Did you hear the one about the “Religious Left praying to Obama”? I hope not. Here’s the embarrassing story: a video clip of a pro-universal-health-care prayer service, originally posted on the Gamaliel Foundation web site but appropriated, “captioned,” and distributed by the obviously trustworthy Naked Emperor News and on Breitbart.tv, caused a stir on right-wing blogs yesterday because it reportedly showed liberals chanting the petition, “Hear our cry, Obama.”

With apologies for insulting your intelligence, let me clarify: it wasn’t true. You can see the original video on the homepage of the Gamaliel Foundation. The people gathered (nine months ago, Media Matters notes) are responding to petitions by saying, “Hear our cry, O God” — which was obvious to many who viewed the video on other sites, despite the fact that it had been captioned to suggest otherwise.

This “Lefties think Obama is the messiah!” meme is really getting old. The only people fooled by it are the ones spouting it — just as the only people who call Obama “The One” are people who think they’re being satirical. This was a desperately crude smear that shouldn’t have fooled anyone — certainly not anyone familiar with what prayer sounds like. And yet, Mark Shea posted it on his blog, commenting (irony alert!) that it “must be seen to be believed.” Rod Dreher picked it up and did some concern-trolling over at Beliefnet (e.g., the Left have only themselves to blame!). And, when their error was pointed out, they both fell back on “I’m pretty sure at least some of those people are saying ‘Obama.’” Come on, really? Todd at Catholic Sensibility called it “an Emily Litella moment” for both, but in fact a sheepish “…Never mind” would be an improvement over their response so far. Seems like they’re taking their cues from Breitbart.tv, which posted this hilarious “editor’s note” upon being called out:

Editor’s note: We’ve updated this post with the longer version of the original event. As you’ll see in the comments and related links there is a debate over what is actually being said. Does the crowd say, “Hear our cry, Obama” and “Deliver us Obama?” Or are they saying “Oh God?” In the longer version the first two repetitions seem to have a distinct “uh” sound at the end that resonates as “Obama.” The later repetitions are a little fuzzier. Did some of the religious leaders present become uneasy? Or was there a mix of what was being said? [They forgot option 3: "Or is the entire thing a shameless, trumped-up smear?"] Read some of the blogger analysis below. What do you think?

Yes, perhaps thinking is a good tool to bring to this matter… Ah well, better late than never! The whole thing reminds me of the false story about the Council of Macon — meant to discredit the Church, it ends up reflecting poorly on the person who uncritically repeats it. Doesn’t a tale this outrageous deserve just a little skepticism? The obvious moral here is don’t be so quick to assume the worst about your opponents that you abandon all your critical-thinking skills. But I would also like to see “people of faith” be a little bit more careful about using religion and prayer to score such cheap political points. Christians shouldn’t be so cavalier with the “messiah” jokes, and we surely ought to be hesitant to mock an interfaith prayer service. Deliver us, O God, indeed.

Update: More here.

A Newsmax columnist advocates describes the possibility of a bloodless military coup to solve the “Obama problem.” (HT TPM)  This is not an isolated case.  Media Matters surveys the growing trend of violent rhetoric from the right.

NCR reports that Cardinal Rode, the initiator of the Vatican’s visitation of US women’s apostolic religious communities, is asking the US bishops to pony up the $1.1 million to cover costs.

Hmmm….what if they gave a visitation and nobody paid? What if the bishops decided they had more urgent budgetary priorities, and just said no? Just a thought…

A good story in today’s NY Times laying out the various options on how to treat abortion in the health care reform plan.   Here’s a taste, but go read the whole thing:

At least 31 House Democrats have signed various recent letters to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, urging her to allow a vote on a measure to restrict use of the subsidies to pay for abortion, including 25 who joined more than 100 Republicans on a letter delivered Monday.

Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, a leading Democratic abortion opponent, said he had commitments from 40 Democrats to block the health care bill unless they have a chance to include the restrictions.

After months of pushing the issue, Mr. Stupak said in an interview, Mr. Obama finally called him 10 days ago. “He said: ‘Look, try to get this thing worked out among the Democrats. We want you to work it out within the party,’ ” Mr. Stupak said, adding that Mr. Obama did not say whether he supported the segregated-money provision or a more sweeping restriction. “We got his attention, which we never had before.”

After the president called, Mr. Stupak said, Ms. Pelosi agreed to meet with Mr. Stupak on Tuesday to discuss his proposals for the first time, her office confirmed. Her spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, said in a statement, “As we have throughout the process, we are meeting with our members to listen to their concerns, consulting with the administration, and making progress.”

Although I haven’t looked at the actual language of his amendments, the Hatch/Stupak proposals sound very sensible as described in the story — i.e., prohibit the use of federal subsidies to purchase policies that include abortion coverage, but allow women to purchase abortion “riders” on their own.  Given the ideological tactical stance most Republicans have taken against health care reform in any shape or form (regardless of how abortion is treated), credit for more restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion, if they become part of a successful bill, should go to the group of pro-life Democrats discussed in the story.

