In the April 10 issue of Commonweal, and now up on the homepage, is another article on the economic crisis by Charles R. Morris. Few write as clearly as Morris about the series of events and decisions that have brought us to this pass. Fewer still write as trenchantly. Morris spares no one in his survey of the rubble:

The whining on Wall Street about the “Obama Bear Market” is, of course, grossly unfair. It took years for Wall Streeters to blow up the world, so there was no way that a new team could put it back together in just months.

But after the silky-smooth campaign, the administration’s performance has not been impressive, often seeming both irresolute and fumbling. It’s still early, and the public seems well disposed, but it’s past time to finish filling the key jobs, and to stop getting rolled by the bankers.

It would also be nice to see some conviction around a few central points:

• Almost all the “innovation” of the past decade has been destructive. The derivative inventions that enable irresponsible mortgage brokers in Nevada to destroy banks in Switzerland are very dangerous, and the industry has proved that it can’t be trusted with them.

• The financial sector has to shrink. The merger of commercial and investment banking, which put federally guaranteed deposit money at the disposal of high-rolling wheeler-dealers, was an accident waiting to happen. It has duly happened, and has been worse than anyone thought. It’s time to make banking dull again.

• At this late date, it is no longer excusable for key players like Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to keep on being surprised. There needs to be a standard playbook for intervening; clear guidelines for who fails and who doesn’t; and a quasi-independent corporate structure to hold and manage the government’s security holdings. Drive-by policymaking by Treasury officials and random congressmen will surely end in tears. The current process (which the administration inherited) seems to be: Pay whatever AIG, or Merrill (or whoever) asks for, and hope against hope that it’s the last. It never is, and we have to do better.  

Read the rest here.

The Italian word can evoke the Italian tragedy…  Below is a Lamentation of Christ taken down from the cross from the same workshop of Master Paul in Levocha.  Here also are two websites that have some fifty ways in which the Pietà has been represented in art: centuries of pain and grief–and love:

http://christianart.blogspot.com/2006/04/piet-lamentation-over-dead-christ.html

http://www.textweek.com/art/pieta.htm

I was in Europe last week–visiting Father Reginald Foster in Rome (miraculously, he’s improving, but he still needs prayers), and attending a conference on my colleague  Vincent Rougeau’s book on Christians in the American Empire at Notre Dame’s facility in London on Trafalgar Square.

While it was uncharacteristically cold and wet in Rome, it was spring–glorious spring–in England.  And on the weekend, I took a trip to see Winchester Cathedral, one of the oldest and largest cathedrals in Europe.  You can see the earliest Saxon structure, and the medieval flying buttresses set off against the bright blue sky.  Apparently, the whole thing almost collapsed in the early twentieth century, and was saved by a diver who worked underwater shoring up its foundations.

I did not know that Jane Austen is buried in the Cathedral.  A fresh bouquet of yellow roses was adorning the plaque near her grave.   I think she’d like the people-watching there.

Of course, I can’t resist. . . I vaguely remember learning to dance in elementary class to the song “Winchester Cathedral.”  Thanks to Youtube, here is the Lawrence Welk version: Read the rest of this entry »

All of us join in prayer for the victims and survivors of the earthquake that devastated the Abruzzo region of Italy early this morning. I know from a friend in Rome that tremors were felt there, sixty miles to the West.

The Guardian has a helpful map showing the region, the epicenter, and the fault lines that traverse the Italian peninsular.

Italy being Italy, polemics have already begun. But a sober statement comes from the head of Italy’s National Geophysics Institute:

“Every time there is an earthquake there are people who claim to have predicted it,” he said. “As far as I know nobody predicted this earthquake with precision. It is not possible to predict earthquakes.”

He said the real problem for Italy was a long-standing failure to take proper precautions despite a history of tragic quakes. “We have earthquakes, but then we forget and do nothing. It’s not in our culture to take precautions or build in an appropriate way in areas where there could be strong earthquakes,” he added.

