Bernard Lonergan, S.J., in Method in Theology, identifies what he terms “eight functional specialties” in doing theology. The eighth is “communications.” Pope Benedict may be an expert in “doctrines” and “systematics” (two of the other functional specialties, according to Lonergan), but John Allen thinks the Vatican is pretty woeful with regard to “communications.”

One of the things I like about Allen is that he comes up with alternatives. Here, from his latest, post:

What might a more effective communications strategy have looked like?

Rather than dropping this decree on an unsuspecting world, the Vatican could have called a press conference to present it, with senior officials such as Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews — so that the interpretation would be simultaneous, not after-the-fact. At that time, four key points could have been made:

This move is not an endorsement of the personal views of these four bishops. In particular, in light of Williamson’s past comments, the pope wishes to clearly repudiate any attempt to diminish or deny the horror of the Holocaust.
Catholicism’s commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, and to good relations with the Jewish people, is unchanged.
Lifting the excommunication gets the traditionalists in the door, but it does not mean they have arrived. If they are to be fully reintegrated, they must accept official Catholic teaching, including religious freedom and respect for other religions.
The pope feels he’ll have more leverage to nudge traditionalists in this direction by opening a dialogue, rather than keeping them on the outside.
That might not have been enough to short-circuit all the negative reaction, but it surely would have softened the blow. All four points were implied in the Jan. 25 statement from Ricard, as well as the Jan. 28 comments by Benedict XVI, but coming only in the wake of negative public reaction they inevitably smack of spin.

In short, the Vatican under Benedict XVI still has not learned the lessons of Regensburg. The terrible irony of these meltdowns is that they’re a boon for people hostile to the pope or the church, who can cluck about how “I told you so,” while they fall hardest on those most inclined to be sympathetic.

“Shameful” bonuses? A million-dollar dustbin? A new coporate jet for the executives of a bank in crisis? How is this possible? How is it possible that we’re surprised? This is an old story in American capitalism: businesses that are theoretically insolvent — or people who are theoretically bankrupt – but practically as extravagant as ever. The late John Updike wrote about the phenomenon in a 1983 essay titled “The Bankrupt Man.”

The bankrupt man dances. Perhaps, on other occasions, he sings. Certainly he spends money in restaurants and tips generously. In what sense, then, is he bankrupt?

He has been declared so. He has declared himself so. He returns from the city agitated and pale, complaining of hours spent with the lawyers. Then he pours himself a drink. How does he pay for the liquor inside the drink, if he is bankrupt?

One is too shy to ask. Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday’s New York Times ran a story on page A6 (and online) about the statement Benedict XVI made at Wednesday’s papal audience. He attempted to explain his decision to reach out to the SSPX and reiterated the Church’s condemnation of the Shoah. The last line of that article — a quote from the pope’s address — struck a few of us in the office as slightly odd:

He added that he hoped that his gesture would be met “by a commitment on their part to fulfill the further steps necessary to realize full communion with the church,” including “recognizing the majesty and authority of the pope and of the Second Vatican Council.”

The “majesty” of the pope? Doesn’t that seem rather…preconciliar?

As you probably suspected, the Times‘s Rachel Donadio was apparently working with a less than authoritative translation. Whispers went with the one provided by Zenit:

I trust that following from this gesture of mine will be the prompt effort on their part to complete final necessary steps to arrive to full communion with the Church, thus giving testimony of true fidelity and true recognition of the magisterium and the authority of the Pope and the Second Vatican Council.

You couldn’t call that fluid prose, but the part about the “magisterium” sounds a lot more likely, doesn’t it?

Since the pope was speaking Italian at the time, let’s check the original text:

Auspico che a questo mio gesto faccia seguito il sollecito impegno da parte loro di compiere gli ulteriori passi necessari per realizzare la piena comunione con la Chiesa, testimoniando così vera fedeltà e vero riconoscimento del magistero e dell’autorità del Papa e del Concilio Vaticano II.

I’m no expert, but I think that rules out “majesty” as an option. (That would be, I think, “maesta”?) Just one more amusing bit of evidence that a little Catholic knowledge would go a long way in the newsroom.

“While I respect the opinions of those who oppose abortion, I do not understand why those same leaders would oppose policies proven to reduce abortions. Modest estimates put the number of undesired pregnancies averted in California at over 108,000 with over 41,000 abortions prevented within the first 4 years after expanding access to contraceptive options. Over a quarter of those pregnancies would have been in adolescents under the age of 20, accounting for over 11,000 prevented abortions.