An essay in which your intrepid Correspondent, doing an able impersonation of Bill Donohue, delivers himself of some rantings about a certain Oscar-winning child abuser…

Rocco Palmo highlights Archbishop Burke’s latest speech on the responsibilities of Catholics in the public square. As Rocco notes, the talk seems to be a direct response to Cardinal Sean O’Malley’s defense of his decision to give a public funeral to Ted Kennedy, and Cardinal McCarrick’s decision to preside over the burial service.

Taken together, O”Malley’s and Burke’s talks seem to outline the state of the debate.. Nonetheless, I was troubled by one particular aspect of Burke’s speech, which struck me as going further rhetorically than he has gone before.

If there has always been the danger of giving scandal to others by public and seriously sinful actions or failures to act, that danger is heightened in our own time. Because of the confusion about the moral law, which is found in public discourse, in general, and is even embodied in laws and judicial pronouncements, the Christian is held to an even higher standard of clarity in enunciating and upholding the moral law. It is particularly insidious that our society which is so profoundly confused about the most basic goods also believes that scandal is a thing of the past. One sees the hand of the Father of Lies at work in the disregard for the situation of scandal or in the ridicule and even censure of those who experience scandal. (emphasis added).

Am I wrong, or is Burke here implying that McCarrick and O”Malley were influenced by the Devil himself in making the decisions they made? If so, this strikes me as quite a new level of accusation by one brother bishop to another.  Maybe not absolutely, as my friends who study early Church history tell me.   But quite new for us.

BREAKING NEWS: BAT LOOSE IN CONGRESS

The first time I saw this, I thought it was real for a couple of seconds).
(It’s not. Gotta Love the Onion.)

The sacred Day of Atonement has begun (at least here in Brooklyn) and to help those who are going to fast, let me mention Glenn Beck. Appetite gone, right?! Amazing. It’s just as he’d want it, too, because, as I wrote in this PoliticsDaily piece, Beck has asked that we all fast on Yom Kippur–to “make it a day of Fast and Prayer for the Republic. Spread the word. Let us walk in the founders steps.”

The Founders all being Jews, of course.

But that all is nothing compared to this clip of Katie Couric (or a viewer, actually) asking Beck what he meant by “white culture”–Beck accused Obama of hating white culture, which is…what, exactly, Mr. Beck?

His, er, answer, is priceless. Video here.

Via the indispensible Daily Dish.

Today’s Dedication of the Chapel of the Holy Spirit at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut was awe-inspiring. The distinctive beauty of the setting, the solemnity of the liturgical prayers, the abundant flow of oil and incense, the creative variety and appropriateness of the music made the more than two-hour celebration seem one prolonged moment of joy and thanksgiving.

Here is a portion of the prayer of dedication:

Lord, send your Spirit from heaven to make this church an ever-holy place, and this altar a ready table for the sacrifice of Christ. Here may the waters of baptism overwhelm the shame of sin; here may your people die to sin and live again through grace as your children.

Here may your children gathered around your altar, celebrate the memorial of the Paschal Lamb, and be fed at the table of Christ’s Word and Christ’s Body.

Here may prayer, the Church’s banquet, resound through heaven and earth as a plea for the world’s salvation.

To mark the release of Dan Brown’s latest novel, the Telegraph collects twenty of the worst sentences from his previous works. I’ve never even cracked the cover of The Da Vinci Code, or any of the others — a number of people have told me I ought to, but they always qualified their recommendation with “The writing is really terrible, but…” When it comes to fiction, there’s no “but” that can convince me to read something that pretty much everyone agrees is written badly. So, until I saw this list, I hadn’t confirmed that verdict for myself. And all I can say is — wow, everyone was right. My favorite:

Deception Point, chapter 8: Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.

As the Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers notes, “It’s not clear what Brown thinks ‘precarious’ means here.”

I also love this one:

The Da Vinci Code, chapter 5: Only those with a keen eye would notice his 14-karat gold bishop’s ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué.

Looks like somebody just learned some Churchy vocabulary!

This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course. If you’re working your way through The Lost Symbol and you come upon some deserving passages, please share with the rest of us!

The New York Times carried a profile today of  Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old man suspected of a terrorism conspiracy. I admire the way Michael Wilson wrote the piece because it reflects a humility often missing in news coverage: Although the piece is well-reported, it makes clear that much about Zazi is not known, and that he has not been proven guilty of the charges against him.

The article explores the way Islam played a role in Zazi’s life, but avoids the trap of equating religious fervor with terrorism:

“Even if he is proven to be the aspiring terrorist the government asserts, how and why he became one may not be understood for months, if ever. The suspects who have been charged with terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks were fueled by a variety of motivations and influences, and often a mix of them: politics, family, economic deprivation, social alienation, the work of a terrorist recruiter. Religion sometimes provides a general framework and sense of identity, but other factors and events frequently drive the transformation.”

