…The one true American faith, that is: Free-market capitalism. Praise be its name forever! And don’t any of you go backsliding during what Rev. Brooks rather euphemistically calls this momentary “pause” in our economy:

But if there is one thing we can be sure of, this pause will not last. The cultural DNA of the past 400 years will not be erased. The pendulum will swing hard. The gospel of success will recapture the imagination.

Somewhere right now there’s probably a smart publisher searching for the most unabashed, ambitious, pro-wealth, pro-success manuscript she can find, and in about three months she’ll pile it up in the nation’s bookstores. Somewhere there’s probably a TV producer thinking of hiring Jim Cramer to do a show to tell story after story of unapologetic business success. Somewhere there’s a politician finding a way to ride the commercial renaissance that is bound to come, ready to explain how government can sometimes nurture entrepreneurial greatness and sometimes should get out of the way.

Testify, Brother Brooks! Read it all in his column today.

I hadn’t heard of the Sulpician priest Joseph Martin until I read his obituary in the New York Times today. But he is another example of a priest who used the moral authority of his position — and his own experience of being human — to make Christ known in the world.

The Rev. Joseph C. Martin, whose battle with alcoholism inspired him to become a national leader in the fight against the disease by speaking, writing books, making videos and starting a treatment center, died March 9 at his home in Havre de Grace, Md. He was 84.

…Father Martin first became widely known through a talk he gave on the 12 steps of recovery propounded by Alcoholics Anonymous. He sometimes began with a preface similar to the one every alcoholic uses to address meetings of the organization, changing it to give his full name: “My name is Joe Martin, and I’m an alcoholic.”

In talking about the many lives Fr. Martin touched in his ministry, the article quotes one woman who recalled her reaction after hearing him speak: “He removed the shame from me.” If that’s not acting in persona Christi, I don’t know what is.

I don’t know whether Fr. Martin was Irish (he sure looks it!), but of course, you don’t have to be Irish to identify with his family history of alcohol abuse and be grateful for his witness in recovery. Reading his story on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day reminds me to pray for the intercession of my own favorite Irish saint, Venerable Matt Talbot, that everyone who struggles with addiction may find the path to wholeness and know that they are loved.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everybody. Have fun, and be safe!

“If it’s obvious that we’re not talking embryos that can — that under any conceivable scenario would be used for a process that would allow them to be fertilized and become little babies, and I think if it’s obvious that we’re not talking about some science fiction cloning of human beings, then I think the American people will support this. I think they’ll support it because we want to solve type 1 diabetes. We want to solve — we want to find out about whether Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s can be reversed. We want a whole range of other things. And I think at some point, you know — maybe it’s — decades down the way — if somebody severs an arm and you try to sew it back on, and you’re missing some component things, if you can figure out how to fill in the blanks, I think people would like that…. [President Obama] has apparently decided to leave to the relevant professional committees the definition of which frozen embryos would not be — are basically going to be discarded, because they’re not going to be fertilized. I think the American people believe it’s a pro-life decision to use an embryo that’s frozen — it’s never going to be fertilized for embryonic stem cell research, especially since now, notwithstanding some promising developments, most of the scientists in this field and the doctors will tell you they don’t know of any other source that’s as good as embryonic stem cells for all the various things that need to be researched. But those committees need to be really careful to make sure if they don’t want a big storm to be stirred up here, that any of the embryos that are used clearly have been placed beyond the pale of being fertilized before their use. There are plenty — there are a large number of embryos that we know are never going to be fertilized, where the people who are in control of them have made that clear. That –the research ought to be confined to those, and I think the committees will surely do that.”

Thus spake the forty-second president of the United States — a president not famous for malapropism or contempt for science. The words are taken from an interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, who introduced the discussion by remarking that President Clinton was “someone who studied this.” Apparently not.

(HT: Ryan Sayre Patrico at First Things)

It’s true. Against the advice of Tim Geithner, AIG will pay out roughly half a billion in bonuses to the 370 people who bankrupted the company. In a letter to Secretary Geithner, AIG CEO Liddy claims that when it comes to these bonuses, “AIG’s hands are tied.” Liddy trots out the same pathetic excuses: we promised bonuses to these people and we can’t afford to lose their talent. Bringing down a company the size of AIG is pretty impressive. Hate to see those gifted workers walk.

