When President Obama speaks at West Point on Afghanistan, he will be speaking above all to a domestic audience; NATO countries will be listening in as will Pakistan; presumably some messages will be delivered to the governing elites of Afghanistan. While the president will no doubt focus on numbers of troops (30,000 has been leaked, but who knows), exit strategies, perhaps the costs to the American taxpayer, and conditions that the Afghan government will have to meet. But based on the NYU meeting I attended last week, there are other critical issues that we should listen for, in part to know how thorough his due dilligence has been.
1. Afghanistan’s economy is narco-based; opium is the currency of the local farmers as well as the Taliban. National corruption is supported by this currency. What is the alternative?
2. Afghanistan is a tribal society and has never been a nation-state in the accepted definition. Will Obama talk about a political system, a confederation, suitable to the tribal society that it is and so far remains.
3. He may speak of development, but what kind of development is appropriate for a society that is largely an oral (i.e., non-readers) one governed by tribal elders and not by popular vote or by an entreprenurial elite.
4. He will talk of troop numbers and perhaps of over-all strategy, but what kind of military plan will be in place and what will the CIA and Special Forces be doing?
5. He will certainly speak of Afghan forces taking up the fight, but except for a small elite force in the Afghan Army, it is a country that has no real military infrastructure, nor a serious police force.
6. Afghanistan is surrounded by several states who have a serious interest in a stable and peaceful country. Will Obama draw them in: Russia, China, the Stans, and Iran. What will he ask of them?

A year ago, Christopher Ruddy reported for us on the most pressing crisis in American Catholicism. I refer, of course, to the losing record of the Fighting Irish and Notre Dame’s underperforming football coach, Charlie Weis. Now I see Weis has been dismissed, so there’s one fewer thing for the bishops to worry about. No word yet on whether the order came directly from Rome, but I expect our operatives in South Bend will keep us informed.

In a New York Times op-ed today, Kenneth J. Wolfe doesn’t answer the question in my headline, but he does see a “counterrevolution” in the return of the Tridentine rite. In a piece titled “Latin Mass Appeal,” Wolfe also offers an interesting take on the liturgical development of the past century. Here’s the kicker:

Benedict understands that his younger priests and seminarians — most born after Vatican II — are helping lead a counterrevolution. They value the beauty of the solemn high Mass and its accompanying chant, incense and ceremony. Priests in cassocks and sisters in habits are again common; traditionalist societies like the Institute of Christ the King are expanding.

Chanting Latin, wearing antique vestments and distributing communion only on the tongues (rather than into the hands) of kneeling Catholics, Benedict has slowly reversed the innovations of his predecessors. And the Latin Mass is back, at least on a limited basis, in places like Arlington, Va., where one in five parishes offer the old liturgy.

At the beginning of this decade, Benedict (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) wrote: “The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above, but is closed in on itself.” He was right: 40 years of the new Mass have brought chaos and banality into the most visible and outward sign of the church. Benedict XVI wants a return to order and meaning. So, it seems, does the next generation of Catholics.

Liturgy posts are like waving a red flag at a bull, which is always good fun. And I’m sure many will wade in with waves of their own. I’ll start: Apart from Wolfe’s cheerleading for the old rite, I think he makes a number of dubious assertions. For one thing, he calls Benedict “a noted liturgist,” though I think Ratzinger is that only in the sense that he is very interested in liturgy, and of a certain kind. Maybe that qualifies. He also imputes an omnipotence to Archbishop Annibale Bugnini so powerful that it evidently hypnotized popes Pius XII, Paul VI and even John Paul II into indulging in reforms against their will–and even after Bugnini’s death. Hmmm…

He never seems to explain the “paradox” of Pius XII “scoffing” at modernizing the liturgy and then preparing the way for such modernization. And viewing liturgical reform as a sop to Protestants? And the idea that the Tridentine rite and traditionalism are booming seems suspect if one goes by, well, the numbers.

Hey, everyone can have an opinion, and Wolfe takes a legit approach. But I think his history is skewed. I also marvel at the terminology and triumphalism of such apologists. Wolfe, for example, lauds the unvarying “rubrics” of the past rite yet now apparently welcomes the manifold liturgical options that Benedict is introducing. Paradox indeed. In any case, I am not a liturgist, noted or otherwise, so corrections welcome.