The article is quite chilling, nonetheless. Zazi – suspected of a conspiracy to set off bombs on the New York City subway on the anniversary of the 9/11 attack – was a friendly vendor of coffee and doughnuts several blocks from the site of the World Trade Center.

Last May I entered a post on dotCommonweal about the new chapel that was under construction on the campus of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, and about the striking mosaics that are one of its most distinctive features. Tomorrow the chapel will be dedicated. In today’s New York Times, Peter Steinfels reflects on its significance.

Steinfels quotes Sacred Heart’s President, Anthony J. Cernera:

Anthony J. Cernera, the president of Sacred Heart — a layman and a theologian — …  said the chapel was a challenge to the “spiritual but not religious” catchphrase.

“It would be a terrible mistake to fall into the trap of accepting that dichotomy,” he said. “The best way to be spiritual in the Catholic tradition is to celebrate the Eucharist and to use all the signs of the faith.”

If the leadership at Sacred Heart does not buy the spiritual versus religious dichotomy, they also do not seem to be paralyzed by the inclusive versus exclusive dichotomy. Their university, they know, is widely recognized for promoting Christian-Jewish and ecumenical understanding.

Under Cernera’s leadership, Sacred Heart University has been in the forefront of reflecting upon the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and of presenting it both to its own faculty and to the wider community. Dr. Cernera has edited two volumes of essays by prominent theologians, philosophers, and educators: Examining the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. He also sponsors a yearly presidential seminar for faculty of Sacred Heart University from different academic disciplines.

Moreover, as Steinfels indicates above, the University’s Center for Christian Jewish Understanding is a leader in promoting ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue. One outcome has been another book edited by Cernera: Examining Nostra Aetate after Forty Years.

I have been a friend of Anthony Cernera for many years, and am honored to be one of the presenters each year in his faculty seminar on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. When I ask myself what has shaped his creative vision, it seems to me that it is the providential fruit of two influences: the intellectual rigor and creativity he received from his Jesuit education at Fordham and the liturgical centeredness flowing from his love affair with the Benedictine tradition embodied in Mount Saviour Monastery near Elmira.

Together they have shaped his conviction that when the Eucharistic center is firm, the circumference can be joyfully extended to embrace all witness to God’s Wisdom. The new chapel is testimony to that conviction.

Well, yes,  as a matter of fact!

One of the good things about finishing up my graduate work is that I now have more time to read books about topics other than theology (although I’m keeping my hand in here and there). 

A few months back, I went on a bit of a Ron Hansen tear, reading—more or less in a row—The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Mariette in Ecstasy, and Exiles, Hansen’s novel about the shipwreck that promoted Gerald Manley Hopkins to write “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” I was prompted to read more of Hansen’s work because I had read and enjoyed Atticus several years ago.  Hansen’s protagonists—Jesse James, Mariette, Hopkins, Atticus Cody—always have a certain mystery about them.  It’s difficult to get inside their heads and you seem to pick up more from the reactions they provoke in others.  Hansen’s fondness for writing about historical characters sometimes sets limits on where he can take them.  But that’s a discussion for another time.

I’ve had another nice run of fiction more recently.  It began when I decided to pick up Albert Camus’ The Stranger, which I hadn’t read since I was a junior in high school.  It was a different translation, a new one by Matthew Ward that favors short, declarative sentences in the model of Hemingway.  The translation “worked” in the sense of helping to convey Meursault’s disconnection from the world around him.  In the end, though, I was left with the same feeling I had in high school, which is that the character of Meursault just doesn’t speak to me.  He reflects Camus’ atheism and conviction of the ultimately absurdity of existence, but not Camus’ moral stance, which seems to me equally important.  I think that the character of Dr. Bernard Riuex in The Plague gives us a better sense of Camus’ personal convictions. 

After finishing up The Stranger, my wife recommended what turned out to be a delightful murder mystery by Matthew Pearl entitled The Dante Club.  The novel is set in 19^th century Boston.  The premise is that a small group of America’s finest literary minds—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, and publisher J.T Fields—who call themselves the “Dante Club” are preparing the first American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.  At the same time, Boston experiences a series of bizarre murders.  The members of the Dante Club recognize that the murderer is staging scenes from Dante’s Inferno.  They must leave their sheltered literary existence and join forces to find a killer.

The book is a slow start, but it is absolutely worth it.  I haven’t enjoyed a mystery this much since Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which also appeals to lovers of books. Pearl is a gifted writer and he brings to life a mid-19^th century Boston with unhealed wounds from the recently concluded Civil War.  To say any more would be to risk spoiling the mystery.

Finally, I recently completed a book I had been wanting to read for some time, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.  Stegner is considered a “western” writer, perhaps the greatest western writer we have.  At one point, the San Francisco Chronicle put out a list of the greatest fiction and non-fiction works about the West and Stegner topped both lists.  Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1971 and is generally considered his greatest work.

