Bernard Dauenhauer has asked that this story from the NCR be posted; it concerns a court decision allowing German Catholics to refuse to pay their church tax and yet remain members of the Catholic Church. A very different system than our own!

The gist of the story: “Leaving the church in Germany starts with a visit to the local court or registry office where the applicant completes an official declaration of withdrawal before a court official. The court then sends notifications to the parish, the employer and the local registration office.

“Excommunication from the church ensues automatically and one’s baptismal certificate is endorsed to that effect.

“The German Catholic church has meted out the penalty of excommunication to 1.1 million former members from 1998 to 2007.

“In August 2007 Zapp, an emeritus professor of canon law, went to his local registry office to announce that he was leaving the Catholic church. After signing the required document, he went to the archbishop’s office and declared that he was still a Catholic.” Read the whole thing here: http://ncronline.org/news/global/german-court-upholds-church-tax-challenge

Twice today, on different blogs, I’ve come across links to this Time article: “After Ted Kennedy’s Death, Silence from the Pope,” by Jeff Israely. It tells the story of how Teddy fell from favor with Catholics, built around a dramatic final rejection: as the (original) article tells it, the pope simply ignored the deathbed letter Ted Kennedy wrote and had hand-delivered by President Obama.

Israely rehearses the usual RC sqabbles, and then tosses in a few quotes from “one veteran official at the Vatican, of U.S. nationality”:

“Why would he even write a letter to the Pope? The Kennedys have always been defiantly in opposition to the Roman Catholic magisterium.”

Back at headquarters, however, there is little room for nuance. “Here in Rome, Ted Kennedy is nobody. He’s a legend with his own constituency,” says the Vatican official. “If he had influence in the past, it was only with the Archdiocese of Boston, and that eventually disappeared too.”

The problem with this article — aside from the scurrilous anonymous quotes from “headquarters” — is that the pope did, in fact, respond to Kennedy’s letter with his own letter promising prayers and imparting his apostolic blessing (as the AP reports here). We know this because Cardinal McCarrick read from both letters at the gravesite on Saturday. After that, the article was amended, but not exactly “corrected.” A parenthetical briefly interrupts the flow, and then it’s back to handicapping Kennedy’s Catholic credentials:

(UPDATE: At Kennedy’s burial at Arlington on Saturday, retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick read excerpts from Kennedy’s letter; he also provided portions of the Vatican’s response to it.)

I think that pretty seriously underplays the extent to which this article got it wrong. I know the pope’s letter wasn’t anything extraordinary, and there are genuine reasons for Catholics to feel ambivalent about the Kennedy legacy. But gossip and bad information is a pretty flimsy hook to hang an article on — especially one that ends with an attempt to discern “the final flicker of Kennedy influence in American Catholicism.”

UPDATE: If Israely was embarrassed by the article linked above, he’s hiding it well. His follow-up article has this headline: “The Pope’s Response to Ted Kennedy’s Letter: Pro Forma.” Rather than acknowledge that the “pro forma” response revealed on Saturday discredits his original report, he’s now reporting that the Vatican’s failure to comment after Kennedy’s death proves…something. (His anonymous sources say so!) And, oddly, he tries to set up a contrast with the letter received by Ted’s sister Eunice just before she died, even though that sounds like it was precisely the same kind of we’re-praying-for-you form letter. Is this another example of that incorrigible liberal media bias I keep hearing about?

Bill Moyer has this to say about the Democratic Party and Health Reform:

MOYERS:  I don’t think the problem is the Republicans . . . .The problem is the Democratic Party.  This is a party that has told its progressives — who are the most outspoken champions of health care reform — to sit down and shut up.  That’s what Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff at the White House, in effect told progressives who stood up as a unit in Congress and said: “no public insurance option, no health care reform.”

And I think the reason for that is — in the time since I was there, 40 years ago, the Democratic Part has become like the Republican Party, deeply influenced by corporate money.  I think Rahm Emanuel, who is a clever politician, understands that the money for Obama’s re-election will come from the health care industry, from the drug industry, from Wall Street.  And so he’s a corporate Democrat who is determined that there won’t be something in this legislation that will turn off these interests. . . .

HT: Glenn Greenwald http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/08/29/moyers/index.html 

“The diocese of Scranton requires a bishop who is at least physically vigorous. I am not that bishop.” *

The resignation of Bishops Martino and Dougherty is official. The Wilkes-Barre, PA Times Leader has the story, and (raw) video of the press conference. It sounds like “health reasons” is the official explanation, although rumors of disease were happily inaccurate.