More fuel for your rage inferno from Hilzoy:

If the people in the AIG Financial Products felt this way, they could have made all these legal issues about contracts vanish by simply declining their bonuses. And they could solve the retention problem by agreeing to stay around as long as they’re needed, at their existing salaries. Instead, they are using our predicament to extract even more money for themselves. And that’s obscene.

And Robert Reich asks: are these people accountable to anyone?

Another coda to the terrible story of the 9-year-old girl in Brazil whose serially abusive stepfather impregnated her with twins, leading her mother to take her for an abortion on the advice of doctors who said her life was at serious risk. The story shocked Brazilians  but was made worse (and raced around the Catholic blogosphere) when the local archbishop announced that the girl’s mother and the doctors were excommunicated. (There were early reports that the child was declared excommunicated, too, but as she is under 17, that wasn’t canonically possible.) A top Vatican official, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, publicly backed the Brazilian churchman, Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho of Olinda and Recife, according to this CNS story.Now another top Vatican official, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life and an apparent up-and-comer in Rome, wrotes in L’Osservatore Romano that the excommunications had been a mistake. Richard Owens of the London Times writes from Rome:

“Before thinking about an excommunication it was necessary and urgent to save an innocent life”, he said. The excommunication had been decided on and publicised “too hastily”.

Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Archishop Fisichella noted that the excommunications had rebounded on the Church. “Unfortunately the credibility of our teaching was dented. It appeared in the eyes of many to be insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking in mercy.” The girl “should have been above all defended, embraced, treated with sweetness to make her feel that we were all on her side, all of us, without distinction.”

Owens also notes that last week the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops said the excommunications of the mother and doctors were wrong–the girl’s mother acted “under pressure from the doctors,” who said the child’s life was at risk, and a church official said only doctors who “systematically” conducted abortions should be excommunicated. (The doctor in this case had publicly defied the archbisop and said he would continue going to Mass.)

Fisichella and the Vatican were no doubt keenly aware of the gap between the act of mercy toward the schismatic bishops of the SSPX and this apparent lack of pastoral concern. But his words are just right in this case, IMHO.

PS: A CNS story just moved with the latest, and more details.

Benedict XVI today announced a “Year for Priests”– a fine idea, though one that apparently also comes with a tough message for lay people dealing with a shortage of priests, and the Eucharist.

First, the announcement. According to the Vatican press release:

“Benedict XVI highlighted the “indispensable struggle for moral perfection which must dwell in every truly priestly heart. In order to favour this tendency of priests towards spiritual perfection, upon which the effectiveness of their ministry principally depends, I have”, he said, “decided to call a special ‘Year for Priests’ which will run from 19 June 2009 to 19 June 2010″. This year marks “the 150th anniversary of the death of the saintly ‘Cure of Ars’, Jean Marie Vianney, a true example of a pastor at the service of Christ’s flock”.

The news release ends, however, with this paragraph, in full:

“The centrality of Christ leads to a correct valuation of priestly ministry, without which there would be no Eucharist, no mission, not even the Church. It is necessary then, to ensure that ‘new structures’ or pastoral organisations are not planned for a time in which it will be possible to ‘do without’ ordained ministry, on the basis of an erroneous interpretation of the promotion of the laity, because this would lay the foundations for a further dilution in priestly ministry, and any supposed ‘solutions’ would, in fact, dramatically coincide with the real causes of the problems currently affecting the ministry”.

That seems like a pretty direct admonishment to lay reform groups, such as Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) on this side of the Atlantic, or Wir sind Kirche (We are Church) in Europe–or to the many individual Catholics or groups who are trying to cope with a growing shortage of priests, and of parishes and of the Eucharist. 

A couple of thoughts: I don’t think one should necessarily conflate lay initiatives for reform or simply lay-led ministries in the absence of a priest as intentional or even unintentionally undermining the role of the priest. Many if not most of these groups value the priesthood. And some argue that the women’s ordination movement itself reflects a kind of clericalism!

Obviously the laity in the post-Vatican II age of a “priesthood of all believers” and a vocations crunch has contributed to an intense debate over the role of the priest and that of the laity. With or without the vocations shortage there would still be a debate, I believe, about the servant-leader and what is often called the cultic or iconic model of priesthood. (And most will respond, “both/and, not either/or…”)

But the vocations “crisis” (scare-quotes are used to denote doubt about the term–some will see it as a good thing, perhaps, others as non-existent) has also forced the church on the ground into new arrangements–lay people as pastors, even women as pastors, the ordination of married converts, and of course overworked, overstressed circuit rider priests who are used as sacramental machines rather than pastors, and with parts wearing down and no replacements.

