I never dreamed that I would avidly read the “Business Section” of the Times with a mix of fascination and dread. But such are the times that are upon us.

A great help, for their clarity and moral indignation, have been the columns of Joe Nocera, in my humble view, fully meriting a Pulitzer.

Today he writes about the American International Group (A.I.G.): “Propping Up a House of Cards.” Here’s part of what he says:

Donn Vickrey, who runs the independent research firm Gradient Analytics, predicts that A.I.G. is going to cost taxpayers at least $100 billion more before it finally stabilizes, by which time the company will almost surely have been broken into pieces, with the government owning large chunks of it. A quarter of a trillion dollars, if it comes to that, is an astounding amount of money to hand over to one company to prevent it from going bust. Yet the government feels it has no choice: because of A.I.G.’s dubious business practices during the housing bubble it pretty much has the world’s financial system by the throat.

If we let A.I.G. fail, said Seamus P. McMahon, a banking expert at Booz & Company, other institutions, including pension funds and American and European banks “will face their own capital and liquidity crisis, and we could have a domino effect.” A bailout of A.I.G. is really a bailout of its trading partners — which essentially constitutes the entire Western banking system.

I don’t doubt this bit of conventional wisdom; after the calamity that followed the fall of Lehman Brothers, which was far less enmeshed in the global financial system than A.I.G., who would dare allow the world’s biggest insurer to fail? Who would want to take that risk? But that doesn’t mean we should feel resigned about what is happening at A.I.G. In fact, we should be furious. More than even Citi or Merrill, A.I.G. is ground zero for the practices that led the financial system to ruin.

“They were the worst of them all,” said Frank Partnoy, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a derivatives expert. Mr. Vickrey of Gradient Analytics said, “It was extreme hubris, fueled by greed.” Other firms used many of the same shady techniques as A.I.G., but none did them on such a broad scale and with such utter recklessness. And yet — and this is the part that should make your blood boil — the company is being kept alive precisely because it behaved so badly.

Karl Barth famously counseled the preacher to preach with the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other. As we prepare for the First Sunday of Lent with its gospel of the temptation narrative, I finally understand that Barth meant the “Business Section.”

President Obama makes sense, at Camp Lejeune, out of the hash that Iraq has been. Stirring.

“There are many lessons to be learned from what we’ve experienced. We have learned that America must go to war with clearly defined goals, which is why I’ve ordered a review of our policy in Afghanistan. We have learned that we must always weigh the costs of action, and communicate those costs candidly to the American people, which is why I’ve put Iraq and Afghanistan into my budget. We have learned that in the 21st century, we must use all elements of American power to achieve our objectives, which is why I am committed to building our civilian national security capacity so that the burden is not continually pushed on to our military. We have learned that our political leaders must pursue the broad and bipartisan support that our national security policies depend upon, which is why I will consult with Congress and in carrying out my plans. And we have learned the importance of working closely with friends and allies, which is why we are launching a new era of engagement in the world.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/27/barack-obama-speech-iraq-war-end

If you prefer a U.S. source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/politics/27obama-text.html?pagewanted=all

So I neglected to mention that a few of us from Team Commonweal have invaded the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress. Any other Commonwealers among the throngs? Stop by booth 213 and say hello. Free issues for those who mention dotCommonweal! For every copy of America you turn in, get two copies of Commonweal!

The Times of London:

The ceremony was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President.

The Harrisburg Patriot and Union:

We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation, we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.

The former President of Harvard University:

I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes.

All commenting on Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.”

As I move to the end of Ronald C. White’s magnificent new biography, A. Lincoln, one reads on in awe and dread.

Job losses are mounting everywhere, and this sight–employees of The Rocky Mountain News reacting to word that today’s edition would be the last for the 150-year-old paper–is all too common. But I hope I always find it deeply affecting, and less common.

