Here’s one that’s sure to get some twisted knickers:

Bishop Edward Slattery of Tulsa has decreed that the celebrant at masses in the Cathedral will now celebrate ad orientam, to the East (though it’s not clear if the sanctuary points East). Here is a link to Slattery’s column in the diocesan magazine announcing the change, in a pdf format.

The New Liturgical Movement has excerpts as well here, in which Slattery explains why, along with Pope Benedict XVI, he believes ad orientam is superior to versus populum–and is not about the celebrant “turning his back to the people”:

In the last 40 years…this shared orientation was lost; now the priest and the people have become accustomed to facing in opposite directions. The priest faces the people while the people face the priest, even though the Eucharistic Prayer is directed to the Father and not to the people.

This innovation was introduced after the Vatican Council, partly to help the people understand the liturgical action of the Mass by allowing them to see what was going on, and partly as an accommodation to contemporary culture where people who exercise authority are expected to face directly the people they serve, like a teacher sitting behind her desk.

Unfortunately this change had a number of unforeseen and largely negative effects. First of all, it was a serious rupture with the Church’s ancient tradition. Secondly, it can give the appearance that the priest and the people were engaged in a conversation about God, rather than the worship of God. Thirdly, it places an inordinate importance on the personality of the celebrant by placing him on a kind of liturgical stage.

The “reform of the reform” continues apace, which is something of an irony in view of Benedict’s ostensible ‘conservativsm.” Posts on liturgy are always going to create uproars. I will admit that this admixture of rites disturbs me, because it seems to foster division rather than the unity the liturgy aims to do.

And not just in the pews. I was struck by the statements (as related in The Tablet) from the new Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, to a gathering of the Latin Mass Society that the old rite is not to supplant or be construed as superior to the novus ordo. “The view that the ordinary form of the Mass, in itself, is in some way deficient finds no place here,” he said.

What Bishop Slattery seems to be doing is a kind of admixture, I think. That may be even more problematic. Question: Does the Novus Ordo allow for an ad orientam posture?

The New York Times obituary for columnist and political provocateur Bob Novak ends on a punch line:

After largely ignoring religion and dabbling in Unitarianism, Mr. Novak, in 1998, at age 67, converted to Roman Catholicism. In a ceremony, Msgr. Peter Vaghi proclaimed that the “prince of darkness” had been transformed into a “child of light.”

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who was in attendance, warned against jumping to conclusions.

“Well, we’ve now made Bob a Catholic,” Mr. Moynihan said, according to Washingtonian magazine. “The question is, Can we make him a Christian?”

I guess that’s one way to read this story on the gala planned for the end of the Year for Priests:

Vatican City, Aug 14, 2009 / 10:19 am (CNA).- The Congregation for the Clergy, headed by Cardinal Claudio Hummes, announced this week that the Pope Benedict XVI plans to close the Year for Priests by convoking a huge meeting of priests from around the world between June 9-11 in Rome.

Every Catholic priest in the world—there are around 407,000—is invited to the meeting, which will have the theme of “Faithfulness of Christ, Faithfulness of the Priest.”

Maybe the nuns can fill in that Sunday? If the Vatican investigation clears them…This actually echoes the experience here in New York during last year’s papal visit, when all New York priests were supposed to come to Yankee Stadium to help distribute communion for the Yankee Stadium finale. That would have effectively left parishes without the Sunday Eucharist, and a few pastors said thanks but no thanks.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious has issued a statement [.PDF] objecting to the fact that church authorities will not disclose who has funded a Vatican investigation of women religious in the United States.

Comments the apostolic visitator, Mother Mary Clare Millea, made to Catholic News Service on July 31 raised many more questions than they answered:

Mother Clare …  declined to discuss specifics related to the study’s cost, including how it is being financed. She said, however, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is not funding the effort.

“Anyone who has contributed has not wanted their name to be publicized,” she said. … “We are welcoming the support of individual dioceses, individuals or groups who would be willing to help defray the expenses.”

Nor would Mother Clare identify the bishops and others who developed the questions submitted to the religious orders. “We feel it’s prudent to let them remain anonymous,” CNS quoted her as saying.

But actually, it would be prudent to have reasonable disclosure. The larger issue lurking here is the extent to which major donors wield outsized influence in the Catholic Church.  That is a story that would really take off with the right opening.

