This is not likely to be a popular post, but here goes.  I am a big fan of Philip Pullman’s so-called “dark material,” namely, his trilogy, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass.  Over on the America blog, James Martin has posted on this and, although his view is a bit unclear, he says that he agrees with Bill Donohue that parents should be warned about Pullman’s books.  That’s fair enough.  Michael Dirda’s review of The Amber Spyglass for The Washington Post a number of years ago made this point as clearly as it can been made.  Dirda writes: “But make no mistake: This book [The Amber Spyglass] views organized religion as repressive, life-smothering, mendacious and just plain wrong, right from the beginning of time.”

What then is there to like?  Once again, Dirda hits the mark: “In the end, the “Dark Materials” trilogy is an ode to the joy of living in a physical world, a hymn to flesh, to exuberance, to the here and now, to free thought, imagination and feeling, to nobility of spirit.”

I happen to think that these positive traits are entirely compatible with organized religion and so I choose to focus on the positive rather than on any anti-religious themes in these books.  

I read these books to my son when he was not old enough to appreciate the metaphysical reflections on the relationship between goodness and authority.  For him, it was simply a wonderful adventure story.  It was that for me, too.  But it also had the great merit of being an adventure story full of difficult ideas that had to be reckoned with.

And if I haven’t angered enough readers already, let me add this: Pullman’s trilogy is infinitely better than the Harry Potter series.

Thanks, Rocco and CNS!

Pope Benedict’s new encyclical, his meditation on hope, Spe Salvi, was released today.

My initial impression is that it is denser than Deus Caritas Est — the hand of the professor is evident. It could well serve for Advent reading: a lectio continua.

Here is a passage that caught my attention:

47. Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire”. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God. In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ’s Passion. At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is clear that we cannot calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming “moment” of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart’s time, it is the time of “passage” to communion with God in the Body of Christ.39 The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear to us all. The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two together—judgement and grace—that justice is firmly established: we all work out our salvation “with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our “advocate”, or parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1).

UPDATE I:

John Allen, with his usual perceptiveness, has identified a number of themes in the new encyclical that have been pillars of Joseph Ratzinger’s theological reflections over the years.

• Truth is not a limit upon freedom, but the condition of freedom reaching its true potential;
• Reason and faith need one another – faith without reason becomes extremism, while reason without faith leads to despair;
• The dangers of the modern myth of progress, born in the new science of the 16th century and applied to politics through the French Revolution and Marxism;
• The impossibility of constructing a just social order without reference to God;
• The urgency of separating eschatology, the longing for a “new Heaven and a new earth,” from this-worldly politics;
• Objective truth as the only real limit to ideology and the blind will to power.

What I find missing, in Allen’s helpful catalog, however, is the distinctive Christic substance [hypostasis!] that structures the encyclical. The foundation of the Pope’s eschatological vision is the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Christian hope has a personal form and face.

I’m certain that John Allen would not deny this. But it is important, I think, to underline it.

UPDATE II:

Ian Fisher in Saturday’s New York Times chimes in:

The document, called “Saved by Hope,” weaves a complex but elegant
argument for the necessity of hope, drawing deeply on history,
philosophy and theology. His first encyclical, issued almost two years
ago, concerned charity and love.

Thus, Benedict, whose nearly
three-year papacy has stressed a return to theological basics, has now
explicitly addressed two of the three fundamental Christian values:
faith, hope and charity.

Newsweek has a lengthy profile of Giuliani that burrows into his youth to explain Rudy the Politician. The piece quotes from the John Judis piece in The New Republic, which we posted earlier, that tries to explain Giuliani’s authoritarian streak in terms of traditional Catholic thought. To me, the Newsweek profile (lengthy and meaty) does more to explain Rudy simply by setting out the Catholic culture he grew up in, the tribalism, and the style of Catholic education. Such as the Christian Brothers who used corporal punishment as a matter of course–and were thanked by the senior Giulianis for doing so.

“Corporal punishment was routine at Bishop Loughlin. Adolescent anarchy was a fearful thing; the Brothers beat it out of kids. Some students were afraid. “When you see someone picked up by the shirt and tie and punched in the face, or other teachers throwing chalk across the room—it was very scary,” says Joseph Sicinski, who was Giuliani’s classmate.”