What does it mean to say that the Kingdom of God is at hand?  In the chapter of The Lord entitled “Beginnings,” Guardini offers some reflections:

Things in general, by their very existence, fill the spiritual ‘space’ both within and around me, not God.  God is present to me only when the crowding, all-absorbing things of my world leave room for him-either in or through them, or somewhere on the periphery of their existence. No, God certainly does not dominate my life.  Any tree in my path seems to have more power than he, if only because it forces me to walk around it!  What would life be like if God did rule in me?

Then I would know, not by strenuous, conscious effort, but spontaneously, from the vitality of constant encounter: He is! His would be the one name, the one reality before all others.  I would know him as I know the beauty and the freshness of a meadow in full bloom, and I would be able to speak of him as I speak of its richness, deeply conscious of what I meant.  His essence would be as real and clear to me as that of a person I knew intimately and understood–to my good or harm: someone with a certain face, a familiar gait, whose mind and spiritual powers responded in a specific manner to my own.

UPDATE: The Vatican is underwhelmed by Williamson’s “apology” as well. Read here and here.

The Holocaust-denying schismatic Traditionalist was just kicked out of Argentina, which seems unjust to me, despite Williamson’s noxious views. Today, back in his native England, Wiliamson issued an apology, via ZENIT (an arm of the Legionaries, which has had its own travails), for his quite detailed argument that the Nazis did not gas Jews in death camps. But while Williamson has said he will do more study regarding his views of the Holocaust, he doesn’t seem to repent of them here. He apologizes to those who were hurt by his remarks.

The text:

LONDON, FEB. 26, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is a declaration released today from Lefebvrite Bishop Richard Williamson, regarding his comments on the Holocaust in an interview aired in January by Swiss television.

* * *

The Holy Father and my Superior, Bishop Bernard Fellay, have requested that I reconsider the remarks I made on Swedish television four months ago, because their consequences have been so heavy.Observing these consequences I can truthfully say that I regret having made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them.

On Swedish television I gave only the opinion (…”I believe”…”I believe”…) of a non-historian, an opinion formed 20 years ago on the basis of evidence then available, and rarely expressed in public since.

However, the events of recent weeks and the advice of senior members of the Society of St. Pius X have persuaded me of my responsibility for much distress caused. To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologize.

As the Holy Father has said, every act of injust violence against one man hurts all mankind.

+Richard Williamson,
London, 26 February, 2009

In which Ann Althouse suggests that those who thought Jindal flopped (a group which seems to include everyone who watched the speech with the exception of Rush Limbaugh) might be manifesting subconscious racism, and in which her commenters respond by adding anti-Catholicism to the mix.  At first, I thought she must be trying to make a joke (a poorly executed parody of Republican stereotypes of Obama supporters, perhaps?), but her response to Andrew Sullivan’s reply makes me doubt my initial read.  Any thoughts?

“You don’t mess with Joe” Biden was wearing ashes today. I guess that settles it.

The consensus seems to be that it was not a good night for Bobby Jindal.  But the award for the strangest response to the President’s speech clearly goes to George Will: (HT HuffingtonPost)

Asked for a “final thought” on the president’s speech last night, conservative columnist George WIll chose to focus on the fact that Obama was able to wrap his arms around another man, in friendship. “I don’t know when men started to hug each other, but hug they do, and look at that,” he said.

Huh?

Stephen Carter of Yale Law School has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times. The immediate issue is the recent talk by Attorney General Eric Holder about race. But the wider concern is the down-sizing of our discourse to sound-byte morsels. Carter writes:

When we talk about race we do tend to talk in simplistic categories, spending more energy on labeling each other than on reasoning together.

This difficulty, however, is not limited to race. There are few issues of any importance that are not reduced, in public dialogue, to sloganeering and applause lines. Whether we argue over war or the economy, marriage or religion, abortion or guns, we reduce our ideas to just the right size for the adolescent tantrum of the bumper sticker.

Carter’s words rang with a particular resonance as I read some of the coverage of the appointment of Archbishop Timothy Dolan to New York. He’s a “hail-fellow-well-met” type (cheers), who is by reputation “orthodox” (boo). And though the more thoughtful recognize the inadequacy of liberal/conservative labels in matters theological and religious, it too quickly (because easily) becomes the default mode of our discourse.