The book tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history who returns to live in his grandparents’ house in Grass Valley, California.  Confined to a wheelchair because of a crippling bone disease that has cost him a leg, Ward is sorting through his grandmother’s letters as part of his effort to write a book about her life.  An eastern woman with literary and artistic talent, Susan Ward nevertheless choses to marry a man—a mining engineer—committed to the settling of the West and follows him on a number of ventures, most of which turn out to be failures.  As Ward discovers more of his grandmother’s history, he is forced to reflect on its meaning for his own life.

The book succeeds on many levels.  One of the aspects of the book that interests me most is Stegner’s approach to history.  Written in the late 1960s when the “counterculture” of that era was still in full bloom, the book reflects Stegner’s frustration with the rising generation’s refusal to see any value in history or tradition.  At the same time, Stegner refuses to idealize the history of the West and there is little romance in the hard lives his grandparents led.  Although Stegner’s characters do not display deep religious sympathies, I find something deeply Catholic in this struggle to find a truthful past that is nevertheless a “usable past.”

So how about the rest of you?  Read any good books lately?

No time to blog right now but I thought I would link to this new essay in The New Republic by David Nirenberg about Pope Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate.  Enjoy.

At America’s blog, Michael Sean Winters identifies the “Kooks on the Left” who mirror those on the right. And they are…

Maommar Qaddafi of Libya and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran!

Let’s give them both a round of applause–and maybe a seat at the Commonweal Conversations dinner?

MSW (I am generally a fan) also manages to weave in E.J. Dionne’s column (E.J. is also a liberal, though he is rarely so loquacious as the aforementioned gents) on chintzy charities as well as Michael Moore on “Capitalism.”

So which one of these is not like the others?

UPDATE: Michael Sean wrote me to ask for a “correction,” saying I had made a serious mischaracterization of his views by implying that he had pinned Qaddafi and Ahmedinejad as liberals. (Winters said he does not comment on blogs and asked me to do so here.) I reiterated to him, and will again here, that my intent was more tongue-in-cheek. I thought his set-up did make it sound as though Q & A were part of the liberal “kookiness,” and reading the rest shows he obviously intends that it is the UN that was “a leftie fantasy,” as he put it in his email to me. I saw the reference above more as an entry point to his entire post about an equivalency with right-wing kookiness–an analogy with which I disagreed, and still do. Which does not detract from what I consider his many fine writings. For what that is all worth.

Bill de Haas posted this link on Little Acorns/ Mighty Enemies below: POGO’s http://www.contractormisconduct.org/ along with an editorial from the Dallas Morning News making a point we all missed: The legislation defunding Acorn will also defund any government contractor that has fraud or misconduct charges against it. Pogo has 100 listed, including some of our biggest military-industrial corporations. Let’s see what happens.

Here’s another report on the same legislation:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/24/the-unintended-consequenc_n_298540.html

My fellow pilgrim and I arrived in Santiago do Compostela Monday, meeting many familiar faces from along the way, and seeing other familiar faces arrive after we did. It’s been a fascinating journey.

One surprise for me is the number of older pilgrims, people at or near retirement age. We met a lot of couples who set out to Santiago as a short, vigorous vacation, but there were also those who were figuring out what one recent retiree called “Stage Three.” If Stage One is education and the adventures of youth, and Stage Two is the different adventures of marriage, family and career, what will Stage Three hold? For them, walking the camino held a promise of adventures in the present and yet to come, was a demonstration of their continued physical well-being and love for each other, and it also gave them time to talk together about how to continue to be of service to others in the world. It was a long walking retreat at a transformative time in their lives.

We seem to have a number of ways to mark the various transitions of Stages One and Two, but few, if any, for Stage Three. Of course, there is always the camino.

Russell Shaw of OSV has a column at InsideCatholic.com that discusses “Polarization and the Church” and takes a not unexpected tilt in blaming what I guess would be considered the “left,” though Shaw sees it as a problem of politically-oriented bishops versus religiously-orthodox. (He also pins much of the blame on Barack Obama, but says it’s nothing personal–just politics.)

But the interesting part, for me, comes at the end, when Shaw argues that the divide in the Church is really between practicing, mass-going Catholics and less observant or largely “lapsed” (or “col-lapsed,” in NYT editor Bill Keller’s coinage) Catholics.

“On the whole, the polarization of American Catholics isn’t a split among practicing members of the Church.

According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, only 23 percent of Catholic adults in the United States now attend Mass every Sunday — which is to say 77 percent do not. Moreover, reports CARA, 75 percent receive the Sacrament of Penance — confess their sins, that is — less than once a year or never.

This isn’t American Catholicism at some point in an imagined future — it’s a snapshot of where we are now: three out of four adults seldom or never participating in the central religious acts of their Church, while only one in four does. Here’s the real polarization of American Catholics.

In the Notre Dame dust-up, 56 percent of Catholics who don’t attend weekly Mass thought the university did the right thing by honoring Obama, but only 37 percent of the weekly Mass-attenders agreed. More polarization. Instead of criticizing the university’s critics, bishops would do well to address this pervasive crisis at its roots, while at the same time considering the possibility that the views of people who go to Mass every week are the sensus fidelium at work.”