“At Bishop Loughlin, Giuliani was a catechist, a student who instructed younger children in Catholic doctrine. Giuliani was not remarkably pious, but like many dutiful boys of his time and background, he seriously considered the priesthood. (He would later joke to friends that he gave up his priestly ambitions because “celibacy ain’t for me.”) But Giuliani wound up applying for a college scholarship “to study law or medicine,” the classic roads of upward mobility for the sons of immigrant families.”

This and other pieces also try to explain Giuliani’s soft spot for his oft-times nefarious friends (and, presumably, his peace with his rather wayward personal life) as part of the Catholic understanding of “that fine, blurry line between saint and sinner.”

David Brooks tried a similar tack in a recent column, The Real Rudy in which he (somewhat cloyingly) praises Giuliani’s “inner light”–that is, his former, more liberal views on immigation and gays and abortion–and wonders why he has abandoned his true self.

I’m not so sure that washes. Maybe what we see is Rudy’s true self. I do think it will be fascinating to see (esp after yesterday’s revelations of taxpayer funds used during his extramarital affair) how–and whether–Giuliani will play out as a “Catholic” candidate.

UPDATE: Two stories out now that could have more impact on Giuliani’s chances than his Catholic education. One is from the Village Voice on Rudy’s ties to Qatar sheiks who were cozy with the kind of folks Rudy likes to denounce.

Second is a story on the front of today’s Times, Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again about Giuliani’s “misstatements.” Money quote:

“All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong.”

If only the Christian Brothers could get their hands on him now…I have a sense this truthiness will come to haunt him, esp as Huckabee marches on.

James Davidson and Dean Hoge have an essay in this week’s
Commonweal entitled “Mind the Gap.” It highlights an emerging gap between the
ways that clergy and laity understand their respective roles in the Church. 

The core of this gap is a disjunction between two models of
priesthood.  The first is a “servant-leader”
model where priests work in a collaborative fashion with laity.  The “cultic” model, by contrast, emphasizes
the priest “as a man set apart” and sees the laity having a more limited role.

Although I’m generally a fan of both Davidson and Hoge’s
work, I don’t find the distinction between the “servant-leader” and the “cultic”
models to be helpful.  Adopting this
framework is as likely to exacerbate the tensions they identify as to resolve
them.

First of all, the terminology is problematic.  In particular, the use of the word “cultic” as
an apparent synonym for “authoritarian” carries the implicit suggestion that it
is wrong for priests to place great emphasis on their liturgical
responsibilities.  This is hardly the
teaching of Vatican II, which argued famously that the liturgy was the “summit”
and “fount” of Christian life and that “no other action of the Church can equal
its efficacy by the same title and to the same degree.”

Secondly, the authors deduce the existence of this “cultic”
mindset by the response of priests to statements that are theologically ambiguous.  Davidson and Hoge are concerned, for example,
that younger priests respond in the affirmative when asked whether “ordination
confers on the priest a new status or permanent character which makes him
essentially different from the laity.” 
While more redolent of scholastic terminology than I might prefer, this
statement is not at variance with
what the Church teaches about the priesthood (see CCC 1547).  So why should affirming it be considered
evidence of a “cultic” mindset?

Thirdly, the classification of priests according to these
two models reinforces a simplistic narrative of how the priesthood is changing:
where once we had (good) “Vatican II” priests, we now have (bad) “John Paul II”
priests.  I, too, am concerned about
seminarians who seem to know nothing more of the Catholic tradition than what
they have read in the Catechism.  On the
other hand, would it be offensive to suggest that there are at least some
laypeople whose ecclesiology owes less to Vatican II and more to a vague
congregationalism absorbed from the surrounding culture?

I am not blind to the problems that Davidson and Hoge want
to highlight.  Priests who cannot build
strong collaborative working relationships with lay staff and volunteers will
do enormous damage to the Church.  In my
experience, however, petty ecclesiastical tyrants are no longer solely a clerical
phenomenon.

There’s no question that the emerging generation of priests
is different in many ways from those who came before them.  That’s true of the laity, too, by the
way.  The potential for conflict is
real.  Sociology can help us understand
and reduce those conflicts, but not if we insist on stuffing people into the
tired old “liberal” and “conservative” boxes. 
We need a broader set of categories. 
Mary Ann Reese, the coordinator of Young Adult Ministry for the
Archdiocese of Cincinnati, wrote an article for America
in 2003 where she developed eight different categories to help her understand
the diversity of the young people she was encountering.  What struck me about her approach was that
she seemed sincerely interested in getting inside the heads of these kids and
understanding their various points of view.