Here you can find the beautiful and moving eulogy preached at the funeral of Cory Aquino by her long-time friend and spiritual advisor, Fr. Catalino Arevalo, S.J.

A “founding father” of the field of  bioethics, Dan Callahan’s work on the nature, purposes, and limits of health care is essential reading.

Get well soon, Dan!

I remember an incident a view years back that really made me despair about our collective ability to get a handle on health care costs.  I was consulting to a large, multi-site radiology practice that was taking a look at its MRI practice.  While there were a small set of MRI scans that made up the bulk of the work (e.g. knee, hip, spine, etc.), each radiologist had small differences in how they ordered those scans, i.e. which view of the joint they wanted in what order.  These differences tended to reflect differences in training.

The site chiefs believed that it would be more efficient if the practice could agree on standardized approaches (known as “protocols”) to ordering these scans.  This would be especially useful in cases where a study ordered by one radiologist (e.g. during an ER visit) was read by another in a different location.  It would also be easier to develop standard templates for the radiologists to use in documenting their findings.

All the chiefs could see the benefits of this idea.  We put together a committee—with several subcommittees—to develop the protocols.  Several of the chiefs volunteered some of their younger colleagues, because they thought this would be a good leadership development opportunity.  We worked hard over several weeks and developed a proposed set of protocols for review.

When the final set came before the chiefs for review, several became controversial.  The draft protocols for knee, hip, and shoulder contained many more views of the joint than any of the chiefs—all very experienced—would generally order.  Implementation of these protocols would have led to a significant increase in costs and a degradation in appointment access, since these studies would now have taken longer.

The protocols were “remanded,” so to speak, back to our committee. What became clear in the ensuing dialogue was that the younger physicians who had recently completed training were demanding more views.  Our first reaction was to assume that this reflected a lack of confidence, leading to a need for more views.  It turned out, though, that it really reflected changes in the underlying technology that made the additional views more likely—but still not very likely—to reveal positive findings of one form or another.  Rather than deferring to the chiefs, the younger physicians stuck to their guns, convinced that settling for a smaller number of views was poor medicine.

We were at an impasse.  I remember a later discussion among the chiefs.  One of the chiefs, a very respected and experienced radiologist, ruefully admitted that he felt uncomfortable second-guessing his younger colleague about the knee protocol.  “You should see her at work,” he said. “she can find things I never would have found.”  While we did implement some of the protocols, we ultimately abandoned our effort to develop a consensus around the rest.

One of the iron rules of health care is that if the technology is available, it will be used.  And, yes, that means we will sometimes find things that would not have been found before and that patients will benefit as a result.  But it may well be the case that one might have to scan many, many patients with this new and more expensive technology in order to find a single case of the finding in question.  The physician wrestles with a tension between his or her duty—enshrined in both law and professional ethics— to the patient in front of them and their responsibility—often less clearly defined—to be good stewards of the resources of the health care system.  Patients, for our part, tend to complain about “waste, fraud and abuse” in the health care system when it is tied to the actions of others.  When it comes to our own care, however, we tend to want the physician to do everything possible.

 I don’t have a tidy set of ideas for reining in health care costs, mostly because I can easily imagine why most of them won’t work very well.  I am fairly certain, though, that if we don’t find a way to use our ever expanding array of health care technology more judiciously, the health care system is going to collapse under its own weight.

Today’s New York Times gives a matter of fact and chilling chronology of the time elapsed from when a small plane left Teterboro airport to its collision with a helicopter over the Hudson River last Saturday: 11:43:30 a.m. to 11:53:14 a.m.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article by a priest who ministered to some of the families after the tragedy, and preached the homily at the funeral Mass for the helicopter pilot, Jeremy Clarke. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Capt. Clarke believed in just such a promise of God’s enduring love. In fact, he believed it so much that just recently he decided to come back to his Catholic faith through the sacrament of confirmation. He described this adult decision in a “letter to God” that his fiancée shared with me. He wrote:

Dear God,

None of this could have happened without your intervention. The timing could not have been more perfect. The improbable has become a reality.

I pray to keep improving myself and getting better with your help. Thank you for all that I have in my life, I am blessed.