“A proven path to fewer abortions and marked reductions in federal spending, what is a conservative not to like? Perhaps it is the mistaken belief that the availability of contraceptive access will increase premarital sexual activity. This belief simply fails to stand up to the evidence. In 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services (under Republican Secretary Tommy Thompson), released a report documenting an increase in contraceptive use with a decrease in sexual activity between 1995 and 2002. Supplying contraceptives and educating adolescents about sex during the late 1990s did not increase their likelihood to engage in sexual activities; it did keep them from getting pregnant. Even supplying emergency contraception to adolescents, prior to sexual activity, has been proven not to affect sexual behaviors.”

Whole thing Here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-pete-klatsky/why-contraception-saves-m_b_162520.html

The GOP mandarins are voting now for a new chairman of the Republican Party, a move expected to signal how the party will apporach the post-Bush future–bigger tent, more of the same, or something else. This is also of course a debate within the wider conservative movement. Via Mark Silk, Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic indicates former Maryland lieutentant-governor and African-American Catholic, Michael Steele, may have a shot. Steele is pro-life but kind of big tent, and would–the pundits say–signal a new way forward. He might also represent a conundrum for Catholic conservatives (and some bishops), or a relief to same:

A Steele Surge?

30 Jan 2009 10:04 am

Voting begins in two hours, but the chatter in the halls of the Capital Hilton is that Michael Steele has benefited from a last-minute surge of support.  Steele’s team estimates that he has at least 40 first-round votes in the bag, second only to current RNC chairman Mike Duncan, who will probably finish the first round with between 55 and 65 votes. 

During a private meeting with members last night, Steele vociferously defended his personal views — he’s pro-life — and his intention to broaden the party’s reach to include those who disagree. He was well-recieved.

We have discussed the future of Catholic politicis and pols before, here and here.

According to news reports, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is enveloped in a federal grand jury investigation involving its handling of priests who sexually abused minors. Other prosecutors have conducted similar investigations and brought no charges. But in this case, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Thomas O’Brien, has come up with a novel use of a federal criminal law as the basis for a possible case, according to sources quoted in various reports.

The prosecutor is looking to see whether church officials violated the federal “honest services” fraud law, reports the AP’s veteran LA legal writer Linda Deutsch. She adds:

The law, which makes it illegal to scheme to deprive others of their right to honest services, has most often been used to prosecute politicians and chief executive officers of corporations. It has never been used against a church.

What it means is that the federal government is investigating whether church leaders such as Cardinal Roger Mahony committed a crime by being dishonest in their dealings with the Catholic faithful of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Some of the news coverage has been very skeptical of such a case. The Los Angeles Times devoted an article to describing a number of cases in which prosecutor O’Brien made questionable use of federal law.

The AP quoted Notre Dame law prof G. Robert Blakey, who helped design the “honest services” law, as saying it was “outrageous” that the federal government was in the case.

And it certainly raises serious questions about government intrusion in religion. Should the government be able to determine the proper relationship between a bishop and his flock?

Cardinal Mahony has said he was “mystified” by the investigation.  But one can   imagine a set of facts that would lead a  prosecutor to consider whether federal fraud laws applied.  The repeated transfer of priests who  abused children time and again could  be seen as perpetrating a criminal fraud  if it was accompanied by lies  to the parishioners about the background of the priests in question or the reason for the transfers.

It remains to be seen if the “honest services” statute, which the courts have sometimes tried to limit,  could conceivably apply here – whether there was an intent to defraud. (The law is an add-on to the federal mail fraud and wire fraud statutes that makes it a crime “to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.”)

The “honest services” law was intended to help prosecutors combat sleazy politicians who couldn’t quite be reached with bribery and exortion statutes. But, as Prof. Blakey, the author of the federal racketeering law, would know, such laws can often have a much broader reach than originally thought.

Stephen Colbert’s oddly touching plea for patriotic hope:

I know it’s heresy for a Notre Dame professor to admit, but I really am not into football.  But I do like the Superbowl ads, especially the Etrade Baby ads, which are available on line.  There’s supposed to be a new one in the big game. (Note that in the mobile baby one, the blackberry’s ringtone is Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus–baby Mozart!)

For anyone who needs a few moments’ break, here they are:  –to the right of the preview.

David Brooks has a thoughtful column today on the decline of “institutional” thinking.   In contrast to what might be termed “expressive individualism,” Brooks talks about what it means to think institutionally:

In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.

Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations. They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them. A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relation to her land is not an individual choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. Her social function defines who she is. The connection is more like a covenant. There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.