Carter continues:

Democracy, at its best, rests on a foundation of mutual respect among co-equal citizens willing to take the time for serious debate. After all, even on the momentous issues that divide us, there is usually the possibility that the other side has a good argument. Yet if we paint our opponents as monsters, we owe them no obligation to pay attention to what they have to say.

If  this is true of democracy, how much more is demanded of life in the body of Christ?

Carter concludes:

If you read Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” — and everyone who loves democracy should read it, at least every two or three years — pay attention to the speech by the fire chief, Captain Beatty, explaining why they burned the books. The reason was not national security or political power. It was complexity. Books, says the fire chief, make ideas too difficult. The reader winds up lost, he says, “in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.” The people demanded the books be burned because they wanted no complicated ideas.

So along with Peter Nixon’s suggested reading of Guardini, perhaps Bradbury deserves some Lenten perusal as well.

My Lenten reading this year is Romano Guardini’s The Lord, a classic spiritual work from the mid-20^th century.  Although of Italian descent, Guardini lived almost his entire life in Germany.  He was a priest, a theologian, and a spiritual writer, as well as one of the pioneers of the liturgical movement.  The Lord is an extended meditation on Jesus as encountered in the Gospels and reflects the growing influence of the biblical movement in Catholicism during this period.

From time to time over the next 40 days, I may post excerpts from The Lord that strike me in a particular way.  Here is one from the chapter “Baptism and Temptation,” where Guardini writes of Jesus’ temptation in the desert as depicted by Luke:

Once more forces collect for the assault-the mountain-peak view of the vast glory of the world, offering itself to him who is truly competent to rule!  How the sensation of spiritual strength must swell the breast at Satan’s words!  The will to power increased with the sense of exalted dignity and importance!  Never was the costliness of earth more deeply felt than by Jesus’ greatest and most sensitive of hearts; sweet and potent, it must have hummed in his blood, calling up all his powers of creativeness and ownership.  The greatness you feel in you, mighty one that you are, what are you going to do with it? Squander it on the paltriness of the poor or the stuffiness of the pious? On the mission of a wandering preacher? You were born to rule; the power and responsibility of a true sovereign await you!  Tremendous temptation!

Guardini is writing in the post-WWII period and his words reflect his experiences with Nazism and its cult of the übermensch.  But the “will to power” is a recurring theme in human history and not unique to a particular time or place.  How many modern day Raskolnikovs can be found in the financial industry?  Or perhaps, if we are honest with ourselves, we can see him in the mirror when we awake each morning.

While the Ash Wednesday injunction to “repent and believe in the Gospel” is more biblical, I must confess that I miss the older “Remember thou are dust and unto dust thou shalt return.”  The shock of being confronted with the certainty of our death is a good way to begin Lent.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

On his New Yorker blog, “Interesting Times,” George Packer writes: 

Obama isn’t trying to remake America’s economy and society out of ideological hubris. He’s initiating sweeping changes because he inherited a set of interrelated emergencies that require swift, decisive action. There’s an instructive example for both [David] Brooks and Obama’s supporters to bear in mind: Herbert Hoover became President with the sterling reputation of a practical man, an engineer and businessman who had succeeded at everything in his life. When the Depression began, he took what he assumed to be practical steps to ameliorate it. But, as Richard Hofstadter observed in The American Political Tradition, “What ruined Hoover’s public career was not a sudden failure of personal capacity but the collapse of the world that had produced him and shaped his philosophy…Because, on his postulates, his program should have been successful, he went on talking as though it were, and the less his ideas worked, the more defiantly he advocated them.”