We need more of this kind of thinking.  We need diverse models of lay and priestly
ministry that can help the emerging generation of clergy and laity to better
understand each other and their respective vocations.  Models that emphasize—and even
exacerbate—polarization are not going to get the job done.

Welcome to the blogosphere, America! Be sure to check out their new blog, In All Things, which debuted this week.

I’ve always been intrigued by those Renaissance paintings depicting some crucial moment in the life of Christ: the wedding feast at Cana, the healing of the blind man, even the Last Supper. There is an intensity of energy at the center, but as our eyes move toward the periphery of the painting, the wondrous fades into the ordinary: people chatting, children playing, dogs sleeping.

In today’s New York Times, the ever insightful Verlyn Klinkenborg, muses about two photographs of Abraham Lincoln. And then wonders:

What would the photographic record show if it reached back, say 500 years, instead of 180?

One
answer is that it would show us this same structure over and over
again: a fiercely concentrated knot of people hanging on the words of
someone at the center of the crowd. And around them? People standing in
looser and looser concentrations, until finally — far enough from the
epicenter — their attention turns away from history and focuses on the
abiding interest of almost anything else. And this is somehow the
inherent bias of the camera. It always directs us toward the center of
attention, never away to the periphery, even though that is where our
attention eventually wanders.

“Britain’s Got Talent” is the equivalent of our “American Idol”–complete with Simon Cowell–he does double duty. Here’s the qualifying round for one Paul Potts, a cellphone salesman from Cardiff. 
Bob Imbelli, you’ll like this one. Really.  I promise.
HT: Margaret Silf in AMERICA.

Today’s NY Times has an obituary for Mel Tolkin who led the famous team of writers who produced the stories and jokes for the classic “Show of Shows” and later “Caesar’s Hour.” Tolkin lived through pogroms in the Ukraine, of which he said: “The pressures made heroes of some, and poets and violinists of some. But it made for a lot of broken human beings too. I’m not happy to have to say this: it created the condition where humor becomes anger made acceptable with a joke.” It surely is not coincidental that in a century so horrific for Jews almost all the great comics were of Jewish descent.

There must be some association between absurdity and humor. Someone must have written about this.

To offer an example utterly trivial by comparison: the two years in the seminary that were most difficult, and difficult in part because of absurd conditions and rules, are the years that I remember laughing the most. And I think what an important role common laughter continues to have in my best and longest friendships, some of them dating back to those days.

You have to admit, this is pretty funny. And gutsy. . . especially for the seminarian who plays the contraceptive.

.

Andrew Sullivan links to Deal Hudson’s post on Rudy Giuliani’s paid consultant (and childhood friend) Msgr. Alan Placa, who was accused of sexual abuse in a 2003 grand-jury report and has been suspended from ministry for the past five years. Andrew asks the right question: Where’s the press on this story? Given the vigor with which many reporters have pursued the Catholic Church’s sexual-abuse scandal, why have so few stories been written about Placa and Giuliani?

As usual, there were many amusing and moving story lines at the recent consistory for the creation of 23 new cardinals, all of which got ample play elsewhere. Most poignant had to be the elevation of the Chaldean patriarch in Baghdad, Cardinal Emmanuel-Karim Delly.  The personal favorite for the media had to be the elevation of Cardinal John Foley, longtime head of the Vatican Council on Social Communications. Cardinal Foley is a very pastoral man, and very approachable and very funny–virtues not always associated with hierarchs in the Curia, were Foley has served for more than two decades. Little did I know that he may have owed some of his humor to, of all people, his old school chum comedian Henry Gibson (no relation, no way, no how), as this CNS story recounts.

Cardinal Foley has also been a journalist, among his various incarnations, hence his interest and interaction with the media. But until CNS wrote it up, I’d never heard this story (I’m probably the only one who hasn’t), recounted by Foley’s former colleague Joe Ryan, currently the assistant editor at the diocesan newspaper of Wilmington, Del. It’s about a trip Foley, then a young priest and editor of the Philadelphia archdiocesan paper, took to the Holy Land with Cardinal Krol:

Philadelphia’s Cardinal John Krol was touring the Holy Land in the early 1970s when he went to Egypt and visited the pyramids at Giza. Like many tourists there, the distinguished prelate was invited by a persistent hawker to ride a camel.