Update:

A second quake hit L’Aquila a few hours ago. Here is the report from the Turin daily, La Stampa:

Ancora paura in Abruzzo. Una nuova forte scossa di terremoto di magnitudo 5.3 si è verificata nell’aquilano alle alle 19.42. La scossa è stata avvertita oltre che in tutto l’Abruzzo anche nel frusinate, nel Lazio e nelle Marche. Quest’ultimo terremoto ha provocato altre vittime, con certezza una nella frazione Santa Rufina di Roio. Nuovi crolli sono stati segnalati un pò dappertutto nei centri vicino all’Aquila dove è crollata, quasi interamente, la basilica delle Anime Sante, in piazza Duomo.

Further fear in Abruzzo. A new quake registering 5.3 took place at 7:42 p.m. The basilica of the Holy Souls in Piazza Duomo of L’Aquilla collapsed.

The death toll stands at 229. The La Stampa link provides photos and videos as well.

Jane Mayer “About a year ago, a book came out in England that made a fascinating prediction: at some point in the future, the author wrote, six top officials in the Bush Administration would get a tap on the shoulder announcing that they were being arrested on international charges of torture.”

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/04/13/090413ta_talk_mayer?ref=fp5The book is by Phillipe Sands  Torture Team, Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, Palgrave-MacMillan, 2008. Well worth reading.

On Friday we posted our latest editorial — a comment on the Obama-at-Notre-Dame dustup — and alerted blog readers here. Commenter Alan Mitchell and others were curious to know what The Commonweal had to say about Buckley and Mater et magistra back in 1961. Now that I’m back in the office, with our archived issues at hand, I can fill you in.

I haven’t found any direct remarks about America, the Jesuits, or the denunciation of Buckley. [Scratch that! Chris Cimorelli found something I missed. See below.] But the editors did weigh in on the National Review‘s comments and competence in the August 25, 1961 issue. I think this may be taking us farther away from the limited sense in which the situations are analogous, but it’s still an interesting topic, independent of our present editorial. So here’s an excerpt from “‘A Venture in Triviality,’” from 1961:

As we see it, there is one real merit in the editorial position the National Review has taken on the new encyclical: it is straightforward. As such, we consider it a clear improvement over what is often standard practice in Catholic conservative circles: to claim theoretical acceptance of the social thought expressed in papal encyclicals while denying its applicability in almost every specific situation. But this is about the only merit we can see in the National Review‘s position. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinal was hospitalized here in New York late Saturday, with “stomach pain” — and apparently they’ve determined that he needs a pacemaker. All the reports I’ve heard say the situation isn’t very serious, but of course the timing is unfortunate. (The timing may also be the reason this is making headlines at all. It was the top story on NY1 this morning!)  This is his final Holy Week as archbishop — or rather, as “apostolic administrator” — and it must be disappointing for him to be sidelined. On top of that, the Cathedral’s getting ready for the installation of the new archbishop on the Wednesday after Easter. (Although Egan might be pleased to have an excuse to avoid the media’s attention on that occasion.) And, as I understand it, this will be the first time in the diocese’s history that the previous bishop was able to be present for the installation of the new one!  So here’s hoping he’ll be able to preside at, or at least attend, the Triduum liturgies this year, and that he’ll be back in good health for the Easter week festivities. I know he’d appreciate our prayers in the meantime.

Been meaning to post a music-recommendation thread for months now. What’s on your iPod–or your turntable? What are you playing, singing? This is the time of year when I spend my commute brushing up on choral pieces for the Triduum. I’ll be back in the motherland this Easter–subject to the musical stylings of my childhood parish, and missing the teriffic pieces I’ve grown accustomed to singing for Holy Week. Here’s one of them. If you’ll indulge me, I’ll post more later in the week.

Bruckner: Christus Factus Est, WAB 10 – Edward Higginbottom: The Choir Of New College Oxford

Just back from the Palm Sunday liturgy. Every year I forget that half the church is full of people who don’t otherwise  go to Mass, and every year I forget that they will be there.

Our pastor welcomed them all, as he should have, at the end of Mass encouraging them to come more often…and of course they will on Holy Thursday and Easter… maybe Good Friday and next Christmas.

So what’s the problem? Or what’s my problem? They don’t know what to do or how to behave. Why are they there?

