For years, after Vatican II, the issue of the Catholic identity of colleges and universities, was, for the most part, avoided. Most institutions were, in effect, drawing upon previously accumulated capital.

John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae brought the issue to the center of attention once again, and a number of institutions belatedly responded with new mission statements that stressed not only “Jesuit” or “Vincentian” or “Augustinian,” but their commitment to the “Catholic” tradition.

Some promising Catholic Studies Programs were initiated, as was, in some places, the attempt to begin serious conversation about the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.

But still the crucial issue of “hiring” has not been seriously confronted (though, if I remember correctly, the Steinfels broached this subject more than 15 years ago).

Now, an article in the current America (available only to subscribers — the August “grace period” having expired!) broaches the problem acutely.

The author, a faculty member at Notre Dame (no, not that faculty member) pulls no punches: he cites some fascinating details.

Here is his radical prescription for what he fears will be an otherwise terminal illness:

The matter of hiring Catholic faculty has been of concern at Notre Dame for
some time. The Rev. Robert Sullivan, of the history department and the
Erasmus Institute, now heads an effort to identify able Catholic scholars.
He also heads an ad hoc committee on recruiting outstanding Catholic faculty members, appointed by Provost Burish. One of the charges for this committeeis to identify “the best practices for hiring Catholic faculty members.” One can only hope and pray for the success of these endeavors.

It must be understood, however, that this is not a matter that can be
massaged by minor measures. The temptation for administrators is to hope
that a little adjustment here and a bit of tinkering there might improve the
situation without stirring faculty opposition. Settling for minor measures
in the present circumstances, however, indicates a complicity in the
secularization process. A major change in the hiring process is required,
and the need for it must be approved at the level of the board of trustees
and implemented with courageous leadership, whatever faculty resistance it
generates.

If the seemingly inevitable downward trend in the Catholic percentage of the
faculty is to be arrested and reversed, a major board decision calling for
two-thirds of all future appointments to be committed Catholic scholars is
essential. This would require very different ways of hiring from the
department-based procedures of today. The university would need to engage in what might be termed strategic hiring or hiring for mission. A recognition
that this approach is crucial to its identity could drive the endeavor. It
would require Notre Dame (and other schools that want to preserve their
Catholic mission and character) to be truly different from their secular
“preferred peer” schools. Failure to take such action, however, will lead
schools like Notre Dame to merely replicate such secular institutions and to
surrender what remains of their distinctiveness. This is surely a sad
prospect for those who hoped, with Ex Corde Ecclesiae, that a Catholic
university might constitute “an authentic human community animated by the
spirit of Christ.”

Kevin Drum
makes a nice, and frequently overlooked, point about why unions matter
for reducing inequality.  The Church has gotten this for over a century:

If you’re interested in
government policies that actively favor the working and middle classes,
you need to have some kind of substantial political interest group
fighting on their side. That’s Politics 101, and right now unions are
pretty much all we’ve got. They aren’t perfect, and they frequently act
only in their own narrow self-interest, but without them there’s no
organized opposition to the agenda of corporations and the rich. Warts
and all, they’re worth supporting until something better comes along.

A recent web-only piece over at Christianity Today pulled together some string on what could emerge as the next front in the abortion wars, especially with the silly campaign season coming on–namely, challenging pro-lifers to articulate the penalties in a society of re-criminalized abortion. The pro-choice refrain is “How much time should she serve?” in reference to the mother who aborts her fetus. The emerging pro-life response is an interesting one: that abortion is not murder, as understood under the law. It was especially surprising to hear the prominent Southern Baptist leader Richard Land espouse that view, adding the savvy (in my view) opinion that abortionists might be given a lesser charge of manslaughter. That is not necessarily a tenable position if the pro-life movement were held to the letter and spirit of much of its louder rhetoric. But the emerging pro-life response does seem an example of the political agility of the movement (as per Saletan’s “Bearing Right”) and its willingness to take half a loaf, as opposed to the more dogmatic pro-choice camp. Or it could signal a problem for the pro-life side.

It’s good to know that I’m not the only Commonwealer who apparently knows every line of Casablanca by heart.  And, yes, it is tempting to put the dialogue from the movie in the mouths of the various characters in the unfolding drama in Cleveland.  But I’m going to resist.

I do, however, want to raise an issue that I have not seen addressed thus far in the coverage of the corruption scandal.  

One part of the indictment against Joseph Smith and Anton Zgoznik reads as follows:  “From early 1996 through December 2003, Smith caused and induced certain offices and departments of the Diocese and certain of its constituent organizations, including but not limited to the CCA [Catholic Cemeteries Association], the Seminaries, and the Diocesan-owned high schools, to retain the services of the Zgoznik Entities to perform accounting, computer, financial, and other related services, including outsourcing of certain functions previously performed in-house by the Diocese and those constituent organizations.”

To read the whole indictment, click here.

The total amount paid by the Diocese and the constituent organizations to Zgoznik entities was $17,533,330.

My question: When the budgets at the seminaries and the high schools were presumably very tight, why did no one question moving work to Zgoznik and associates when moving that work was going to cost so much more?

The trial resumes next Tuesday and I’m hoping to get down to the courtroom for a first-hand look at the proceedings.

Former Cleveland Bishop, Anthony Pilla, testified yesterday in the corruption trial involving former diocesan officials. Prosecutors called Pilla to testify, but when the defense attorney sought to press Pilla on whether he personally benefited from sweetheart deals, the judge, Ann Aldrich, ruled in favor of the prosecutors’ objections and shut down this line of questioning.

One exchange in court was memorable, if only for Bishop Pilla’s demonstration that he is not a fan of movie classics. When asked by Assistant U.S. Attorney, John Siegel, about his reaction to a letter he received in January 2004 informing him of allegations (and corroborating evidence) of a kickback scheme in the diocese, Pilla said he was “Shocked, Shocked” because he had complete trust in his chief financial officer. As any Casablanca fan knows, Inspector Renault is “shocked, shocked, to find gambling” at Rick’s Café.

