Last week half-term governor of Alaska Sarah Palin delivered her unhinged description of Obamacare:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Of course, no one has proposed “death panels.” But bureaucrats who decide whether babies born with Down Syndrome can receive medical coverage? Those we already have. Over to publius at Obsidian Wings, who cites the Georgetown Center for Children and Families:

Margaret Demko, the mother of three-year-old Emily, testified before the Ohio Finance Committee on February 27, 2008, on how waiting for health care coverage has impacted Emily and her future.

Emily was born with Down Syndrome. After receiving Emily’s diagnosis, the family decided that it was important for Margaret to stay home in order to best meet the needs of their child. They explored numerous options after losing their employer-sponsored coverage, but due to Emily’s pre-existing condition, the Demkos were denied private coverage. Luckily, they qualified for Medicaid. However, by their 6-month reauthorization meeting, the monthly family income was $135 over the allowable limits.

The medical bills, in excess of $3,500 a month, were devastating, forcing the family to make difficult decisions regarding therapy. Emily’s medical condition requires orthotic shoe inserts, physical therapy, and corrective eye treatments, as well as hearing and blood tests. The Demkos cannot afford to incur all the expenses at once.

(H/T: Barbara)

There’s a lot to be puzzled about in the “debate” (I hesitate to dignify it with that term) over health care reform:  Palin’s exploitation of her infant son with her instantly infamous “death panel” comment; the anti-reform protester who was supposedly injured in a scuffle with SEIU members who is taking up a collection to pay his medical bills because he (wait for it) recently lost his job and is uninsured; the anti-reform protester at a townhall meeting in South Carolina who told his conservative congressman to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.”  But I think this line from an Investors Business Daily editorial in opposition to health care reform may win the prize:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Can a democracy function at this level of discourse?  The mind reels.

P.S. The IBD line is so breathtakingly stupid, I initially thought maybe their site had been hacked, but the editorial is still up, so I am assuming it is authentic.

UPDATE:  I assumed everyone knows this, but a commenter emailed me to suggest that I make it clear for those who do not — Stephen Hawking was born and has lived his entire life in the U.K.  But that’s only one of the reasons the IDB quote is stupid.

A while back, some of our commenters were floating the idea of a dotCommonweal “book club,” inspired by the conversations this blog often hosts about this or that literary work. I like the idea, but I’m not ready to volunteer to coordinate a reading schedule… But that’s mainly because, in a sense, the other editors and I are already doing that, trying our best to give you a steady supply of thought-provoking material to read and discuss. (You are reading the magazine, aren’t you? We depend on our subscribers!)

Now that fiction has returned to Commonweal‘s pages, maybe we really can have an informal “book club” here on our blog. If you haven’t yet had the chance to read Alice McDermott’s short story “I Am Awake,” which is featured in our July 17 issue, take some time to check it out. Then come back here and share your impressions with the rest of us. I’ll get things started by noting what struck me when I first read it: the portrayal of how teenagers think and act seems remarkably authentic and contemporary to me. That’s something that I think is difficult for many authors to pull off, even authors who are writing expressly for the “young adult” audience. I don’t have a teenager handy to test this out, but I think most high-schoolers would recognize the world McDermott describes in this story. So I’d be interested to hear from parents: would you give this to your teens to read? And what did you make of it yourself?

The excellent Kenneth Feinberg, who organized and carried out the post-9/11 settlements with the families of those killed, is in charge of reining in Wall Street.  Here’s what he’s up against: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/business/10pay.html

As I’ve mentioned before, my bi-weekly after Mass treat is opening the Boston Globe to Katherine Powers’ column, “A Reading Life.” She has led me to rediscover authors once read, but long forgoten (by me). Spurred on by her, I’ve recently picked up the stories of Nikolai Gogol. At least I had heard of Gogol.