The pope rightly stresses the centrality of the Eucharist, but without offering (it seems) viable remedies to the absence of the Eucharist for so many people. Priests are central to the church–I support anything that supports them, as this Year of Priests is designed to do. But the Eucharist is also not just for priests.

So what do we do? Reasserting clerical privilege doesn’t cut it, as the reality on the ground is what it is. Cardinal Egan even raised a discussion of optional celibacy. There are other options, all of which would not undermine the priestly office. I think it would be good to discuss options now before the crisis gets even worse.

The full text here, in Italian, of the pope’s talk today to the Congregation for Clergy in which he made the announcement.

Hat tip: Cathy Grossman at USA Today.  

Must read: Mark Danner’s harrowing review of the Red Cross report on the CIA’s treatment of fourteen “high value” detainees.

And so, after a devastating and unprecedented attack, the gloves came off. Guided by the President and his closest advisers, the United States transformed itself from a country that, officially at least, condemned torture to a country that practiced it. And this fateful decision, however much we may want it to, will not go away, any more than the fourteen “high-value detainees,” tortured and thus unprosecutable, will go away. Like the grotesque stories in the ICRC report, the decision sits before us, a toxic fact, polluting our political and moral life.

One of the comments on my recent post about Front Porch Republic — a new blog where traditionalist conservatives with agrarian and distributist leanings opine — contained a fairly typical response to agrarianism: “Oh, I’d love to live in an ecologically sound world that retains the beauty God conferred on it, but farming for everyone?”

Well, no. Not even earnest agrarians propose farming for everyone.

But I do understand this response. Most of us dismiss agrarian thinking as being either innocently or dangerously romantic. We’re obviously not going to return to a pre-industrial society so why kid ourselves? I know — that’s often been my reaction, too.

Still, something in me senses a major disconnect here. Yes, most of us are permanently and hopelessly detached from our agrarian roots. And yet we constantly invoke the beauty and fragility of nature or “the environment” (wretched, wretched term). We can spend huge amounts of time, money, and effort praising nature, and frolicking in it — hiking, skiing, kayaking, etc. — hell, we even love nature from the comfort of our armchairs.

But somehow when we speak of nature as mediated by human effort — the farm — we lose interest and talk about how unlikely it is that any of us will become farmers anytime soon.

Huh?

If you ask me, the most dangerous form of nature romanticism today centers around the cult of the “wild” — for all its virtues, it is a sensibility that tends to discount agriculture. As if the human touch, even in the careful stewardship of the land, is somehow tainted and uninteresting. (There’s a big philosophical can of worms beneath this way of thinking, but a blog post ain’t the place to run it under the electric can opener.)

So, in short: Is talk about localism and sustainability, the importance of a regional, versus a global, economy, and the role that regional agriculture can play in these issues nothing but quixotic blather? Is the effort to think about how the food we eat is made — and what it does to us — merely prissiness? I don’t think so.

Sadly, the current frantic effort to prop up the economic status quo ante makes it highly unlikely that anyone — including President Obama — will pause to seriously reflect on the true radicalism of sustainable regional agriculture. We’re just so desperate for things to get back to the way they were….

In one of the comments on my post, Brian Volck presents a wonderful short list of serious authors exploring these issues: not only Wendell Berry, but Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and Norman Wirzba, among many others. Read his comment for specific titles.

That’s the headline on the Times story regarding Cheney’s remarks on CNN on Sunday.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that President Obama had made the country less safe, asserting that the new administration’s changes to detention and interrogation programs for terrorism suspects would hamper intelligence gathering.

Mr. Cheney said the moves suggested that terrorism was now being treated as a law enforcement problem.

“He is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack,” Mr. Cheney said of Mr. Obama in an interview on the CNN program “State of the Union.”

That’s the Dick Cheney who helped created this mess, right?

My alternate hedder: “Shut the #$%&*! up!”

First runner-up:  ”Go away!”

Other entries welcome.

The NYT has posted a 2000 op-ed piece by Charles Freeman printed in its pages. Tough but realistic about Israelis and Palestinians, and truer today than when it was written.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E7DB173EF93BA25753C1A9669C8B63

And this gets at some of the choppy waters behind Freeman’s withdrawal or disposal depending on what happened.