The cardinal asked the editor of his newspaper, The Catholic Standard and Times, if he thought he should get on the camel.

“No, your eminence,” said Msgr. John P. Foley. “I would advise you not to get on that camel.”

Cardinal Krol, caught between a beckoning Bedouin and his dubious priest-editor, decided his opportunities in life to ride a camel would be limited, so up he climbed.

Msgr. Foley promptly took his boss’s picture, which ran in Catholic newspapers around the world. It showed the Archbishop of Philadelphia, ungainly in the camel’s saddle, looking more like the former butcher from Cleveland he had been than Lawrence of Arabia.

“You told me not to get on the camel; why did you take my picture?” the cardinal asked the editor.

“As your loyal priest, your eminence, I gave you my best advice,” Msgr. Foley said. “As the editor of your newspaper, I took your picture.”

I’ve always considered religious life and journalism as profoundly analogous callings, but vocations which could not coexist within the same soul. Perhaps that’s not quite true.   

Commonwealers might be interested to note a growing movement within Congress that is arguably anti-Muslim. Back in January, Sue Myrick, Republican Congresswoman from North Carolina, formed the “Anti-Terrorism Caucus” in the House of Representatives. (See Press release here.)

The Caucus originally had 67 members and has apparently now grown to 118. If you want to see why we ought to be deeply concerned by this development, please read the interview Congresswoman Myrick gave to Investor’s Business Daily. The interview was posted on IBD’s website last week and can be found here.

Here is one exchange:

“IBD: Many Islamists are well-spoken, and seem skilled at manipulating not only our media but our laws. If they can use our constitutional freedoms against us to block due scrutiny, what chance do we have of marginalizing them?

Myrick: Over the last 25 years, there has been a concerted effort on the part of radical Islamists to infiltrate our major institutions in America. They have done that by funding professors’ projects in our colleges and universities. Then, they influence what is taught by making the program dependent on their yearly donations. Several classes have graduated and are now in the media, the judicial system, teaching in our schools and colleges, various branches of our government, even in our military.”

Congresswoman Myrick goes on to talk about how jihadists wish to impose sharia law in the U.S. “Unchallenged,” she says, “it will happen.”

The paranoia in this interview is pretty frightening. If the interview reflects the thinking of a majority of the Anti-Terrorism Caucus, there is cause for real concern.

Chicago Sun-Times writer Steve Patterson reports today on the disconcerting story of a parish business manager who warned the chancery about his pastor’s questionable spending habits and was told to keep his yap shut–then fired.

Brockhagen was business manager at St. Margaret Mary — the
Northwest Side parish [Rev. Mark] Sorvillo was convicted of stealing thousands of
dollars from. In that role, Brockhagen was responsible for overseeing
financial records.

Sorvillo, it later emerged, was spending lavishly on himself and a male stripper he met at a gay club.

Says concerns rejected

Brockhagen was never charged with any wrongdoing and never
officially implicated as being involved in Sorvillo’s years-long scam.
Yet the cloud hangs over him, through a skeptical glance or quiet
whispers around the neighborhood, Brockhagen and parishioners say.

He had to know something, they speculate. How could he not have known?

In fact, Brockhagen says, he did know about Sorvillo’s spending
habits — and brought them to the attention of the archdiocese multiple
times. Each time, he claims, archdiocese officials asked him to remain
quiet.

But now that Brockhagen has been fired — and filed a retaliatory
discharge lawsuit against church leaders — he says he feels more free
to talk about what he knew and when he knew it.

Read the rest right here.

In his homily during Saturday’s Consistory, the Pope turned his thoughts to Iraq:

I now think with affection of the communities entrusted to your care and, in a special way, of those that are most tried by suffering, by challenges and difficulties of different sorts. Among these, how can I not turn my gaze with apprehension and affection, in this moment of joy, to the dear Christian communities of Iraq? These brothers and sisters of ours in the faith are experiencing in their own flesh the dramatic consequences of a long conflict and are living in an ever more fragile and delicate political situation. Calling the patriarch of the Chaldean Church to enter into the College of Cardinals, I intended to express in a concrete way my spiritual nearness and my affection for those populations. We would like, dear and venerable brothers, together to reaffirm the solidarity of the whole Church with the Christians of that beloved land and to invite and to implore from the merciful God, for all peoples involved, the longed-for coming of reconciliation and peace.