The front-page story from today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer can be found here.

Bracing figures from the Census Bureau: 47 million Americans (15.8 percent of the population) lack health insurance, up from 44.8 million last year. And the number of uninsured children rose for the second consecutive year–after years of steady decline. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Most of the problem with health insurance were traceable to the continued
erosion of employer-based healthcare coverage. The percentage of people covered
by employer plans decreased to 59.7% of the population in 2006, down from 60.2%
in 2005.

Of particular concern, the number of uninsured children rose for
the second year in a row, after a long period in which it had been steadily
declining, thanks to the expansion of government health coverage. More than
600,000 children joined the ranks of the uninsured in 2006, a change that the
Census Bureau called statistically significant.

“The increase in the
uninsured rate [for children] can be attributed to the decline in private
coverage,” said David Johnson, chief of the Census Bureau division that produced
the statistics.

The news about uninsured children comes as the Bush
administration and Congress are deadlocked over a plan to renew and expand a
popular federal-state partnership that provides health insurance for children of
the working poor. Known as Healthy Families in California, the State Children’s
Health Insurance Program insures about 6 million children nationally. But it
will expire Sept. 30 unless President Bush and Congress can come to
terms.

Bush has proposed a small increase for the $5-billion-a-year
program, one that independent analysts say will not be enough to maintain the
current levels of coverage. A Senate-passed plan would cover about 3 million
more children over five years, while a House version would extend coverage to 5
million more children. Bush has vowed to veto both bills.

Yesterday, the New York Times editorialized on the subject:

The challenge to the White House and Congress seems clear. The
upward trend in the number of uninsured needs to be reversed because
many studies have shown that people who lack health insurance tend to
forgo needed care until they become much sicker and go to expensive
emergency rooms for treatment. That harms their health and drives up
everyone’s health care costs.

The most immediate need is to
reauthorize and expand the expiring State Children’s Health Insurance
Program. It has already brought health coverage to millions of young
Americans. It should be reinvigorated to bring coverage to many
millions more.

Not to worry, the American Medical Association (AMA) is on it, as its recent ad campaign, “Voice of the Uninsured,” makes clear. Last Thursday, the New York Times ran a heartstrings-tugging full-page ad from the AMA. “One out of seven of us doesn’t have health insurance,” its headline announced. “But we all have a voice. And a vote.” Below that headline was a photo of a middle-aged black woman holding a stethoscope up to her mouth as though it were a microphone. And at the bottom of the page, the campaign’s Web site: VoiceOfTheUninsured.org. Sounds positively empowering, doesn’t it?

“One out of seven Americans is uninsured,” the Web page repeats. “This isn’t just a statistic. It’s a tragedy.” Indeed it is, so why would the AMA’s proposals (PDF) track so closely with President Bush’s inadequate plan? Laden with reassuring verbiage emphasizing the importance of “freedom,” “choice,” “security,” the AMA’s ad campaign seems to be a rather impressively executed bait-and-switch.

Joan Acocella (the name sings!), the dance critic of The New Yorker, has a stunning book review in the current issue.

She discusses (at welcome length) Robert and Jean Hollander’s new translation of Dante’s Paradiso, bringing to a close their epochal journey through the three cantiche of the Commedia.

Ms Acocella has the highest praise for Jean Hollander’s translation. She is more reserved about Robert’s voluminous notes, useful, she thinks, more for the graduate student than for the average reader.

Of Paradiso itself, however, she seems conflicted in a secular sort of way. There is, clearly, some magnificent poetry, but all that dusty scholasticism. Besides heaven can sound simply boring — nothing but unreserved love.

Of course, she says it more breezily than that (this is The New Yorker after all):

[W]e live in an intermediate, tragic world. Paradise is not like that. Neither, accordingly, is the Paradiso.
This lack of shading is the fundamental problem, poetically, with Heaven’s emotional life. The souls there are uniformly
charitable. “Oh, here is one who will increase our loves!” the spirits
in the sphere of Mercury exclaim when the pilgrim arrives there. The
souls in the spheres of Venus, Mars, and Jupiter are just as glad to
see him, and as their greetings accumulate one starts to feel a little
nostalgic for the screaming and farting that went on in Hell.

Strangely, what is missing from this fascinating review, by the New Yorker’s dance critic, is any sense of dance, of the joyful movement of persons in relation, of the moto spiritale of the individual, now fully freed to join in the highest form of love: true friendship.

It is telling that the word “communion” does not appear in Acocella’s multi-page reflection. Yet, if one were to try, foolishly, to sum up Paradiso in a word, “communion” would, I think, be the closest approximation.

Finally, one of the scholastic questions she enumerates is this: “At the Last Judgment, will souls in Heaven get their bodies back?” And she leaves it at that: dry, distant, unanswerable.

But for the souls this is no scholastic disputatio. It is literally the heart of the matter. For it has to do with their integrity as persons, their familial relations, the significance of their (and all) history.

Without bodies, how can joy be whole? how can the dance be complete?

Yesterday, the Feast of St. Augustine, Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham, England preached at a Mass at Merton College Oxford. The occasion was a workshop, sponsored by the Latin Mass Society, to instruct priests on the celebration of the “extraordinary form” of the Roman Rite.

The Archbishop made a number of points that I find judicious and helpful.

No matter the language of the celebration, no matter the form, these phases of the rite, this journey of the liturgy, must be set forth clearly. The celebrant, acting in the person of Christ and in the name of the Church, needs to ensure that his actions enable the souls in his care to participate in this saving mystery, to take part in each of its steps. This participation has to be profound, spiritual, informed by understanding – an active participation and not passive, not ‘leaving it to the priest to celebrate the Mass for us.’ Such is the shape and expectation of the one rite of the Mass, whether in its ordinary or extraordinary form, and it is given for the nourishment and salvation of the people.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church turns to St Augustine, whose feast we keep, to make clear the mystery in which we are to participate. It states:

St Augustine admirably summed up this doctrine that moves us to an ever more complete participation in our Redeemer’s sacrifice which we celebrate in the Eucharist:

‘This wholly redeemed city, the assembly and society of the saints, is offered to God as a universal sacrifice by the high priest who in the form of a slave went so far as to offer himself for us in his Passion, to make us the Body of so great a head…Such is the sacrifice of Christians: “we who are many are one Body in Christ.” The Church continues to reproduce this sacrifice in the sacrament of the altar, so well known to believers, wherein it is evident to them that in what she offers, she herself is offered.’ (CCC 1372).