After being introduced by the director of communications, Bishop Martino read a prepared statement. He described the financial and organizational problems he confronted when he became bishop in 2003. Then he said:

“For some time now there has not been a clear consensus among the clergy and people of the diocese of Scranton regarding my pastoral initiatives or my way of governance. This development has caused me great sorrow, resulting in bouts of insomnia and, at times, a crippling physical fatigue.”

Bishop Martino concluded, “”As is customary on an occasion like this, I seek forgiveness from anyone whom I may not have served adequately as bishop due to my human limitations.”

From the Times Leader:

[Philadelphia Cardinal Justin] Rigali praised Martino, Dougherty and Bishop Emeritus James Timlin, who stood in the back of the room during the press conference. Rigali named Monsignor Joseph Bambera, Pastor at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Archibald, as his official representative in the Diocese, giving him the title “vicar general.”

Trivia question (to which I don’t know the answer): are there any other dioceses in the U.S. with two living bishops emeriti?

* Updated to correct wording, per video.

Dan Barry pretty much captures the details of yesterday’s funeral and burial: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/us/politics/30kennedy.html

Three phrases are always associated with the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin: “common ground,” “a consistent ethic of life,” and the “seamless garment.” More than phrases, they embody a challenge, difficult of realization, and often, in their pursuit, strangely divisive rather than uniting.

I was struck once again by this in reading the late Senator Kennedy’s moving letter to Pope Benedict, read yesterday at the graveside service.

The Senator spoke with passion of his Catholic faith, handed on to him by his parents, and how it sustained him in moments of scarcely comprehended tragedy. He forthrightly confessed his own weaknesses and asked for prayers.

Senator Kennedy then offered a litany of the commitments that governed his public life:

I want you to know, Your Holiness, that in my nearly 50 years of elective office, I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I’ve worked to welcome the immigrant, fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education. I have opposed the death penalty and fought to end war. Those are the issues that have motivated me and been the focus of my work as a United States Senator.

For all the considerable merit of these accomplishments, I noted, with sadness, that the seamless garment had been rent and re-stitched. Had this deeply talented man found the means to include the protection of the infant in the womb among the good causes he promoted, had he been able to witness boldly to a consistent ethic of life, I believe the Catholic community’s mourning and prayers would have been even fuller, more whole-hearted.

Still, I and many others will respond to his final words to the Pope:

I continue to pray for God’s blessings on you and our Church and would be most thankful for your prayers for me.

Update:

Since folk appear to be still contributing to the thread, I thought I would provide a link to Ross Douthat’s column in today’s New York Times. He writes, in part:

It’s worth pondering how the politics of abortion might have been different had Ted shared even some of his sister’s qualms about the practice. One could imagine a world in which America’s leading liberal Catholic had found a way to make liberalism less absolutist on the issue, and a world where a man who became famous for reaching across the aisle had reached across, even occasionally, in search of compromise on the country’s most divisive issue.

There’s an article in the New York Times about a trend in middle and high school education–dropping assigned, classic texts and letting kids read pretty much whatever they want, including “James Patterson‘s adrenaline-fueled ‘Maximum Ride’ books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the ‘Captain Underpants’ series of comic-book-style novels.”

I tend to be a tad crusty on issues like this–as in, “this is another sign that the Apocalypse is upon us”–but as a parent and a teacher I know the exhausting struggle of wills with students these days when it comes to asking them to read something. Anything.

So I do have brief moments when I think “let them read anything–the back of a Honey Nut Cheerios box–at least that may help get them in the habit of reading.”

But, back on the crusty side again, I think: “This is the death of authority and the triumph of consumerism.”

To read something because your teacher thinks it’s a good idea–this is now oppression?

In fact, I suspect that the most powerful force at work here is not postmodern attacks on authority but simply the siren song of pragmatism–”in the age of Twitter they won’t really read or engage ‘Huckleberry Finn’ so they should at least choose to read ‘Captain Underpants.’

I don’t buy it.

A good teacher should be able to fire up any class for a great text. Part of the teacher’s job description is learning how to overcome resistance. In a word, to generate the right set of circumstances for the secular equivalent of a conversion experience.

For me it happened in the eighth grade during what seemed like an interminable line-by-line slog through Julius Caesar. One day I was full of fear and loathing; the next I was intoxicated and in love. I don’t think this could have happened without that slog. (Thank you, Mr. Taussig!)

Teachers, don’t despair. Do not abandon your teaching authority. Challenge them to read the good stuff. Literary metanoia can still take place.