Today, however, she extols a writer I had never heard of: the South-African born, London-residing, thankfully still-living Justin Cartwright. Here is part of what she says:

It is clear from Cartwright’s writing that he is not religious – indeed, quite the reverse. “One of the things that has struck me all my adult life,’’ he writes in “Oxford Revisited,’’ “is the extraordinary amount of energy that has been wasted on the hope that life has meaning.’’ It doesn’t, he says; but it is also clear from his novels that he laments the squandering of the moral currency that was built up by the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is the shared understanding and unexamined acceptance built over a couple of millennia that there really is such a thing as right and wrong, that, to put it in Cartwright’s terms, behaving decently and ethically is “the only way to live.’’ It may be that all the badness we see today – and which fills his novels – went on just as much in the past as it does now, who knows? But since David Hume, shall we say, and the permanent sundering of “is’’ and “ought,’’ no writer has really been able to explain morality. The great book on this subject is Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue,’’ and if you find you have become a fan of Cartwright, you will read that book with satisfaction and, perhaps like me, find yourself wandering around the place locked in interior debate with both writers.

Have others read Cartwright? Would they recommend him … if not “After Virtue,” after Gogol?

This Sunday’s Gospel, continuing the consecutive reading of the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, contains the statement of Christ in response to the grumbling crowd: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him.” (I note in passing that the politically correct “I Am the Bread of Life” has transmogrified this into “unless the Father beckon”, apparently in order to avoid the masculine personal pronoun.)

In their commentaries on this statement, Augustine and Aquinas explored at some length how to reconcile the fact that faith must be free and the statement that no one can come to Christ (which means believe in him) unless drawn dragged, pulled by the Father. Both of the saints point out that the verb implies some degree of violence. If one has to be dragged to Christ, how can faith be free?

By pure coincidence, while thinking about my homily for this Gospel, I read an article in the London Tablet by Fr. Daniel O’Leary which ends with his quoting some lines from Denise Levertov’s poem “The Thread.” I was delighted to see how Christ’s metaphor informs the whole of what I take to be her description of her poetical and religious journey:

Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven’t tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.

I believe it was Matthew Boudway who a few weeks ago posted a couple quotations and asked us to guess who had penned them.

One of the two struck me forcefully. A brief excerpt: “It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a ‘belief,’ perchance the belief in redemption through Christ, the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian: only Christian practice, a life such as he who died on the cross lived, is Christian…. States of consciousness, beliefs of any kind, holding something to be true for example — every psychologist knows this — are a matter of complete indifference and of the fifth rank compared with the value of the instincts…. To reduce being a Christian, Christianness, to a holding of something to be true, to a mere phenomenality of consciousness, means to negate Christianness.”

The author was Friedrich Nietzsche, but the person it made me think of was Luigi Giussani (1923-2005), founder of the lay movement Communion & Liberation (CL).

All this by way of preface to the following statement: I’m coming out of the closet.  I belong to CL.

I don’t know why I’ve been so shy about sharing this fact about me, given its centrality in my life. Part of it stems, I suspect, from an awareness that lay movements have occasionally been marred by scandals. Another element of my shyness probably has to do with the way that lay movements are so often interpreted in political terms — as being either conservative or liberal. A final element may simply have to do with the general ignorance on the part of most American Catholics about movements; they’re perceived by many still as somehow a church within the Church, a threat to parish life, etc.

In short, I’m afraid of being pigeonholed.

But back to Nietzsche. His words reminded me of these words from Msgr. Giussani: “Christianity is an event. There is no other word to indicate its nature: neither the word law nor the word ideology, conception, or project. Christianity is not a religious doctrine, a series of moral laws, a complex of rites. Christianity is a fact, an event: everything else is a consequence.”

This insight is what drew me to CL and makes the movement such a vital part of my life. It’s also what attracted Joseph Ratzinger, who became quite close to Giussani and preached his funeral in Milan. As Benedict XVI, he has regularly made statements that closely parallel those of Giussani, such as these words from Deus Caritas Est: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

There’s much more I could say, but I’ll leave it at that. I happen to think that lay movements are going to be an important part of the Church’s life in the coming decades, though individualistic Americans have been slow to understand and join them.

I’m curious what people thing, not so much of CL in particular, as of movements themselves. I welcome your thoughts.

Now this ought to be good.

Now that President Obama has pledged to refocus attention on U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the New York Times reports that “the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won.”