And on Sunday, he asked for a day of prayer for the conference about to open in Annapolis:

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

On Tuesday, at Annapolis in the United States, Israelis and Palestinians, with the help of the international community, intend to re-launch the negotiation process to find a just and definitive solution to the conflict that has bloodied the Holy Land for 60 years and provoked so many tears and so much suffering among the two peoples. I ask you to join yourselves to the day of prayer declared today by the U.S. bishops’ conference to implore the Spirit of God for peace for that region so dear to us and to give wisdom and courage to all the protagonists in this important meeting.

A terrific piece by my colleague Chrisian Smith on religon and “emerging adulthood”. By this Smith means the decade or so that educated young people take, on average, between the time they leave home and the time they “settle down.”

Here’s Smith:

A matter related to religious and other beliefs worth pondering concerns emerging adults’ social attachments to churches. We have long known that, for a variety of reasons, religious participation for many young people declines significantly when they leave home. Going away to college seems especially likely to kill regular church attendance for most. Historically, marriage and parenthood have then marked the return for many to church and more active faith. Regardless of what one thinks of these facts per se, the following general observation holds. When the space between high school graduation and full adulthood was fairly short, as it was 50 years ago, the length of time spent out of church tended to be rather short. But with the rise of emerging adulthood in recent decades, churches are now looking at 15-year or even 20-year absences by youth from churches between their leaving as teenagers and returning with toddlers—if indeed they ever return.

And these are crucial years in the formation of personal identity, behavioral patterns, and social relationships. Returning to church as full-fledged young adults with children in tow—yet having spent a decade or two forming their assumptions, priorities, and perspectives largely outside of church—they may very well bring to the churches of their choice motives, beliefs, and orientations difficult to make work from the perspective of faithful, orthodox Christianity. The phrase “consumer-oriented” comes to mind. The burden then placed on the tasks of serious Christian formation, education, and discipleship can be weighty. One has to wonder whether such church returnees may not be shaping the church more than the church shapes them.

For those of you who aren’t watching football, shopping, eating, sleeping, or catching up on work,  I thought I’d open a thread on this week’s cover article“The Other Health Crisis: Why Priests Are Coping Poorly.”

Today is the feast day of Blessed Miguel Pro, S.J., who was martyred 80 years ago today in Mexico.

Pro was born in Guadalupe in 1891. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1911, the same year that Mexican president Porfirio Díaz was overthrown. In the resulting chaos, an anti-clerical government came to power in the country and the Jesuit novices had to flee to Los Gatos, California. Pro eventually found his way to Belgium, where he was ordained in 1925. A year later, he returned to Mexico to find a church suffering under what writer Graham Greene called “the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth.” In his book The Lawless Roads, Greene described Pro’s clandestine efforts on behalf of Mexico’s Catholics:

Within two months of Pro’s landing, President Calles had
begun the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth. The churches
were closed, Mass had to be said secretly in private houses, to administer the
Sacraments was a serious offence. Nevertheless, Pro gave Communion daily to
some three hundred people, confessions were heard in half-built houses in
darkness, retreats ‘were held in garages. Pro escaped the plain-clothes police
again and again. Once he found them at the entrance to a house where he was
supposed to say Mass; he posed as a police officer, showing an imaginary badge
and remarking, ‘There’s a cat bagged in here’, and passed into the house and
out again with his cassock under his arm. Followed by detectives when he left a
Catholic house and with only fifty yards’ start, he disappeared altogether from
their sight round a corner – the only man they overtook was a lover out with
his girl. The prisons were filling up, priests were being shot, yet on three successive
first Fridays Pro gave the Sacrament to nine hundred, thirteen hundred, and
fifteen hundred people.

Pro was finally captured by the government in November
1927.  President Calles ordered him
executed by firing squad.  As he was
being led to his execution, he forgave the soldiers.  Declining a blindfold, he stood with his arms
out in imitation of the crucified Christ. 
His last words were “Viva Cristo Rey!” (Long live Christ the King!).

Pro was beatified in 1998 by Pope John Paul II. His story is an inspiring one and is worth remembering as we prepare to celebrate
Sunday’s feast of Christ the King.

Very funny. Especially if you remember, to your chagrin, most of the videos he’s spoofing.

But who could forget “Ice, Ice, Baby.”