It has been four years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans and called the world’s attention to the poverty and neglect that plagued so many of its people. Last year a documentary called Trouble the Water was released by Zeitgeist Films, and I watched it many months ago. It has stayed with me, coming back vividly every time I hear any reference to New Orleans or the tragedy of Katrina. Now that the anniversary has come around again, I want to recommend it to you. Trouble the Water is a powerful, challenging firsthand account of what happened in the Ninth Ward in 2005, and a deeply moving story of faith, hope, and love in action.

A resident of the Ninth Ward named Kimberly Rivers Roberts is the central figure in the film and the source of much of its material. When Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Roberts had just purchased a video camera, and she took it out into the neighborhood as she watched some neighbors flee and checked in with many others who hoped to ride out the storm in their homes. “Just in case it’s all gone, I’m getting it on tape, see?” she narrates as the camera rolls. “I’m showing the world that we did have a world ’fore the storm come.”

The footage is shaky and amateurish (you can get a taste of it in the trailer, at the end of this post), but its authenticity gives it power. Roberts keeps rolling as she chats with relatives and friends in the neighborhood about what might be coming. Adults try to laugh off their anxiety. Little girls, more excited than alarmed, boast, “I ain’t never scared of a hurricane! Who’s afraid of water?” Roberts herself admits frankly that she would leave if she could, but she has no means of escape. All she has is faith. “I believe Jesus the Lord will send me through this one,” she says. “Whenever the Lord allow it, I’ll be able to tell the story.”

And so Roberts keeps filming as the rain intensifies, and as the waters rushing through the streets swallow the porches, and then the entire first floors, of the homes up and down the block. Soon she and her relatives are huddled in the attic, hoping for rescue. The filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal splice in news footage and audio from 911 calls to paint the bigger picture of how Katrina tore through New Orleans. One desperate caller, trapped by rising waters, is left speechless when the emergency operator says, “There is no rescue team.” Roberts’s neighbor Larry comes to the aid of his stranded neighbors, using a punching bag to stay afloat as he swims from one house to another and carries the people inside to higher ground. Read the rest of this entry »

I learned of Senator Kennedy’s death when I awoke at around 2:30 in the morning, flipped on my clock-radio, and heard Bob Schieffer giving a very graceful, carefully crafted summary of the Senator’s life. It had obviously been prepared well in advance and had been held ready for the moment, a practice as common as the obituaries of famous people written in advance and kept in ready at newspapers. When I got up around 7:00, I found the networks in full mourning-mode, with the major anchors on hand and, again, well-prepared biographical summaries. From then on, it was pretty much all-Teddy all the time. When I got back to D.C., I read a story in one paper that referred to “a nation in mourning.” I believe that the funeral was covered live today by some of the networks.

It all got me thinking about how “events” are shaped and even created by the media. Sen. Kennedy’s sister died two weeks or so before he did, and her death was noted in the media and in the press, but it didn’t take up a whole half-hour of the evening national news. Suppose the media and the press had treated the Senator’s death the same way that they treated Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s death. Would we still be able to speak about “a nation in mourning”? Senator Bird of West Virginia is well up there in years and has been ill of late. At his death does anyone expect from the press and the media anything like the reaction to the death of Sen. Kennedy? Will the nation be in mourning? Or does it take the media to plunge the nation into grief?

By coincidence last evening I came upon the hilarious review of a book on Ronald and Nancy Reagan that Gore Vidal published twenty-five years ago in the New York Review of Books. He makes a passing reference there to “the thundering sentimental scores” that Max Steiner composed to accompany Bette Davis’s acting in various Hollywood dramas to make sure that the audience wept at the appropriate moments. Are the media our Max Steiner?

Anybody else watching? I’m catching up now (thanks to my DVR). But you can tune in live at the Web site of the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

UPDATE: Don’t miss E.J. Dionne’s column about the Liberal Lion. A sample:

He suffered profoundly, made large mistakes and was, to say the least, imperfect. But the suffering and the failures fed a humane humility that led him to reach out to others who fell, to empathize with those burdened by pain, to understand human folly, and to appreciate the quest for redemption.

That made him a rarity in politics. Never pretending that he knew everything, he had a magnetic draw for talented people who stayed with him for years. He trusted them and gave them room to shine. Their guidance and his own intelligence and feverish work made him one of the greatest senators in history.

Good piece in today’s New York Times.

As recently as July, the bishops’ conference had largely embraced the president’s goals, although with the caveat that any health care overhaul avoid new federal financing of abortions. But in the last two weeks some leaders of the conference, like Cardinal Justin Rigali, have concluded that Democrats’ efforts to carve out abortion coverage are so inadequate that lawmakers should block the entire effort.