“Allies’ Clocks Tick Differently on Iran”

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/weekinreview/15SANGER.html?_r=1&ref=weekinreview

It seems we haven’t yet linked from dotCommonweal to Paul Elie’s excellent profile of Rowan Williams in the March issue of The Atlantic. In this we have been very much remiss, and we owe an apology to our friend Paul, as well as to any of you who didn’t find the story on your own. Fortunately, it’s available online, and it’s very much worth your time.

I’ve always liked what little I knew about Williams — especially since he’s a fellow admirer of James Alison. (I love his comment — quoted in Christopher Ruddy’s January 30 Commonweal article — that Alison’s books “leave you with a feeling that perhaps it’s time you became a Christian.”) Elie’s profile fills in the details, and I came away admiring Williams even more. As Elie describes him, Williams is a leader who is convinced that the path through conflict — not the path that avoids it — is the one that leads to deeper fidelity and a more thoroughly Christian church. The article also offers food for thought about how the Anglican/Episcopalian community’s leadership differs from the Catholic hierarchy, for better and for worse. Journalistic shorthand often describes the Archbishop of Canterbury as a C-of-E pope, but Williams sounds very un-papal when describing his role at the head of the Anglican Communion:

“The responsibility is not to argue a case from the top or cast the chairman’s vote. It’s to hold the reins for a sensible debate—and that’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

Elie elaborates on the Catholic/Anglican contrast in an interview published online: Read the rest of this entry »

Peggy, with unerring instinct, guessed it right: I am “on the road.” But, happily, the nation’s leading newspaper accompanies me.

She also resolved my dilemma regarding which of two homilies in today’s Times I should post. Since she chose my man Joe, let me choose her man Peter.

In a fine column about the stem cell debate and the need to attend to issues of ethics, he concludes:

Two days after Mr. Obama’s announcement, The Times ran three science-related articles. One was about stem cell researchers worried that any new federal financing might prove insufficient. It also ran an article about a prolific medical researcher who admitted fabricating research that just happened to support the products of the pharmaceutical company underwriting the research. Both were reminders of how much science is affected by big money.

And the paper ran a Page 1 article about European nations’ debating whether surgical or chemical castration is an effective, humane and legitimate treatment to rehabilitate violent sex offenders. No one can read that article and imagine that this is simply a scientific question, to be resolved by medical scientists on their own terms, rather than one that is profoundly moral and political.

Is that any less true when it comes to not only human embryonic stem cell research but also a host of other ethically fraught, knotty scientific questions now challenging Americans?

Update:

Would that the editorial writers for the Times would read and ponder their “Beliefs” columnist! From this morning’s (Monday) lead editorial:

When the N.I.H. sets the rules for federally financed research, the main criterion should be whether a proposal has high scientific merit.

Bob Imbelli must be traveling so I post in his absence Joe Nocera’s homily this A.M.

“Madoff Had Accomplices: His Victims ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/business/14nocera.html?_r=1&ref=business

Wait till you get to the lady who is suing the SEC for Madoff’s sins!

Stewart vs. Cramer (H/T everyone):

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM – Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Pt. 2

Here’s a great story about a priest looking out for his parishioners:

EAST HAVEN, Conn. — Latino merchants in this New Haven suburb have been complaining for months that they get a disproportionately large share of attention from the local police. Officers, they say, have harassed them and their customers by lingering outside shops, stopping cars and demanding to see driver’s licenses.

But their complaints were largely confined to grumbling among themselves and at a local church until Feb. 19, when a white American priest was arrested.

The priest, the Rev. James Manship, who was videotaping a police visit to an Ecuadorean-owned grocery store on Main Street when he was led off in handcuffs, has become an unlikely symbol of racial profiling, charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with the police.

On the heels of the announcement of Ross Douthat becoming an op-ed columnist for the NYT, I thought this might be an opportune moment to point out another faint sign of life sprouting from the ash-heap of American conservatism.

It’s a new online magazine or blog or whatever these websites are called — Front Porch Republic. It’s motto is “Place. Limits. Liberty.”

I have a natural interest in FPR. As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I literally grew up within the conservative intellectual movement. Bill Buckley was my first boss.

But even as an undergraduate at Hillsdale College — academic Mecca for young conservatives — I became deeply uncomfortable with the way mainstream conservatism was moving in the late 1970s — with its unthinking support of corporate capitalism, its penchant for militarism and willingness to play world policeman, and its unbridled appetite for the self-righteous posturing of the culture wars.

