what’s in an extra vowel? Well Kearny is only around five miles west of the very fancy new HQ skyscraper the Times has raised just across the street from the ‘Port of Authority’ bus terminal. I’ve never bought the argument that the Times is anti-Catholic but if the Pope lived in Kearny I’d have to change my mind because they’d surely misspell his name there too.

      If you made a list of the 50 all-time greatest American soccer players at least four names would belong to Kearny natives. First it was the Scots then the Irish then here comes everybody. The point about the Sopranos is that David Chase got this whole Jersey location thing right from the start: his sense of place is extraordinary even by Jersey standards and he was perhaps the first creative artist to understand how truly important this was not just as detail, color etc. but as the foundation of his character’s self-understanding; their spirituality, all of it. Philip Roth has been pretty good at times with Newark (he relied very heavily on a wonderful local historian names Charles Cummings who died in December); the Boss of Monmouth County has certainly had his moments too and surely the casting of Little Steven as Silvio was in part homage to Freehold’s native son.

      Springsteen anticipated Sunday’s finale with Meeting Across the River from the Born to Run album way back in 75. You knew in the end it had to come down to New York versus Jersey. The Garden State is just an amorphous land mass to Phil Leotardo as it is to the NYT: a couple years ago the paper of record ran a story on the city of North Bergen explaining why new condos there were so appealing to empty-nesters that had raised their families in Bergen County and wanted to remain in-county. Only problem is North Bergen is in the County of Hudson, you know, the place where people remain active in politics long after they die (of course it’s also true that mobster Joe Adonis once helped run the Republican Party in Bergen but that’s for another time).

     As to the interests of Commonweal folk: it seems to me there’s a growing divide in Catholic studies between focus on value of experience (like where you grow up) and ideology (like no matter where you grow up you’re really from Rome–not the one in upstate New York the other one–) and ideology is winning by a landslide. So maybe it’s not such terrible idea to make stand as Sopranos bows out: it’s more than important to know where you come from and where your students come from and what was important to their relatives; like what it meant for Corrado Soprano to grope his way back to the Clay Street Bridge in Newark that night.      

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria looks at the foreign policy challenges facing the United States in the post-Bush era. It’s a long article, but definitely worth reading.  Here is an excerpt:

There are many specific issues that the United States needs to get far more engaged in, from the Israeli-Palestinian problem to global warming to Darfur to poverty alleviation. Most important of all is the shift of global power toward new countries in Asia, and what that means for international order and cooperation. But to succeed at any of this, we will need greater global legitimacy and participation. We are living in new times. As countries grow economically and mature politically, they are demanding a greater voice in global affairs and a seat at the high table. The United States should make sure that it is listening to these voices, new and old, and recognize that to function effectively in this new world, it can lead only through partnerships, collaborations and co-operation. The Bush-Rumsfeld model of leadership—through declarations, threats and denunciations—is dead.

Above all, the United States has to find a way to send a powerful and consistent signal to the world that we understand the struggles that it is involved in—for security, peace and a better standard of living. As Barack Obama said in a speech in Chicago, “It’s time to … send a message to all those men and women beyond our shores who long for lives of dignity and security that says, ‘You matter to us. Your future is our future’.”

Some of foreign policy is what we do, but some of it is also who we are. America as a place has often been the great antidote to U.S. foreign policy. When American actions across the world have seemed harsh, misguided or unfair, America itself has always been open, welcoming and tolerant. I remember visiting the United States as a kid in the 1970s, at a time when, as a country, India was officially anti-American. The reality of the America that I experienced was a powerful refutation of the propaganda and caricatures of its enemies. But today, through inattention, fear and bureaucratic cowardice, the caricature threatens to become reality.

At the end of the day, openness is America’s greatest strength. Many people on both sides of the political aisle have ideas that they believe will keep America strong in this new world—fences, tariffs, subsidies, investments. But America has succeeded not because of the ingenuity of its government programs. It has thrived because it has kept itself open to the world—to goods and services, ideas and inventions, people and cultures. This openness has allowed us to respond fast and flexibly in new economic times, to manage change and diversity with remarkable ease, and to push forward the boundaries of freedom and autonomy.