Others, echoing the popular alarms about “rationing,” contend that the proposals could put a premium on efficacy that could penalize the chronically ill.

“No health care reform is better than the wrong sort of health care reform,” Bishop R. Walker Nickless of Sioux City, Iowa, declared in a recent pastoral letter, urging the faithful to call their members of Congress.

In a diocesan newspaper column this week, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver agreed, saying the proposal was “not only imprudent; it’s also dangerous.”

Here’s Chaput’s column. And you can find Nickless’s right here.

More from Kirkpatrick:

Mr. Obama has said the health care overhaul should preserve the current policy that federal money not pay for elective abortions, and congressional Democrats say they are trying to do that. House health care legislation would allow the secretary of Health and Human Services to decide whether a proposed government insurance program would cover abortions. But any health insurance plan that does cover abortion — whether government-run or private — would be required to segregate its government subsidies from its patients’ premium payments so that no taxpayer money would pay for the procedure. And all patients would have the choice of plans that do and do not cover it.

House Democrats say many states similarly segregate federal money when they cover abortion under Medicaid. But abortion opponents say they take as a model the federal employees benefits program, which excludes health plans that cover abortion.

Kirkpatrick’s kicker is rather astounding:

“The Catholic Church does not teach that government should directly provide health care,” Bishop Nickless of Sioux City wrote, adding, “Any legislation that undermines the vitality of the private sector is suspect.”

Read the rest of this entry »

In his wonderful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God, Robert Wilken not only provides a fine introduction to the fathers of the Church, he also offers an overview of the fundamental themes of the Catholic wisdom tradition.

Chapter Eight, “Happy the People Whose God is the Lord,” draws principally upon  Saint Augustine’s great work, The City of God. To commemorate the feast day of the Bishop of Hippo, an excerpt from Wilken’s chapter:

Augustine offers no theory of political life in the City of God. But he shows that God can never be relegated to the periphery of a society’s life. That is why the book discusses two cities. He wishes to draw a contrast between the life of the city of God, a life that is centered on God and genuinely social, and life that is centered on itself. Augustine wished to redefine the realm of the public to make place for the spiritual, for God.

As Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury has observed, the City of God is a book about the “optimal form of corporate human life” in light of its “last end.” In Augustine’s view, “It is life outside the Christian community which fails to be truly public, authentically political. The opposition is not between public and private, church and world, but between political virtue and political vice. At the end of the day, it is the secular order that will be shown to be ‘atomistic’ in its foundations.”

A society that has no place for God will disintegrate into an amoral aggregate of competing, self-aggrandizing interests that are destructive of the commonweal.

Well, this is unusual.

Bishop Joseph F. Martino is expected to resign as head of the Diocese of Scranton next week, sources within the diocese confirmed to The Times-Tribune today.

Still waiting for official confirmation, of course. When was the last time a bishop just resigned?

UPDATE: It’s confirmed — and the auxilary bishop, John Dougherty, is going too. (He’d already turned 75 and was waiting for his resignation to be accepted.) Press conference on Monday; no official reason given yet.

Why so late with the Latin on Caritas in Veritate?

Reginaldus non est Romae.

Here’s the scoop from the Tablet –Robert Mickens’s Letters from Rome.  Many thanks to Eugene Palumbo who drew it to my attention:
Exactly two months ago Pope Benedict XVI signed what had been hailed as his “much-anticipated” encyclical on human development, Caritas in Veritate. However, the 145-page document was not made public until a week later when it was launched at an exclusively Italian-language press conference at the Vatican. Because of its importance for the worldwide Church, the encyclical was simultaneously issued in several modern European languages. But the Latin version was nowhere in sight – the first time in history that a papal encyclical did not debut in the Church’s “official” language. Now, several weeks late, the Latin text is finally ready for publication, although it’s not clear when it will be printed, given how little gets done during Italy’s August holidays. And it’s also unclear whether the Vatican plans to draw attention to the late arrival. So why the long delay? It’s simple – the absence of the Vatican’s top Latinist, Fr Reginald Foster OCD. The Carmelite priest, who will be 70 in a few months, has been on medical leave since January, and at a clinic in his native Milwaukee since late April. Without him, the rest of the Latin section at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State evidently
got lost in translation. Finally, an official decided enough was enough and sent the Latin draft to Fr Foster, asking him to make corrections quam primum. Speaking to me by phone this week, Reggie, as he is known to his friends, said he immediately spotted several errors and had “questions about some of the words” in the complicated text. But he had a relative fax the corrected pages back to the Vatican. Then he received a note from a friend in Rome, which read: “Sine te, Reginaldae, maxima calamitas est!”