I hope that your study of the Missal of Pope John XXIII will help you to appreciate the history and richness of that form of the Mass. And I trust that you will bring all that you learn to every celebration of the Mass you lead in the future. I have no doubt that each of us must strive for improvements in the way the ordinary form of the Mass is celebrated so that its inner mystery and spiritual movement is more clearly set forth. As Pope Benedict says, we must do all we can to bring out the spiritual richness and theological depth of the Missal of Paul VI, ‘for that will guarantee that the Missal of Paul VI will unite parish communities and be loved by them.’

Please remember that what you study here is not a relic, not a reverting to the past, but part of the living tradition of the Church. It is, therefore, to be understood and entered into in the light of that living tradition today.

The full text of his remarks is available in the “Comments” section of the post by Damian Thompson in the Telegraph.

I attended last Sunday, for the first time in forty years, a Mass celebrated according to the Missal of John XXIII. I hope to make some further observations in the days to come. But one powerful impression was the need, as the Pope suggests, for both forms of the Roman rite to enrich one another in their different, but complementary sensitivities.

Today is the feast of St. Augustine.  One of the most exciting developments in study of the great bishop is the attention being given to his sermons often comparatively neglected in favor of his great works. (A new translation of all of them is being prepared.)  Most of them were not written out in advance and they have a freshness about them and often show him inter-acting with his congregation. Here are a few gems I have discovered over the past few years (translations mine).

[Of Christ] Life came down in order to die; bread came down in order to hunger; the way came down in order to be wearied on the journey; the spring came down in order to thirst.

[In an exhortation to prayer] Human laziness should blush with shame: God is more willing to give than we are to receive; he is more willing to show us mercy than we are to be freed of our miseries.

[Commenting on the words of the Psalm: "Magnify the Lord with me"] I don’t want to magnify the Lord alone. I don’t want to love him alone. I don’t want to embrace him alone.

[Commenting on the Psalm verse: "Better is a single day in your courts than thousands of days"] Men desire thousands of days and greatly wish to live here. They should scorn the thousands of days; they should desire the single day, the day that has no sunrise and sunset, the single day, the eternal day, to which yesterday did not yield and which tomorrow does not press. We should desire that single day. What do we have to do with thousands of days? We are going from thousands of days to a single day.

[Of God]: Seeking, although lacking nothing.

He sought those who were not seeking him.

To a joyful person even a prison is wide, and to a sad person even a meadow is narrow.

Your soul will not die unless you choose to kill it.

Don’t think that heresies can be created by small minds. Only great men make heresies.

You are more inward than my inward self. Within, in my heart, you have written a law by your Spirit, as if by your finger, so that I would no longer fear it like a slave without love, but would like a son love it with a chaste fear and fear it with a chaste love.

Grace achieves this: that commandments are kept out of love that could not be kept out of fear.

Every love has its own power. Love cannot be idle in the heart of a lover: it has to lead somewhere. Do you want to know what kind of love it is? See where it is leading.

Nothing is more difficult and nothing more admirable than loving one’s enemies.

It is no small insight to know from whom to seek insight.

Don’t be today what you were yesterday, and don’t be tomorrow what you are today.

I realize I’m beginning to sound like a broken record on this topic, but it’s an important one. The cable channel HDNet recently aired a Dan Rather special on the myriad and very serious problems with computer touchscreen voting machines that is well worth watching. (Warning: it’s about an hour long.) HDNet has helpfully posted transcripts and several supporting documents on their Web site.

For those who like their family law disputes with a little Cuban flavor, there is this story from NPR:

A child custody trial begins Monday in Miami that threatens to
become a repeat of the Elian Gonzalez case.

A
farmer from Cuba is trying to get his 5-year-old daughter returned to
him there. Her mother brought her to the U.S. but was declared
incompetent after trying to commit suicide. A Cuban-American foster
family in Miami, where the father is a well-known sports agent, wants
custody of the girl.

The judge has
removed a gag order, but so far the case is not the talk of the city,
in part because Cuban-Americans are still sheepish over how the Elian
story made them look to the rest of the nation.

Out here in Dairyland everybody feels a bit low and squabbly this time of year, what with the end of county fair season and the kids grousing about going back to school. So it’s maybe no wonder that the usually below-the-surface disagreements about hand-holding during the Our Father have recently become an issue with local Catholic broadcasters and reporters.

Naysayers like me find the practice unhygienic (the kiddies who just coughed your next illness into their hands are the most enthusiastic hand-holders), awkward (do you jump the aisle, just hold your hand toward the person sitting in the pew across the aisle, or what?), and contrived (Midwesterners are not demonstrative people, mostly opting for the single-pump handshake on rare occasions when public affection is required).

Others want to know why they can’t kneel to take communion. No, it’s not in the rubrics, but neither is hand-holding, which has never been in the rubrics. More evidence that the happy clappies are taking over the Church

Still others say that holding hands is a lovely symbol of our one-ness as the Body of Christ. It’s Our Father, after all, not My Father.

I like to think this will all blow over when the Oktoberfest beer tent goes up. But the movement against hand-holding during the Our Father seems to be gaining ground.

Thoughts?

From Media Matters via Talking Points Memo:

LIMBAUGH: Here’s [caller] in Lake Orion, Michigan. Thank you for calling. Great to have you on the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. It’s great to talk to you. I talked to you
once before. I’ve been listening to you for a couple of years now, and
I think I’m getting brighter, but there’s a lot to be learned. I know
I’m no expert in foreign affairs, but what really confuses me about the
liberals is the hypocrisy when they talk about how we have no reason to
be in Iraq and helping those people, but yet everybody wants us to go
to Darfur. I mean, aren’t we going to end up in a quagmire there? I
mean, isn’t it — I don’t understand. Can you enlighten me on this?