UPDATE: Kenneth Wolfe replied in the comments below and I think it merits more prominent play. Here’s what he says:

Goodness, I love liberal Catholics — I really do.

I commend the above writers who took the time to quibble with facts and points. The argument about whether it was fair to note the barely-a-decade parish work of Bugnini in light of the pope’s resume is an interesting one.

But, sadly, I see the same, tired arguments by most others above: Vatican II is settled, the novus ordo is set in stone until the end of the world and anyone who dares remind us there was a Church before the mid-20th century will be maligned as an univited guest.

Like it or not, Benedict XVI is a fan of traditionalists. Two of his biggest actions thus far into the papacy have been the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum (essentially removing bishops from decisions regarding the traditional Latin Mass and all the pre-VII sacraments) and the un-excommunication of the four living SSPX bishops. Next up is to fully reconcile the SSPX.

Yet I see scoffing and Upper West Side-esque dismissal by those who (in my opinion) don’t want to face reality. The Church is swinging back to the right. You may not like that, and you are entitled to your opinion. But you ought to act a little less surprised and angry that a traditionalist viewpoint could be aired in the mainstream media.

There have been several recent attempts to reignite the culture wars in the United States–I don’t think they will be successful, in large part because people are still focused on economic survival.  At the same time, it’s worth noting the limitations of the prophetic rhetoric of condemnation in achieving social reform. I came across this passage from English poet and social critic Matthew Arnold (d. 1888), who was protesting the influence of a too narrow and negative conception of religion as avoiding sin and obeying divine law among the middle class in nineteenth century England.

It’s a salutary reminder not to reduce religion to mere negative moralism.  Ultimately, as Arnold notes, it’s “sweetness and light”– goodness, truth, and beauty– that attracts and transforms  people.  And one of the strengths of the Catholic tradition has always been its ability to situate the moral rules in the context of a broader and rich view of human flourishing.  Incidentally, that’s why I like Evangelium Vitae so much–the “culture of life” is fully, and positively, described therein–it’s not reduced simply to opposition to the “culture of death.”

“Another newspaper, representing, like the Nonconformist, one of the religious organisations of this country, was a short time ago giving an account of the crowd at Epsom on the Derby day, and of all the vice and hideousness which was to be seen in that crowd; and then the writer turned suddenly round upon Professor Huxley, and asked him how he proposed to cure all this vice and hideousness without religion. I confess I felt disposed to ask the asker this question: and how do you propose to cure it with such a religion as yours? How is the ideal of a life so unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as is the life of your religious organisation as you yourself reflect it, to conquer and transform all this vice and hideousness?“  (Culture and Anarchy, para. 30.)

How indeed.

While most of us were gorging ourselves yesterday, Ireland was busy digesting a government report on their own clergy sexual-abuse scandal. Its verdict? Over a period of thirty years, diocesan authorities systematically covered up sexual-abuse allegations against clergy–in collusion with the police. The L.A. Times reports:

The commission, which investigated how the church and state agencies handled three decades of endemic child abuse by priests in the Irish capital [from 1974 to 2004], also criticized police and social and health authorities who, with a few exceptions, it said, ignored complaints or simply referred allegations back to the church hierarchy.

Presenting the government-commissioned report at a news conference in Dublin, Justice Minister Dermot Ahern spoke of his “revulsion” on reading the findings and called them a “scandal on an astonishing scale.”

Ring any bells? The seven-hundred-page Murphy Report, three years in the making, studied how the archdiocese handled abuse allegations against a sample of forty-six priests who worked in Dublin between 1974 and 2004. (Eleven of the forty-six have either been convicted of or pleaded guilty to sexual assault. The rest are dead–or haven’t been prosecuted.) According to the report, the archdiocese demonstrated an “obsessive concern with secrecy and the avoidance of scandal,” while showing “little or no concern for the welfare of the abused child.” The archbishop has apologized. So have the police. And the government has promised swift action.

Other main findings from the report (from the Irish Times):

All archbishops and many of the auxiliary bishops in Dublin handled child sexual abuse complaints badly. None of the four archbishops reported their knowledge of abuse to gardaí [the police] “throughout the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s”.

Church authorities used the concept of “mental reservation”, which allows senior clergy to mislead people without being guilty, in the church’s eyes, of lying.

Senior members of the gardaí regarded priests as outside their remit, with some members reporting complaints to the archdiocese instead of investigating them.