Does it even make sense to talk about “winning” when it comes to this conflict? And if so, what will “winning” look like? According to the NYT article, the National Security Council is working on a list of “broad objectives for metrics to guide the administration’s policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Besides defeating insurgents and capturing terrorists, success involves “eliminating corruption, promoting a working democracy, and providing effective aid” — as well as building a self-sufficient army.

All this follows on President Obama’s promise, in March, that his administration would “set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable.” But is pressing forward with this part of the Bush agenda really the right way to go? In the next Commonweal, Andrew Bacevich asks whether the U.S. ought to be dedicating so much of our energy and resources to pursuing the “war” in Afghanistan. The issue date is August 14, but you can read the article — “The War We Can’t Win: Afghanistan and the Limits of American Power” — online now. Bacevich wonders:

What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing that the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention? In Washington, this question goes not only unanswered but unasked. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. As then, so today, the assumption does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Read the whole thing. (And watch for another perspective on Afghanistan, from aid worker Joel Hafvenstein, in the same issue.)

From the Times obit:

Budd Schulberg, who wrote the award-winning screenplay for “On the Waterfront” and created a classic American archetype of naked ambition, Sammy Glick, in his novel “What Makes Sammy Run?,” died on Wednesday. He was 95 and lived in the Brookside section of Westhampton Beach, N.Y.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Betsy.

Mr. Schulberg also wrote journalism, short stories, novels and biographies. He collaborated with F. Scott Fitzgerald, arrested the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and named names before a Communist-hunting Congressional committee. But he was best known for writing some of the most famous lines in the history of the movies.

Some were delivered by Marlon Brando playing the longshoreman Terry Malloy in the 1954 film “On the Waterfront.” Malloy had lost a shot at a prizefighting title by taking a fall for easy money.

“I coulda been a contender,” Malloy tells his brother, Charley (Rod Steiger). “I coulda been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

(Have a look at Richard Corliss’s remembrance, too.)

Here is Schulberg’s 1953 Commonweal article about Fr. John Corridan, “Waterfront Priest” (PDF).

UPDATE: Jim Fisher’s great obit posted to the blog for his new book:

Budd Wilson Schulberg, that is, knew seemingly everybody enshrined across that vast tableau we know as twentieth century culture. He was standing next to his friend Bobby Kennedy in a passageway at LA’s Ambassador Hotel when RFK was murdered in June 1968. He was seated ringside when his friend Muhammad Ali reclaimed his heavyweight title from George Foreman in Zaire in October 1974. That was nearly three decades after Budd not only arrested Leni Riefenstahl (”Hitler’s favorite filmmaker) while working for his friend the legendary director John Ford in the wartime OSS; he wrested from her an implicit admission she knew about the Nazi death camps, a truth she subsequently denied for decades.

Budd was an amazingly gifted listener; perhaps the result of  a lifelong if highly manageable speech impediment, but more likely because listening was simply his supreme gift.  When he met the  ”waterfront priest” John M. “Pete” Corridan in late autumn 1950, the gruff, guarded Jesuit told Schulberg there was “no percentage” to be gained via collaboration between the men on a film project. During that very first meeting, however, Schulberg–who had been commissioned to write a screenplay based on a New York Sun waterfront expose for which Corridan served as prime source–began to win the priest’s enduing trust. They talked boxing; they talked mob talk; they talked briefly about the Catholic church’s radical social teachings, which came as great a revelation to Schulberg  as they did to many Catholics. Within days Budd experienced his first waterfront pub crawl along Manhattan’s forbidding “Irish waterfront,” in the company of Arthur “Brownie” Brown, Corridan’s most devoted “rebel disciple” in the struggle to overthrow the mob-ridden, Tammany-backed and Church-blessed union that had misrepresented dockworkers in the Port of New York and New Jersey since the turn of the century.

It is sad that the great feast of Christ’s Transfiguration is tucked, almost unobtrusively, into the middle of the week. In some of the Eastern Christian traditions the feast is preceded by a vigil and followed by an octave. Nonetheless the Transfiguration remains one of the richest feasts of the liturgical year, worthy of prolonged pondering.

It might be called “the feast of integral humanism,” which celebrates not only Christ’s true identity as beloved Son of the Father, but the dignity and destiny of all who are being transformed in Christ’s likeness.