I was always more attracted by the “traditionalist” wing of conservatism, with its emphasis on the delicate nature of the social fabric, mediated by place and region and “intermediate institutions,” its minimalist — if not isolationist — tendencies in foreign policy, and its stress on the more or less equal dangers of big business and big government.

The folks over at Front Porch Republic represent the best of this strain of conservatism — which owes a great deal to Catholic social thought, including the idea of subsidiarity. And of course to Southern Agrarianism and Chestertonian Distributism. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that many of the contributors are Catholic. (Of course the vaguely Protestant Wendell Berry is perhaps the single most important exemplar of FPR’s vision.)

They’re also a pretty young group. I suspect there’s some sort of generational thing going on with them — I suspect that most of them would not be ardent disciples of the conservatives refined in the fires of the 1960s — Michael Novak, say, or the late Fr. Neuhaus.

Though it’s a new website, there’s already a great deal of energy, wit, and trenchant analysis to be found at Front Porch Republic. Sure, casting your eyes casually over their site you might a few things that are a bit off-putting or strange — their blogroll includes “The Tory Anarchist” and “Conservative Heritage Times.” And yes, it is highly unlikely that the FPR will be adopted by Republican Party operatives and become a viable political force any time soon — so you might be tempted to write them off as descendents of Don Quixote — but these guys are, well, smart, and maybe even a little prophetic.

I may be wrong, but I happen to think that Catholics of whatever political stripe would find dialogue with the FPR crowd invigorating. I mean, if subsidiarity means anything, then Catholics ought to be wary of the path we’re heading down — wedding the Leviathan state to multinational capitalism. We should all care about the preservation of three endangered species: “Place. Limits. Liberty.”

He’s Ross Douthat, erstwhile Atlantic editor and blogger and a serious upgrade from William Kristol, who started badly–not entirely unexpectedly–and went down from there during his year-long stint, which ended–not entirely unexpectedly–a couple months back.

I’d hoped that Douthat would get the nod–and obviously that went into Sulzberger’s decision-making process–despite the fact that he’s so bloody smart and so bloody young (29 years old):

Asked when The Times last had such a young columnist, Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, said, “I don’t think ever.”

Douthat will also bring a Catholic sensibility on ethics and morals and social justice to the page, and of course a politically conservative disposition. Hey, he has time to learn–look how fast David Brooks is backpedaling under the onslaught of reality! And some question Brooks’ conservative bona fides anyway. Douthat may suffer similar slings and arrows, given some of the heterdox views  he and Reihan Salam wrote about in their book, “Grand New Party.” (Jim Sleeper reviewed it for Commonweal.)

In his writings at The Atlantic, Douthat has often been brutally honest about the failings of the GOP in the last election, politically and ideologically.

Read Damon Linker’s welcome at TNR, in which Douthat’s frequent sparring partner opines:

Ross’s appointment represents a broadening of debate in the mainstream media. Unless I’m mistaken, he will be the first pro-lifer ever to write a column for what is still (by a wide margin) the premier daily newspaper in the United States. That he’s also a committed orthodox Catholic who enjoys (and excels at) defending his beliefs against critics both serious and silly is a real bonus. Too many pro-life and devoutly religious Americans fall into one of two camps: Either they lack the intellectual ability to engage in conversation and argument with the wider culture, or else they use their intellect to rally their own side for political battle, content to mock and dismiss those outside their ranks. Ross deftly avoids both vices in his writing — and American public life will be elevated because of it.

And his colleague Marc Ambinder reminds us it’s pronounced dow-that — with a soft “th.”

New York’s Cardinal Edward Egan a closet liberal? Who knew?! Well, he’s out now. In a 30-minute interview with a NY radio show–part of Egan’s valedictory tour as he prepares to leave office–His Eminence did indeed say that celibacy is ”a perfectly legitimate discussion.”

“I think it’s going to be looked at, and I am not so sure it wouldn’t be a good idea to decide on the basis of geography and culture not to make an across-the-board determination,” Egan said on the Fred Dicker Show.

As the Our Sunday Visitor blog recounts it, Egan seemed to chalk his openness to optional celibacy up to the vocations crisis and his disappointment in not being able to reverse that trend during his tenure. And he noted–as so many have over so many years (decades? centuries?) that Eastern Catholic churches have had no problems with optional celibacy.