For those of you who didn’t waste your time in a manner that enables you to get the allusions, contemplate this:

Over 65 MILLIION people have watched this on youtube.

Boston College’s Church in the 21st Century Book Series, published by Crossroad, has a new title: Take Heart: Catholic Writers on Hope in Our Time. It contains short essay-reflections by many authors, including such Commonweal stalwarts as Lawrence Cunningham, Luke Timothy Johnson, Don Wycliff, and Melissa Musick Nussbaum. (I suppose full disclosure dictates that I confess to having a piece in it as well.)

The essay by Luke Johnson, that I was reading this morning (lectio, if not divina, certainly salutaris) contains these lines:

Why, then, do I keep grading “C” papers even when they persist in being “C” papers? Why do I leap to receive calls from my children even though I know well they may not be bringing good news? Why do my wife, Joy, and I savor the sweetness of each moment of life even as we feel life slipping away? Why does it gladden me to welcome converts to the church even when I know the trials that await them? I once thought that my positive disposition toward life was due to animal high spirits. But as the animal in me weakens, the spirit does not seem to waver. Perhaps my hope really is in something/someone other than myself.

As a teacher, I do not hope that all “C” students will turn into “A” students. Rather, I hope in the living God who constantly, in every generation, sets fires in the minds of some of the young, igniting in them the drive and desire to take up the never-ending battle for truth and beauty and goodness against the forces of barbarism even within themselves. So I cast little seeds of thought, hoping in my students and in the One who can gift them with wisdom. As a theologian who loves the church, I do not hope that ecclesiastical policy will suddenly perfectly realize God’s will. Rather, I speak and write with hope in the living God who can, in every generation, raise up prophets from among us to carry out a powerful witness, not only to the world, but to the church as sacrament of the world

To Luke Timothy: grazie molte; and blessed Thanksgiving to all.

Update:

It seems that even the Pope has been reading dotCom:

Earlier today the “Vice-Pope” [the Cardinal Secretary of State] announced that Spe Salvi — “Saved By Hope” — Benedict XVI’s second encyclical, will be “signed” … and made available on 30 November. [post-Thanksgiving thanks to Whispers in the Loggia]

Today’s NY Times has an article on different attitudes of religions with regard to cloning human beings. Laws against it tend to prevail in countries that once were Christian, whereas in Asian countries, in particular, research into such cloning is not only not frowned upon by religious people but is actively supported. Prominent Western scientists who wish to engage in such research have been moving to Asian countries. Genetic manipulation of other animal species and of plants is also regarded quite differently, but not along the same lines as cloning humans.

A map puts the differences very dramatically.

In a recent New Republic article, “Authority Figure,” John Judis traces Giuliani’s bully  law-and-order character back “to his childhood in New York and to his enrollment for 16 years in Catholic schools.” It is a worthy endeavor, but in the end, Judis seems (to me) to link a caricature of Catholic teaching to a caricature of a Catholic politician. At Catholic schools, Judis writes,

“…Giuliani was exposed to a specifically Catholic (as opposed to Protestant-individualist) view of the relationship between authority and liberty–one that dates from Aquinas’s Christian Aristotelianism, was spelled out in Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical on the Nature of Human Liberty, and still enjoys currency today, even in the wake of Vatican II. Catholic thinkers do not see liberty as an end in itself, but as a means-a “natural endowment”–by which to achieve the common good. For that to happen, individuals have to be encouraged to use their liberty well; and that is where authority comes into play. Authority, embodied by law and the state, encourages–at times, forces–free individuals to contribute to the common good. Or, to put it in Aristotelian terms: Authority–by creating a just order–encourages liberty over license.”

Judis then notes in a sidelong way that Giuliani has repudiated much of Catholic teaching–not to mention his rather un-Catholic behavior toward his wives and children–but continues:

“But his exposure to Catholic and classical political thought clearly had a lasting impact on him. At a forum on crime in March 1994, sponsored by the New York Post, Giuliani voiced views on liberty and authority that seemed to flow from these teachings. He criticized liberals for seeing only “the oppressive side of authority.” “What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be,” he said. “Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.” Asked in the question period to explain what he meant, Giuliani said, “Authority protects freedom. Freedom can become anarchy.” Norman Siegel, the then-executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said afterward that he was “floored” by Giuliani’s definition of liberty and authority. But anyone who studied philosophy at a Catholic college would not have been surprised by Giuliani’s words….SNIP…Just as the danger of Protestant individualism is that it can be used to rationalize plutocracy, the danger of Catholic communitarianism is that it can be used to rationalize a slide toward authoritarianism. Giuliani’s ideas on liberty and authority were integral to his assault on crime in New York, but they also may have encouraged a penchant for using power to curtail freedom.”