The great  Paul VI brought the notion of integral humanism into the center of his papal magisterium, especially in his encyclical “Populorum Progressio” that calls for  human development guided by and worthy of humanity’s God-given vocation. And Benedict XVI incorporated this theme into his recent encyclical “Caritas in Veritate,” paying warm homage to Paul VI.

I think it fair to say that the image of the transfigured Christ was at the heart of Pope Paul’s spirituality, and I think it a singular act of divine Providence that Paul died on the day of the feast: August 6, 1978.

In his insightful and poignant biography of Paul VI, Peter Hebblethwaite recounts the last hours of the Pontiff. At 6:00 p.m. his secretary begins celebrating the Mass of the feast in the small chapel at Castelgandolfo with Paul lying on his death bed in the adjacent room.

Paul receives Communion under both kinds, his viaticum for the journey. As Mass ends Paul has a massive heart attack. It is as though he had exploded from within.

For another three hours Paul lingers on … murmuring repeatedly, faintly, as though for himself alone, “Our Father, who art in heaven …” By 9:30 p.m. even this ceases.

With everyone kneeling by his bedside, Cardinal Villot begins the prayers for the dying. Paul opens his eyes briefly, recognizes Villot, murmurs “grazie” and sketches a limp blessing before subsiding into a deep sleep, his last. There is no agony. At 9:41 the doctor says, “The Pope is dead.” Then the alarm clock [bought in Poland so many years before] went off.

Catholics celebrate the Eucharist in communion with the Pope, the local bishop, and all bishops, with the clergy and the entire people. If we attend to the words of the eucharistic prayer, our hearts and minds are stretched, we become more catholic in our concerns.

When praying this part of the liturgy I try to be especially mindful of those places where Christians suffer persecution for their faith. Here the internet can be of enormous help in expanding our horizons beyond the parochial. Sandro Magister is a good source for information about the Church throughout the world. In his latest post he writes of attacks upon the small Catholic community in Pakistan:

They threw stones, burned homes, and pursued  those fleeing, firing wildly. In the end, nine people were dead. Seven of them have the same last name, Hamid, and belong to the same family clan as Fr. Hussein Younis, a Franciscan. They include two children. Their only fault is that they were Christian.

It took place in Pakistan, in Gojra, in the province of Faisalabad in eastern Punjab. There are 1.3 million Catholics in all of Pakistan, and the same number of Christians of other denominations, out of a population of 160 million, almost entirely Muslim. But the intolerance against this small, poor, peaceful minority has become a fact of life, exploding at times into bloody aggression.

Ongoing coverage of the Church in Asia can be found at UCAN (Union of Catholic Asian News).

An article in Spiegel describes how Poles feel that they have not been given enough credit for initiating the process that within a few short months in 1989 peacefully brought the Soviet empire to an end, surely the most important event in the post-WW II era.  The article mentions the poster of Gary Cooper that helped inspire the efforts of Solidarity in Poland. Here it is:

I wonder who designed that blood-red logo for Solidarnosc.  It was brilliant!

This front-page photo in the Washington Post cries out for a caption:

No doubt there is rejoicing over the return (with Bill Clinton) this morning to the United States of the two journalists captured by North Korea and sentenced to years of hard labor. The release of a journalist by Iran earlier this summer was also good work (probably also by Hillary Clinton’s team at the State Department). Now I notice three wandering Americans are in custody in Iran for crossing the border from Kurdisan in spite of warnings from local Kurdish officials.

What should we make of these? Were the three journalists careless in keeping on eye on their own security? The three, all American citizens, were from Iran in the one case, and Southeast Asia in the other two. Does this make them objects of suspicion greater than if they were white Americans? than if they were men? The three “tourists” captured by Iran? Provocateurs? CIA? Just dumb?

These events seem to needlessly complicate our foreign policy as well as raise old questions about American spying by “journalists” and “tourists.” What can or should be done to discourage these junkets and/or foolhardy behaviors? Or are my suspicions out of place?