This is an apt description of the current attitude of John McCain, Eric Cantor, and Bobby Jindal. Like Hoover, they cannot fathom the failure of their philosophy, so they cling to it and insist that it has all the answers while the country drowns. Conservatism, pace Brooks, is no more likely to be clear-eyed and critical-minded than liberalism. Any set of ideas can harden into ideological certainty, especially when it’s been in power for a long time. Obama’s emphasis on government intervention could become as calcified and resistant to facts as the Republican Party’s free-market conservatism is now. If or when it does, Obama will need to hear from Brooks all the more. But for the moment, Obama is necessarily experimenting in the face of disaster much like the President who followed Hoover.

Read the rest here. “[T]hey cannot fathom the failure of their philosophy.” Not “they will not fathom” it. They cannot. Sure, the response of many conservatives to the bailout and the stimulus package has been opportunistic and cynical. Many of them, though, simply cannot imagine what it would mean — what it now does mean — for the premises of their policy agenda, and indeed of their entire political philosophy, to have failed. Not even the most spectacular failure can force anyone to learn a lesson he desperately wishes not to learn. Historical events are always complicated and contingent enough to admit of more than one interpretation, and the most plausible interpretation is not always the most attractive.

“The financial collapse could mean that our financial industry has been underregulated and overleveraged for many years, and that the power of centralized capital requires centralized public oversight to keep it in check. In that case I and my allies have been fools. Or it could mean that any regulation is too much regulation, and that the market only works when banks are allowed to fail, no one’s money is guaranteed by the government, and everyone must look out for himself. In that case I’m one of a small remnant of brave prophets who are destined to be ignored by all the weaklings now looking to Washington for safety.”

If it were only a matter of rationally evaluating the available evidence, it would be hard at this point not to favor the first of these interpretations. But of course it is never just about rationality; it is also about saving face and even, sometimes, saving one’s very self. What is true of religious conversions is also true of ideological conversions: the old man does not yield easily to the new. Even Paul did not leap up from the ground, jump back on his horse, and ride straight to the nearest village to begin evangelizing. He was stunned, blinded, scared; and those fish scales stayed on for a while. In any case, there is no shame in silence. It is the normal reaction to disorientation. (Alan Greenspan cut a noble figure as he quietly ate three decades’ worth of placid reassurance.) The shame is in simply raising your voice and yelling the same thing you were saying before, this time with your hands clapped over your ears: “Laissez-faire capitalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found wanting and left untried.”

Like the man said — time to put away childish things. 

In its extensive coverage of the appointment of Archbishop Timothy Dolan to head the New York archdiocese, the New York Times takes note of the departing Cardinal Edward Egan’s complaint that the news media distorted his public image:

Cardinal Egan blames the media for what he considers major distortions of his image: portraying him as a cool administrator rather than a passionate pastor who visited almost every one of the hundreds of churches and schools in the archdiocese, and casting him as a villain in the sex abuse scandal, which he believes American bishops handled as well as they could.

Back in 2001, when I was the religion writer for Newsday, I wrote an article that was critical of Egan’s tenure in New York as he approached the first anniversary of his service in the archdiocese. For months afterward, whenever I heard Egan speak, he always took jabs at his critics in the media.

So I would like to respond that from the first, Egan’s true critics were not “the media”; they were people who work in the church – lay people, clergy and religious. As I wrote back then: “from within the archdiocesan offices and parishes, there comes a rumble of complaints from loyal Catholics, some whom have worked many years for the church” – a sentence based on many interviews beyond those detailed in the article.

While reporting the article, I decided to go see Egan in a pastoral setting in one of his parish visits. He treated a group from a neighboring South Bronx parish, St. Jerome’s — poor people who meekly asked him to visit their parish to see that it was worth saving – with extraordinary rudeness. Clearly annoyed, he kept refusing to discuss the subject.

His response was so inappropriate that one South Bronx pastor stood next to Egan before the church sanctuary and “with all due respect,” told the cardinal: “I know that an important part of being pastor is listening … A lot of us here would like to know what St. Jerome’s has to say.” Egan did not take the hint. He responded: “I’d like to get on to another subject.” Later that evening, the pastor of St. Jerome’s returned to his church with his parishioners and told them from the pulpit: “The bishop wouldn’t listen to us and he wouldn’t let people speak and that’s bad.” (Egan later found donations to rebuild and keep St. Jerome’s.)