It said there were some courageous priests who brought complaints to the attention of their superiors. But in general there was a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

The report concluded that it is the responsibility of the State to ensure that no similar institutional immunity was ever allowed to occur again.

Ah, mental reservation. The truth but not the whole truth so help you God. Is Father available? No, the secretary says, knowing Father is upstairs not doing much of anything. She has mentally reserved the rest of the truth: that Father is not available to the person asking. Clever concept. Perhaps it’s time to give it a proper burial.

More, much more: A background timeline from the Irish Times. Their editorial. Dublin auxilliary bishop argues the Murphy inquiry should not be extended beyond Dublin to the rest of the country. Letters from the Murphy commission to nuncio and Rome asking for information about clergy sexual abuse went unanswered. Who abused and where. Backgrounder on the Murphy commission. Abusive priest forces victim’s family to move. Minister for Justice promises “a collar will protect no criminal.” The archbishop’s apology.

Is it Lent yet?

President Obama has established a new bioethics commission.  The chair of the Commission is Amy Guttman, the president of the University of Pennsylvania.  The vice chair is James W. Wagner, the president of Emory University.  You can read the press release here.

President Bush’s  Council on Bioethics had many critics, but I was not one of them.  It was a serious and committed group of scholars and they did important work.  The new commission is more likely to be politically left-of-center than the right-of-center PCB, but let us hope that the new commission does not get mired in a new round of battles in the culture wars.

Any recommendations for commission members?  My nomination: Cathy Kaveny.

you might want to watch Arlo Guthrie perform the Thanksgiving Day classic, Alice’s Restaurant.

Have a nice nap, everyone.

Mosul (AsiaNews) – Explosive devices were detonated this morning at two Christian sites in Mosul, the Church of Saint Ephrem and the Mother House of the Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine. At present, there are no reports about casualties but the church was entirely destroyed. The convent also suffered damages but it is not known how much. Christian sources in Mosul told AsiaNews that the “attack was like a Mafia warning”, a message to Christians “to get out of the city.”

Is this two years in a row or three that I’ve posted this classic WKRP clip? What the hell?–it’s tradition. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. (You can watch the whole episode, and the rest of the first season, at Hulu.)

To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us — and He has given us everything …

So goes this week’s reflection from The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living, which seems to find just the right quote from Thomas Merton every week.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

The cover of the December 2009 issue of The Atlantic is a cheeky photo illustration of a wooden cross that doubles as a real-estate signpost marked “foreclosure.” Alongside it, this headline: “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?”

Is it just me, or have magazines like The Atlantic and Harper’s been getting more sensationalistic lately with their religion-baiting cover stories? This one is obviously intended to provoke, and Hanna Rosin, who wrote the article, is likely not responsible for that headline. Jonathan Walton (whom Rosin quotes at length in the piece) calls it “a classic case of great article, horrible title!” Walton’s response is insightful, particularly in picking apart why headlines like this one are so infuriating. But I don’t agree that the article is “great,” and worse, I’m not sure the title misrepresents it. Rosin is not, of course, actually arguing that belief in Christ, broadly speaking, is responsible for our present economic troubles. But if you take away the provocative framework suggested by the headline, she’s not making much of an argument at all.

This is a pity, because the subject is important. Walton says, “Hanna Rosin carefully makes the appropriate connections between the sort of hyper-consumerist, greed-induced, Mcmansion sensibility that fueled both the housing crisis, and the explicit and implicit messages of the prosperity gospel in America.” I agree with all of that except “carefully.” There is good reporting in here, and with care it could have generated an excellent story. But Rosin’s article is unfocused and unsatisfying, and in the end not much more thoughtful than the cover suggests.

First of all, as you’ve probably noted, the “Christianity” in the headline refers not to belief in Christ in general, but rather to the perversion of Christianity known as the “prosperity gospel”—a predatory money-making scheme that fools people by telling them what they want to hear and pretending the Bible backs it up. Rosin knows, on some level, that actual Christianity has little to do with what her case study, Pastor Fernando Garay, is preaching to his Latino congregation in Virginia. In her second paragraph she quotes a Mexican immigrant and “parishioner” of Garay’s explaining, “Jesus loved money too!” The quote is there because it’s transparently ludicrous. The question it raises is, why does anyone fall for this nonsense, and what happens when they do?