UPDATE: Nicholas Kristoff, long a proponent of engagement with North Korea, has changed his mind; he claims there is mounting evidence that it is exporting nuclear technology to Myanmar (aka Burma). The headline: ”Rethinking North Korea, With Sticks”  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/opinion/06kristof.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Update 2: Martha Raddatz of ABC reports that the “hikers” have been moved to Teheran. Scroll down to read the comments! http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/08/hikers-who-crossed-into-iran-have-been-moved-to-tehran.html

In today’s Washington Post, Jennifer LaRue Huget’s weekly column, “Eat, Drink and Be Healthy,” is devoted to Julia Child’s famous book on which she is somewhat less enthusiastic than Peggy Steinfels in her thread of a day or two ago. In the same issue of the Post, she has a little note “The Checkup,” which begins with this paragraph:

A paper in the September issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reviewed all the scientific studies of organic and conventional foods published between 1958 and 2008. Culling flawed studies left a team of researchers with 162 out of an initial 152,000. Examining those 162 studies’ findings, the researchers found that organically produced foods offered no nutritional advantages over conventionally produced foods.

I am less interested in the results of this study than in that off-hand remark that “culling flawed studies left a team of researchers with 162 out of an initial 152,000.” Now does this mean that, as my trusty calculator leads me to believe, that only .00108% of all those studies can be considered not to be flawed? That only one in a thousand of them is not flawed?

By the way, our hens have begun producing eggs.  Organic, and nutritionally far superior to any others produced anywhere on the planet.

The most recent issue of The Hastings Center Report has a very interesting article on emergency contraception, so-called Plan B.  The author, Rebecca Stangl,  argues that even if opponents of Plan B are right that emergency contraception works, at least sometimes, by making the uterus inhospitable to a fertilized egg, it does not follow that there is no moral difference between Plan B and abortion.  Her analysis of the case in relation to the principle of double effect is worth reading.  Registration is required, by registered users can read the article here.

I was taking notes on John Murray Cuddihy’s fascinating and provocative  No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste, and came across, well, us–Commonweal.

In a chapter entitled, “A Tale of Two Jesuits: Leonard Feeney, SJ, and John Courtney Murray, SJ”, Cuddihy suggests that the real animus of Feeney wasn’t non-Catholics  –it was Commonweal Catholics.

Father Feeney’s From the Housetops was was founded not primarily to win Protestant converts but to attack Catholic liberals.  It was to be a weapon in an intra-Catholic quaqrrel. Like its lineal post-Vatican II descendant of twenty years later, L. Brent Bozell’s Triumph magazine, it was created to proclaim an unembarrassed and militant Catholicism and to stem the “leakage” from the Church that was becoming increasingly evident. (p.50).

. . .

It was the growth of these well-bred, tolerant manners, the phenomenon of Irish Catholic “liberal Catholicism,” that Father Feeeney and his Center conceived of themselves as trying to stem. Commonweal magazine was the weekly voice of this liberal Catholicism. A “Commonweal Catholic,” in Feeney’s circle, was a Catholic who was fastidiously discrete about his Catholicism. He was “passing.” A liberal Catholic, Mrs. Clarke writes, is one who always knows “how god should behave. God’s behavior is invariably made to conform with the Liberal’s own fine feelings . . . [he knows] how an incarnate God should talk ad behave . . . [he] does not like the statement “No Salvation Outside the Church” [not because the statement is false but] because “it isn’t nice.” (p. 55).

Cuddihy is quoting Catherine Goddard Clarke, The Loyolas and the Cabots: The Story of the  Boston Heresy Case (1950).  She was the President of the Harvard Center run by Feeney.  I’m trying to get the book.

Three things struck me:

1.  It would be fun to see some of the Commonweal editorials of the time.

2.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

3.  Some things that aren’t nice are also not true.

More perspective:   Avery Dulles on Father Feeney’s death.

In an interview with Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, the archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, expressed concerns over social networking Web sites such as Facebook and My Space:

“I think there’s a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we’re losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together and building a community.

“We’re losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person’s mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point.

“Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together.”

The archbishop blamed social network sites for leaving children with impoverished friendships.

Pope Benedict XVI expressed similar concerns in his remarks for World Communications Day in May. I should note that with much coaching from my daughter and the encouragement of my book editor, I reluctantly started a Facebook page a few months ago.  I’ve come to enjoy it because it provides a link to many people I don’t see as often as I’d like. But even so, I think the archbishop is on to something. Do social networking sites build social capital, or do they just give the illusion of social interaction? I guess I will have to consider Facebook  a guilty pleasure.