With love,

Jeremy Clarke

On this feast of the Assumption of Mary, from John Donne’s “A Litanie:”

For that faire blessed Mother-maid,

Whose flesh redeem’d us; that she-Cherubin

Which unlocked Paradise, and made

One claime for innocence, and disseiz’d sinne,

Whose wombe was a strange heav’n, for there

God cloath’d himselfe, and grew,

Our zealous thankes wee poure. As her deeds were

Our helpes, so are her prayers; nor can she sue

In vaine, who hath such titles unto You.

One of the voices most worth listening to on matters of health care policy is Michael Place, former head of the Catholic Health Association, former advisor to Cardinal Bernardin, and charter member of the Catholic Common Ground Initiative. He is a moral theologian with extensive, on-the-ground, practical experience.   Here is an article he published in the current issue of America

I had the privilege of being part of  a CHA working group that he convened on cooperation with evil and Catholic health care institutions, which brought together a broad range of Catholic moralists to discuss the application of the principle of cooperation in an institutional setting.  Father Place was a superb facilitator of the discussion, regularly clarifying the issues, and identifying the fault lines, and bottom lines, in a non-polemical way.  For anyone interested in teaching or learning the topic of cooperation with evil, the final report is, I think, a good resource.

Charles Krauthammer’s column in today’s Washington Post makes a good deal of use of three reports from the Congressional Budget Office about the very high cost of the proposed reforms of health care. He is particularly concerned to show how prevention does not reduce but increases the total costs. I don’t know where the truth in any of this lies, but the one great question I’ve had from the beginning is this: How do we pay for it?

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University has just released a study, carried out on behalf of the National Religious Vocations Conference, entitled “Study of Recent Vocations to Religious Life.”

John Allen said the “sound bite” coming from this study would be: “the next generation of religious will be more ethnically diverse and more traditional.”

It is already the subject of heavy spin-control with conservatives crowing and liberals discounting the conservative response.

John Allen has given the report his usual nuanced response here. He uses terms from the sociology of religion to try to understand what’s going on — “high tension” vs. “low tension.”

CARA is here. You can download a pdf of the report directly off their home page.

Let’s say good night with a laugh — courtesy of Fail Blog.

(I know, I know… he’s a bishop, not a cardinal. Anybody recognize the poor guy?)

A comment on an earlier post made me think about the ways in which the meaning of the term “socialized medicine” has changed over the years.

Decades ago, the term tended to be used to describe a system in which the public sector directly provided health care services, as is the case in the United Kingdom.  To some extent, this usage makes sense as such a system literally “socializes” the practice of medicine. 

During the 1950s, the term also got applied—in a pejorative way—to physician group practices such as those affiliated with Kaiser Permanente here in California (disclosure: KP is my employer).  Kaiser Permanente physicians were refused admission to the California Medical Association and often refused admitting privileges at hospitals because they were practicing “socialized medicine.”  The charge was ironic because Henry Kaiser was as capitalist as they come and operated huge construction and manufacturing businesses.  Kasier tried to apply the same techniques of vertical integration that he used in his other industries to health care.

More recently, the term now seems to be applied, willy-nilly, to a wide range of national health insurance systems with fundamentally different features.  In Canada, for example, the practice of medicine, per se, is not socialized.  Physicians and hospitals (other than public hospitals) remain private entities.  A more correct term for the Canadian system would be socialized insurance.

In other countries, though, the term has even less meaning because there is often a mix of public and private entities involved in both care delivery and insurance.  In Germany, for example, union-sponsored “sick funds” play a major role in the health insurance market.  The only thing really “socialized” about these systems is that there is an ultimate guarantee that if you fall through the cracks of the insurance market, there is some kind of public provision for your care.

When I look at the major health care reform bills moving through Congress, it looks to me like they envision this kind of mixed system rather than fully socializing the practice of medicine (UK) or insurance (Canada).   For good or for ill, the vast majority of individuals will still obtain insurance through their employer, although purchasing coverage as an individual will be considerably easier and—for low and moderate income families—more affordable.  Guaranteed issue and a moderate standardization of benefit packages will prevent the ‘race to the bottom’ that has recently characterized benefit design in the health insurance market.  We can certainly raise a lot of questions about the financing and how much the federal government, employers and individuals should be asked to contribute.  But that is haggling over the details.