“Is it a closed issue? No, that’s not a dogmatic stand,” he said, when Dicker asked if he had “any hesitancy about priestly celibacy.” 

Listen to the whole show here. The celibacy remarks are near the end–sort of like Egan’s tenure as NY archbishop, which of course leads to the question of why he has waited until now to speak up on an issue that is anathema to the Vatican.

One reason may be that, as Rocco notes, the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Clery, Brazil’s Cardinal Claudio Hummes “was forced to retract similar comments made in the Brazilian press following his 2006 appointment.” Hummes stated that such a discussion on celibacy was “not on the table.”

Except that it is on the table. It’s just that no one wants to see the table. Except that we keep bumping into it.

Egan’s comments are surprising (and perhaps disappointing to those who would have liked to hear them years ago) but not altogether surprising. Egan did not possess the pastor’s touch as a bishop, to be sure. But I was struck by his pastoral sensitivity a few years ago during one of the (interminable) debates at bishops meetings over the coming liturgical changes to a more literal Latin-sounding English. Egan took the mike and forcefully, with exasperation even, denounced the proposed changes and said, almost verbatim, “For Heaven’s sake, we have to think of the people, and the pastoral priority here, of all these changes coming down all the time.” If only he’d translated that into action a bit more as archbishop. But there will be a new fellow soon, though I don’t expect Timothy Dolan will rock the celibacy boat.

PS: Egan’s idea of starting optional celibacy on a “local option” basis seems eminently sane and practical.

The New York State Legislature is considering a bill that would lift the statute of limitations on civil suits concerning child sexual abuse. The sponsor of the legislation had this to say:

“Senator Thomas K. Duane, a Manhattan Democrat and the bill’s lead sponsor in the Senate, said he was “extremely optimistic” about its chances.

“He said that opponents’ claims of unfairness were not compelling, and that warnings of bankruptcy for religious institutions, which he dismissed as unlikely, missed the point.

“It’s not about money,” he said. “It’s about giving people the right to seek justice.”

It’s not about money?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/nyregion/12abuse.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

The current issue of The New Yorker (available online only for subscribers) has a number of the poignant final poems of John Updike, some written as he was preparing for his death and bidding farewell to his loved ones.

They are also replete with grateful memories of the relations he formed as a youngster and of the town he immortalized as “Shillington.”

He writes: “To think of you brings tears less caustic/ than those the thought of death brings.”  And again: “I’ve written these before, these modest facts/ but their meaning has no bottom in my mind.”

In a final poem, “Fine Point” (dated December 22, 2008), he says (sings?): “The timbrel creed of praise/ gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.”

Reading them, with emotion, I remembered one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ final poems. “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection,” and felt it a prayer that:

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

Breaking details about Commonweal‘s eighty-fifth anniversary celebration, Commonweal Conversations:

Date: Monday, October 19, 2009 at 6:30 p.m.
Place: Pier 60, Chelsea Piers, New York City

Receiving the second Catholic in the Public Square Award: Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics.

Presenting the award: PBS commentator and columnist Mark Shields.

Event chair: Rev. Edward Malloy, CSC, president emeritus, University of Notre Dame.

More info right here.

From John Thavis at Catholic News Service:

Pope Benedict XVI has written a letter to the world’s bishops defending his decision to lift the excommunications of four traditionalist bishops and expressing regret that it gave rise to misunderstandings and polemics, according to Italian newspapers.

The pope said the controversy over Bishop Richard Williamson’s statements denying the extent of the Holocaust was “a misadventure that was for me unforeseeable” and acknowledged that the Vatican should have paid more attention to information easily available on the Internet, the reports said.

The pope said he was particularly saddened at the reaction of some Catholics who seemed willing to believe he was changing direction on Catholic-Jewish relations and were ready to “strike at me with hostility.” He thanked “Jewish friends” who helped clarify the matter and restore a sense of trust.

He emphasized that improving Catholic-Jewish relations has been a longstanding personal theological priority.

As for the Society of St. Pius X, he said the church cannot ignore a community of believers that has 491 priests, 215 seminarians and thousands of faithful.

He emphasized, however, that to reach full communion in the church, the traditionalist society would have to accept the Second Vatican Council.

“One cannot freeze the church’s teaching authority at the year 1962,” he said, referring to the society’s rejection of many of the council’s teachings.