Rosin doesn’t seem sure what questions she wants to ask. “America’s churches always reflect shifts in the broader culture, and Casa del Padre is no exception,” she writes. So maybe the problem isn’t “Christianity” after all; maybe it’s America that’s at fault? She explains that she picked Garay’s church because it “is comprised mostly of first-generation [Latino] immigrants. More than others I’ve visited, it echoes back a highly distilled, unself-conscious version of the current thinking on what it means to live the American dream.” I guess. But it’s the next paragraph that jumps off the page at me, suggesting that the story Rosin ought to be telling is much more specific: Read the rest of this entry »

Over at the Atlantic Monthly, Ron Brownstein has a post about how the Senate Finance Committee health care reform bill would “bend the trend” on health care costs.  An excerpt:

In their November 17 letter to Obama, the group of economists led by Dr. Alan Garber of Stanford University, identified four pillars of fiscally-responsible health care reform. They maintained that the bill needed to include a tax on high-end “Cadillac” insurance plans; to pursue “aggressive” tests of payment reforms that will “provide incentives for physicians and hospitals to focus on quality” and provide “care that is better coordinated”; and establish an independent Medicare commission that can continuously develop and implement “new efforts to improve quality and contain costs.” Finally, they said the Congressional Budget Office “must project the bill to be at least deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window and deficit reducing thereafter.”

As OMB Director Peter Orszag noted in an interview, the Reid bill met all those tests. The CBO projected that the bill would reduce the federal deficit by $130 billion over its first decade and by as much as $650 billion in its second. (Conservatives, of course, consider those projections unrealistic, but CBO is the only umpire in the game, and Republicans have been happy to trumpet its analyses critical of the Democratic plans.)  “Let’s use the metric of that letter,” said Orszag, who helped shape the health reform debate for years from his earlier posts at CBO and the Brookings Institution. “Deficit neutral; got that. Deficit-reducing second decade, got that. Excise tax: That was retained. Third is the Medicare commission: has that. Fourth is delivery system reforms, bundling payments, hospital acquired infections, readmission rates. It has that. If you go down the checklist of what they said was necessary for a fiscally responsible bill that will move us towards the health care system of the future, this passes the bar.”

McClellan, the former Bush official and current director of the Engleberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution, was one of the economists who signed the November letter. McClellan has some very practical ideas for improving the Reid bill (more on those below), but generally he echoes Orszag’s assessment of it. “It has got all four of those elements in it,” McClellan said in an interview. “They kept a lot of the key elements of the Finance bill that I like. It would be good if more could be done, but this is the right direction to go.”

I think this post is very well done and provides a good overview of the key issues.  What is also interesting is the involvement of McClellan, a former Bush administration official, in these discussions.  The fact is that there are a number of very smart Republican health policy wonks out there with some good ideas.   But their ability to influence the direction of the legislation is limited by the rejectionist stance that the Congressional Republicans have taken.

Fr. Joseph N. Moody was one of the great priests of the Archdiocese of New York in the last six or seven decades. Tall, athletic, and handsome, he was first encountered by most of us as a professor of modern history at Cathedral College, the minor seminary of the Archdiocese of New York. We knew him to be the nearly polar opposite, physically and ideologically, of another great character on the faculty there, Florence D. Cohalan. Fr. Moody was a passionate teacher who could come close to tears in describing a particularly dramatic moment in history. He took a great deal of interest in his students and actually sought their views on historical personages. He was also the only teacher whose language in the classroom occasionally betrayed his experience in the navy.

We were eventually to learn that Fr. Moody was an acknowledged expert on nineteenth-century French history, was a participant in the National Council of Christians and Jews, a vigorous defender of the rights of labor, and a champion of efforts on behalf of Negroes (as the word was then). He edited a 914-page volume, Church and Society. Catholic Social and Political Thought and Movements, 1789-1950 (New York: Arts,. Inc. 1953), many of whose chapters, including especially his on France, are still worth reading. He served as pastor in two parishes in the suburbs of New York City. He also taught at the College of New Rochelle and at The Catholic University of America. (Upon his death in 1993, a lovely appreciation of him was published by in the American Historical Association.)