 My sense, though, is that the health care reform debate has moved far beyond these pragmatic considerations and has become an epic clash of ideological worldviews.  Conservatives—when their criticisms are not completely detached from reality—seem fear that such a significant expansion of the federal government’s role in health care threatens to undermine the progress they have made in lowering the burden of federal taxation, retrieving the ideas of federalism, and reducing the dependence of individuals on the state.  Many liberals, for their part, are hoping for just the opposite, i.e. that the success of health care reform will restore public trust in the capacity of the federal government to act effectively on behalf of the common good.  A few, though, seem to be clinging to the idea of a “public option” out of an ideological antipathy to the private provision of health insurance and a a hope that a gradual migration of people into the public plan would lead to the de facto adoption of a “single payer” system.

These are concepts worth arguing about, but I wish the partisans had picked another issue.  The reality is that our health care system is a patchwork partnership between the federal government, states, and the private sector and under any conceivable reform scenario it will—and should—remain so.

The distinguished Christian ethicist Gilbert Meilaender published an essay in this issue of Commonweal lamenting the dissolution of President Bush”s bioethics council, on which he served.

That President Obama would want to appoint his own bioethics council is, of course, not surprising.  As Professor Meilaender knows, President Bush dissolved President Clinton’s bioethics commission in order to appoint his own group.  My guess is that some members of President Clinton’s commission were as displeased as Professor Meilaender now is when their group was disbanded.

The larger question, it seems to me, is what is the purpose of such a presidential council?  Moreover, we should ask what kind of diversity ought such a council to seek in light of its purposes?  I reflect upon these questions in this article,  which argues that neither the Clinton Commission nor the Bush Council really filled the bill.

Correction:  President Bush alllowed the Clinton Commission to expire naturally (on Oct. 31, 2001), but named Kass as the head of his new commission the preceding August, and set him to work  on the stem cell question.

The second story in the “Interrogation, Inc.” series, by the New York Times’s David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti, focuses on the CIA’s secret prisons — aka “black sites” — and the man who was commissioned to create them. Like the interrogation “experts” profiled in yesterday’s story (discussed here), this man built a fortune with the help of the extralegal aspects of the “war on terror.”

The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had transformed Mr. Foggo from a fringe player into the C.I.A.’s indispensable man. Before the 9/11 attacks, the Frankfurt base was a relatively sleepy resupply center, running one or two flights a month to outlying stations. Within days of the attacks, Mr. Foggo had a budget of $7 million, which quickly tripled.

…He was a logical choice for the prison project: aggressive, resourceful, patriotic, ready to dispense a favor; some inside the C.I.A. jokingly compared him to Milo Minderbinder, the fictional character who rose from mess hall officer to the black-market magnate of Joseph Heller’s World War II novel “Catch-22.”

Even his name, “Dusty Foggo,” would fit right into Heller’s darkly comic universe. And, in a turn of events worthy of Heller, Foggo is now serving time in prison for fraud — but not for “wrongdoing in connection with the secret prisons.” That was just his job.

There’s another pop-culture reference in the story I found even more chilling:

Eventually, the agency’s network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields, officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, “forever.”)

Here’s hoping this new focus on the ugly facts will shame us into doing more than joking about the damage done. With reporting like this to its credit, maybe the NYT will even find the integrity to start calling torture by its proper name.

UPDATE: Scott Horton — a very valuable source of information on the ongoing investigation of the legal side of the “war on terror” — blogs at Harper’s about this story, and what it conspicuously left out.

“We have to make decisions that are deliberative about our health care at every moment. What I have said is that if I cannot say another prayer, if I cannot give or get another hug, and if I cannot have another martini — then let me go.”

–Monsignor Charles Fahey, 76, chairman of the board of the National Council on Aging, a nonprofit service and advocacy group. He was responding to the Associated Press about Sarah Palin’s “death panel” accusations and was Religion News Service’s Quote of the Day.

When I broke my ankle, my sister came out to help for a few days.  I told my six-year-old niece that I appreciated her sacrifice of her mother’s presence , and wanted to give her a little gift as a token of my appreciation.  What did she want:  “a girl on an elephant.”  It was a toy she’d seen somewhere–that was all the information I could get out of her.

Now, I was completely trapped at home.  What to do?  I went to Amazon.com, typed in “girl elephant” and found, well, a girl on an elephant–Island Princess Barbie, to be precise:

Eureka.     Two clicks, and it was on its way.

Amazon has changed the way I do almost everything–almost all books I buy, almost all stuff I buy, Christmas presents, etc. are done online.  I’ve bought appliances online.  I don’t go and browse.