This column made me think of an experience I had yesterday.  As part of the research I am doing for a story I am writing, I had a conversation with a DRE at parish that has recently embraced more traditional forms of liturgy, particularly in the area of music.  The changes had shaken the parish up a bit, leading to some families leaving the parish, but also some new families joining.   One anecdote she shared was that the parish tends to lose some of their high school students who gravitate toward parishes that have confirmation programs tied in to their “Life Teen” masses, which use contemporary Christian music.   She asked the DREs at the other parishes whether the teens were more likely to stay involved in the parish after confirmation.  The answer was “no,” the attrition rate was still pretty bad…:-)

I wonder sometimes whether our efforts to make our preaching, liturgy, or catechesis more accessible and relevant are ultimately successful.  There is an irreducibly “institutional” dimension to Christian life that places real demands on its adherents.  As Commonweal columnist John Garvey once put it, “the tradition makes demands upon you before you make demands upon it.”  We need to be deeply shaped by the Christian tradition and its practices before we have the competence to think seriously about adaptation and change.  

At the same time, of course, we can all tell stories of institutions that vanished or were seriously weakened because they were unable to adapt.   The history of Christianity is not the story of an institution that has never changed, but rather one that has (successfully) adapted during various crisis points in its history: the transition from its Jewish roots into Hellenistic culture; the movement from the Mediterranean world of ancient Rome into the warrior cultures of Northern Europe; the response to the challenge of modern science, including the application of scientific methods to the study of scripture, to name just a few. 

“Thinking institutionally” requires great reverence for the traditions of an institution, but it also requires creativity.  The tradition requires people who are highly skilled in its practices who are capable of making wise judgments about whether and how to adapt to changing circumstances.   What we need to form is not caretakers but craftspeople.  The question, I suppose, is whether we are forming either particularly well right now.

Brian Robinette and Tom Beaudoin’s new blog. Looks interesting.

Cheer up, Palestrina lovers, I’m sure there’s a specialized blog for you too!

Boston College’s Church in the 21st Century Initiative sponsors quite a number of activities. Among them is its semi-annual “C-21 Resources.” Here, around a chosen theme, articles are excerpted (mostly from periodicals such as “America” and “Commonweal“) that afford a basic approach to the topic. The Spring 2009 issue is devoted to “Catholic Spirituality in Practice.”

Among the excerpts is one that particularly struck me. The authors are Ann Ulanov and the late Barry Ulanov, and their topic is “Intercessory Prayer.” Here is an excerpt from the excerpt:

We pray for those we love because we must. We know that our love is not powerful enough to protect them from all harm, from all illness, from all evil, from death. Our love is not omnipotent. Our care for them, our insistence that they must have a good life, a full life, a life lived from the center of themselves, forces us to intercede with God on their behalf. By ourselves we cannot guarantee them much. We cannot even prevent our own faults from hurting them. We cannot restrain our own strong hopes and pressures so that they can find and live their own idea of the good life instead of the one we have ordained for them.

When we recognize these limiting effects of our love, it is that very love for our children, our dear friends, our husband or wife that impels us beyond ourselves to confide their souls into God’s keeping. Praying for them changes our love from a closed to an open hand, from a hand that tightly holds them under rein to one that holds them loosely. Praying for them makes us supple and flexible in our love for them.

We learn to pray for those we dislike and avoid as well, for those we hate and fear, for our enemies. Such prayer shifts our attention from all the things others have done to us or neglected to do that so wounded or enraged us, to focus on what it is in ourselves that permits others to acquire such power over us, the power to put us, in effect, in the hell of anger, or dismay, or insecurity, or fear. Prayer for them directs us to the antecedent attitudes or conditions of personality in ourselves that deliver us over into others’ power.

Praying for our enemies changes our attitudes toward them. Enemies make us bring light into painful hidden corners of ourselves that we would prefer to leave dark. By trying to put ourselves in another person’s shoes, we may discover what we do that so irritates others and makes them dislike us. We hear new voices in our prayer that usually we tune out. We see ourselves from a different angle, one we could not find either by ourselves or with the help of friends. Only enemies can help us here. In this way they are priceless.

There are many other good things in the Issue, which is available on pdf format here. I have found the various issues of the past years good for discussion groups in the parish and ancillary reading in my undergraduate courses.

I was introduced to John Updike by one of my fellow-seminarians at the North American College in Rome in the early 1960s, mostly as the author of short stories in The New Yorker. I was hooked and began to read everything that he published. The six months after I was ordained, when we had more freedom in Rome, I had the habit, on the afternoon we had off, of walking over to the Piazza di Spagna, buying the latest issue of The New Yorker, and spending the next two or three hours drinking tea after tea at Babington’s Tea Room reading Updike et al., before heading back, supercharged with caffeine, along the Tiber to the College. I became hooked on Updike and devoured anything he wrote; the hope that he might have a short story or a poem or a review in The New Yorker by itself justified a subscription.