In what seems to be a rejoinder to America magazine’s strong, persuasive editorial on the controversy surrounding President Obama and Notre Dame, Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne/South Bend restates his case against inviting the president to speak at commencement and awarding him an honorary doctor of laws.

At the outset it should be acknowledged that in responding to the controversy Bishop D’Arcy has not shown the same flair for the dramatic exhibited by some other bishops.  (Consider Bishop Doran of Rockford, Illinois, who, after declaring Notre Dame president John Jenkins no stranger to sponsoring smut–that would be the dreaded Vagina Monologues–suggested he rename Our Lady’s University “Northwestern Indiana Humanist University,” which Doran publicly communicated through the Cardinal Newman Society.) While one might disagree with Bishop D’Arcy’s version of events, it’s tough to take much issue with the way in which he has voiced his displeasure. In other words, he’s never approached the unhinged shenanigans of some of the protesters at Notre Dame. (Speaking of, I never thought Randall Terry could jump the shark. Wow, was I wrong.)

But that doesn’t mean Bishop D’Arcy is right.

Read the rest of this entry »

A while back, Gregory Wolfe posted a moving testimony to the force for good that Communion and Liberation hd been in his life –and asked a general question about the role of movements in the Church.  Maybe it’s the lawyer in me, but I see the possibility of danger, as well as good–and I’m worried about the danger .

I camer across a moving testimony of a different, and heartbraking, sort –from a young woman who feels betrayed by her time in a different movement — Regnum Christi.

How do we tell the good from the bad?  Ecclesiastical approval at the highest levels?  Regnum Christi and the Legionnaires of Christ were great favorites of John Paul II.   Endorsements and approval?   Power and influence?  Regnum Christi and the Legionnaires had all that.

And, apparently, all that was not enough.

Is more law the answer? Do we need “blue sky laws” and independent audits for movements to prevent spiritual fraud, just as we do for publicly traded corporations to prevent material fraud?  If so, what should they look like?   What rules and regulations have various dioceses implemented?

If not canon law, then what?

Canon lawyer Peter Vere has posted a list of questions to consider in evaluating movements, formulated by Fr. Morrissey, a professor of canon law at Ottowa.   The link is below; I have also pasted Mr. Vere’s letter into the com boxes, with his permission.

Here is the link:

http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/vere_peter_whatcanonlawyerslookfor_0402.htm

Ted was the only Kennedy politician I ever knew (the other brothers having died both before their time and before I was born), and I didn’t know nearly as much about him as I probably should have. I was mostly aware of him as a caricature and a punch line — at least until he opposed the Iraq War in 2002. So the obituaries and remembrances that mark his passing today are a chance for me to bone up on some recent history and take a look at the scope of his life and career.

The lengthy, detailed obituary in the New York Times was my first stop this morning. Later in the day I took advantage of the Daily Dish’s roundup of reactions across the Web. I found the short reflection from the Economist particularly insightful. It ends:

Mr Kennedy will never achieve the public sainthood that his brothers achieved. Republicans knew that, especially after he stopped being a presidential threat. That had the effect of allowing conservative activists to underestimate him and allowing conservative senators to work with him. Mr Kennedy found a way to push past his flaws, then use them to his advantage. His brothers furthered the myth that political progress is made by great men at great moments. Mr Kennedy proved that it is often the badly-flawed people, the counted-out people, who really get things done.

Matthew Yglesias points out that his youth at the time he arrived in the Senate was one of those “flaws” that became an advantage.

Have you read anything worth passing on about Senator Kennedy? And what do you remember?

President Obama has announced that he will name Ben Bernanke to a second term as chair of the Federal Reserve. This would seem to avoid the media frenzy of “will he?” / “won’t he?”  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/business/economy/26fed.html?hp

I have just finished reading David Wessel’s In Fed We Trust. Bernanke is impressively cool and clear-headed during the high moments of the crisis last year at this time. Not perfect, mind you, but the man for the job. Paulson is reported in the book to be as frantic and loose-minded as he appeared to be on TV. Wessel is well worth the read raising all the issues of conflict of interest that are lightly touched upon in most news stories.

UPDATE: Chris Eggeimeir posted a caveat about Bernake in the comments below. The caveator he cited,  Simon Johnson, has a post at the NYTimes. Reasonable questions are raised about whether Bernake can free himself from the powers and ideas that led to the current Great Recession. But as with the earlier discussion, Johnson does not propose an alternative to Bernake. Is that because there is no real alternative?