Apropos of the earlier post on the church’s “dry drunks,” the well-regarded Bishop of Stockton, Stephen Blaire, gave a savory homily last month at the ordination Mass for two new priests from his diocese. (HT: Rocco’s Whispers) In motifs reminiscent of John XXIII–but perhaps aimed at those who would fashion themselves as the new clericalists?–Blaire employed a powerful image from the Old Testament:

“There are some in the Church today who do not look forward in hope with the eyes of faith but tend to be preoccupied with looking back in some kind of nostalgia for a Church they never experienced prior to the Second Vatican Council. I encourage you to study the history of the Church as a living and developing tradition and not to look back as Lot’s wife did or you might end up being a pillar of salt rather then the ‘salt of the earth.’ “

Read more of Blaire’s homily here: http://www.stocktondiocese.org/english/bishop/homilies/homily19May2007.html

But don’t miss this nice bit:

“I have always treasured the words of my first pastor when I was newly ordained: We are here to serve the people and to do it with a touch of class.”

Taking off my moral theologian hat, and putting on my hat as a native Rhode Islander, I found this column to be rather ironic. Very few people in Rhode Island would vote for Rudy anyway. In addition to being one of the most Catholic states in the nation, it’s among the bluest of blue states.

In addition, probably due to our history as “Rogue’s Island,” we have an independent streak; we tolerate a lot from our politicians. Vincent “Buddy” Cianci’s brushes with the law didn’t prevent him from being reelected mayor of Providence until the feds finally brought him down on RICO charges–some people even thought the corruption charges were too harsh–a man has to make a decent living, after all.. Defining ourselves in opposition to puritanical Massachusetts, we are all a bit rebellious. Personal scandal, well, the general attitude is that we all have our problems. Lots of of Rhode Island grandmothers prayed for Congressman Patrick Kennedy, who had a little public trouble with addiction. He was a nice boy and he helped a lot of Rhode Island grandmothers. Come to think of it, Rudy would fit in pretty well in Rhode Island–if only he were a Democrat.

All politics are local. And Rhode Island politics are very local indeed. But the bishop’s idea of offering Rudy a photo op in exchange for a $1500 donation to a pro-life charity; now that’s good. That’s the kind of constructive give-and-take Rhode Islanders understand.

The saint making machine at the Vatican shows no sign of slowing down. We have just had released to us a list of those Servants of God who are now lined up for beatification. Almost without exception they are vowed religious/founders and foundresses, and priests except for the pacficist martyr (and married layman) of the Nazi period F. Jagerstatter. Amid all this saint making, however, it strikes me as odd that many of my young Catholic students are named Heather, Crystal, Madison, Ryan, and so on. Is this one of those small signs of the impending apocalypse about which the late (wonderful) Walker Percy urged us to be attentive? Some years ago, when informed that a now departed Notre Dame coach had a son named something like “Dwayne” an old subway alumnus snorted: “What the hell kind of name is that for a kid? Notre Dame coaches name their kids “Anthony” or “Patrick”. A small ray of hope on the horizon: last year, the most popular name for a masculine baby in the United States was “Jose.”

We lived in the heartland of America when The Sopranos debuted; the absence of HBO could not prevent us from being in on the fun, with constant updates from ma and pals: ‘Jimmy they mentioned Wyckoff!’ [Carm's near-squeeze Vic Musto fled there from her N. Caldwell home on pretext of a contracting project] one of the municipalities in the county of Bergen in which we once resided. Now all these years later poor Uncle Junior is about to be evicted from the “Wyckoff Therapeutical Center” and consigned to a state mental institution.

       We returned to Jersey in the interim and subscribed to HBO; the rage and cussin’ always seemed to bother Charlie though he was never in the room during airtime, so we picked it up in pieces on the fly just as we had in St. Paul and St. Louie. While we were in exile on the Mississippi Jersey finally became a ‘destination’ in no small part due to the extraordinary geographic devotion of David Chase and company: I doubt there’s a location on earth where more shades of class race ethnicity and sex are signified merely by invoking a place name. Even the one howling outrage–the filming of the classic ‘Pine Barrens’ episode in New York’s totally wrong-looking Harriman State Park–yielded an inside joke since nearly every teenager in North Jersey eventually finds themselves wandering around Harriman and many–at least in my day–engaged there in the kind of recreational activities that often found them disoriented and saying things like: ‘I told you we should have stopped at Roy Rogers.’ (Paulie Walnuts’ rejoinder to Christopher’s plaint–while unsuitable for repeating in a family blog–ranks among the greatest comebacks in the annals of television history).