When Rabbit, Run came out, I bought a copy and brought it to lectures at the Gregorian University, where, one day, I was told by one of my classmates that this was perhaps not the sort of book I should be reading while our professor went on in Latin about the theology of the spiritual life.

I appreciated it that Updike had religious, and specifically Christian, interests and, it seemed, commitments–that has not been at all common among great modern figures in U.S. literature. I loved “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” and have quoted it occasionally in homilies. (N.T. Wright quotes it in his recent mammoth book on the resurrection of Jesus.)

There is a scene in Rabbit, Run, in which a young Protestant minister named Eccles (a tad obvious, the name, but also rhymes with “feckless”), who is practicing his well-meaning ministry toward Rabbit, Harry Angstrom, including by means of games of golf, goes to visit the much older Lutheran minister in the town, the Angstroms being members of Pastor Kruppenbach’s church, Rabbit’s wife a member of Eccles’s church. Perhaps, Eccles ventures, the two ministers should cooperate in trying to help the couple save their fraying marriage? He can barely get the words out when Kruppenbach explodes (“even in his undershirt, he somehow wore vestments”):

“Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary; this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job.” …

“I’ve listened to your story but I wasn’t listening to what it said about the people. I was listening to what it said about you. What I heard was this: the story of a minister of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf. What do you think now it looks like to God, one childish husband leaving one childish wife? Do you ever think any more what God sees? Or have you grown beyond that? …

“It seems to you our role is to be cops, cops without handcuffs, without guns, without anything but our good human nature. Isn’t it right? … Well, I say that’s a Devil’s idea. I say, let the cops be cops and look after their laws that have nothing to do with us.” …

“If Gott wants to end misery He’ll declare the Kingdom now.” …

“How big do you think your little friends look among the billions that God sees? In Bombay now they die in the streets every minute. You say role. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer. There is your role: to make yourself an exemplar of faith. There is where comfort comes from: faith, not what little finagling a body can do here and there, stirring the bucket. In running back and forth you run from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful, so when the call comes you can go out and tell them, ‘Yes, he is dead, but you will see him again in Heaven. Yes, you suffer, but you must love your pain, because it is Christ’s pain.’ When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot–he clenches his hairy fists–‘with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. That is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do or say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that. It’s all in the Book–a thief with faith is worth all the Pharisees. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.”

Although, if I remember correctly, Kruppenbach disappears from the novel at this point, I’ve always felt that he represented Updike’s own view of what Christianity has to offer. Kruppenbach is pure Karl Barth. In his first collection Assorted Prose Updike included a review of Barth’s book on Anselm’s proof for the existence of God, a review written, he explained in the preface to the collection, “in acknowledgment of a debt, for Barth’s theology, at one point in my life, seemed alone to be supporting it (my life).” This review is followed immediately by a single paragraph devoted to Paul Tillich’s Morality and Beyond; the review’s last sentence reads: “Terms like ‘grace’ and ‘Will of God’ walk through these pages as bloodless ghosts, transparent against the milky background of ‘beyond’ and ‘being’ that Tillich, God forbid, would confuse with the Christian faith.”

But two things led me to become disillusioned with Updike. The first was the preface he wrote when he gathered his short stories about the Maples into a single volume entitled Too Far To Go. I can’t find my copy at the moment, but at some point in the preface he says, in explanation, of the erosion of the marriage he has chronicled in these wonderful short stories: “Well, nothing lasts forever”. I thought when I read it that this was the sort of thing that the Rev. Eccles might say.

The other was the unpleasant sensation left in me by Updike’s autobiographical work Self-Consciousness, particularly his unrepentant, almost casual, description of his infidelities in his first marriage. It struck me that by writing and publishing this, he was renewing the pain he had caused. And I really haven’t read much of his ever since. Still, when I heard yesterday of his death, I felt real sorrow, as at the death of an old friend with whom one had once been close, with whom one had in the meantime lost touch.

On this feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, having just finished Paul Mariani’s dense, devoted biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, I thought I would post Hopkins’ translation of the “Adoro Te Devote:”

 Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore,
Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more,
See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart
Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.

Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived:
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth Himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.

On the cross Thy godhead made no sign to men,
Here Thy very manhood steals from human ken:
Both are my confession, both are my belief,
And I pray the prayer of the dying thief.