When Egan was named archbishop of New York, there was a mountain of positive, almost entirely uncritical media coverage – a rather forced tone of celebration, in retrospect. The same occurred when he was created a cardinal. If he leaves the chancery with a negative public image, it’s largely because he alienated his own people.

Martin Scorsese is finally making a film he’s been wanting to make for many years: a screen version of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence (1966).

Scorsese had originally planned to make Silence after Gangs of New York, but he chose to do The Departed instead.

Filming in New Zealand this year, Silence will feature Daniel Day-Lewis, Benicio Del Toro, and Gael Garcia Bernal — an all-star ensemble, if you ask me.

The novel tells the story of a young Portuguese Jesuit, Sebastião Rodrigues, who goes to Japan in search of his father in faith, Cristóvão Ferreira, who, it is said, has apostasized under the brutal persecutions of the Shogunate (persecutions that would soon lead to the closing of Japan to all contact with the outside world).

It’s not hard to see why this story fascinates Scorsese — violence, faith, doubt, betrayal come together in a tale that is shot through with a deeply Catholic “tragic sense of life.”

The film will be released in 2010. It will be tough to watch, but I’m willing to bet that it will be one of Scorsese’s best. I hope it will draw many people to the novel, a twentieth century masterpiece.

Since he’s in all the headlines, you’ll pardon me if I take this opportunity to remind you once again that Bishop Timothy Dolan — who, you may have heard, is the new archbishop of New York — has an article in the current issue of Commonweal. Would that everyone were so blessed! Instead, our friends at First Things have taken this opportunity to re-post a weak piece of satire (originally published in 2002) in which “ubiquitous correspondent” George Weigel uses a remark of Dolan’s as a jumping-off point to lampoon those elitist, liberal “Commonweal[th]” Catholics. It’s… Well, it’s not something I’d be inclined to brag about. But then, I wouldn’t be moved to comment at all if the blog post hadn’t shown up on the CathNewsUSA RSS feed as an “opinion” piece.

Some background: CathNewsUSA is a news aggregator run by Paulist Press that collects stories of interest to Catholics from around the internet. It’s fairly new, and they seem to be still in the process of working out the kinks — excerpts are posted with little or no context and not-very-prominent sourcing, and generally I tend to find it more confusing than helpful. So, today, they’ve posted several paragraphs from the First Things blog re-posting under the heading “Opinion,” and with no context, leading at least a few benighted commenters to assume the piece is both current and in earnest. Worse, in copying-and-pasting Weigel’s work, they seem to have “corrected” one of his jokes — he refers to “the liberal Catholic magazine Commonwealth” (and similarly alters our editors’ names), but on the CathNewsUSA site the reference is to Commonweal. Don’t do us any favors, CathNews web editors! (For the record: None of us here at Commonweal have any objection to anything Bishop Dolan might have said seven years ago… at least that we’re aware of.)

Oddly, CathNewsUSA has a separate page for “Satire” — but there’s nothing on it. Perhaps they should combine it with their tab for “Humor“? So far there’s one story linked to in that category — Christopher Ruddy’s “Sunday Morning Quarterbacks,” which we posted here on our site in December. It’s nice that they managed to file this one appropriately. Unfortunately, the excerpt on their “humor” page credits it to… the Chicago Sun-Times. Oh brother.

Amy Sullivan has an informative piece in Time on the movement to stop a bill that has yet to be introduced.  Check it out.  The upshot is that the anti-FOCA hysteria — brought to you in part by the USCCB — has little to do with FOCA itself and a lot to do with disillusionment on the Catholic right with the Catholic electorate’s swing towards Obama in the last election.  Here’s a taste:

The campaign against FOCA, which would essentially codify the Roe v. Wade decision by saying the government can’t place limits on abortions performed before viability, began shortly after Barack Obama’s election in November, at the annual general meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). In a unanimous decision, the bishops voted to “mobilize the resources of the USCCB, dioceses and the entire Catholic community” to oppose the act.