      Then there was the day Charlie and I were enjoying hamburgers at Galloping Hill his favorite Union County locale; I was thinking as usual how would I ever finish this book on the Irish mob that I’d been working on for as long as he’d been diagnosed with autism, but thinking mostly about how we’d quit everything to return to Jersey for the autism services only to discover we had nowhere the near the pull to get him into one of the designer private schools. Jersey as a destination indeed! No sooner was the Garden State declared autism services capital of the world than all manner of folk that’d never be caught dead there are moving in with their autistic kids and many are flashing the long green and touting their fund-raising connections. Hey, my grandpa was born on a farm in Moonachie! no longer cut it. So here we are in December 05 pulling Charlie from his public school autism classroom; cheesy Union County educational politics left us with no other choice. The Sopes. had become a lot less fun from up close. Meanwhile right around the corner from Galloping Hill in Union the authorities are discovering a body entrunked behind the Huck Finn diner; it’s corpse of a guy that had recently been acquitted (unbeknownst to victim) in a trial of alleged O.C. figures from the International Longshoremen’s Association, the self-same outfit that was prime subject of book I was struggling to finish.     

    This guy was linked to the real-life Jersey mob family on which Sopes. may well have been based and yes, just as that cowardly baron of Westchester Uncle Philly sneeringly noted, this real-life family was once accused of failing to ‘prick the fingers’ of its inductees (Leotardo’s ‘pygmies’ were dismissed as so many ‘farmers’ by pundits from the real 5 NYC families). But note well: when you’re from Jersey the city and its ways are no great mystery. Bigshot New Yorker Phil can order Tony off his property (‘Go back to Jersey’) from the safety of his faux-turret; but like they say, Phil, there’s no toll charged westbound over the GWB, pal: good luck finding your way. 

       The final Jersey thing: you can move in-state and things change. We’ve lived in eight of the 21 counties all north of Rte 195 but for a stint in the county of ‘Whitecaps;’ we moved across county lines again for a better public school and found one. Jersey is on the mainland but is not quite yet the heartland; it’s fluid and flexible so unlike tribal NYC: as we say in the book (done: ‘The Irish Waterfront and the Soul of the Port: New York/New Jersey, 1927-1954′) it’s no fluke the code of silence that terrorized the waterfront for decades was broken by a Hobokenite, Tony Mike DeVincenzo. Nor was it an accident that the greatest waterfront movie ever made was filmed in the Mile Square City too and the third leg of the trinity of all-time great television shows (Honeymooners, All in the Family now joined by Sopes.) was shot all over the Garden State and reveals its many splendors as never before.

     Now Newark is on its way back in a big way: Johnny Boy shoulda lived to see this; so too all my ma’s cousins and uncles that fought Newark’s fires when they weren’t fighting each other.

Interesting story about the installation of solar energy cells on the Pope Paul VI Auditorium in the Vatican.

The conversion to solar cells for the auditorium was apparently suggested by Pope Benedict’s statements about his concern for the environment. 

Efforts are being made to ensure that the aesthetics of the building remain intact. Unused energy generated by the cells can be tapped by other Vatican facilities. Some additional buildings may also go solar in the future.

Or even good. So says Paul Baumann in his review of Christopher Hitchens’s latest book, which appears in the June issue of the Washington Monthly. Regretably, it’s not online. But maybe someone with better Intertube skills than I can crack their confusing Web site. In the meantime, here’s a snippet to whet your appetite.

Finally, beyond identifying this or that particular enemy, the larger question remains: Is ridding the world of religion the best way to preserve secular pluralism and freedom of conscience? Would the world in fact be a better, freer place without religion? I doubt it. In the history of the United States alone, for instance, committed religious believers were instrumental in the struggle for independence and a constitutional democracy, the abolition of slavery, the fight for women’s suffrage, and the victories of the labor and civil rights movements. In Poland and elsewhere in Europe, meanwhile, the victims of totalitarianism found solace and a focus for resistance in the surprisingly empowering “illusions” of religion. So have many devout Chinese.

Like any other enduring human activity–science, sex, baseball–religion can be misused, and Hitchens is in good company when he denounces religious violence, intolerance, and obscurantism. But his contention that religion has always and everywhere been the enemy of civilization and human dignity is absurd.

For the rest, hunt down a copy of the WM at your nearest newsstand.

And look for Eugene McCarraher’s review of the book in the June 15 Commonweal. It doesn’t disappoint.

Here (ht Melissa Rogers) is a strongly worded open letter criticizing James Dobson and Focus on the Family for supporting the Partial Birth Abortion Act.

There is an interesting underlying question about whether incremental legislation on abortion is moral, and under what circumstances. For those who seek more light than heat on this question, I highly recommend the debate between John Finnis and Colin Harte in Helen Watt, ed., Complicity and Concscience. It’s published by the Linacre Centre, a Catholic medical ethics think tank in England.

Meant to bump this last week, but be sure to check out America‘s spiffy new Web site. Rebuilding a site from the ground up isn’t easy; they’ve done a heck of a job.