I am not like Thomas, wounds I cannot see,
But can plainly call thee Lord and God as he;
Let me to a deeper faith daily nearer move,
Daily make me harder hope and dearer love.

O thou our reminder of Christ crucified,
Living Bread, the life of us for whom he died,
Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind,
There be thou the sweetness man was meant to find.

Bring the tender tale true of the Pelican;
Bathe me, Jesu Lord, in what Thy bosom ran
Blood whereof a single drop has power to win
All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.

Jesu, whom I look at shrouded here below,
I beseech thee send me what I thirst for so,
Some day to gaze on thee face to face in light
And be blest for ever with Thy glory’s sight. Amen.

In an earlier thread on the death of John Updike, Joseph S. O’Leary directs our attention to “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” a poem written very early in Updike’s career. The poem is unambivalently Christian, and one wonders whether Updike could — or would — have written it later in his career. Ambivalence about all things, but perhaps especially about religion, was one of Updike’s literary hallmarks. Nobody was better at evoking the texture of a complicated mood; and, like Whitman, he was not afraid of self-contradiction. Many of his later stories about faith and the loss of faith could be read as fictive commentaries on Mark 9:24 — “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” But this early poem reads more like a poetic commentary on Flannery O’Connor’s famous line about the Eucharist: “If it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it.”

SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

The post below focused on accounts of Benedict XVI’s statements vis-a-vis Judaism and the SSPX rehabilitation effort which has ocassioned such controversy and pain. But the CNS story that just moved focuses on his remarks at the general audience on his thinking in lifting the excommunications:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Benedict XVI said he lifted the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops in the hope that they would take further steps toward unity, including the recognition of the authority of the pope and of the Second Vatican Council.

The pope, speaking at his general audience Jan. 28, said he was motivated by a desire for church unity when he removed the excommunication of Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the Society of St. Pius X, and three other bishops of the breakaway society.

“I undertook this act of paternal mercy because these prelates had repeatedly manifested to me their deep pain at the situation in which they had come to find themselves,” the pope said.

“I hope my gesture is followed by the hoped-for commitment on their part to take the further steps necessary to realize full communion with the church, thus witnessing true fidelity, and true recognition of the magisterium and the authority of the pope and of the Second Vatican Council,” he said.

The pope said he considered the restoration of full unity in the church as one of his primary pastoral tasks, one he had emphasized at the inaugural Mass of his pontificate in 2005. This task of maintaining unity, he said, is symbolized by the Gospel account of the miraculous catch of fishes, when the net did not break despite the heavy catch.

Always good to have it from the horse’s mouth. (Full text not available yet, unfortunately.) But it still begs the question: Why so much for this group?

UPDATE: Sandro Magister’s analysis today is a good overview, and notes that Benedict has done much–and unilaterally–for the SSPX and received little in return. He makes this point as well:

A few of the Roman curia and the bishops criticize Benedict XVI for making unilateral gestures toward the Lefebvrists, without having anything in return.

It is observed that all of his gestures have a clear coherence and theological consistency. But they are falling on soil that has not been adequately cultivated.

Even the lifting of the excommunication of the four bishops falls under these criticisms. It is observed that the excommunications have also been lifted between Rome and Constantinople, but that this strongly symbolic gesture took place within a process of real ecumenical reconciliation. This process is absent among the Lefebvrists, and the divisions with them remain intact.

At today’s weekly general (public) audience, Pope Benedict XVI weighed in with remarks aimed at distancing himself from the Holocaust denials of one of the recently un-excommunicated ultra-right “Tradical” bishops. Here’s the AP account:

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI said Wednesday that he feels “full and indisputable solidarity” with Jews and warned against any denial of the full horror of the Holocaust.

Benedict spoke days he revoked the excommunication of a bishop who says no Jews were gassed during the Holocaust. The decision provoked an outcry among Jews.

“As I renew my full and indisputable solidarity with our brothers,” Benedict said, “I wish that the memory of the Shoah prompt humanity to reflect on the unpredictable power of evil when it conquers the hearts of men.” Shoah is a Hebrew word for the Holocaust.

“May the Shoah be a warning to everyone against oblivion, denials or reduction,” the pope told thousands of pilgrims at a weekly audience at the Vatican.

The Vatican had already distanced itself from comments by bishop Richard Williamson, who has denied that 6 million Jews were murdered during World War II. The Holy See said that removing the excommunication by no means implied the Vatican shared Williamson’s views.

But these were the first comments on the issue by the pope since the controversy erupted.