Never mind “Bowling Alone.”  Are Americans –heaven forbid–shopping alone?  And is this a good thing?  Or does having to get out and mingle in the public square —to go to the toystore– do something good for us?

By claiming that Democrats are pushing health-care reform too quickly, Republicans are asking us to forget anything that happened before the last election. Americans have been talking about this problem for decades now; meanwhile little has been done about it. And as we have continued to talk, the problem has gotten much worse. Now Democrats who made health-care reform a prominent part of their platform have set about making good on their campaign promise. This is how democracy is supposed to work, no?

No doubt Republicans would like to see this — and every other important — question deferred until after the midterm elections. But Republican presidents and congressmen have been deferring or scuttling health-care reform for forty years. To the president they now say, Take your time. To themselves they say, Kill it. They call what’s happening a hurry not because they think health-care reform is too important to rush, but because many of them still don’t see what’s so urgent about helping the fifty million Americans who are uninsured and the many millions more who are underinsured. This Times article could help them see, if they would stop using the American flag as a blindfold.

For the second day in a row, thousands of people lined up on Wednesday — starting after midnight and snaking into the witching hours — for free dental, medical and vision services, courtesy of a nonprofit group that more typically provides mobile health care for the rural poor.

Like a giant MASH unit, the floor of the Los Angeles Forum, the arena where Madonna once played four sold-out shows, housed aisle upon aisle of dental chairs, where drilling, cleaning and extracting took place in the open. A few cushions were duct-taped to a folding table in a coat closet, an examining room where Dr. Eugene Taw, a volunteer, saw patients.

When Remote Area Medical, the Tennessee-based organization running the event, decided to try its hand at large urban medical services, its principals thought Los Angeles would be a good place to start. But they were far from prepared for the outpouring of need. Set up for eight days of care, the group was already overwhelmed on the first day after allowing 1,500 people through the door, nearly 500 of whom had still not been served by day’s end and had to return in the wee hours Wednesday morning.

We have good reasons to hurry.

One of the interesting dynamics in the current debate over health care reform is the number of people who are concerned about government involvement in health care. As someone who has been working in health care for more than 15 years, I have to say that the horses left the barn on that one a very long time ago.

First of all, federal and state governments are a direct provider of health insurance to a very large number of people. Medicare (a federal program) and Medicaid (a federal-state partnership) together provide health insurance to more than 100 million Americans. Taken together, these two programs—which have been around since the mid-1960s–provide almost half the revenue going to hospitals.

In addition to providing health insurance directly, federal, state and local governments also buy a lot of health insurance from private insurers. This is mostly to cover their employees (roughly 16 million FTEs), but the Children’s Health Insurance Program (another federal-state partnership) also purchases private health insurance for about 10 million children nationwide.

Federal and state governments are also major regulators of the health care sector and this, too, has been the case for a very long time. Hospitals are regulated at both the federal and state level, although hospitals accredited by the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) are usually deemed to have met many federal and state regulations. Physicians, nurses and other health care professionals must also comply with both state laws and the rules of their professional bodies.

In addition to regulating providers (e.g. hospitals, physicians), federal and state governments also regulate the business of insurance. This is primarily a state function.  Here in California we actually have two bodies to do this, the Department of Insurance (which regulates all types of insurance, including health insurance) and the Department of Managed Health Care (which specifically regulates HMOs). Employers who self-insure are exempt from state insurance law, but are governed by a federal law called ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.

Finally, while government plays a smaller role in the direct provision of health care services in the United States than in some other countries, its role is still significant. Public (non-federal) hospitals account for close to a quarter of all community hospitals in the United States, and many of these hospitals provide essential (but expensive) services that other hospitals have abandoned, such as trauma centers and burn units. The VA, of course, runs the largest integrated health care delivery systems in the country, with more than 1400 hospitals, clinics and nursing homes.

My point in recounting all this is merely to say that federal, state and local governments have been deeply involved in providing health care and health insurance—and in regulating these industries—for a very long time. Those of us who work in the industry sometimes chafe at this oversight, but we also respect, for example, the VA’s achievements in the area of patient safety and Medicare’s increasing sophistication about quality measurement and improvement.