A chain e-mail of unknown origin soon began making its way into Catholic inboxes, warning of an imminent threat to the anti-abortion cause. “For those of you who do not know,” it read, “the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) is set to be signed if Congress passes it on January 21-22 of 2009. The FOCA is the next sick chapter in the book of abortion.” The e-mail urged Catholics to say a novena — a devotion of dedicated prayer for nine successive days — beginning on Jan. 11 and ending the day prior to Inauguration Day. (See pictures of Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to America.)

When Jan. 22 came and went without a Freedom of Choice Act becoming law, the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities announced a nationwide postcard campaign to blanket congressional offices and the White House with appeals to stop FOCA. Anti-FOCA groups on Facebook soon had more than 150,000 members and added thousands more each day. Priests started preaching against the legislation, and churches began circulating petitions to oppose its passage.

In the midst of all this activity, the fact that there was no Freedom of Choice Act before the 111th Congress went largely unnoticed and unmentioned.

In 1919 the U.S. bishops put out a document: “The Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction” which offered their ideas about re-ordering American society, economy and politics.  It was largely written by Fr. John A. Ryan, one of the leading American Catholic social thinkers of the first half of the 20th century.  The Archives at Catholic University recently made available on line a good deal of material for anyone who wants to study it.  Perhaps even help in our present mess?

Over at TPM, George Lakoff has a few ideas about how to hear Obama’s national address this evening (2/24/09). His notion of Obama and bi-conceptualism makes some interesting claims about Republicans (and Democrats).

“The third crucial idea behind the Obama Code is biconceptualism, the knowledge that a great many people who identify themselves ideologically as conservatives, or politically as Republicans or Independents, share those fundamental American values–at least on certain issues. Most “conservatives” are not thoroughgoing movement conservatives, but are what I have called “partial progressives” sharing Obama’s American values on many issues. Where such folks agree with him on values, Obama tries, and will continue to try, to work with them on those issues if not others. And, he assumes, correctly believe, that the more they come to think in terms of those American values, the less they will think in terms of opposing conservative values.

“Biconceptualism lay behind his invitation to Rick Warren to speak at the inaugural. Warren is a biconceptual, like many younger evangelicals. He shares Obama’s views of the environment, poverty, health, and social responsibility, though he is otherwise a conservative. Biconceptualism is behind his “courting” of Republican members of Congress. Read the rest of this entry »

In a comment on a post below, Jimmy Mac quoted a reflection on Newman. Only when I came to the end did I realize it was from an article I had written in 1991.

But then the associations came thick and fast. I had taken a year’s leave from Boston College to be close to my mother during her growing memory loss and to take steps to insure her well being. I lived in Our Lady of the Assumption parish with the hospitable Monsignor John Mescall. I wrote the piece for Church Magazine  to mark the Newman Centenary. The magazine was founded by my good friend Monsignor Philip Murnion, who did not spare the red pencil for the sake of friendship. All this led to a real sense of spiritual communion and to prayer.

Last Sunday’s reading from Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians contains some of the most passionate and powerful lines in the New Testament:

I swear by God’s truth, there is no Yes and No about what we say to you. The Son of God, the Christ Jesus that we proclaimed among you – I mean Silvanus and Timothy and I – was never Yes and No: with him it was always Yes, and however many the promises God made, the Yes to them all is in him.

Reading them I always remember an association: they  adorned the ordination card of Joseph Komonchak in 1963 in Rome — for me an association, for him, I am sure, deeply resonant spiritually. The Council was in full swing, and its outcome unsure. That newly-ordained priest has become one of the Council’s significant interpreters.

Then, I found Paul’s words today on Amy Welborn’s website, and I will now ever associate the passage with her and her beloved husband Michael. She gifts us with the full spiritual resonance of that “Yes” here.

At the end of this week, I will be going to a small symposium sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Catholic Studies in LA on John O’Malley’s book, What Happened at Vatican II (reviewed in this issue of Commonweal).  Joe K. is also a participant.