I’m not sure that goes far enough for the Jewish community–or many others–in light of the many other sore points out there. What is interesting is the clear pattern that has developed: Benedict says or does something that upsets a community, there is an outcry, then the generic statements of reassurance from the Vatican. There are better ways to do this, if one cares to.

UPDATE: Reuters just moved an interview with Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in which he has some tough things to say about the pope’s actions:

VATICAN CITY, Jan 28 (Reuters) – Pope Benedict has given credence to “the most vulgar aspect of anti-Semitism” by rehabilitating a Holocaust-denying bishop, said Elie Wiesel, the death camp survivor, author and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

In an exclusive interview with Reuters, Wiesel also said there was no way the Vatican could have not known about the bishop’s past and it may have been done “intentionally”.

“What does the pope think we feel when he did that? That a man who is a bishop and Holocaust denier — and today of course the most vulgar aspect of anti-Semitism is Holocaust denial — and for the pope to go that far and do what he did, knowing what he knows, is disturbing,” Wiesel said by telephone from New York.

“The result of this move is very simple: to give credence to a man who is a Holocaust denier, which means that the sensitivity to us as Jews is not what it should be,” he said late on Tuesday.

Read rest of the Reuters piece after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

I confess. When I’m in New York I read The New York Post. But, to keep my good standing among dotCommers, let me make it perfectly clear that, when riding the subway, I keep it carefully hidden within the pages of The New York Times.

However, it seems that now The Post is reaching me even in Boston — once again in the pages of The Times.

Thus I discover this in today’s Maureen Dowd column:

How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?

The “Citiboobs” — as The New York Post, which broke the news, calls them — watched as the car chieftains got in trouble for flying their private jets to Washington to ask for bailouts, and the A.I.G. moguls got dragged before Congress for spending their bailout on California spa treatments. But the boobs still didn’t get the message.

Then I turn to “About New York” only to find — you guessed it: The New York Post:

Nothing puts Albany in a trance like watching the scaffold of lies that rises when a powerful figure tries to wiggle of out some political clumsiness or gracelessness. On Tuesday, The New York Post called Mr. Paterson the “Lyin’ King” for his hedged accounts of the Kennedy matter.

Now, in these days of economic spin out, can’t the highly paid columnists of The Times come up with their own zingers? How much do they have to pay Murdoch in royalties for trading on his prior usage?

Maybe I’ll start reading The Times in the pages of The Post next time I take the subway.

I updated my post below, but just in case people aren’t checking that thread, here’s the latest development in the Williamson saga.

John Allen reports today that the Vatican has released a statement from SSPX superior Bishop Bernard Fellay, who apologizes for Williamson’s offenses. It reads, in part:

It’s clear that a Catholic bishop cannot speak with ecclesiastical authority except on questions that regard faith and morals. Our Fraternity does not claim any authority on other matters. Its mission is the propagation and restoration of authentic Catholic doctrine, expressed in the dogmas of the faith. It’s for this reason that we are known, accepted and respected in the entire world.

The affirmations of Bishop Williamson do not reflect in any sense the position of our Fraternity. For this reason I have prohibited him, pending any new orders, from taking any public positions on political or historical questions.

We ask the forgiveness of the Supreme Pontiff, and of all people of good will, for the dramatic consequences of this act. Because we recognize how ill-advised these declarations were, we can only look with sadness at the way in which they have directly struck our Fraternity, discrediting its mission.

This is something we cannot accept, and we declare that we will continue to preach Catholic doctrine and to administer the sacraments of grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Shrewd move, as far as it goes. I would have preferred something stronger (”ill-advised” doesn’t begin to describe what Williamson spews), sooner (why did it take so long for Fellay to publicly condemn Williamson’s unhinged views about the Shoah when he has been repeating them for years?), and less, well, huffy (yes, yes, you’re respected the world over, but why not name the Jewish people in your apology to the pope and to “all people of good will”?). And P.S.: the Fraternity isn’t the only one that suffers as a result of this train wreck. But at least Fellay appears to have an inkling of the gravity of Williamson’s transgressions.

Interesting, too, that the statement was released by the Vatican. Given Fellay’s reticence to condemn Williamson’s outrageous views–as recently as yesterday–it seems likely that Fellay felt some pressure from Rome to issue his statement.

Word has come that John Updike has died after a battle with lung cancer.

The obituaries and evaluations have already begun to flow.

When giving Updike a lifetime achievement award, an MC once said: “Commending the work of John Updike is a bit like praising democracy or defending the value of freedom. You don’t know where to start, and you feel embarrassed to be stating the obvious.”

Don’t I know it.