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/bernanke-and-other-firefighters/?hp

If you want a dose of inspiration for the day, go read the rest of this article:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — He toiled in California’s farm fields alongside his Mexican migrant worker parents and didn’t learn English until he was 12. Now Jose Hernandez, NASA astronaut, is about to rocket into orbit.  His parents will be in Florida next week for space shuttle Discovery’s launch, as will his two older brothers and sister, who also worked the cucumber, sugar beet and tomato fields back in the 1960s and 1970s.

“A lot of kids loved summer vacation,” Hernandez said in a recent interview. “We dreaded it because we knew what that meant. That meant we were going to be working seven days a week in the fields.” Hernandez, 47, vividly recalls being dusty, sweaty and tired in the back seat of the family’s car after a hard day of labor. Before starting the engine, his father would look back at his children and tell them, “Remember this feeling because if you guys don’t do well in school, this is your future.”

“That was pretty powerful,” Hernandez recalled. All four took it to heart. Each graduated from high school, “a moral victory” for third-grade educated Salvador and Julia Hernandez, now 71 and 67 years old, respectively. Each went to college, “the icing on the cake,” according to their youngest child. “And of course now being an astronaut, to them that’s just unbelievable,” said the soon-to-be spaceman. “I think they’re higher in orbit than we’re going to be in.”

Discovery is scheduled to blast off in the wee hours of Tuesday. Seven astronauts will be on board for the space station supply run, including two Mexican-Americans, as it turns out, and a Swede.

The Washington Post’s media maven, Howard Kurtz, notes that the persistence of the “death panel” reports shows the infirmity of the mainstream media:

For once, mainstream journalists did not retreat to the studied neutrality of quoting dueling antagonists.

They tried to perform last rites on the ludicrous claim about President Obama’s death panels, telling Sarah Palin, in effect, you’ve got to quit making things up.

But it didn’t matter. The story refused to die.

The crackling, often angry debate over health-care reform has severely tested the media’s ability to untangle a story of immense complexity. In many ways, news organizations have risen to the occasion; in others they have become agents of distortion. But even when they report the facts, they have had trouble influencing public opinion.

And that goes for the MSM across the spectrum, as far right as National Review. Canary in the mine for political discourse? Or has it always been thus?

Maureen Dowd’s column today is about Anna Wintour, the legendary –and legendarily difficult –editor of Vogue who was reportedly the model for Meryl Streep’s character Miranda Priestly in the (very funny) movie The Devil Wears Prada.

But I have a different theory.  I think something in Meryl Streep’s characterization was based on Professor Kingsfield, the legendary contracts professor from the Paper Chase–the fictionalized account of  life for first year law students at Harvard Law School.

Here are two scenes.  Miranda’s brutal take-down of Andie, the new graduate of Northwestern University who finds herself unexpectedly working for a fashion magazine, and Kingsfield’s brutal take-down of  Hart, the new graduate of the University of Minnesota who unexpectedly finds himself caught off-guard in the first day of class.

Jim Martin, SJ, discusses an important question at NPR.

My view:  Of course he did!

Who says newspapers report only the bad news? The Washington Post has marked the start of Ramadan with an interesting story about how the growing Muslim community in northern Virginia is finding worship space inside synagogues.

Will the Ramadan story become a staple in religion news coverage in the U.S. media, much as stories about Passover, Easter, Christmas and Good Friday are? It’s not easy for religion journalists to come up with a fresh angle for these stories! Harder, of course, is to fast all day from food and drink in the August heat – this is the first time in 33 years that Ramadan is being celebrated in August, as The Associated Press notes.

Happy Ramadan to the Muslim community.

“Torture and Academic Freedom”: The NYTimes has this blog debate on the question of UC Boalt School of Law withdrawing John Yoo’s tenured appointment. Interesting ins and outs of what he violated and did not violate offered by a group of law professors.

Kathleen Clark at Washington University has the clearest assessment of what Yoo probably violated, but it is unclear that his offense can be punished by withdrawal of tenure unless he is found guilty of violating his obligation to give his client (the executive branch of the U.S. government) an accurate legal assessment. We know he has violated that obligation from various testimonies and leaks, but somehow he has not been found guilty–except in some proportion of public opinion. Legal beagles? any assessments.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/torture-and-academic-freedom/

Writing in the Daily Beast, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz challenged Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to a debate about Catholic moral theology.   Dershowitz deeply disagrees with a dissenting opinion in which Scalia  (and Thomas) expressed doubts about whether the Constitution protects the right of a condemned prisoner who already had received a full and fair trial to additional collateral review of his case,  in a habeas corpus proceeding based on a new claim of  “actual innocence.”