There are some inherent problems in Shaw’s invocation of polling data to locate the sensus fidelium. For one thing, the Pew poll he refers to showing a 45-37 majority of weekly attenders disapproving of the ND invite included only white non-Hispanic Catholics. That’s a pretty big hole in the poll.

Also a Quinnipiac poll just before Obama’s visit to ND showed that weekly mass-goers felt Notre Dame should not rescind the invite by a slim 49-43 percent majority.

So pick your numbers. But Shaw does raise an interesting and very relevant question of theology and, I suppose, sociology and political science: Who gets to speak for the church, and above all, where does the sensus fidelium reside? Is it among mass-goers or all the baptized? At what point does one become sufficiently “practicing” to be counted as part of the sensus fidelium?

This is, I suppose, an irrelevant exercise in many respects. But it is also inevitable as the church has a voice in the affairs of the day, and figuring out what that voice is would be a question for political sicentists and the Holy Spirit. And I think Russell Shaw raises an issue that Catholics themselves of all stripes sense–that those who attend have a larger say in the sensus fidelium because they are developing their sense of the faith. Maybe it comes down to a sense of possessiveness, maybe something else.

New York’s own Archbishop Timothy Dolan is the subject of a feature article in the latest issue of New York magazine: “The Archbishop of Charm,” by Robert Kolker. It’s primarily concerned with evaluating Dolan as a spokesperson for the Church to the wider world — or at least to New York City.

Catholic leaders across America are now faced with the same dilemma: How do you maintain the message of the church when that message is being questioned with ever-greater frequency? In choosing Timothy Dolan for the critical New York post, Rome has picked someone who is, if nothing else, an expert message-deliverer, blending the spotlight-loving tendencies of an O’Connor with all of the warmth and approachability that Egan lacked. But if you can’t alter the content of the message, is the delivery enough?

I’m not sure this is the most fruitful angle on the challenges and goals of Dolan’s position. But it’s a rewording of something Dolan himself told Kolker.

The challenge, as Dolan sees it, is how to expand the church’s appeal while protecting its principles. “How do we make something that is by its nature timeless timely?” he asks. “How do we make something that is by its nature otherworldly attractive to the world?”

Cardinal Egan seemed to feel (and, at the end of his tenure, was often heard to say) that the media in NYC has it in for the archbishop of New York. It always seemed to me that he hurt himself by approaching the media with that assumption in place — his defensiveness could hardly yield flattering press coverage. But Dolan is a much friendlier subject and a cheerful interviewee, and it pays off — that supposedly hostile media turns out to be rather friendly. New York may not be buying the Church’s take on homosexuality, but they obviously got a kick out of the way Dolan expressed it. “God made me with a particular soft spot in my heart for a martini…” That’s good enough for a pull-quote, even if in context it comes off as a rather lame attempt to soften the Church’s hard line against homosexual behavior.

There’s some interesting background information if you’re not up to date on Dolan’s bio. The interview itself doesn’t give much away, but the charm certainly comes through. It’s hard to imagine a speech like this one coming out of Egan’s mouth, at least in conversation with a reporter — and even if you prefer your hierarchs more dignified and remote, you have to admit the new archbishop makes the job sound like fun:

Dolan suggests that even Benedict has done more to embrace the secular world than anyone had expected. He once heard Benedict say, “The church is all about yes, yes, not no, no.” “And I thought, Bingo! You know, the church is the one who dreams, the church is the one who constantly has the vision, the church is the one that’s constantly saying ‘Yes!’ to everything that life and love and sexuality and marriage and belief and freedom and human dignity—everything that that stands for, the church is giving one big resounding ‘Yes!’ The church founded the universities, the church was the patron of the arts, the scientists were all committed Catholics. And that’s what we have to recapture: the kind of exhilarating, freeing aspect.”

Those not near a copy of New York can read the article online. (I probably don’t have to tell you this, but: skip the comments. Come back here and tell us what you think.)

At the Religion New Service blog, Dan Burke reminds us that John T. Elson, the author of the (in)famous 1966 TIME magazine cover on the death of God, has passed away. In the New York Times obit, a former managing editor of TIME said of Elson, a Notre Dame grad:

“He was catholic with a capital C and a small c in his interests, deeply and widely read. His ability to absorb an enormous amount of information and turn it into a readable story was remarkable.”

Our own ability to absorb information may be less impressive. The issue was enormously controversial, and produced Time’s “biggest newsstand sales in more than 20 years and elicited 3,500 letters to the editor, the most in its history to that point,” according to the NYT.

And it remains a touchstone for many, especially religious conservatives, who regularly refer to the notorious issue as the one in which the liberal press declared God dead–while the faithful have since proved the secularists wrong.

In reality, however, the cover posed a question: “Is God dead?” And, as Burke writes, “the article’s actual headline was ‘Toward a Hidden God,’ and it was a scholarly, careful look at how secularism, urbanism, and all the other ‘isms were changing people’s ideas about God.”