So in a spirit of self-discipline and educating myself, two inquiries.

1. Observations from or about people who only go to church on “high” holydays. Why?

2. Observations from those who go all the time and have figured out what to do about the seldom-comers. Pray for them? Scowl at them when talking, carrying on, sitting so you can’t kneel? ETC.? Admonish them? Welcome them? Go to an unpopulated church? Stay home?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been decidedly unenthusiastic about undertaking further stimulus programs for combating the current recession/depression. Many attribute this to fear of the sort of inflation that wreaked havoc upon Germany in the past.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interview with historian Richard J. Evans, the third volume of whose trilogy on the Nazi era has just appeared.

Here is one of the questions and responses:

Was it inevitable that a government like the Third Reich would emerge in Germany? If so, when did it become inevitable?

In “The Coming of the Third Reich,” I try to say that it was not inevitable while pointing out that the Weimar Republic did, in fact, bring Nazism. The crucial point to remember is that in the 1928 elections, Nazis scored less than 3% of the national vote. By 1932 they were by far the largest party, with one third of the vote. So it’s the Depression. More than one third of the work force is unemployed by the middle of 1932. Businesses have crashed; banks have bankruptcies; people are disoriented by terrible inflation. It’s a desperate situation. And in that situation, the sense of activism, dynamism, youth, vigor, and radicalism that Hitler and the Nazis conveyed, tapping into nationalist resentment about the Treaty of Versailles with vague but vehement promises to restore Germany to its greatness…. All that had an irresistible appeal

Today’s Washington Post has an article on a National Gallery exhibit of medieval illuminated pages.  This is one of them, showing Christ on the lap of Abraham.

 All the blessings of Holy Week and Easter to all!

The collapse of the Soviet empire has permitted westerners freer access to the treasures of art in Eastern Europe. One of these is the high altar in the Church of St. James in Levoča in eastern Slovakia. It was carved by the school of an artist known as Master Paul, about whom not a great deal is known except that he lived in the town at the turn of the sixteenth century. Above is the Last Supper he carved out of wood. It is said that he put the faces of his fellow citizens on the apostles who are pictured very naturalistically. Note the two at the opposite ends of the table, one stuffing his face with bread, the other drinking. The beloved disciple rests his head on the table in front of Jesus. You can find more detail at the site of the Web Gallery of Art http://www.wga.hu/index1.html . (This is a wonderful site, with a fine search engine. My only complaint about the site, which comes from Hungary, is that it gives the name of the town in Hungarian and speaks of him as having been active in “Upper Hungary”! I don’t think Hungary has given up all claims on Slovakia.)

Archbishop Wuerl honors Communion stances of local bishops
Catholic News Service
Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl is following the lead of local prelates regarding the reception of Communion by Catholic elected representatives and government officials whose views may conflict with Church teaching.

The archbishop’s stance, first explained in a May 1, 2008, column in the Catholic Standard, garnered some attention as the U.S. Senate March 31 opened confirmation hearings on the nomination of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic, as Department of Health and Human Services secretary.

http://www.cathstan.org/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=27&ArticleID=2412

Slightly related: John Thavis of Catholic News Service has this on the Vatican non-response to the brouhahaha at UND.

http://cnsblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/the-vatican-and-notre-dame/    (ht: Tom Reese)

Here is Tom Reese’s take on the CNS article cited above: “What is not said but implied is that if Sebelius changes her residence, she will be able to go to Communion in Washington. Wuerl, along with McCarrick, was a leader in opposing the use of Communion as a weapon against Catholic politicians.”

Here’s a link to a really great story about RUN DMC (who are being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) on NPR.  Go take a look (or listen).

New York City’s brand new stadiums open today and are extensively covered in the New York Times. The Times’ architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff provides an overview:

each stadium subtly reflects the character of the franchises that built them. Yankee Stadium is the kind of stoic, self-conscious monument to history that befits the most successful franchise in American sports. The new home of the Mets, meanwhile, is scrappier and more lighthearted. It plays with history fast and loose, as if it were just another form of entertainment.