Dershowitz thinks Scalia and Thomas are wrong about the Constitution.  More interestingly, however, he thinks they are bad Catholics.   He writes: “It would be shocking enough for any justice of the Supreme Court to issue such a truly outrageous opinion, but it is particularly indefensible for Justices Scalia and Thomas, both of whom claim to be practicing Catholics, bound by the teaching of their church, to do moral justice.”

He goes on to opine, “whatever the view of the church is on executing the guilty, surely it is among the worst sins, under Catholic teaching, to kill an innocent human being intentionally.  Yet that is precisely what Scalia would authorize under his skewed view of the United States Constitution. How could he possibly consider that not immoral under Catholic teachings.”

Dershowitz is right that intentionally killing an innocent human being is a grave sin.  But in Catholic thought (unlike some versions of criminal law), “intentionally” does not mean “foreseeably.”   Moreover, Catholicism takes seriously the nature and limits of role-related obligations.  Consequently, when a judge does his job, following  just procedures to the best of his ability, he  cannot be said intentionally to inflict unjust harm an innocent defendant who is caught in the web of the system–even if that judge personally recognizes the defendant’s innocence.

The moral and jurisprudential question has to be:  what is a just procedure, all things considered?  In evaluating habeas corpus procedures, how do we balance the conflicting social goods of achieving a correct result, on the one hand, and recognizing the need for finality, on the other?   I myself think that in our society, given its resources for discovering the truth, a just system of collateral appeals requires special accommodation for claims of actual innocence in death penalty cases.  But in other societies, with fewer resources, this might not be the case.  (I’m here prescinding, as Dershowitz does, from the question whether the death penalty is just–I’d say the same thing about a sentence of  life in a supermax facility).

If they do have a debate, I’d like to propose a theological  text as its basis:  St. Thomas Aquinas on the duties of a judge with respect to a condemned prisoner he knows to be innocent: Summa Theologica, II-II, q 64 art. 6, rep. ob. 3.

Ad tertium dicendum quod iudex, si scit aliquem esse innocentem qui falsis testibus convincitur, debet diligentius examinare testes, ut inveniat occasionem liberandi innoxium, sicut Daniel fecit. Si autem hoc non potest, debet eum ad superiorem remittere iudicandum. Si autem nec hoc potest, non peccat secundum allegata sententiam ferens, quia non ipse occidit innocentem, sed illi qui eum asserunt nocentem. Minister autem iudicis condemnantis innocentem, si sententia intolerabilem errorem contineat, non debet obedire, alias excusarentur carnifices qui martyres occiderunt. Si vero non contineat manifestam iniustitiam, non peccat praeceptum exequendo, quia ipse non habet discutere superioris sententiam; nec ipse occidit innocentem, sed iudex, cui ministerium adhibet.

If the judge knows that man who has been convicted by false witnesses, is innocent he must, like Daniel, examine the witnesses with great care, so as to find a motive for acquitting the innocent: but if he cannot do this he should remit him for judgment by a higher tribunal. If even this is impossible, he does not sin if he pronounce sentence in accordance with the evidence, for it is not he that puts the innocent man to death, but they who stated him to be guilty. He that carries out the sentence of the judge who has condemned an innocent man, if the sentence contains an inexcusable error, he should not obey, else there would be an excuse for the executions of the martyrs: if however it contain no manifest injustice, he does not has no right to discuss the judgment of his superior; nor is it he who slays the innocent man, but the judge whose minister he is.

Journalistic ethics might not permit David Gibson to note it, but nothing, I believe, prevents my drawing attention to his review in “America” of Patrick J. McCloskey’s new book The Street Stops Here: AYear at a Catholic High School in Harlem. It is a year-long study of Rice High School, and by David’s account, an important book.  Thanks to Eugene Palumbo for suggesting the thread.

For all of those dotcommonweal readers who don’t subscribe to People magazine, here is  a recent story about Kourtney Kardashian and abortion.

The pedagogical power of People is. . . considerable.

Thanks to a recommendation by Austen Ivereigh (on the America site), I have been led to  the works of Michael Casey, an Australian Cistercian monk. I’ ve been reading his Fully Human, Fully Divine with much pleasure and profit.

The book is a theological-spiritual meditation upon the Tradition’s teaching that, in Christ, humankind is called to transformation and divinization (theosis).