The NYT obit continues:

The quiet, studious Mr. Elson, who died on Sept. 7 at the age of 78, was an unlikely bomb-thrower, and his article, for those who ventured past the cover, reflected his scholarly bent. Meekly titled on the inside as “Toward a Hidden God,” it began: “Is God dead? It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no.”

For the next six pages, readers were guided through thickets of theological controversy and a shifting religious landscape. Profound changes taking place in the relationship of believers to their faith were often expressed through the words of people, both eminent and ordinary, grappling with the same fundamental problems. Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Billy Graham and William Sloane Coffin were quoted. So were a Tel Aviv streetwalker, a Dutch charwoman and a Hollywood screenwriter.

More than 30 Time foreign correspondents were also involved in the project, conducting some 300 interviews to measure contemporary thinking about God around the world.

In fact, one of those journalists involved in the project was a young Philadelphia priest, John Patrick Foley, who would go on to become and archbishop (and now cardinal) and serve as a top communications official at the Vatican for many years.

In any case, God seems to have survived the kerfuffle. The better question now is that posed by Dan Burke:

“It seems worth asking whether the kind of journalism John Elson practiced is gone with him.”

You can read the original TIME essay here.

Believe it or not, another issue of Commonweal is on its way to subscribers. Here’s what everyone can read online:

• Paul Moses’s cover story, “Mission Improbable: St. Francis & the Sultan,” an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s attempt to end the Crusades in 1219 by converting Egypt’s Sultan Malik al-Kamil to Christianity.
• Our editorial on the war in Afghanistan — “Why Are We There?”
• Rand Richards Cooper’s review of the films The Baader Meinhof Complex and The English Surgeon.

And that’s just a start. Maura Ryan’s article “Toxic Legacy: Why the Environment Is a Life Issue” proposes “five concrete ways for Obama to move from promise to action on children’s environmental health.” Melinda Henneberger’s column examines how “the anger industry” influences American politics. The “Last Word” essay by Kenneth L. Parker explores the sad fate of the ancient Nubian Church. And our book review section includes the latest installment of Lawrence S. Cunningham’s Religion Booknotes, as well as Denis Donoghue on Frederick Seidel’s collected poems; Paul O’Donnell on Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia; and Andrew Gleeson on Richard Grigg’s Beyond the God Delusion.

If you’re not lucky enough to be a subscriber already, we have lots of ways to fix that. Click “Subscriptions” in the toolbar at the top of this page to see what works for you: get us by mail, or try an online subscription. There’s a PDF version — handy if you’re overseas — and, of course, Commonweal makes a great gift for any occasion. Still on the fence? We’ll send you two free issues. We think you’ll be hooked.

Have you heard about the sixth-century Church council where bishops took a vote on whether women have souls? No, that didn’t actually happen, but it has been a popular anecdote for decades — handy for anyone who wants to paint the Catholic Church (or religion in general) as anti-women and isn’t too picky about their facts.

The September 11 “Laity Issue” of Commonweal has a feature article by Kathleen Sprows Cummings on how the myth of the Council of Mâcon figured prominently in American discourse in the early twentieth century, and what that reveals of the historical roots of the divide between Catholics and feminists that persists to this day. (The article — “Do Women Have Souls? Catholicism, Feminism & the Council of Mâcon” — is available online only to subscribers, which may be the excuse you’ve been looking for to subscribe now.)

Looking at how easily bad information spread one hundred years ago makes me wish I could say we’ve come a long way. The Internet makes fact-checking easier than ever — but it takes skill to use it to find the truth, and far less skill to use it to spread or validate bad information. Here’s hoping this post will stop someone, somewhere, from telling the story of the Council of Mâcon as if it were true. For more background on how the Mâcon story got started in the first place, check out “The Myth of Soulless Women“, an article by Michael Nolan from the April 1997 First Things. And if it’s the American history angle that interests you, check out Professor Cummings’s recently published book, New Women of the Old Faith.

In related news: in July, Notre Dame’s Web site featured a response from Professor Cummings to the news of the “visitation” of American women religious. It seems quite careful and rather mild to my eyes, but it drew the ire of the Cardinal Newman Society, who called it “a radical feminist commentary that is disrespectful of the Vatican.” You’ll have to decide for yourself.

I’ve been AWOL from this blog while preparing for, and leading, a weeklong study tour in Rome and Florence.

On the eve of my return to the States, I’m sitting in my hotel room in Rome — which is tucked into the side of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme — and thinking about St. Helena and her determined effort to find the True Cross. This is where Helena, the Emperor Constantine’s mother, had a palace, which she left when she went on her quest to Jerusalem.

The Cross seems like a good topic for reflection on a day when Rome is mourning the loss of six soldiers in Afghanistan….

I’m also surfing the web (too tired to sightsee) and I see that Uwem Akpan, SJ’s collection of short stories, Say You’re One of Them, has just been chosen as Oprah’s latest Book Club pick.