LIMBAUGH: Yeah. This is — you’re not going to believe this, but
it’s very simple. And the sooner you believe it, and the sooner you let
this truth permeate the boundaries you have that tell you this is just
simply not possible, the better you will understand Democrats in
everything. You are right. They want to get us out of Iraq, but they
can’t wait to get us into Darfur.

CALLER: Right.

LIMBAUGH: There are two reasons. What color is the skin of the people in Darfur?

CALLER: Uh, yeah.

LIMBAUGH: It’s black. And who do the Democrats really need to keep
voting for them? If they lose a significant percentage of this voting
bloc, they’re in trouble.

CALLER: Yes. Yes. The black population.

LIMBAUGH: Right. So you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa,
you get rid of the white government there. You put sanctions on them.
You stand behind Nelson Mandela — who was bankrolled by communists for
a time, had the support of certain communist leaders. You go to
Ethiopia. You do the same thing.

CALLER: It’s just — I can’t believe it’s really that simple.

Gerard Manley Hopkins suffered from dark nights, too, and wrote at least four poems while he was in the midst of them; they’re often called “the Terrible Sonnets.” This is one of them, written, it seems, he was starting to come out of the dark.

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,

Charitable; not live this tormented mind

With this tormenting mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get

By groping around my comfortless, than blind

Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find

Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

‘s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather–as skies

Betweenpie mountains–lights a lovely mile.

By the way, in the last line, “betweenpie” is a word that Hopkins made up. He seems to have taken the word “pied,” meaning “of various colors,” taken it to be the passive participle of a (non-existent) verb, namely “pie,” so that the whole phrase means, as one commentator puts it: “as the sky seen between dark mountains is brightly dappled.”

I confess to having been in the dark concerning the contemporary re-incarnation of the ancient philosopher (happily this occurred prior to the Chinese Government’s prohibition).

But several posts by Grant enlightened me to his existence.

So, from time to time, I’ve surreptitiously peeked into his lantern.

Here’s an example of what I saw:

Let us now praise illustrious women

Posted by: Diogenes - Aug. 23, 2007 11:05 AM ET USA

In
King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor character that
Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely “First
Servant.” All the characters around him — Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund
– have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story is
going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such
delusions. He has no notion how the play is going to go. But he
understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of
old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it. His sword is out
and pointed at his master’s breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him
dead from behind. That is his whole part: eight lines all told. But if
it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to
have acted.
– C.S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night”

Dismayed by Bishop Gerald Gettelfinger‘s
lint-flavored observations on yet another predator priest he’d kept
stashed in an Evansville parish, it struck me what a shabby figure my
own sex has cut throughout the clergy abuse crisis, and, on the
contrary, how frequently the voices raised in opposition to the lies
and injustice have belonged to women. None of these women was heeded,
as it happens, but they deserve to be honored all the same for the
decency and guts to sound off in the face of iniquity.

High on the roll of honor is Boston housewife Margaret Gallant, who wrote letters to archbishops Medeiros and Law beseeching relief from Father John Geoghan’s ongoing molestation of seven of her nephews.

“Our family is deeply rooted in the Catholic Church,
our great-grandparents and parents suffered hardship and persecution
for love of the Church. Our desire is to protect the dignity of the
Holy Orders, even in the midst of our tears and agony over the seven
boys in our family who have been violated. We cannot undo that, but we
are obligated to protect others from this abuse to the Mystical Body of
Jesus Christ. … [Fr. Geoghan's] actions are not only destructive to
the emotional well-being of the children, but hits the very core of our
being in our love for the church…”

Sorry, Margaret dear, no can do. Geoghan’s “effective life of ministry” had another 16 years to run.

When I first read Margaret Galant’s letter some years back, I was overwhelmed by the love and anguish it expressed. Love and anguish not only for the children, but for the church.

Diogenes’ post gives further examples of such “illustrious women.”

Big news in today’s (or, technically, tomorrow’s) the Age of Melbourne :

THE Catholic Church is still not serious about confronting
sexual abuse, only “managing” it, according to the Sydney bishop
who headed Australian efforts to tackle abuse.

(…)

Bishop Robinson, 70, who was abused as a child, headed the
Australian Catholic Bishops Conference professional standards
committee for a decade until he retired because he was so
disillusioned in 2004.

(…)

He said the response of the church, especially the Vatican, to
the sexual abuse crisis did not go deep enough. “The most profound
factor about sex is that the church has had a morality for 2000
years based on offences against God and I find that quite
inadequate. I ask if we should move to a morality based on
relationships, on good and harm to people.”

Bishop Robinson said the Catholic Church centralised too much
power in the hands of the Pope. “The entire responsibility of the
church throughout the world to something as big as sexual abuse
depended too much on the response of one person.”

Read the rest right here.

Mark Lilla’s New York Times Magazine article has garnered some attention on this blog and elsewhere. I recently received the following helpful response to the piece from Dean Brackley, SJ, of the Universidad Centroamericana in San Salvador. Have a look:

Mark Lilla’s essay “The Politics of God” in the New York Times Magazine (Aug. 19) left me with mixed feelings–and major reservations.

Lilla is scared of “political theology,” which slides for him into messianic fanaticism, especially of the Islamist sort. I can understand that, but let’s make some distinctions. Lilla celebrates the Great Separation of religion and politics that followed the seventeenth-century religious wars in Europe. This helped give us the modern democracies and lay states. Good. But is separating church and state the same as separating religion and politics? Is it the same as privatizing religion? Is a public role for religion always intolerant and destructive?