His myriad gifts and accomplishments will be lauded — his long, productive writing career, maintained at such a high level of grace and stylishness; the range of his fictional output, from the Rabbit novels with their brilliant chronicling of post-war suburban affluence and angst to his recent attempt to inhabit the mind of a young terrorist; his ravenous curiosity, generating fascinating essays on visual art, Ted Williams, and a host of other subjects, including a steady stream of generous and incisive book reviews.

Am I stating the obvious?

In the coming days, out of respect, discussion of the more controversial elements of his life and opinions will be muted — the accusations of misogyny, pornographic obsession with sex, and a bevy of political hot potato issues, such as his defense of the Vietnam War.

I do wonder how many of the eulogizers and critics will touch on his Christian faith — a dark, Barthian thing, perhaps, but like so much else in his life, consistently held and practiced.

I realize I’m only scratching the surface of the obvious here, but I will conclude by saying, with genuine feeling: Requiescat in pace.

This comment by Chris Currie was pasted in the comments on my thread on cooperation below.  I thought it deserved more prominence.

I’m not a “moderate” on the issue of abortion. (Despite my beliefs in the legitimacy of compromise in the pursuit of a long-term goal and in a consistent ethic of life that informs my positions on a number of other issues.) I fervently hope, pray and work for a day when abortion will be both rare and illegal.

However, I’ve had many opportunities (such as today) to engage with thoughtful individuals who do consider themselves “moderate” in their approach to this issue.

In my experience, a “pro-life moderate” means different things to different people. While I appreciate Matt’s point about needing to know the specific platform of pro-life moderates before the “absolutist” wing of the movement can consider joining them in common actions, it seems even from the discussion above that this is not definable.

Some moderates are such because they see aspects of the issue as gray areas; others because the issue doesn’t have the pre-eminent importance attached to it by more “extreme” pro-lifers; still others because of competing concerns that are sometimes hard to reconcile with pro-life advocacy that is often seen as part of a larger (or narrower) right-wing agenda.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bishop Williamson really doesn’t think that women should receive a higher education.  Heaven forbid, they might take a course in Jewish Studies–and learn about the Holocaust!

Just posted by John Allen at NCR:

When the Vatican lifted the excommunication of four traditionalist Catholic bishops Jan. 21, it’s entirely possible Rome was unaware that one of those bishops, an Englishman named Richard Williamson, had just given an interview to Swedish television in which he denied that the Nazis had used gas chambers and asserted that no more than 200,000 to 300,000 Jews had died during the Second World War.

In retrospect, however, it would be disingenuous for anyone to feign surprise.

A troubled history with Judaism has long been part of the Catholic traditionalist movement associated with the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre — beginning with Lefebvre himself, who spoke approvingly of both the World War II-era Vichy Regime in France and the far-right National Front, and who identified the contemporary enemies of the faith as “Jews, Communists and Freemasons” in an Aug. 31, 1985, letter to Pope John Paul II.

Reacting to the furor over Williamson, the Vatican has stressed that lifting the excommunication is not an endorsement of his views on the Holocaust, and has repeated its firm commitment to Catholic-Jewish dialogue and to combating anti-Semitism. The pope’s outreach to traditionalists should instead be seen, spokespersons said, as an “act of peace” intended to end the only formal schism in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

Canonical experts also point out that, technically speaking, Holocaust denial is not heresy. It’s a denial of historical truth, not a truth of the faith, and hence repudiating it is not inconsistent — at least from a strictly logical point of view — with the Jan. 21 decree from the Congregation for Bishops ending the excommunication of the four Lefebvrite prelates.

That’s a fine distinction, however, likely to be lost on much of the world, especially given that Williamson’s comments hardly came out of the blue.

Read the rest right here.

Update: John Allen reports today that the Vatican has released a statement from SSPX head Bishop Bernard Fellay, who apologizes for Williamson’s offenses. It reads, in part:

Read the rest of this entry »

Cardinal Ricard, the Archbishop of Bordeaux and member of the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei” has issued a statement regarding the lifting of the excommunications. The link to the French bishops website is:

http://www.eglise.catholique.fr/actualites-et-evenements/actualites/declaration-du-card.-ricard-a-propos-de-la-levee-de-lexcommunication.html

A key paragraph is the following:

La levée de l’excommunication n’est pas une fin mais le début d’un processus de dialogue. Elle ne règle pas deux questions fondamentales : la structure juridique de la Fraternité Saint Pie X dans l’Eglise et un accord sur les questions dogmatiques et ecclésiologiques. Mais elle ouvre un chemin à parcourir ensemble. Ce chemin sera sans doute long. Il demandera meilleure connaissance mutuelle et estime. A un moment, la question du texte même du Concile Vatican II comme document magistériel de première importance devra être posée. Elle est fondamentale. Mais toutes les difficultés ne seront pas forcément de type doctrinal. D’autres, de type culturel et politique, peuvent aussi émerger. Les derniers propos, inacceptables, de Mgr Williamson, niant le drame de l’extermination des Juifs, en sont un exemple.