The health care bills currently working their way through the Congress are very large and I’m sure almost everyone can find something in them that concerns them. We certainly need a deep and substantive debate over the details of this legislation. It should not be rushed through because of some artificial deadline. But angry rhetoric about the evils of “government controlled health care” is deeply disconnected from the reality of the health care system and the real challenges it faces, not least of which is the growing number of uninsured.

Today’s must-read: the first, jaw-dropping article in the Times‘ important two-part series “Interrogation, Inc.” Bear with me as I quote at some length:

Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.

(…)

At the C.I.A. in December 2001, Dr. Mitchell’s theories were attracting high-level attention. Agency officials asked him to review a Qaeda manual, seized in England, that coached terrorist operatives to resist interrogations. He contacted Dr. Jessen, and the two men wrote the first proposal to turn the enemy’s brutal techniques — slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding — into an American interrogation program.

By the start of 2002, Dr. Mitchell was consulting with the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center, whose director, Cofer Black, and chief operating officer, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., were impressed by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon. One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear. In this person’s words, Dr. Mitchell suggested that interrogations required “a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings.”

What a colossally foolish notion. By the spring of ’02, Scott Shane reports, the United States had captured Abu Zubaydah. In Thailand, the FBI used traditional–and legal–”rapport-building methods” to gain information from Zubaydah. “Then the C.I.A. team, including Dr. Mitchell, arrived,” Shane writes. “With the backing of agency headquarters, Dr. Mitchell ordered Mr. Zubaydah stripped, exposed to cold and blasted with rock music to prevent sleep. Not only the F.B.I. agents but also C.I.A. officers at the scene were uneasy about the harsh treatment.” According to one official Shane interviewed, within weeks Mitchell was directly questioning Zubaydah.

Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times’ Paul Vitello  took a look back this week on the Catholic bishops’ lobbying campaign that averted proposed New York state legislation to open the door to many more lawsuits over sexual abuse of children.  It turned out that some of the Assembly members who voted for the bill in previous years, when it had no chance of passing in the  State Senate, withdrew their support for  Assemblywoman Marge Markey’s measure once it became clear that it might actually have the votes to become law.

The Markey bill  would have created a one-year window to file  lawsuits currently barred by the statute of limitations. The bishops’ best argument, in my view,  is that however horrendous the clergy sex abuse scandal is, it would be fundamentally unfair to rewrite the legal rules covering past offenses with the primary aim of making the Catholic Church pay up. It is fundamentally unfair to the many victims, however, that the church’s systematic cover-up of the problem will not be punished adequately  in the New York state legal system.

Shouldn’t there be some form of arbitration under which dioceses will  compensate the victims to the best of their ability? Now would be a good moment for the New York state bishops to make that decision, before the Legislature returns to reconsider Markey’s bill.  And if the New York state bishops can’t agree on this, then individual bishops can in conscience act on their own.

At his Boston Globe blog, Articles of Faith, Michael Paulson reports getting some blowback for using the word “wafer” instead of “host” (or “Host”) in this story on the return of perpetual adoration at a eucharistic shrine in Boston. The most extensive criticism came from Terry Mattingly at his GetReligion blog.

To which Michael responds:

Just to be clear: multiple mainstream dictionaries identify the altar bread most commonly used in Catholic churches as a wafer. Here, from Dictionary.com, is the second definition of wafer: “a thin disk of unleavened bread, used in the Eucharist, as in the Roman Catholic Church.” Although some of the commenters complained that the word is pejorative, so far as I can tell dictionaries do not describe it that way, and a quick Google search suggests that the word is widely used in the Catholic context.

Furthermore, I need to be clear about how I see my role here: I’m a religion writer for a secular newspaper; I am not an apologist or an evangelist for Catholicism or any other religion. Part of my job is to try to describe what is going on in the world of religion using language that is clear, descriptive, and understandable, to readers of a variety of faiths and to readers of no faith. It is not my job to stake out, or to state, a position on what takes place metaphysically during a Catholic Mass or any other religious rite — in this story I described, to the best of my ability, what the Catholic Church says takes place, but it is not my role to simply assert, as some readers suggested I should have, that God is present in the consecrated bread. That is a belief, and one that I respect, but when I am describing a religious practice I am attempting to describe the tangible and visible aspects of that practice in language that readers can clearly understand, and I rely on worshipers, religious leaders, and academics to describe what believers understand to be happening spiritually or supernaturally.