One of their top sports writers, George Vecsey, weighs in with this:

Were these new places really necessary? Yankee Stadium was cramped and outmoded but quite awesome. Shea Stadium was a horror, but it was the Mets fans’ beloved horror. Knowing what we know now about the economy, we surely could have lived with them indefinitely.

The main goal became turning ballparks into resorts, land cruises designed for A.I.G.-bonus-recipient wallets, the games lasting long enough to wring more twenties and hundreds out of the faithful.

Bread and circuses. Shrimp and pennant races. Luxury boxes and follies. Laugh and cry.

And yet, like salmon swimming upstream or birds migrating on ancient flyways, real fans will find a way to the ballparks, pulled by the life-affirming force of baseball coming around again in the spring.

Despite my Bronx-loyalties  and Mantle-era Yankee nostalgia, on paper I like the looks of (pardon the expression) “Citi Field” better.

Now will it be President Obama or Archbishop Dolan tossing out the first ball?

I suppose this isn’t too surprising.  What is surprising to me is that it is getting any attention in the mainstream media at all.  Why on earth does anyone care what Glenn Beck things of this appointment (or anything else for that matter)?  Or even what some conservative Republican Senator thinks, unless there are enough votes to filibuster.  Last I recalled, their side lost the election.  The primary objections to Koh seem to be (1) some trumped up charge that he wants to impose Sharia law,  and (2) his vociferous criticism of the Bush administration’s abuses of the rule of law.  I won’t dignify the first, but as to the second, see above.   It’s the lawyers (conservative or not, see Jack Goldsmith) who were not critical of the treatment of rule of law under the last administration who have some ‘splainin to do, not those who were.

UPDATE:  Perhaps I wasn’t clear.  Go ahead and listen to Glenn Beck if you want to.  War game the future civil war you think is coming.  Take seriously Sen. Inhofe’s rantings about snowfall in the spring disproving global warming.  I don’t care.  My point is that Obama won the election, and, as Republicans never tired of pointing out regarding Bush’s nominees, Obama is entitled to appoint people who agree with him.  Harold Koh is an honorable man, an esteemed scholar, and an eminently qualified lawyer.  Until there appears to be a real reason to oppose the nomination (not just that he was critical of the last administration) or enough opposition to actually put the nomination in some sort of danger, Glenn Beck’s paranoid delusions about Sharia law or the other latest rumblings from the far-right wing echo chamber are simply not suitable to be featured in the New York Times, etc.  It’s just not part of the news that’s fit to print.

UPDATE:  From the comments, here’s a response to the Koh criticisms, from Jack Balkin (thanks Antonio).

In the final chapters of The Lord, Romano Guardini follows Jesus into Jerusalem.  His disciples marvel at the greatness of the Temple.  Jesus says to him, “do you see all these great buildings? There will not be left one stone upon another that will not be thrown down!”  Guardini writes:

The end of the world and Judgment are not to be regarded as myths of a distant future, but as possibilities to God’s wrath that keep astride of our own lives.  We do not inhabit a safe, biological, historical and spiritual unit that goes its invulnerable way under the canopy of a harmless religious mystery called God, but like Jerusalem, both we as individuals and the world as a whole live under the ever-present possibility of judgment.  Only when the protection that direct reality seems to give my obtuse senses has been partially withdrawn and the threat of God has become a personal reality, am I a believer in the full Biblical meaning of the word.

The editorial from our forthcoming issue (dated April 10) is now online.

It would be helpful for those currently leveling charges of disloyalty at the University of Notre Dame and its president, John Jenkins, CSC, to revisit the Buckley imbroglio. The university’s invitation to President Barack Obama to give this year’s commencement address has ignited a kind of inquisition, which has more than a passing resemblance to what Garry Wills called the “brutal use of doctrinal suspicion” against Buckley.

What imbroglio, you ask? The rest is here.

If you can stand to revisit the “condoms make the problem worse” imbroglio one more time, Fr. Tom Reese has a valuable analysis up at the Newsweek/Washington Post/Georgetown(?) “On Faith” site. (I can’t keep track of who’s running that store.) He makes some helpful distinctions that were generally lost in the rush to take sides after the pope’s airplane press-conference:

The condom controversy once again shows that the pope and the Vatican do not know how to deal with the media. Anyone with any experience with Western media knew that a condom quote would dominate the headlines. The need to revise the response made matters worse.