The lifting of the excommunication is not the end, but the beginning of a process of dialogue. It does not resolve two fundamental questions: the juridical structure of the Fraternity of St. Pius X in the Church and an agreement on dogmatic and ecclesiological questions. But it opens a path to walk together. This path will undoubtedly be long. It will require better mutual knowledge and respect. At a certain moment the question of the text of the Second Vatican Council, as a document of the Magisterium of primary importance, must be faced. This is fundamental. But all the difficuties will not necessarily be only of a doctrinal order. Others, of a cultural and political nature, will also emerge. The recent unacceptable statements of Bishop Williamson, denying the drama of the extermination of the Jews, is one example.

My gratitude to Robert Mickens for bringing the Statement to my attention and providing the link.

Bernard Avishai is a reasonable man and he has a peace plan for Israel/Palestine. His conclusion

“The point is, if we have learned anything from this past year it is that things that “cannot go on” eventually can’t. The current carnage in Gaza is nothing if not a wake-up call: peace is not impossible, but Jerusalem could become a kind of Sarajevo in a matter of weeks, with Israeli Arabs joining in the fray. President Obama has the privilege of coming into power during a Middle Eastern crisis, which like all the other crises create opportunity. He can bring a new era to this region, but as with his plans for economic recovery, climate change, and the rest, the greatest danger is in thinking small.”

The plan:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/25/whats_love_got_to_do_with_it_pt_2/#more

“The discernment of spirits, such as the First Letter to the Thessalonians demands in response to the dubious prophets and prophecies of the time (5:9ff.), remains our permanent task. Both the acceptance of justified criticism and the protection of the faithful from falsifications of the Gospel, from an adulteration of the faith by the spirit of the world which passes itself off as the Holy Spirit, are integral parts of this discernment. We can learn it only in a deep interior union with Christ, in an obedience to the Word of God which finds ever-new expression in our lives and in an inner rooting in the living Church of all places and all times. But we are all in constant need of forgiveness and correction.”

(Joseph Ratzinger, 1993)

A lot of smart people have tried to figure out the elusive formula for achieving peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Research by two social scientists, outlined in an op-ed article in today’s New York Times, finds that financial compensation or even massive economic development aid alone could never resolve a dispute so rooted in the sacred values of the two peoples.

The researchers, Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges, outlined another option as they summarized the results of an extensive survey:

Fortunately, our work also offers hints of another, more optimistic course.

Absolutists who violently rejected offers of money or peace for sacred land were considerably more inclined to accept deals that involved their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures. For example, Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war. Similarly, Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist.

They noted that partisans from both sides – Abu Marzook, deputy chairman of Hamas, and Benjamin Netanyahu – echoed these findings in interviews. They conclude, “Making these sorts of wholly intangible `symbolic’ concessions, like an apology or recognition of a right to exist, simply doesn’t compute on any utilitarian calculus. And yet the science says they may be the best way to start cutting the knot.”

(These ideas are outlined further in an article Atran co-authored in Negotiation Journal.)

I would add that this is essentially the approach Pope John Paul II took, particularly in his visit to the Holy Land in 2000: He recognized the sufferings and sacred values of both peoples. For the Palestinians, he did this by visiting a refugee camp and speaking in a moving way on the world stage about the Palestinians’ suffering. For the Israelis, he did this through his emotional visit to Yad Vashem and the conciliatory note he left at the Western Wall.

The pope’s example didn’t take hold; the intifada began months later. Nor do I think the Holy See’s position has influenced the bulk of American Catholics in their view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The study cited here shows that a real peace can never be negotiated unless both sides in the dispute recognize their opponent’s core or sacred values. And it would help if the American supporters of both sides did the same.

One of the bishops recently welcomed back into the Catholic Church by Pope Benedict XVI:

Time magazine has a lovely photo essay (with audio) on their website today, focused on the lives and vocations of cloistered Dominican nuns in Summit, New Jersey.  The images are beautiful, and it’s enlightening to hear a couple of the sisters discuss their vocations in their own words.

If that piques your curiosity about the cloistered life, the Summit sisters offer regular virtual glimpses of monastery prayer, work, and recreation on their blog. And photographer Toni Greaves has more pictures on her site.