Michael Kimmelman’s essay on the front page of the NY Times today talks about the way people behave at great museums, the Louvre in this case. He is struck by the fact that many don’t seem to look at the art but are content, if they stop at all, to take a quick photo and then move on. He writes:

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

We could dream about covering lots of ground thanks to expanding collections and faster means of transportation. At the same time, the canon of art that provided guideposts to tell people where to go and what to look at was gradually dismantled. A core of shared values yielded to an equality among visual materials. This was good and necessary, up to a point. Millions of images came to compete for our attention. Liberated by a proliferation, Western culture was also set adrift in an ocean of passing stimulation, with no anchors to secure it.

So tourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have “done” the Louvre. It’s self-improvement on the fly.

I’ve noted the same phenomenon with regard to monuments or natural vistas: how many people don’t stop to look and to admire, but are content to take a quick photo or two and then get back on the tour bus for the next stop. Everything has to be framed within a view-finder. (Could this be the influence of television–the framed shot?) I saw something symbolic the last time I was in Rome. When I stopped by the Trevi Fountain, I watched a man with his back to the fountain, arm outstretched with his cell-phone in his hand, taking a photo of himself in front of the fountain. A photo of himself looking away from the fountain somehow sums it up.

As we go through the health care reform debate, it’s worth stepping back for a minute and taking a look at the big picture.  Why is health care reform important?  What should we care about?

Bishop Murphy’s letter on evaluating health care proposals is both comprehensive and concise.

In reviewing the various materials out there, I found that this longer  framework for evaluating  comprehensive health care reform issued by the Bishops’ Conference  in 1993 (at the time of the last  major push for reform) continues to be extremely helpful.

In 1986 I was teaching a doctoral course at Catholic University and had among my students a young and dynamic Philipino priest, Fr. Luis “Chito” Tagle. With him we followed the events that were to lead to the peaceful demise of the Marcos government and the installation as president of Mrs. Corazon Aquino, or “Cory,” as everyone called her. The day that “People Power” accomplished this we toasted the event and Chito with champagne in the class. (Probably, no–surely, against the rules!)

Later that year I was in the Philippines on my way to a meeting of the Theological Advisory Committee of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences in Hong Kong. Fr. Catalino Arevalo, S.J., spiritual advisor to Cory, brought me into the presidential palace where I met her. My chief memory is of a very humble woman who made no secret of her need for our prayers. I also got to see the notorious room in which Imelda Marcos stored her huge collection of shoes, many pairs of them never used, with the price-tags still on them.

The Philippine hierarchy took an active role in the popular uprising. Cardinal Sin, archbishop of Manila, was particularly important in urging the people to demonstrate peacefully against the regime. He was a very powerful figure in the Church there. (It was said that in the Philippines, “No bishop is conceived without Sin.”)

The NY Times obituary speaks of all this as “a high point in modern Philippine history, and it offered a model for nonviolent uprisings that has been repeated often in other countries.” I wonder what was its influence on the demonstrations that were to lead, three years later (twenty years ago), to the collapse of the Soviet empire.

In 1967, living in Paris, I was delighted to find a copy of a book about French cooking in English (I couldn’t cook and read French at the same time). The book by Julia Child and her French collaborators has since been hailed as a classic. I still use it for pate brisee (with accents), boeuf bourguignon, and the dry marinade for roast pork. From time to time I read it with the thought of trying something new one of these days.
A few years back there appeared a blog by a woman cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Subsequently a book appeared, Julie & Julia by Julie Powell. Now a Nora Ephron movie is on the horizon.
I grabbed a copy of Julie and Julia in a bookstore the other day to see what it was like to cook the great book from beginning to end.
But that’s not the story–really. The author, a bored, unhappy Texan transplanted to New York, who hates her job, and drinks too much, has taken a classic cook book and used it to create a self-aggrandizing and vulgar memoir that feeds off Julia Child, turning a silk purse into a pig’s ear.
Will the movie restore Child’s luster and wit? I guess we’ll see next week.