So I thought, to get some more ideas for us to talk about, I’d open a thread on John Wilkins’s article in this issue, and also on the review of O’Malley’s book.

The real plum job awarded in New York yesterday.

Just as the AP calls it, the Journal-Sentinel reports that Timothy Dolan will be New York’s next archbishop.

It’s official. Here’s the press release from the Archdiocese of New York.

Even if they’re mistaken, and I seriously doubt that, you’ll be interested   And be sure to read Archbishop Dolan’s article in the February 27 issue of Commonweal. For a sneak peek at “Blueprint for Peace: Pope Benedict’s Call to Fight Poverty,” click here.

Link dump: New York Times (Powell), Dolan quotes from AP, USA Today, NCR, CNS, New York Times (Goodstein), Dolan’s letter to Milwaukee priests and archdiocesan staffers.

An interesting piece in the NYT urging compromise on the question of gay marriage/civil unions. One wonders — given the public opinion data showing very strong support for gay rights, generally, among people under 30 — if this will be a hot issue at all 20 years from now. In this sense the contrast with abortion — 36 years after Roe v. Wade – is striking.

The NY Times had a profile this weekend of St. John the Evangelist parish in Stamford, Connecticut and the comeback that “confession” is making in that parish.  I was a member of that parish while I was clerking in New Haven in 1999-2000 (my wife was working in NYC, so we lived in Stamford to split the commute).  The profile caused me a bit of nostalgia.  The story features Fr. Stephen DiGiovanni, who was there when I attended.  He had a real thing for confession.  I used to come home and complain almost every weekend to my wife that, no matter what the Gospel readings, he found a way to talk about confession.  Lazarus and the Rich Man?  Confession.  Beatitudes?  Confession.  The rich young man?  Confession, confession, confession.  Nearly ten years later, it appears that he’s still singing the same tune.  You have to admire the persistence and consistency. And it appears to be bearing fruit.  I wonder what would have happened if he had placed the same emphasis on service to the poor.

Here’s a very interesting piece in the Times of London, on Pope Benedict and criticisms he is receiving even from among Cardinals for his leadership (or lack of same).

Here begins Frank Rich’s hebdomadal jeremiad:

“I don’t want to pretend that today marks the end of our economic problems,” the president said on Tuesday at the signing ceremony in Denver. He added, hopefully: “But today does mark the beginning of the end.”

Does it?

No one knows, of course, but a bigger question may be whether we really want to know. One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable. Obama’s toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized G.O.P. but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door.

And this is the way it ends:

Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks’ managements and shareholders. It’s because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all. Wall Street’s last barons still seem to believe that they can hang on to their old culture by scuttling corporate jets, rejecting bonuses or sounding contrite in public. Ask the former Citigroup wise man Robert Rubin how that strategy worked out.

We are now waiting to learn if Obama’s economic team, much of it drawn from the Wonderful World of Citi and Goldman Sachs, will have the will to make its own former cohort face the truth. But at a certain point, as in every other turn of our culture of denial, outside events will force the recognition of harsh realities. Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word — depression — is next on America’s list to avoid.

A bang … or a whimper?

Jean Raber talks about Alec Baldwin’s leading man days being over–.  Personally, I think he’s still got the bad-boy charm going for him.  But speaking of bad boys. . . .  here’s the clip from Malice that his character was referring to by saying “I once claimed to be God in a deposition.” Thanks to David Cochran, whose comment on the thread below prompted me to look for it.

Rocco’s Whispers today has a lovely story about the funeral of Korea’s Cardinal Kim, with photos that stand in a certain contrast to the one illustrating the story set out just before, the latter photo itself standing in a certain contrast to the lives of two of the people whose canonization has been announced: Fr. Damien and Sr. Jeanne Jugan.

Alec Baldwin’s commercial for Hulu.  He actually looks like he will eat the “mushy mush.”

Okay, it’s Friday.  And I’m picking up on Joe K.”s “aliens” theme.