As a Cistercian, Casey draws upon the rich heritage of the Cistercian fathers: Aelred of Rievaulx, Isaac of Stella, and, especially, Bernard of Clairvaux, whose feast the Church celebrates today.

Casey concludes his book with a chapter, “Eternity,” and writes:

We are divinized to the extent that nothing of our humanity is denied, despised, or ignored, when nothing of what makes us human is lost or left behind. Just as God’s Son lost nothing of his divinity during his sojourn on earth, so we will carry to eternal life everything in our lives that is genuinely human.

May the humanity of Jesus inspire us to accept our own humanity in all its present ambiguity, so that through him and with him and in him we may become, in a manner that is beyond our imagining, full sharers in his divinity.

And Casey quotes an “Ode on Eternal Day” from Bernard’s “Sermons on the Song of Songs:”

O never-ending solstice when daylight lasts forever.

O noon-day light, marked with the mildness of Spring,

stamped with summer’s bold beauty, enriched with autumn’s fruit –

and lest I seem to forget — calm with winter’s rest from toil.

I’m about to do something I’m not used to doing: criticize an act of church-based political activism for not focusing enough on the single issue of abortion.

The headline in the Scranton Times-Tribune today: “Anti-health-reform flier distributed in Church bulletin.” The Times-Tribune‘s website has a just-legible scan of the flier, which is signed “Susan Cirba, Education Director” and bears the logo of Pennsylvanians for Human Life. Follow that link and you’ll find this description: “Pennsylvanians for Human Life is a non-sectarian, non-partisan, non-profit organization that educates the public on life issues in an informative, non-judgemental [sic] manner.”

These are all important values for any organization that wants to distribute literature at Mass. Unfortunately, the flier that parishioners at St. John the Evangelist got in their bulletin wasn’t exactly “non-partisan” or “non-judgmental.” The paper quotes one parishioner who describes it more accurately: “It’s lies and it’s inflammatory.” What most surprised me when I read it was how little of it is related — even very distantly — to abortion, and specifically to the genuine concerns about abortion funding that have been articulated, for example, by the USCCB. In fact, it bears no relation at all to the U.S. Bishops’ stated position on health-care reform. Instead, it’s full of claims like this: “The bill establishes mandatory ‘end of life counseling’ for those age 65 and older that we suspect will promote assisted suicide and euthanasia. This is not far fetched.” The flier directs folks to prolifescranton.org, the Web site of the Scranton chapter of Pennsylvanians for Human Life, for more “information” (“Please click on the assisted suicide navigation bar,” it says), as well as to Cirba’s blog and a few other sites (but not the one set up by the USCCB to educate Catholics about health-care-reform-related issues).

The impetus for distributing the flier in this location last Sunday was evidently to get folks to turn out to a “town hall meeting” with U.S. Rep. Chris Carney (D) on Monday. (Carney, I see, had moved the location of that meeting “to make sure that everyone who wants to be heard has a voice in the process.” I wonder whether he regretted it.)

The Times-Tribune seems to have done a good job covering this — and explaining why it’s odd. As for how it got in the bulletin:

Mrs. Cirba said Tuesday that she did not send the letter directly to St. John’s or any other church. Instead, she sent it to members of her organization in Honesdale and Carbondale before Mr. Carney’s meeting and, “I guess the pastor felt it was important enough to put in the bulletin,” she said.

Efforts to contact the pastor, the Rev. William J. P. Langan, were unsuccessful Tuesday. A Diocese of Scranton spokesman who was given a copy of the letter Tuesday did not respond to requests for comment.

This isn’t the first time St. John the Evangelist in Honesdale, PA, has found itself at the center of the church-and-politics debate. You may recall the discussion forum held there last October — the one where Bishop Joseph Martino reportedly declared, “No USCCB document is relevant in this diocese.” The document he was dismissing at that time was “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” so it will be interesting to hear whether he considers this weekend’s bulletin insert any more relevant or worthy of discussion. I’m also hoping to learn more about whether the pastor, Fr. Langan, really did approve the distribution of this material in the bulletin, as Cirba supposes he did. It may or may not be significant that Fr. Langan is brand-new at St. John’s — he was assigned there, and the previous pastor was reassigned, by Bishop Martino in July.

A fascinating article by Michael Paulson, in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, discusses how religious scholars and writers have, over time, become increasingly enthusiastic about the oeuvre of J. K. Rowling. The Harry Potter books, religious studies professors and journalists now say, contain positive or appealingly nuanced moral messages, according to the article.  Some even tout the series as allegory. Paulson is the Globe’s religion reporter.

Thanks to the invaluable Arts & Letters Daily website for highlighting this piece.