I don’t want to go all Donohue on this, but trying to chalk up Rudy’s obtuse and obstreperous approach to governing to the inculcation of some abstract Catholic authoritarianism seems like a stretch–if not an excuse. It also smacks of the old view that Catholics could not think for themselves, and prefer to walk in lockstep to orders from Rome (or any authrority figure) on what to say or do or think.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic. Calling John McGreevy. Is Rudy just being a good Catholic schoolboy?

“There’s no chin behind Chuck Norris’s beard. Only another fist.” Classic. I don’t know who thought up this spot, but he deserves a raise.

I’m reluctant to start a thread on this theme, but that’s precisely the point William Saletan makes in his two recent “Human Nature” columns in Slate. The first article is entitled “liberal creationism.” Here is a brief snippet:

“If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you’re not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn’t just another fact; it’s a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating “supposedly superior intellects,” “eliminating the weak,” “paralyzing the hope of reform,” jeopardizing “the doctrine of brotherhood,” and undermining “the sympathetic activities of a civilized society.”

The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals.”

As much as I hate to admit it, Saletan has a point: liberals like me are inclined to dismiss any claims of genetically mediated differences in intelligence among racial groups, regardless of what the research shows. If the research seems not to support our settled convictions, we just dismiss it.

How is this different from the Biblical literalists’ repudiation of evolution?

It’s comments like these, as much as anything else, that explain Giuliani’s surprising acceptability to folks like Robertson.  This is why I doubt the religious right will totally defect from the Republicans if Giuliani is nominated.  He may be personally pro-choice, the argument will go, but he is clearly better on the abortion front than any Democrat could possibly be, because he will nominate more Scalias and Thomases to the Court.

Joseph Bottum has a piece in the most recent issue of First Things on the disappearance of Advent. Here is how it begins (you need a subscription to read the rest of it):

“Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale.

“Every secularized holiday tends to lose the context it had in the liturgical year. Across the nation, even in many churches, Easter has hopped across Lent, Halloween has frightened away All Saints, and New Year’s has drunk up Epiphany. Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing–for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.”

When I was growing up, we didn’t trim the Christmas tree until Christmas Eve, and that held in my siblings’ families until fairly recently. I won’t talk about the advertising on TV and in stores, which this year began early in November, nor about the incessant playing of Christmas music, except to note that I know of at least one pastor who was berated by a parishioner because during what used to be celebrated as Advent, no Christmas carols were being sung at Mass!  A few years ago I heard a news-anchor refer to the Twelve Days of Christmas as the last shopping days before Christmas!

When Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth appeared, I commented favorably on the review by New Testament scholar, Richard Hays, published in First Things. I thought the review both appreciative and critical of the book.

Now, in the current (December) issue of First Things, a number of letters are printed that, for the most part, criticize the critic. Hays responds in a measured way, and, in the process, clarifies further both his appreciation and his critique.

Here is a portion of what he says:

The letter writers seem to share, to one degree or another, Mr. Kellner’s impression that my review of Pope Benedict’s book “illustrates the resistance of academic theology to reading the gospels as ‘an overall unity expressing an intrinsically coherent message.’” Nothing could be further from my intention. My review actually praised the book’s synthetic aims and, in part, its results. For example, I wrote: “Benedict’s synthetic reading of the canonical New Testament witnesses is both subtle and illuminating,” and I observed that “the book is full of luminous passages that offer a fruitful basis for meditation on the mysterious and gracious figure of Jesus.” I also gave accolades to Benedict’s constructive use of patristic sources and typological interpretation of the Old Testament.

Nonetheless, the letter writers are correct to discern a tone of disappointment in my review. The disappointment arises not because I am “indignant” that Benedict has attempted this task of synthesis or because I think the task impossible but because I think his actual performance of it is regrettably flawed. After reading the book’s foreword, I was rooting for him to succeed, but in my judgment he unfortunately fails to achieve the goals he sets for himself. He insists that “the historical-critical method . . . is and remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical work,” and he wants to accept what “modern exegesis” tells us about the historical setting and composition of the gospels. Yet, recognizing the limits of the historical method, he also wants to integrate these historical findings into a trusting, synthetic reading of the gospels. The problem is simply that he fails to achieve real integration: His use of historical methodology is selective and inconsistent.