Previews have started for a Warner Brothers Nancy Drew movie,
opening June 15. The preview suggests that they are going to pull a “Brady Bunch Movie” on her, taking her out of her time (the wholesome 1940′s and 1950′s) and making her a smart, loveable dork in today’s teenage den of hedonism. They will make her the butt of jokes, even as they let her solve the crimes.

Here’s my friendly advice to the WB executives, in the unlikely event that they happen to read this blog: Don’t mess with Nancy Drew. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into if you do. You see, Nancy Drew is an icon, not only to women my mother’s age, but to women my age and younger women, too. She was was smart, resourceful, with a nice and helpful boyfriend (Ned Nickerson), and two really good best friends (Bess and George), and a loving and supportive father. (Sadly, her mother died when she was three, but her housekeeper Hannah raised her.) Nancy respected adult authority, but not blindly–after all, she knew that adults committed crimes too. And adults respected her in return. She was a role model for lots of young women. She was independent but connected, resourceful, but respectful.

In the 1970′s when I was reading Nancy Drew, you couldn’t get it out of the libraries– they weren’t considered sound good reading material. Ridiculous! As a conseuqence, however, somewhere in Cumberland RI there is a musty stash of about 100 Nancy Drew books, presents for birthdays and Christmas. (Sorry, mom, II promise ‘ll get them the next time I’m home.)

You don’t need to update Nancy Drew to make her relevant–play her as a timeless, period character. I remember being charmed and intrigued by some of the details from my mom’s generation of books–what was a “roadster” –Nancy Drew got a new one ever year, from her well-to-do father, the prominent criminal lawyer Carson Drew. Was there really a time when phone service would go out every big storm? Wow. Nancy went on a plane ride, and wore a “traveling suit”–what’s that? The anachronism was part of the fun. It was not something to mock–it was something to enter into.

I think it would be interesting to see how many women in prominent places today read Nancy Drew–and thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could be a little like her!

The horrors continue to multiply in Iraq. Yesterday after Sunday Liturgy a Catholic priest and three subdeacons were assassinated.

Catholic News Service reports:

Father Ganni, the three subdeacons, and the wife of one of the
subdeacons were driving away from the church when their car was blocked
by a group of armed militants, according to a report by AsiaNews, a
Rome-based agency.


The armed men forced the woman out of the car. Once the woman was away
from the vehicle the armed men opened fire on Father Ganni and the
three subdeacons, an ordained position lower than a deacon in most
Eastern Catholic churches.


The militants then placed explosives around the car to prevent anyone from retrieving the four bodies.


At 10 p.m. local time, authorities finally managed to defuse the explosives and retrieve the bodies.


Chaldean Patriarch Emmanuel-Karim Delly of Baghdad condemned the killings in a statement released June 4.


“It is a most heinous crime that any person of proper conscience would
reject. The authors (of this crime) carried out a most horrible act
against God, against humanity, against their own brothers who were
peace-loving citizens, as well as men of religion who always offered
their prayers to God almighty for security and stability in Iraq,” he
said.


This was not the first attack against Chaldean Catholics. In August of
2002 a Chaldean Catholic nun was killed in Baghdad. The Church of the
Holy Spirit also has been bombed several times in recent months.


In a statement also released to AsiaNews June 4, the Chaldean Synod of
Bishops called on “Iraqi leaders and international organizations to
intervene to put a concrete end to these criminal acts.”

A luxurious passenger train streaking over the Pine Barrens between 1929 and 1941, the Blue Comet was a marvel of speed, luxury, and glamor. It was also, and essentially, New Jersey’s marvel–it carried its well-heeled passengers back and forth between Jersey City and Atlantic City. It symbolized New Jersey’s determination to flourish without becoming a mere satellite of New York; Manhattan passengers had to make their way to Jersey City before they could settle themselves in the Blue Comet for the short trip to the shore.

In this episode, the Blue Comet symbolizes the determination of the New Jersey mob family to survive without being swept into the orbit of Phil Leotardo’s New York-based family. Phil decides to go to war to take out the New Jersey family; he calls them “pygmies,” disparages their morals (they harbored a homosexual made man–until Phil killed him, that is), and castigates their liturgical laxity (anyone can be “made” in New Jersey; furthermore, their induction ceremony was far too relaxed for Phil’s taste). All this, in Phil’s view, deserves the death penalty. So he decides to take out the three top people –Tony, Bobby, and Silvio–and absorb the remnants into his New York family. At last, “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”–we have our mob war.