At the same time, he said, some defenders of Vatican II need to be reminded that being faithful to the council also means being faithful to the church’s entire doctrinal history, without cutting “the roots from which the tree lives.”

The text is to be released tomorrow by the Vatican.

Update:

Here, via Rocco, is the Vatican’s translation.

A furious battle has been going on over the last couple of weeks about the appointment of Ambassador Charles Freeman to head the office of the NIC, the entity that writes our country’s National Intelligence Estimate. He has withdrawn his name apparently under pressure and/or rejection by the Obama Administration and/or Rahm Emanuel and certainly through the complaints of New York’s senior senator Charles Schumer (D.-NY) and other members of Congress.

In case you’ve missed all of this: Here is Freeman’s statement about his withdrawal, the tone of which suggests he would have been the perfect person to oversee and write the estimates that guide our government’s foreign policy.

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/03/10/freeman_speaks_out_on_his_exit

A portion of his statement:

“There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel.  I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel.  It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so.  This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

“The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues.  I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government.” 

More here: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/10/freeman/index.html

Here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-10/obamarsquos-mideast-policy-smackdown/

Andrew Sullivan gives a time line on the blog blow-up and provides links to the ongoing debate: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/a-freeman-time.html

Victory has been claimed by Daniel Pipes and Steven Rosen: http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2009/03/daniel-pipes-takes-credit-for-freeman-takedown-.html

I think Freeman’s comments on Israel in this 2006 speech are what he’s been tackled for. For those commentors who are glad to see him go: What in this speech do you disagree with concerning Israel, Israel and the United States and Israel and the Middle East?

http://www.mepc.org/whats/mpc.asp

News reports note that Pope Benedict XVI will enter the Dome of the Rock when he visits Jerusalem in May. If so, this will be an instance in which Benedict ventures a little further than Pope John Paul II did in relations with Muslims – John Paul stood outside the shrine when he visited Jerusalem in 2000, but did not enter it.

The background story of this breathtaking, 1,300-year-old shrine was very much in the foreground that day, as I recall. A group of Palestinian demonstrators had gotten quite close to the pope and his entourage, shouting insults at the Palestinian officials who hosted John Paul. “Shame on you!” one of the demonstrators yelled. “Saladin took the keys; now you have handed them over to the pope.”

The Dome of the Rock has long figured in the contentious relations between Muslims and Christians. It was built large enough to outshine the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and it contains large inscriptions that denounce the central beliefs of Christianity. Saladin won it back from the Crusaders in 1187.

So it will be an interesting moment when a pope who was once the subject of angry demonstrations in many Muslim countries enters the Dome of the Rock – an important gesture on the part of the pope and his host, the grand mufti of Jersualem.

Is this a Fast, to keep
The larder lean?
And clean
From fat of veals and sheep?
Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish?
Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragg’d to go,
Or show
A down-cast look and sour?
No: ’tis a Fast to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat
And meat
Unto the hungry soul,
It is to fast from strife
And old debate,
And hate;
To circumcise thy life.
To show a heart grief-rent;
To starve thy sin,
Not bin;
And that’s to keep thy Lent.

(HT: John Garvey)

As you’ve probably heard by now, President Obama has signed an executive order lifting the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. Actually, you might have heard that he “lifted a ban on stem-cell research” (that’s how a “snap poll” on local news station New York 1 described it). That’s not true. Those other, missing words are important to understanding what’s actually being done — and why it’s controversial.

A story on NPR’s “Morning Edition” quoted Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) saying that the ban on funding was one in a series of Bush Administration decisions prizing ideology over scientific evidence. But is opposing embryonic stem-cell research really the same as ignoring scientific evidence for global climate change, as she suggests? That seems like a careless analogy to me. I don’t think most opponents of federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research are denying the potential of said research. On the other hand, those who oppose government action to combat climate change generally argue that such measures are unwise (for a variety of reasons), not that they are morally wrong. This isn’t as simple as one side seeing a need that the other doesn’t acknowledge.

Obama seems to understand that this doesn’t come down to a difference of opinion on what constitutes conclusive scientific research. From his remarks:

It is a difficult and delicate balance. Many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose, this research. I understand their concerns, and we must respect their point of view.