Lilla seems to see only negative consequences to mixing religion and politics and, to my mind, simplifies history. One crucial example is the way he presents “political theology” (Christian and Jewish) in the twentieth century. Although the liberal-theology movement of the nineteenth century had many virtues, I agree with Lilla that its proponents were generally naive and superficial about the human weakness and egoism that later blossomed with a vengeance in two world wars and fascist and communist tyranny. What Lilla overlooks is the twentieth-century reaction to liberal theology by another very significant theological movement usually called neo-orthodoxy. It was not just one theologian of this current, the democratic socialist Karl Barth, who “acquitted himself well” in the face of Nazism. Barth had plenty of company, including some of the greatest theologians of the century, people like Paul Tillich (another democratic socialist) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who led the Confessing Evangelical Church in resisting Hitler, and paid the ultimate price. Their political theology was sophisticated and anything but theocratic. One of their number, Reinhold Niebuhr, remains the most influential political theologian in U.S. history. They were Lutherans and Calvinists.

Because of antimodern resistance in the Catholic hierarchy, this “style” of political theology did not emerge in Roman Catholicism until a little later, although Jacques Maritain’s interpretation of Catholic social thought in the 1930s was indeed social-democratic (Integral Humanism). The Second Vatican Council represents a real break, not just theoretical but also practical, with Constantinian aspirations and heralds a new kind of presence of the church in society–although such a momentous change will take time, especially in Catholicism. Even so, Catholic social teaching has matured greatly since World War II, with the church turning into an important defender of human rights. That teaching inspired the social democracy of Konrad Adenauer and others who helped rebuild Western Europe after the war.

One of my pet peeves is the frequent abuse of principles of Catholic social teaching to justify inequality and free-market capitalism. For a better reading, consider what then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said in his 2004 speech to the Italian Senate: “In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”

During the same postwar period, the World Council of Churches was an important advocate of decolonization and human rights and a signal opponent of apartheid in South Africa.

In recent decades, and especially poor countries, church leaders rediscovered the prophetic vocation of the church in defense of the poor. Think of Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Oscar Romero and Christian base communities. Think of how liberation theology has developed the social meaning and political implications of Christian faith from the standpoint of the victims. (If you suppose that liberation theology is a form of theocratic fanaticism, you’ve been taken in by its more irresponsible critics.)

Pardon me if I do not regret the public role of the Quakers and other peace churches and the Catholic Worker movement, with their radical critique of war-making and capitalism. As Jim Wallis has pointed out, the churches have been crucial players in reform movements in the United States, from the abolition of slavery to the civil-rights movement.

A public role for religion is not itself the problem. The challenge is to discover the proper public role. Of course, if you believe that all religious faith is simply irrational–as many intellectuals do today–I can see why you would fear such a role. But genuine faith is not simply irrational. Although it leaps beyond the immediate evidence, it leaps toward where that evidence points, and it does so because not leaping has become less rational and less human. (By evidence here, I mean not just the data of the empirical sciences but also beauty and meaning and moral and religious experience.) Genuine faith is a pathway through life that leads into greater light and produces fruit.

The political problem is not theology and religion in themselves, but misguided religion and bad theology. Christianity, Judaism and Islam, too, cannot be reduced to privatized commodities with no public role without betraying themselves. Historically, privatized religion is not really religion at all.

Reasonable religion and good theology defend the weak and the innocent and nurture commitment to the common good. We have nothing to fear from that. Reasonable religion also points out our moral weaknesses and the limitations of self-serving reason. We have to suspect that without a public role for reasonable religion and good theology, our “enlightened” democracies will descend further into Hobbes’s war of all against all, with lives that are even nastier, more brutish and even shorter.

–Dean Brackley, SJ

William Collier, in a comment on a post below, refers to an extraordinary article in Time Magazine by David Van Biema on Mother Teresa’s prolonged “dark night of the soul.”

The article is based upon a new book of Mother Teresa’s Letters:

A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light
(Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and
her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the
spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The
letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested
that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that
for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of
God whatsoever — or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian
Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”

Van Biema continues:

The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative
reporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa’s correspondence. Kolodiejchuk,
a senior Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible
for petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting
materials. (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is
canonization.) The letters in the book were gathered as part of that
process.

The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish
mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the
“dark night” of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the
growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa’s may be the most extensive
such case on record. (The “dark night” of the 18th century mystic St.
Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet
Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. John’s context, as darkness within faith.
Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and
abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the
book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most
spiritually heroic act.

Teresa’s spiritual agony and its partial resolution are suggested:

There are two responses to trauma: to hold onto it in all its vividness
and remain its captive, or without necessarily “conquering” it, to
gradually integrate it into the day-by-day. After more than a decade of
open-wound agony, Teresa seems to have begun regaining her spiritual
equilibrium with the help of a particularly perceptive adviser. The
Rev. Joseph Neuner, whom she met in the late 1950s and confided in
somewhat later, was already a well-known theologian, and when she
turned to him with her “darkness,” he seems to have told her the three
things she needed to hear: that there was no human remedy for it (that
is, she should not feel responsible for affecting it); that feeling
Jesus is not the only proof of his being there, and her very craving
for God was a “sure sign” of his “hidden presence” in her life; and
that the absence was in fact part of the “spiritual side” of her work
for Jesus.

This counsel clearly granted Teresa a tremendous sense of release.
For all that she had expected and even craved to share in Christ’s
Passion, she had not anticipated that she might recapitulate the
particular moment on the Cross when he asks, “My God, My God, why have
you forsaken me?” The idea that rather than a nihilistic vacuum, his
felt absence might be the ordeal she had prayed for, that her
perseverance in its face might echo his faith unto death on the Cross,
that it might indeed be a grace, enhancing the efficacy of her calling,
made sense of her pain. Neuner would later write, “It was the redeeming
experience of her life when she realized that the night of her heart
was the special share she had in Jesus’ passion.” And she thanked
Neuner profusely: “I can’t express in words — the gratitude I owe you
for your kindness to me — for the first time in … years — I have come
to love the darkness. “

The whole article deserves careful attention. Clearly the book (which I have not yet read) is an important one, perhaps a new classic of spirituality. When Matthew Lamb and James Martin reach common ground on a book’s significance, it’s time to take notice.