During World War II, Fr. Moody served as a navy chaplain, and would receive citations for his service on the USS Massachusetts and the USS Yorktown.. While at sea, he arranged for $50.00 to be sent to Commonweal every month so that its editors could send books from current reading lists. He sent a letter of thanks to the Editors which included this encomium:

The Commonweal is more valuable to me than ever before, for it keeps me informed, better than any other vehicle, in those areas that are of deepest significance. Each week, after reading my copy, I place it in the officers’ wardroom, and I have found that it is the only bridge we possess to reach the secularized American mind. Recently when our officers drew up a list of magazines they wished to obtain, they included The Commonweal, a striking testimony of its power to reach a segment of our reading public that would otherwise be untouched by things Catholic.

In March 1944, Commonweal published an article by Fr. Moody, “Routine: Days in the Life of a Navy Chaplain,” which recounts with his typical combination of down-to-earth realism and hearty optimism the challenges, griefs, and joys of his work with the men at sea. The whole piece is worth reading, but I draw attention to two of his final paragraphs, which can usefully go into any account or appreciation of pre-conciliar Catholicism:

A census showed that the great proportion of Catholics aboard were more active in the practice of religion than they had been at home. The explanation is obvious: the intimacy with which the priest lives with them and his opportunity to influence their personal lives; the activity of lay apostles; the increased occasion for reflection that came in lives freed from all distraction. In practically all cases where a radical change for the better occurred, it was necessary to buttress it with a full course of instructions, for lack of religious training is the prime defect in our adult Catholic. Rarely was fear an important element, as modern naval war-fare is too impersonal to inspire terror, and men’s mental habits are too firmly grooved to be deeply affected thereby. The conviction was always present that although the spiritual results were gratifying, they could have been achieved by intensive missionary activity on Main Street, almost as well as aboard a man-o’-war.

The chaplain’s greatest help in bringing his men to God is the liturgy. The use of Father Stedman’s missal is universal among them, and the regularity of their attendance is increased by their growing appreciation of the beauty of the Sacrifice. They frequently aver that they had no concept of its meaning until they had learned to follow it intelligently. The numbers at daily Mass tripled once the “Missa Recitata” [jak: the "Dialogue Mass"] was introduced, and the response on Sunday was almost as noteworthy. There is little doubt that they were being prepared for a real interest in liturgical participation, which gives one hope that some abiding spiritual result may have been obtained from their experience aboard ship. At least in their religious life, the influence of routine was diminished. Coupled with the aid furnished by the Confraternity Home Study Courses and pamphlets, it was felt that a firm basis was afforded for their further religious development.

As President Obama homes in on the Afghanistan decision, here are some articles you might want to read. I hope he has read them:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/roston    http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2009/11/peril-in-pakistan-fb-ali.html#more   http://blog.stevenpressfield.com/wp-content/themes/stevenpressfield/one_tribe_at_a_time.pdf
HT: Pat Lang http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/

NYU’s Center on Law and Security had a well-attended conference last Friday, “Counterinsurgency: America’s Strategic Burden,” which I hope to write about later this week. The bottom line: many well-informed experts are not optimistic about U.S. prospects in Afghanistan. More than one of them offered the view that Pakistan was a far greater danger, and in the long run a far more difficult problem than Afghanistan.

UPDATE: Bill Moyers did a repris (Friday, November 20) of LBJ’s Vietnam decision making. Moyers captured the muddle and troubled moral considertions by rebroadcasing Johnson’s phone conversation with major players. Moyers was then one of his aides so we can assume that he knows whereof he has selected from taped phone conversations. Here in transcript form: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11202009/transcript1.html  There is a video link as well: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11202009/watch.html

Here you may listen to an interview with Rowan Williams that was broadcast on Vatican Radio.  I’ve been looking for a copy of Cardinal Kasper’s speech at the symposium at which both men spoke.  I have only the report made by CNA. I hope Kasper’s remarks will soon be made available.

One of the major tasks of professional education of all sorts is to help students see that their education is no longer “all about them.”  It never was, of course–but professional school education has a more immediate -connection to the well-being of vulnerable people, whom the students will be responsible for in a few short years.   It’s hard to make that point with law school–  it’s still school, it’s only words.

But think about what dental education would look like if it were only about enriching the minds and spirits of the dental students.   The Onion rarely disappoints.

(BTW: I know this is not fair to Montessori–which never meant to control professional training).