His own conclusion is arguably less careful: Read the rest of this entry »

Now that I have your attention, read this very interesting essay in the Tablet.  (HT Wolcott)  Here’s a taste:

Instead of men kneeling in confessionals admitting to lust, maybe they should be encouraged to regard greed, which was bottom of the male list, as a more devastating and destructive sin. In this respect, it is interesting to note that Pope Benedict has recently suggested that there is a close connection between original sin and the greed that has created the current economic crisis. It is also notable that the credit crunch has been created by a profession that is almost exclusively male. In the line-up of failed bankers, not a single woman’s name has appeared. Male greed has proven to be a murderous sin, destroying the livelihoods of millions, bringing down economies and social institutions and threatening starvation to the most vulnerable people on earth. Recent research at Cambridge University has revealed a connection between men’s behaviour on the trading floors and their testosterone levels. Men with high testosterone levels are more willing to take financial risks, and that risk-taking boosts their testosterone levels even higher. The global economic crisis may be the result of a testosterone tornado sweeping through the banking world. There is also mounting evidence that business productivity and efficiency increase when women are involved in management and decision-making, and it has long been recognised by aid agencies that women invest money more responsibly, implement development projects more effectively and are more likely to yield a return on the investment than men. Many surveys have also shown that women in all societies tend to work longer hours than men, which is perhaps why “sloth” is not high on the list of women’s sins.

And, apropos of my post on FOCA from a while back, I also liked this line:

Although the Catholic Church has since the Second Vatican Council been pragmatically pacifist in its consistent refusal to endorse war as a solution to conflict, the Church is still far more widely known for its moral absolutism on sexual issues than for its opposition to violence. That is partly because of distorted media reporting, but it is also because of the frequency with which the hierarchy pronounces on issues of sex and reproduction. Yet as we all know, Catholic social teaching has much more to offer. It offers a rich resource for condemning unjust social and economic structures and creating a more life-giving vision of society.

Catholics have a lot to offer on issues other than abortion, homosexuality, and stem cells.  If we can’t all see eye to eye on these issues, can’t we at least agree to walk and chew gum at the same time?

A few weeks back I promised readers interested in Oakland’s new Cathedral of Christ the Light an update on educational materials about the cathedral.  Those materials are now available on the cathedral web site and can be accessed by clicking here.   These materials include handouts (in English and Spanish) and lesson plans suitable for various grade levels from K-12. 

There are also two videos, the first being a tour of the cathedral with Provost Fr. Paul Minnihan and the second being an overview of the cathedral’s architecture narrated by cathedral architect Craig Hartman.  I tried various ways of getting the videos to display on the site but was unsuccessful.  I’m afraid web technology has vastly outrun my primitive HTML programming skills…:-)  In any case, enjoy and visit us soon.

“Believing without belonging” has been the American religious mantra for years, and the real-time effects of that anti-”religion” (or anti-institution?) bias was never so apparent as in the latest American Religious Identification Survey. ARIS 2008 surveyed more than 50,000 Americans about their beliefs and builds on two previous sweeping studies, in 1990 and 2001.

The “Nones” are growing (as we wrote at ReligionLink), going from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.2 percent in 2001 and now 15 percent. But the big news may be that New England, sanctuary to the Puritans who helped birth the United States and bequeathed its religious legacy, has now taken over from the Pacific Northwest as the least religiously affiliated section of the country.

But this doesn’t mean more Americans are atheists or even agnostics–just nonreligious, and believing in something, even if they’re not sure what. The number of true nonbelievers remains relatively small: About 1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. (On the other hand, the overall number of avowed atheists has grown sharply from 900,000 to 1.6 million since 2001.)

Yes, ”Christianity” in raw numbers is shrinking: The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian declined from 86.2 percent in 1990 to 76 percent in the latest ARIS. Not all of that is due to immigration from different faiths, and in fact most immigrants coming to the U.S.–even from Asia and elsewhere–are Christian. 

A look behind the numbers shows that most of the decline is due to the ongoing erosion in mainline Protestantism and that evangelical or nondenominational Protestantism is filling the vacuum.

And not surprisingly, the very “religion-y” religion of Roman Catholicism is taking hits, in spite of Latino immigration. ARIS 2008 confirms the Great Shift from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West.  

But there has been real erosion, and Cathy Grossman’s report at USA Today has some spectacular graphics that illustrate the changes in the Catholic Church and other groups.

Read the entire report and summaries at the Web site of the Program on Public Values at Trinity College, which conducted the survey.