There have been at least a couple earlier posts about this volume but allow me to recommend it as well. I just took my MFA students through these tragic tales of  contemporary Africa. The unifying thread in the collection is that all the narrators are all children. The stories are set in various African nations, including Nigeria, Rwanda, and Kenya.

The Cross is present in each of these tales, too.

St. Helena, pray for us.

At his Angelus address yesterday, Benedict XVI cautioned against becoming desensitized to the daily roll call of fatalities from comflicts around the world:

“From the numerous conflicts going on in the world,” the Pontiff said, “almost daily tragic news reaches us of both military and civilian victims. These are facts that we must never get used to, and they arouse a profound outcry and perplex societies that have the good of peace and civil coexistence at heart.”

I continue to find the daily tally of military casualties broadcast, in silence, at the end of the “Newshour” on PBS terribly moving, and I think it is a real service. I don’t watch the program every night, though I wish I could, and I am always grateful for the reminder. Journalism (and other comunications arts) can focus on the particular to prevent us from becoming inured by the general onslaught of events.

Lawrence Downes, whose writing, usually in the “Editorial Observer” section of the NYT’s opinion pages, I like very much, performed this task to great effect the other day in a short piece called “Remembering Sergeant Monti.” It is a meditation on the great gestures by ordinary folk that take place every day:

Staff Sgt. Jared Monti could have stayed where he was.

Under ferocious attack from about 50 Taliban fighters in northern Afghanistan and taking cover behind rocks with his badly outnumbered patrol, he could have waited for artillery and airstrikes to beat back the enemy.

But only yards away, on open ground, one of his men, a private, lay dying. Sergeant Monti dashed out to bring him to safety. Enemy fire forced him to retreat. He ran out again. More bullets and shrapnel forced him back. The enemy was so close that the patrol members could hear voices; the gunfire was so withering that one soldier had a rifle blown from his hands.

The third time Sergeant Monti tried, he was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. He died within minutes.

It’s impossible to pinpoint where Sergeant Monti, of the 10th Mountain Division in Fort Drum, N.Y., got his courage and selflessness. Maybe from his parents, a nurse and a teacher, or from the Army, where sacrifice and service are part of the drill. Maybe he had those virtues all along.

Whatever their source, they came out in full force on that desperate night in June 2006. When President Obama presented Sergeant Monti’s Medal of Honor to his parents, Janet and Paul, at the White House on Thursday, he retold the stunning act of valor. He repeated the sergeant’s words, which made it a simple matter of duty: “No, he is my soldier. I’m going to get him.”

The kicker is powerful. Read on.

Here’s an article on the Church’s most prominent Latinist by CNS. (HT David Gibson).

I talked to him last month, and he is impatient to get back to teaching!

I’m still making my way along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. My fellow caminista and I aren’t doing the whole route, but about half–we’ll have gone about 270 miles when we finish on Monday.

On the camino, we try to minimize our gear because we carry it on our backs from place to place. How many shirts do I REALLY need? How many socks? The camino isn’t easy, but it is simple, in that each day our basic responsibility is straightforward–we rise, we eat, we walk, we rest. We really need very little to do that. As we’ve traveled we shed some gear, while other stuff we continue to carry.

It’s also significant what we do carry beyond practical basics. I’ve been unable to shed books entirely, but still carry 4 or 5, along with the netbook on which I type now. I threw away chapters of one book as I read them. Another, a hardcover I can’t toss because I’m to review it, well, I finally sawed the cover off after a long day. The books, I decided, are worth the cost to my back to carry them. They are part of my being “me” on the camino.

What we decide is worth the cost to carry, and what we can set aside, at least for a time, is a pretty straightforward life lesson. Another echo of this, though, is going on in the Church these days.

What is worth the cost to carry? Is a celibate male clergy worth the cost of diminished access to sacraments? And the related costs of burnout, etc. to the men who are wounded by celibacy and alienation of the women and men denied this form of leadership? Is protecting Church assets worth the cost of the secrecy and the aggressive legal tactics used to defend them? Is unanimity in teaching worth the cost of silencing theologians and stifling debate? Or is it really still simpler: “And [Jesus] said to them, “When I sent you out without money belt and bag and sandals, you did not lack anything, did you?” They said, “No, nothing.” The gospel may be enough. OK, and a few books.

Maybe it’s a bit early to decide, but with most of the nation bathed in sun, it could be a slow day for dotCommonweal. The comment comes from Commonweal contributor Jean Raber (most recent piece on the new Beguines here–subscribers only). Jean was responding to the following comment from Mark Proska in Eduardo’s thread below:

Let’s start with something we can all agree on: Every U.S citizen has access to healthcare and healthcare insurance. Those in the US who don’t have health insurance fall into one of the following buckets:

1) Illegal aliens, in which case the immigration system, not the healthcare system is the problem.

2) Those who can’t afford health insurance, in which case it’s a welfare issue, not a healthcare issue.