I must admit I winced reflexively at the use of “wafer” in the lead. But it is not a simple question. Or is it? One could argue he should describe it as the Body of Christ if he is going to call it anything. Anyway, nothing could be more fraught than describing the eucharist–and we don’t have to resort to the “wafer wars” uproar.

This is a matter of professional interest to me, as well, so I am interested in feedback. I have written so many stories referring to the eucharist yet I can’t recall exactly what I’ve done, or if I’ve had a set policy, or what newspapers follow. Probably the AP Stylebook–and I’m not sure what AP style is, actually.

I would probably describe it as the host, on first reference (“Mr. Host” thereafter?), with an explainer thereafter as to why Catholics refer to the wafer that way. In other words, try to finesse it a bit.

PS: This also echoes the issue of whether the pronoun referring to Jesus should be capitalized.

Lots to keep you busy in the latest issue of Commonweal:

• We’ve already been discussing Andrew Bacevich’s article “The War We Can’t Win,” from the new issue of Commonweal. Subscribers will want to check out Joel Hafvenstein’s article “The Cost of Peace” for another perspective on what it will take to succeed in Afghanistan.
• Our editorial, “In Defense of Politics,” is a response to Caritas in veritate and the pope’s discussion of solidarity and subsidiarity. Subscribers can read two more takes on the encyclical, by Daniel Finn and Eugene McCarraher.
• Gilbert Meilander, a member of President Bush’s bioethics council, responds to President Obama’s decision to disband the council with a defense of the political role of public bioethics commissions: “End of Discussion.”
• Richard Alleva reviews the Michael Mann film Public Enemies.

If the above hasn’t convinced you to subscribe today, there’s also a new short story by Valerie Sayers, “Brooklyn, Bewitched“; a review of the James Ensor show at MoMA by Alejandro Anreus; book reviews of Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid (reviewed by Beth Dufresne) and Shaun Casey’s The Making of a Catholic President (reviewed by James P. McCartin); and Peter Quinn’s remembrance of his friend Frank McCourt.

The reading in today’s Morning Prayer is from the Book of Job. It served to bring to my mind once again the two horrendous and fatal accidents of the past few weeks in my native New York.

One was on the Taconic State Parkway in which a van drove the wrong way on the highway and crashed head-on into an SUV. Four children and the driver of the van perished, as well as three men heading to the home of the daughter of one for Sunday dinner. Along with others, I could enter vividly into the scene from personal experience of the route traveled, of the anticipation of a shared dinner with loved ones.

Then just last week the fatal collision of a small plane and a helicopter over the Hudson River. Five Italian tourists from Bologna, a father, mother, and teenage son, and a father and teenage son, all friends, perished, along with three in the private plane. Once again one pictures the ordinariness of the scene before take-off. And the sudden, swift horror a few moments later.

But terrible as is the fate of the dead, one grieves even more for those who lost loved ones. The husband of the van’s driver. The father and mother of the three girls killed. And the wife and mother of the Italian tourists, who at the last minute had decided not to go on the helicopter tour. In her inconsolable mourning would she rather have gone aboard and accompanied her loved ones in death?

Sharing in small measure their devastation, one comes anguished and speechless to the God of mercy and hopes against hope in the promise of Christ.

The great English philosopher Michael Dummett recounts his journey to Catholicism in an intellectual autobiography in a recent volume of essays on his philosophy:

“During my time at Winchester, my religious opinions underwent a radical swing. Initially, I had an atheist and scientistic outlook; in company with many others in College (the scholars’ ‘house’), I declined to receive an Anglican confirmation at the designated age. My parents protested mildly; neither was a practising Christian, and I think their objection was to any unconventional behaviour rather than to religious dissent. Then  my opinions started gradually to shift. From a diffuse pantheism I came to believe in God, as understood in the Semitic religions. … I was much influenced by a heterogeneous sect of Catholic writers—G.K. Chesterton, Eric Gill, Christopher Dawson. One by one, I came to accept the tenets of the faith. That which I found it hardest to swallow, and which was the last I came to accept, was that of life after death. I do not think that I understood at the time that this rested absolutely on the belief in that, on the face of it, bafflingly unlikely event, the general resurrection: I think I had then a dualist conception of our souls as naturally capable of existing separated from our bodies. I should probably have been puzzled if I had learned of St. Thomas’s dictum ‘Anima mea non est ego’ (‘My soul is not me’). …