All of this controversy over condoms hides a fact that both the Vatican and the media do not want to acknowledge: What the pope says about condoms will have little impact on whether men will use them in Africa or anywhere else. If a man is sleeping with multiple partners and thus violating the Sixth Commandment, do you really think he is going to say to his partners, “Sorry, I can’t use a condom because the pope won’t let me”? Get real. Cultural factors limit the use of condoms, not papal pronouncements.

Clarifying all that allows him to move the conversation forward, to proposing what the Vatican could do to help the situation. Worth a read.

For all the pitfalls of the internet, it can also be a helpful way of realizing the catholicity of the Church. Asia News is an indispensable point of reference. Here is its account of a meeting concerning the Church in China that ended yesterday in Rome:

“Profound sadness” over the latest arrest of Bishop Julius Jia Zhiguo, and for the situation of other bishops and priests who are “deprived of their freedom” has been expressed by the Vatican Commission for the Church in China, which gathered from March 30 to April 1, and yesterday afternoon held a session together with Benedict XVI. The arrest of Bishop Jia (cf. Police arrest underground Zhengding bishop Jia Zhiguo), took place just as the Commission’s work was beginning.

The final statement, published today by the Vatican press office, recalls that this lack of freedom is not “an isolated case,” and cites “other ecclesiastics,” such as many official bishops and priests, “who are subjected to undue pressure and limitations on their pastoral activities.” Many prelates recognized by the government, but who have reconciled with Rome, continue to be subjected to “forced vacations,” far from their faithful, and to political sessions that last for months, in order to convince them of the goodness of the Party’s religious policies, and to subject themselves to the policies of the Patriotic Association.

The members of the Commission desire in the first place to express to them their “assurances of their fraternal closeness and constant prayer, in this season of Lent, illuminated by the Paschal Mystery.” The statement frankly expresses that these situations of “uneasy relations with the civil authorities” “create obstacles to that climate of dialogue with the competent authorities” which the pope – in his letter to Chinese Catholics – said he hoped to have.

As we approach Holy Week, we might keep in special prayer our fellow Christians in both China and India who by their witness often share the sufferings of Christ.

In a New York Times op-ed piece titled “Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism,” the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz writes:

In theory, the administration’s plan is based on letting the market determine the prices of the banks’ “toxic assets” — including outstanding house loans and securities based on those loans. The reality, though, is that the market will not be pricing the toxic assets themselves, but options on those assets….

Consider an asset that has a 50-50 chance of being worth either zero or $200 in a year’s time. The average “value” of the asset is $100. Ignoring interest, this is what the asset would sell for in a competitive market. It is what the asset is “worth.” Under the plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the government would provide about 92 percent of the money to buy the asset but would stand to receive only 50 percent of any gains, and would absorb almost all of the losses. Some partnership!…

Some Americans are afraid that the government might temporarily “nationalize” the banks, but that option would be preferable to the Geithner plan. After all, the F.D.I.C. has taken control of failing banks before, and done it well…. What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a “partnership” in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships — with the private sector in control — have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess.

Paul Krugman has been making the same point in his Times column, but no one in the White House seems to be listening to these two Nobel Prize winners. The Treasury Secretary can’t even bring himself to say the word “nationalize.” The President’s plan, aptly described by Stiglitz as a Rube Goldberg device (the kind “Wall Street loves — clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets”), is exactly what you would have expected from another Republican administration. This is not change you can believe in, or any other kind of change. It is another dodgy improvisation by an economic team that desperately wants to restore the status quo ante. As with debates about health-care reform, the intellectual panic triggered by words like “nationalize” and “socialize” is short-circuiting rational discussion.

Brilliant.

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

By happy coincidence, Passover and Holy Week overlap this year. But that’s next week. For today, April Fool’s Day, this Facebook Haggadah is the ticket. (And it pretty well sums up my views toward MyFace. Or Spacebook. And Twitter. or Tweeter. Or whatever.)

Hat tip to Steve Waldman.