Shocked at such language? John McCain apparently wasn’t when a woman posed the question to him to other day at a kaffe klatsch with voters. No doubt you realize the “bitch” in question is Hillary Clinton. (I guess we can be thankful Barack Obama didn’t come up.)

The response? The crowd guffawed. “I thought she was talking about my ex-wife,” joked one audience member.

McCain, reprising his deft “Bomb Iran” touch, praised the questioner: “That’s an excellent question…”

No, senator. It’s not. Of course, Clinton would be excoriated if she raised gender issues. Then again, look at the gender of the person who asked the question. Telling, perhaps. All the same, it would have been nice, I think, if Sen. McCain had responded like a, well, man.

See the video here.

The Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church recently held their tenth plenary session in Ravenna, Italy from 8-14 October 2007.  The fruit of that dialogue is a new document, entitled Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and Authority.  The text of the document can be found here. 

Cardinal Walter Kasper and Metropolitan John Zizioulas led the respective delegations and were deeply involved in the work.  That is about as good a theological “dream team” as I can imagine.  Kasper’s comments on the document can be found here, and he is appropriately sober about what it represents.  That sobriety has, alas, been absent from some of the press coverage, which seemed to suggest that the Catholics and the Orthodox were on the verge of putting the Great Schism behind them.  I’m afraid we’re still very far from that point.

One interesting point for me is the (albeit limited) discussion of national episcopal conferences in the Catholic Church:

29. In subsequent centuries, both in the East and in the West, certain new configurations of communion between local Churches have developed. New patriarchates and autocephalous Churches have been founded in the Christian East, and in the Latin Church there has recently emerged a particular pattern of grouping of bishops, the Episcopal Conferences. These are not, from an ecclesiological standpoint, merely administrative subdivisions: they express the spirit of communion in the Church, while at the same time respecting the diversity of human cultures.

30. In fact, regional synodality, whatever its contours and canonical regulation, demonstrates that the Church of God is not a communion of persons or local Churches cut off from their human roots. Because it is the community of salvation and because this salvation is “the restoration of creation” (cfr. St Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., 1, 36, 1), it embraces the human person in everything which binds him or her to human reality as created by God. The Church is not just a collection of individuals; it is made up of communities with different cultures, histories and social structures.

The language used is very careful and it probably cannot be used to score points in the ongoing debate within the Catholic Church about “theological status” of national episcopal conferences.  Still, the statement that such conferences, as regional groupings of local churches, are not “merely merely administrative subdivisions” but “express the spirit of communion in the Church” is an important one to reflect on.  It also suggests that the role of conferences within the Catholics Church has implications for our dialogue with the Orthodox.

The statement, of course, has no official status within either the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church at this point.  It will have to be “received” and pondered prayerfully by both.  I think we can all pray that this reception would be fruitful.

The convicted sexual abuser Rev. Donald McGuire plans to fight the Jesuits’ decision to dismiss him from the order. No surprise there. “They can’t abandon me,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. Sure they can. The conviction isn’t going to help his cause when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reviews his case. Note McGuire’s narcissism. “I’m losing friends because people don’t know my side of the story.” Well, no. He had his day in court. He lost.

There is of course a legitimate question about how the church ought to handle convicted or admitted abuser-priests. If the perp is a serial abuser, laicizing him and cutting him loose could put the public at risk. But what is the church to do with a man like McGuire who has been convicted in Wisconsin of molesting two boys, who has been accused of abuse for years, who is now up on federal charges for allegedly traveling internationally to have sex with a minor, who has defied the orders of his Jesuit superiors regarding his contact with minors, and who refuses to admit the abuse of which he has been convicted?

In the Sun-Times article, Fr. Ken Lasch points out that if McGuire isn’t laicized, he could approach “a bishop somewhere around the world who didn’t check him out, [and] he could end up functioning again [as a priest].” Given McGuire’s extensive contacts around the globe (“friends all over the world,” he calls them), that’s not outside the realm of possibility. McGuire says, “I will always be a priest. They can’t take that away from me.”

I suspect they will.