“I was received into the Church in February 1944. My parents were very upset, not, I think, because my action was unconventional, but because of a deep prejudice against Catholicism which had been instilled into them in childhood and survived their loss of all religious faith. Apart from three distant cousins, all female and two of an older generation, whom I very much liked, I had never known any Catholics, and had never attended a Catholic service; I now went to two nearby churches, and found the forms of worship strange, and fascinating. I later learned much more about my religion, and became critical in various ways and a strong advocate of liturgical reform; but my faith was deeply rooted, and it was not for twelve years or more that the first doubts assailed me about whether it was all true. Read the rest of this entry »

Are opponents of health care reform trying to help scuttle the Obama plan by steering it into the rocky shoals of the abortion debate?   Catholic Charities USA,  outspoken in calling for Congress to enact health care reform,  seemed to say as much in a statement it issued in response to “inaccurate online media reports.”

Father Larry Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA, denied claims that he supported health care reform without regard for whether it would lead to more abortions.   “These attacks appear to be politically motivated by opponents of health care reform,” he said. “They are distortions of the truth and disingenuous. Catholic Charities USA will continue to work to reform health care in a way that is consistent with the teachings of our faith.”  He appeared to be responding to stories carried on pro-life Web sites.

Catholic Charities said its position on health care reform legislation and abortion is consistent with statements from the U.S. bishops.

Apropos of “Eating up the past” (below), I saw Julie and Julia last night. Really a very charming and witty effort. The Julia Child part is based on her memoir written with nephew Alex Prud’homme and sticks close to the original; the Julie Powell part departs from Julie and Julia in that Julie Powell is nowhere near as obnoxious in the film as in her memoir. Got that?

The theater was totally filled so that the wit and humor received hearty and contagious laughs. In addition, I felt surrounded by people who had been making Boeuf Bourgignon for many years. Comforting.

From the New York Times obituary:

Mrs. Shriver’s official efforts on behalf of people with developmental challenges began after she became the executive vice president of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation in 1957. The foundation was established in 1946 as a memorial to her oldest brother, who was killed in World War II. Under Mrs. Shriver’s direction, it focused on the prevention of mental retardation and improving the ways in which society deals with people with intellectual disabilities.

“In the 1950s, the mentally retarded were among the most scorned, isolated and neglected groups in American society,” Edward Shorter wrote in his book “The Kennedy Family and the Story of Mental Retardation.” “Mental retardation was viewed as a hopeless, shameful disease, and those afflicted with it were shunted from sight as soon as possible.”

The foundation was instrumental in the formation of President Kennedy’s Panel on Mental Retardation in 1961, development of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (which is now named for Mrs. Shriver) in 1962, the establishment of a network of mental retardation research centers at major medical schools across the United States in 1967 and the creation of major centers for the study of medical ethics at Harvard and Georgetown in 1971.

In 1968, the foundation helped plan and provided financing for the First International Special Olympics Summer Games, held at Soldier Field in Chicago that summer.

“I was just a young physical education teacher in the Chicago Park District back in the summer of 1968, a time of horrific tragedy for the Kennedy family, when Eunice Kennedy Shriver wrapped her arms around the very first Chicago Special Olympic games held at Soldier Field,” Justice Anne M. Burke of the Illinois Supreme Court said in an e-mail message. “I will never forget at the start of the games when she asked me to go to Sears and buy her a $10 bathing suit so she could jump in the pool with the Special Olympics swimmers.”

Read the rest right here.

As several commenters have pointed out, it would be nice to hear more Catholic voices (from all political perspectives) in the “debate” over healthcare.  In light of the rich tradition of Catholic thought on issues of social justice, it would probably help to clarify some of the points of disagreement and elevate the discussion above its current Beck/Limbaugh levels of chaos, fear, and misinformation.  Ryan Anderson passed on this thoughtful post at the Public Discourse blog.  And this report of an emergent Religious Left coalition in support of health care reform includes a reference to Catholics United for the Common Good.  Unfortunately, I think the current state of play is useful to a great many constituencies (including, likely, both political parties) for their own reasons, so I don’t hold out a lot of hope that things will improve anytime soon.  In the meantime, please use the comments to share links to thoughtful discussions of the competing proposals from a distinctively Catholc perspective.