Over the past months there has been a number of references on dotCom to a “Manichaean” mindset. Now The New Yorker has belatedly entered the lists.

Adam Kirsch has a review of Ann Wroe’s new book, Being Shelley, which he entitles: “Avenging Angel: Inside Shelley’s Manichaean Mind.”

Here’s some of what he writes:

Quite simply, Shelley believed that anyone who disagreed with him was
depraved at heart. As a result, his political vision was essentially
Manichaean: “The Manichaean philosophy respecting the origin and
government of the world, if not true, is at least an hypothesis
conformable to the experience of actual facts,” he wrote. Mankind was
made miserable by the willful selfishness of tyrants and priests. And
the millennium, in Shelley’s limitless, idealizing vision, was not just
a matter of universal suffrage. In “Prometheus Unbound,” he imagines it
as a time when the mountains of the moon turn into “living fountains,”
“ugly human shapes and visages” grow “mild and lovely,” and it becomes
“the pain of bliss / To move, to breathe, to be.”

And Kirsch concludes:

Shelley, who frequently quoted the Platonic injunction “Know
thyself,” never knew himself well enough to acknowledge the intolerance
and self-righteousness that went hand in hand with his sublime egotism.
Instead, exiled in Italy with few friends or readers, he indulged in
the voluptuous self-pity that animates so many of his poems. In his own
eyes, he was always misunderstood by the world, like the lonely
creature he wrote about in “The Sensitive Plant”: “But none ever
trembled and panted with bliss / In the garden, the field, or the
wilderness, / Like a doe in the noon-tide with love’s sweet want, / As
the companionless Sensitive Plant.”

The most important limitation of Wroe’s method is that it leaves her
with as little critical perspective on Shelley as Shelley had himself.
Being Shelley means feeling as Shelley felt, and Wroe tremblingly
recapitulates the poet’s sense of being too fragile for this world:
“Rain punished Shelley, too. He stood in it, his heart naked to its
freezing, battering drops.” By the time he drowns, Wroe’s Shelley has
become literally angelic, ready to return to his heavenly home: “White
wings unfolded vastly from his shoulders, as if through this battering
frenzy he could rise to the upper sky.” But, if there is one lesson to
be drawn from Shelley’s life and work, it is that you can’t trust a man
who believes he is an angel.

The Social Science Research Council has just issued a guide entitled, “Religious Engagement Among American Undergraduates”

The guide is introduced this way: “Recent studies of college students’ attitudes toward religion suggest that the academy is no longer the bastion of secularism it was once assumed to be. And these studies further reveal that the spiritual landscape on today’s college campuses is virtually unrecognizable from what we’ve seen in the past. Evangelicalism–often in the form of extra-denominational or parachurch campus groups–has eclipsed mainstream Protestantism. Catholicism and Judaism, too, are thriving, as are other faiths.”

I poked around the site briefly and it looks interesting.  The guide can be found here.

(I’m working on arranging a roundtable discussion with campus ministers from across the country.  Look for that podcast in the future.)

From Newsweek (HT BoingBoing):

In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has
banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government
permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration
for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and
strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is
“an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.”

Apropos of Jean Raber’s post below on Karl Rove’s departure from the White House, I watched his “Meet the Press” performance last night. This man is not retiring from politics. He’s been set loose to bamboozle the Democrats. David Gregory sitting in for Tim Russert and no mean interviewer got as good as he gave to Rove. Watch his performance: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/

The following paragraph from the Times (August 22) front page story of the Fed’s handling of the subprime meltdown reminds us that even economists must come to terms with the unreal.

“Fed officials would probably prefer to wait until their Sept. 18 meeting, by which time they will have more information on whether the fear in financial markets has in fact translated to problems in the real economy.”

Following on my earlier post regarding the problems of some Southern Baptists with a pastor who was still safely in ministry after sexually abusing several girls, here is a story out of South Dakota about an ELCA case. The local TV report, which you can read here, seems to have some element missing, as one would think the denomination would be somewhat more forthcoming. Yet the “official” statement is not terribly enlightening either. So it goes, as they say…

UPDATE: Amazing…The Sun-Times today has a follow-up on the SBC abuser in Illinois–turns out he invited a friend he’d met in prison to lead a special music service at the church. Jeff Hannah’s prison pal is now also his neighbor. The music man, Bryan Buckley, was convicted in 1997 of four counts of criminally assaulting a 14-year-old girl over several months while a youth pastor at another church. The head pastor of the church resigned after the paper started asking questions. But he still sees nothing wrong with having two convicted child molesters in ministry. “We’re a church that believes in grace and redemption,” said Rev. Charles Hamby.

Bobby Jindal is under attack in the Louisiana governor’s race for some articles he wrote on religion (apparently before he entered politics). You can find links to the articles here (although you’ll have to pay to read the entire articles). According to the descriptions on the site, which appears to be affiliated with Jindal’s political opponents, Jindal says that non-Catholics are burdened with “utterly depraved minds”
and calls individuals who ignore the teachings of the Catholic church
intellectually dishonest.

Here’s Kos’s take on the controversy. I don’t have much to say about this, or about Jindal in general, but I thought dotCommonweal readers might find it interesting.

UPDATE: Here’s the “depraved minds” passage, with context:

Yet Christ would not have demanded unity without providing the
necessary leadership to maintain it. The same Catholic Church which
infallibly determined the canon of the Bible must be trusted to
interpret her handiwork; the alternative is to trust individual
Christians, burdened with, as Calvin termed it, their “utterly
depraved” minds, to overcome their tendency to rationalize, their
selfish desires, and other effects of original sin. The choice is
between Catholicism’s authoritative Magisterium and subjective
interpretation which leads to anarchy and heresy.

I think it’s fair to say that Jindal’s critics are distorting his meaning. He does not seem to be saying that non-Catholics are somehow uniquely depraved, but rather that human beings in general are so depraved that they need the Church’s authority to reach the truth. I don’t agree with his theology, but I don’t think he is saying what his opponents are accusing him of saying.