The debate continues over whether the news media downplayed suggestions that  Maj. Nidal  Hasan, the Fort Hood gunman, is an Islamist terrorist.  Critics such as  columnists David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer had said there was too much focus on whether Hasan was mentally ill, what Brooks called a “rush to therapy.”

As someone who has covered such stories in the past – and I mean trying to tell the public on deadline what happened, not writing with a columnist’s hindsight – I think Brooks, Krauthammer, et al are wrong about this. The details initially available to reporters didn’t establish the story Brooks and Krauthammer wanted to see. But from the first day, the better news organizations have been trying to gather the missing facts, as in this piece in Saturday’s Washington Post on Hasan’s contacts with a radical Muslim cleric.

I remember that on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, I was assigned to do a Sunday story providing a larger context about the threat of terrorism. I was a reporter for New York Newsday. Word had gotten out that authorities had detained an Arab taxi driver from Brooklyn, and I began to shape my story with that in mind. I had to start anew when that turned out to be a false alarm.

In 1997, I covered a shooting in which a deranged Palestinian man fatally shot one person and wounded six others at the Empire State Building. In that case, New York City officials, including Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, went to great lengths to avoid any suggestion of a political motive and portrayed the shooting as a random act of violence that could have happened anywhere. They focused attention on the gunman’s mental instability. This was undermined the next day when it came out that the shooter had a rambling letter in his pocket attacking Zionism, among other things, and asserting that he had chosen the Empire State Building for his attack because he saw it as a symbol of all he opposed. Still, there was no evidence that the gunman had any connection to a terrorist group. The letter spelled out a political motivation for the crime, but also made clear that the gunman was mentally ill.

Reporters will generally follow the law enforcement authorities’ lead on these matters, at least until they have the time to develop information from other sources. The facts available on traumatic events such as these are often scant on the first day or two, especially if  the authorities are not forthcoming.

Good journalism is still rooted in finding out and reporting the facts, even in this era of instant opinion. The hair-trigger journalism urged  in coverage of the Fort Hood shooter’s motive is the wrong approach. It’s important for journalists to recognize what they don’t know.

Although most of us who teach are growing inexorably closer to the mountain of FALL exams we have to grade, we’re also thinking about our SPRING courses.

I’m teaching “Faith, Law, and Morality” this spring–which is about, well, faith, law and morality. In each section, I have them do some readings, and then try to show a movie that raises the questions in a vivid fashion. The first section of the course is devoted to looking at “faith, [mora] law and grace–and I have them read Paul and James, Aquinas, and Luther.   (A good Lindbeck student, I have them see that Luther and Aquinas aren’t as far apart on faith and works as people think.).  As for movies, I’ve been showing Babette’s Feast in this section.  Can anyone think of anything else that would work?

A very interesting article by David Feige on trying KSM in NYC.

I’ve been neither an Obama-basher nor an Obama-gusher. Since he is President of the United States, we all have a tremendous stake in the success of his policies and initiatives. But I don’t seem to be alone in experiencing concerns.

Today’s New York Times editorializes on Mr. Obama’s China trip. And, though it cautions against “premature” complaints, the thrust of the piece seems to comprise a litany of laments. For example:

But publicly, Mr. Obama pulled his punches on China’s exchange rate, saying only that Beijing had promised previously to move toward a more market-oriented rate over time. Despite its indebtedness, the United States has the world’s largest economy; Mr. Obama should have nudged Beijing to move faster. We hope he did so privately.

We were especially disappointed that China made no discernible move to join with the United States and other major powers in threatening tougher sanctions if Iran fails to make progress on curbing its nuclear weapons program. President Obama should have made clear in his private talks that the United States and Europe will act anyway if Beijing and Moscow block United Nations Security Council action.

It was also dispiriting that Mr. Obama agreed to allow China to limit his public appearances so markedly. Questions were not permitted at the so-called press conference with Mr. Hu, and his town hall meeting with future Chinese leaders in Shanghai not only had a Potemkin air, it was not even broadcast live in China. It’s obvious that the last thing Mr. Hu wanted was to get questions about issues like his brutal repression in Tibet and Xinjiang. That doesn’t explain Mr. Obama’s acquiescence in such restrictions.

Dana Milbank, in Thursday’s Washington Post, was more blunt:

Listening to President Obama and his Chinese counterpart this week, it was hard to tell who was Hu. One is the leader of a great democracy. The other is the head of a repressive regime. But as the two men faced reporters in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Obama deferred to the wishes of President Hu Jintao: They would not take questions. In lieu of this rite of freedom, the two leaders exchanged platitudes.