Mealy-mouthed whining about the “lack of access” and imprecise formulations of the problem are not helpful.

Here’s Jean:

Help me stop whining, Mark Proska! I certainly don’t want to be a drain on society’s resources or sympathy!

My employer needed to cut health care costs. It has done so by moving those of us who are not represented by unions onto part-time contracts that have no benefits. Problem solved! For them.

I can afford health care for my kid, even with his asthma, so things seem to be better there.

I can’t find it for myself. I’m 55, have pre-hypertension (possibly self-inflicted from reading your posts, and based on newer medical guidelines that have lowered the bar for what’s considered pre-hypertension), so I now have a pre-existing condition and affordable coverage is zippo, even though I’ve been on the horn with all sorts of companies, legit and otherwise, who purport to offer me a “good deal.”

I can pay for routine doc visits, flu shots. I can get a freebie once in awhile on pap and memmo screenings, but I can’t see the point, because if they told me I had cancer, I couldn’t afford to have a catastrophic illness treated.

My best bet for affordable health care is to quit one of two jobs and go on Medicaid. Six- to eight-month wait on that, but, better than waiting another 10 years until I’m eligible for Medicare. However, that means I’ll have health care, but not enough money to meet our very modest financial obligations, and I prefer to stay solvent.

A new Harvard Medical School study estimates that 45,000 people die each year due to lack of access to health insurance (HT TPM):

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.  “We’re losing more Americans every day because of inaction … than drunk driving and homicide combined,” Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.

That access to health care is so clearly a life issue is just part of why the opposition to health reform from some pro-life quarters is so hard for me to understand.   The other reason I am confused by their position is that I don’t  completely understand the anxiety that subsidies for insurance will facilitate people getting abortions.  Obama is willing, as I understand it, to mandate that insurers receiving subsidies pay for abortions only out of revenue received from individual premiums.  The counter-argument I’ve heard is that this distinction is just a gimmick.  Since the newly insured wouldn’t have been able to afford coverage without the federal subsidy, any time they use their subsidized insurance to procure an abortion, it’s as if the federal government’s subsidies were the cause of the abortion.

There are a couple of aspects of the argument that confuse me.  First, surely some of the uninsured surely get abortions today, through services provided by nonprofit groups like Planned Parenthood.  So we’re really talking about some increment of the uninsured – those who would not be able to afford to get an abortion today but who would get one if they had access to subsidized insurance.  How many people are we talking about?  More than the 45,000 people who die each  year because of the lack of access to health care?

But more broadly, wouldn’t this abortion-facilitating argument be equally true for any government subsidy of the poor?  How, for example, is it different from saying that we should not give the poor food stamps because (for some undetermined number of people) that will free up money from their personal budgets that they will then use to go out and procure an abortion that they otherwise would not have been able to afford?  Should we require food-stamp recipients to sign some pledge that they won’t use their private money to procure abortions?  Given the various positions that Obama has taken to try to defuse the abortion issue in the health care context,  that it may nonetheless indirectly subsidize abortions strikes me as a very odd argument against Catholics supporting health care reform.

The latest update on the Legion of Christ.

I think it is a mistake to reduce the problem to a cult of personality of Fr. Maciel.  that’s a way of dismissing the problem–he’s dead, no more problem. Move along folks–no need to worry about the next group to gain papal favor.

I think an equally important factor is the cult of appearances.  I can’t tell you how many people  told me that the liked the order because they LOOKED holy–by which they meant wholesome.  So many clean-cut, handsome priests in soutanes.  So many women dressed in Talbots sweater sets, pearls and pumps.  So many Christmas -card perfect families. And we now know, of course, that maintaining the appearances was a priority for this group.  How could anything that LOOKED so wholesome –so 1950′s –be bad?

My own rule:  Talbots is fine.  Cleancut is fine.  But if your standard of appearance would not allow entry to Jesus Christ himself, then you’ve got the wrong standard.  It’s a challenge for middle-class people–for me too.  That’s one of the reasons I so admire the Catholic Worker movement.

Here’s an essay I wrote several years ago, “Wholesomeness, Holiness, and Hairspray.”

“You Can Tell a Lot About People by Who[m] They Choose to Demonize”
An incisive analysis of the attacks on Acorn and the Senate vote to defund them. Take a look.
http://www.anonymousliberal.com/2009/09/you-can-tell-lot-about-people-by-who.html
(ht: Glenn Greenwald)

Update: The Times has a profile of the provocateur who made the video of Acorn workers. He is the pimp in the videos and has provoked before. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/19/us/19sting.html

Patrick Molloy has helpfully posted this link to the New York Post story on our budding journalists and their plans:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/duo_who_turned_this_trick_2sjQ58MdtwmSXxhfVELmZL

Happy are they who grind the faces of the poor. They shall have a career and prosper.

And here, The typical American solution to the problem, “Acorn Sues Makers of Video” 

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/09/23/us/AP-US-ACORN-Lawsuit.html?_r=1&hp