UPDATE II: As the passage above makes clear, I think the substance of this attack ad has been pretty clearly discredited. This certainly does not reflect well on the integrity of Jindal’s opponents running the ad. What’s more interesting to me, though, is that Kos continues to flog this horse. Here’s his latest take, in which he seems to be defending the veracity of the ad. (FWIW, here’s a diary from another member of the DailyKos community taking on Kos’s support for the attack.) I don’t know much about Jindal’s politics, although I assume we don’t have much in common in that regard. (My main familiarity with him comes through my wife, who is Indian. Jindal is something of a celebrity in the Indian-American community for the completely improbable nature of his political rise in Louisiana.) But, whatever the merits of his political views, I don’t see how anyone with an ounce of integrity can defend the substance of these ads.

Another interesting angle here is the article in which Jindal takes a relatively moderate tone towards Hinduism, his former religion. The web site to which I linked above (which, again, seems to be run by his opponents) highlights that article along with the misrepresented summary of his article on protestantism. That confused me, but then I remembered that among some extremely conservative Protestants, Hinduism is a bit of a boogeyman. So Jindal’s opponents seem to be playing on that and trying to tar him — in ads that, as Kos says, are running mainly in the northern, Protestant part of the state — as intolerant of Protestantism and, at the same time, as too tolerant of Hinduism. Pretty ugly, hypocritical stuff.

UPDATE III: In response to some of the comments below and a few email I’ve recieved, I want to emphasize that I’m not saying that I share Jindal’s positions. I’m just saying that the substance of his views are not those attributed to him in the attack ads. The ads are therefore dishonest, and, I believe, knowingly so. The fact that there might be things that are questionable about Jindal’s views does not make the ads any less dishonest.

Here is the New York Times obituary. I remember seeing her ads for perfect hotel rooms in the New York Times Magazine in the 1980s. (“I wouldn’t setle for skimpy towels. Why should you?”)

Like Martha Stewart, and Hillary Clinton, she seems both to fascinate and repel large segments of the American population. Why is that? Is it merely the fact that they’re tough women trying to make it in a man’s world ? Or is it more than that?

Two instructive items from a world Commonwealers rarely visit, that of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

One is a Chicago Sun-Times article about a Southern Baptist pastor who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 1996 for sexually abusing four girls, ages 15 to 17. He was paroled in 2001, re-married, and a short time later become the pastor at another Baptist Church. The parolee pastor, Jeff Hannah, blamed his exploitation of the girls on “urges” due to his troubled first marriage. The real kicker: The congregation knew of his crimes but liked him so much they kept him on in various capacities. “We believe in forgiveness,” says a deacon who pushed for Hannah’s hire.

Among the many possible lessons, to my mind: 1) Marriage for priests is not a magic bullet; 2) Neither is banning gay men; 3) Lay people can be every bit as obtuse as the most out-of-touch hierarch. There are too many cases of Catholic parishes who loved their priest even though he was an abuser, and demonstrated to keep him on. All religion is local, too. So transparency, accountability, checks and balances.

The second item, via the excellent blog and news digest of the religion staff at the Dallas Morning News, concerns an SBC leader, Thom Rainer, who has withdrawn his endorsement of a chatroom/blog, SBCPost.com, which was set up so Southern Baptists could exchange views. As you can read in his statement, “A plea for a more civil discourse”, Rainer says that the Web site has become an arena for conflict and division:

“Whereas most print media have the accountability of boards, bosses and subscribers, much social electronic media does not have clear and explicit accountability – it’s the community’s responsibility. Words that are hurtful, untrue and even displeasing to our Lord can be written without consequence. The community then becomes collectively accountable.”

The death on July 31 of Margaret Avison–arguably Canada’s pre-eminent poet writing in English–didn’t actually dominate the national media. In fact, it took a few days for the obituaries and tributes to make their appearance, and I couldn’t help but reflect that if Avison were not regularly defined as a religious poet and publicly identified as a Christian, her passing might have commanded greater attention.

Admittedly, the two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award in poetry, the Griffin Prize for Poetry, a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant, several honorary doctorates, and membership in the Order of Canada, was a poet of exquisite complexity of thought and feeling, an intellectual of daunting profundity, and a lyricist of uncommon skill.

But the designation “religious” as opposed to, say, “love” or “political” poet appears to many to have limited her range, restricted her audience, and diminished her stature as a poet. This is, of course, nonsense, especially when you examine her impressive canon–nine volumes of verse, some translation work, and a modest collection of reflective and theoretical prose pieces. So why has it come to pass that “religious” poetry connotes inferior craft or compromised artistic integrity?

Lord David Cecil, in a preface to a collection of Christian verse early in the twentieth century, established a notion of religious poetry that is depressingly wide of the mark. He noted: “poetry should be the spontaneous expression of the spirit. . . but the devout person feels it profane to show himself in all his earthy imperfections. . . .The writer, that is, does not say what he really feels, but what he thinks he ought to feel : and he speaks not in his own voice but in the solemn tones that seem fitting to his solemn subject.” Such a definition as this may apply to a sub-genre of religious poetry that we can call devotional, poetry that subscribes to a restrictive notion of right feeling and religious sentiment. This does not, however, describe Margaret Avison or her art.

There is also a form of religious poetry that is confessional, painstakingly correct in doctrine, and disposed to an evangelizing function that can subsume the art in the higher interests of theology. Although Avison draws heavily on the Christian narrative, a detailed familiarity with the scriptures, and an enlightened appreciation of doctrine, her art is subservient neither to creed nor to religious authority. She speaks with the authority of her art.

Her work is a perfect illustration of the kind of religious poetry that I call sapiential–childlike, penetrative, immediate, and unaffected. The child knows not only through the intellect but primarily through the imagination, with the empathy and freedom the imagination grants. Sapientia (wisdom) is the way of the poet, the child, the innocent dreamer, and Christ; it is the mode of knowing for the religious pastoralist, the Zen master, the visionary, and the mystic. When the poet knows in the highest way and loves in the deepest way she has tasted the innocence of Wisdom. As Avison observes in “Neighbours?”:

To contemplate is an
indulgence, distancing

a self, an object.