Tony hears about the proposed hit from the FBI man (Agent Harris) who eats at Satriale’s –the tip is, in some sense, payback for Tony’s information about the Muslims suspected of terrorism. So Tony realizes that he has to take out Phil in order to survive. He gives the job to Bobby, who eventually decides to bring in the Italian hit men who worked for them successfully on a prior occasion. But on this occasion, things go badly–the hit takes place at the home of Phil’s mistress, but Phil isn’t there at the time –instead, her father, who looks like Phil, is visiting. The Italians kill the father and the mistress instead.
By the time the mistake is discovered, precious time has been lost. The hits on the Soprano leadership are proceeding apace. Bobby is in a model train store, buying a model Blue Comet train, chatting amiably with the owner about how people were better and kinder during the real Blue Comet’s heyday, when he is shot down, brutally, by two of Phil’s hitmen. A model train comes crashing to the ground. Two other hit men block off Silvio and Patsy Parisi’s car at the Bada Bing, opening fire on them. Silvio is hit badly, but not killed; we later learn that he lies comatose in a hospital bed, unlikely ever to awake.

What about Tony? It hasn’t been a good week for him – or for the reputation of psychiatrists. AJ’s bills for the psychiatric hospital are $2200 a day – and it’s not clear they actually did anything more than warehouse the boy. When speaking with someone from the hospital, Tony’s told that kids in crisis don’t need talk therapy–they need a safe, unstressed place. And Tony is told, by his own therapist Dr. Melfi, that talk therapy isn’t helping him. After her own psychiatrist –at a dinner party where he unprofessionally talks about the case — convinces her that sociopaths are actually made worse by talk therapy (they use it to practice manipulation) and she finally internalizes the fact that Tony’s a sociopath (the article about how sociopaths do have sympathy –for babies and animals finally rings a bell), she unceremoniously –and ungraciously – dumps him as a patient. The proximate cause is the fact that he ripped a barbeque recipe out of her office magazine–aptly titled “Departures”. With displaced anger, she asks him why he didn’t think about the desires of her other patients to read the magazine too. Yes–that’s his biggest problem. Sure it is.

Tony goes home, and hustles the family together to go into hiding –without him. He smacks AJ around a bit–impatient with his whining–and reassures Carmela that they won’t go after the family. But you can see that she loves him–it’s not only herself and the children that she’s worried about. Carmela, in my view, is clearly morally superior to Dr. Melfi in this episode–Dr. Melfi discharges Tony as a patient when he becomes an inconvient embarassment to her, due to the (improper) public discussion of her patient at a dinner party of psychiatrists. The manner in which she discharges him is also all about her–not about his welfare, or even the welfare of his son.

Tony, Paulie, and a few loyal members of his crew hide out in a safe house. Tony lies on the bed grasping the automatic gun that Bobby gave him for his birthday present–remembering their conversation about whether you hear the shot that kills you.

One more week. I now think there’s a chance that Tony won’t die. “The Second Coming”–the “rough beast, its hour come round at last,” may be a newly empowered and feral Tony –who amalgamates the New York family to his own by killing Phil. If he survives, he will be strong–free from the need to follow conventional morality, free from the need to nurse his own psychic wounds in therapy, he will be a “rough beast” indeed.

In today’s edition, Emily Brady briefly updates New York Times readers on the situation of Our Lady of Vilnius. Readers of dotCommonweal won’t learn much from the piece, although it does contain one surprise: Joseph Zwilling, director of communications for the Archdiocese of New York explains the decision to paint over the apse fresco. “The church’s fresco was painted over, he added, to protect it from deterioration because it couldn’t be removed,” Brady writes.

That seems awfully hard to believe. Take, for example, an April 2000 Times story about a huge fresco that was threatened by deterioration.

Both the deteriorating building and the mural are in need of restoration. But Robert A. Peck, commissioner of the public buildings service for the agency, said that preservation advisers had told him that the mural would not pass the historical review required in order to have it restored.

So officials plan to restore the building and destroy the mural sometime this year, either by removing the plaster or painting over the mural.

And consider an LSU Today article on a project to restore on-campus frescoes:

Grenier said it took one month just to remove the three layers of paint that were put on top of Dietrich’s exterior mural. She noted that the mural proved to be “extremely forgiving in its tolerance of the chemicals and manipulation required to remove the heavy layers of over painting, which could even destroy other types of mural paintings.”

Maybe there is a special kind of paint that preserves a work of art as delicate as a fresco. And maybe that paint is royal blue. Still, I’m no expert, so I’m going to see what I can find out about the archdiocese’s method of fresco preservation. I’ll keep you posted.