To mine the meaning of

a found identity

will be given only to

recovered innocence.

Avison deplored the excesses of technology, the unexamined and unfiltered love affair that our culture and time have with a narrow understanding of knowledge, a knowledge that is practical, applied, and exclusively scientific. There is a place for another kind of knowledge in our society according to Avison, a paradise knowledge which is there for the seeing if only the child in us is there to see, if only the child in us can hear the

. . .children’s voices

all red and blue and green in the

queer April dimness
just as in Ur, at dusk, under the walls
are a barbarous tongue, lost on

that unmirroring, immured,

that thumping thing,
the heavy adult heart

The children’s voices are
the immemorial chorus. (“Bereaved”)

Avison, the sapiential poet, embodies the consummate union of authentic religious feeling with rigorous artistic standards. She writes the kind of religious poetry that is universal in its appeal, abjures the constricting of religious emotion and the subordination of the intellect, and celebrates the “spontaneous expression of the spirit.” It doesn’t get much better than that. Canada can ill afford to ignore a voice as sublime and humane as Avison’s. Now that it has been stilled, we need to return to the poetry again and again in our desperate search for authenticity and hope, for all poetry is in the end an act of hope. Avison knew that. It is part of her ineradicable legacy.

If you read the New York Times today, you probably saw the story about the trial of the former assistant treasurer of the Diocese of Cleveland, who, along with the former chief financial officer of the diocese, is accused of various criminal charges, including money laundering and tax evasion. Both men have implicated former diocesan officials, including Anthony Pilla, the former bishop, and Rev. John Wright, the diocese’s former financial and legal secretary.

The trials are likely to be very ugly and many in Cleveland are bracing for the worst. Anticipating the negative press coverage that is likely to ensue, Richard Lennon, the current Bishop of Cleveland, sent a letter to diocesan priests several weeks ago about the upcoming trials. Some priests read the letter from the pulpit this past weekend. The text of the letter can be found below.

Dear Father X,

I am writing to make you aware that the trial in the case of The United States of America v. Joseph H. Smith and Anton Zgoznik is currently scheduled to begin on 15 August 2007. The trial is likely to generate coverage by the media.

We pray that the defendants receive a fair trial and that media coverage is fair and balanced. Given the nature of various pretrial motions and statements by the defendants’ counsel, however, it is reasonable to assume that the defendants may try to portray the Diocese and those associated with it in a light favorable to the defense. As a result, media coverage may at times seem sensational.

As you follow the developments in the trial, please keep in mind that:

• The Diocese of Cleveland is not on trial; it is the victim of crimes alleged against the defendants.

• The Diocese produced thousands of documents and has cooperated fully with the Department of Justice, which thoroughly examined various allegations and brought the criminal charges it determined were warranted.

• Any suggestion that those involved with the administration of the Diocese knew or approved of the activities charged against the defendants, or engaged in similar conduct, is false.

• The Diocese does not condone criminal activity; as soon as we became aware of the allegations, we informed the proper authorities, and we conducted a thorough internal investigation.

• The Diocese was defrauded by a person who held a position of trust and by his business associate. While it is difficult to protect against fraudulent conduct, the Diocese has implemented steps since this matter was first discovered to strengthen its financial controls.

• Catholics and all others who generously support the spiritual and social work of the Church can be confident of continued good stewardship by the Diocese.

Should you receive inquiries from parishioners, you may wish to share these thoughts with them. If you have any questions, please feed free to contact Bob Tayek at 216-696-6525, extension 4460.

Sincerely yours in Christ,
The Most Rev. Richard G. Lennon
Bishop of Cleveland

Late last year, I blogged on the decision of the Priests of Holy Cross, Indiana Province, to close Notre Dame High School for Boys (my alma mater). A few months later, I wrote a piece for the National Catholic Reporter detailing how province came to that difficult decision, and how the school would go on. I had hoped to bump the article here when it was published, but NCR firewalled the piece. Wisely, the paper recently opened its online archive to the masses (for a limited time). So for those of you still interested in following the story, click over to their Web site to read my piece. (It requires a few cumbersome steps: first you have to click a button to gain access to their archives; then you have to look in the back-issues area for the April 6 edition.) Alternatively, you can click here to read a copy of the piece that’s archived on LookSmart. A sample:

The collision between high ideals and stark realities is becoming
increasingly common across the shifting landscape of Catholic education
in the United States, yet rarely is the conflict as vividly displayed
as in the story of Notre Dame High School and the Holy Cross Indiana
province. This tangled saga illustrates the crunch of the declining
number of priests and religious with the continuing dedication of
laypeople to Catholic education, while questions of ownership and
Catholic identity add intrigue to the outcome.

Of the 1,203 Catholic high schools in the United States, 42 percent
are sponsored by religious communities. The dwindling numbers of
religious and their increasing financial burdens have forced many
congregations–such as the Jesuits and the De La Salle Brothers–to
move their schools to a two-tiered governance model. In such a model, a
predominantly lay board oversees the daily operations of the school,
while some powers are reserved by the sponsoring community, usually
involving property and religious identity. “Congregations are realizing
that this is a way to continue the mission of their schools,” according
to Notre Dame Sr. Mary Frances Taymans, executive director of the
Secondary School Department of the National Catholic Educational
Association. “Knowing the role they want to sustain over time has to do
with mission and charism,” Taymans explained, these congregations
understand that “it’s time to turn these institutions over.”

But sometimes a governance transition is out of the question. When
a sponsoring community decides to close a school, according to Taymans,
“usually the lay board and parents say they want to try to keep it
open.” In those cases, “congregations tend to agree to maintain
sponsorship, but not financial responsibility for the school,” Taymans
said. In the case of Notre Dame High School, however, that was never on
the table. When asked how the Indiana province decision compares to
national trends in Catholic secondary schools, Taymans said, “It tends
to go differently.”