Finally, the father of a passenger on one of the flights of 9/11 had this to say in today’s Wall Street Journal, regarding the recent appearance of the Attorney General before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Mr. Holder said that he and his boss had not spoken in person about this decision. This matter only involves upholding the constitutional rights of Americans, establishing a precedent with battlefield impact, and the safety and security of our citizens in a time of war. What are the criteria to make something a priority with President Barack Obama? How can it be that this matter didn’t make the cut?

At the risk of sounding like Jimmy Carter, do the polls manifest a mounting malaise?

There are some interesting comments from the ChicagoTribune.com, U.S. Catholic and National Catholic Reporter about what a statement by Cardinal Francis George means for Catholic media and, by the way, what it might mean to Commonweal. Here is what the cardinal said in opening remarks at the recent meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops:

If there is a loosening of relationship between ourselves and those whom Christ has given us to govern in love, it is for us to reach out and re-establish connections necessary for all to remain in communion.  As you know, we have recently begun discussions on how we might strengthen our relationship to Catholic universities, to media claiming the right to be a voice in the Church, [italics added] and to organizations that direct various works under Catholic auspices.  Since everything and everyone in Catholic communion is truly inter-related, and the visible nexus of these relations is the bishop, an insistence on complete independence from the bishop renders a person or institution sectarian, less than fully Catholic. The purpose of our reflections, therefore, is to clarify questions of truth or faith and of accountability or community among all those who claim to be part of Catholic communion.

David Gibson posted earlier about  Cardinal George’s speech, here and at PoliticsDaily, and the more recent reactions focus further attention on the cardinal’s remark about “media claiming the right to be a voice in the Church.” It isn’t clear which organizations Cardinal George was referring to, but there is a certain ominous tone when he speaks of the “accountability” of “those who claim to be part of Catholic communion.”

Chicago Tribune religion writer Manya Brachear started her blog item on this by noting that Cardinal George said, “Relations do not speak first of control but of love.” It did not take the cardinal very long to get to the control part, though. His remark about “accountability” certainly turns the tables on journalists, since it is textbook journalism for us to hold leaders such as the cardinal-archbishop of Chicago accountable.

Over the past two decades, many bishops have  muffled the voices of their diocesan newspapers, often to the frustration of the journalists in their employ. I venture that more than a few of the editors feel this has made the papers less credible and less interesting – and therefore less effective in their mission.

Independent media that cover the Catholic Church closely – and there are many outlets, including blogs, of many ideological flavors – offer a vital sounding board, a place where issues can be discussed outside the narrow confines that bishops have permitted in most of the  official church media. A constructive discussion of their role and influence would be a good thing, but that is not the plan  I glean when Cardinal George speaks of holding journalists accountable to bishops.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, yesterday gave an important speech in Rome at  a symposium sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. It is devoted to the doctrine of the Church (ecclesiology), focuses on three main questions (authority, primacy, the relation between the universal and the local), and wonders whether disagreements with regard to them remain serious enough to undo important convergences with regard to the theological understanding of the Church. You can find the talk here.  And here you can watch and listen to him give part of the speech.

Tomorrow Pope Benedict meets with artists in the Sistine Chapel and will address them. In last Wednesday’s Audience the Pope spoke about the beauty and spiritual inspiration of Europe’s cathedrals. He said:

the power of the Romanesque style and the splendor of the Gothic cathedrals remind us that the “via pulchritudinis,” the way of beauty, is a privileged and fascinating route for approaching the Mystery of God. What is the beauty that writers, poets, musicians, artists contemplate and translate in their language, if not the reflection of the splendor of the eternal Word made flesh? St. Augustine affirms: “Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air, amply spread around everywhere, question the beauty of the sky, question the serried ranks of the stars, question the sun making the day glorious with its bright beams, question the moon tempering the darkness of the following night with its shining rays, question the animals that move in the waters, that amble about on dry land, that fly in the air; their souls hidden, their bodies evident; the visible bodies needing to be controlled, the invisible souls controlling them; question all these things. They all answer you, ‘Here we are, look ; we’re beautiful.’ Their beauty is their confession. Who made these beautiful changeable things, if not one who is beautiful and unchangeable?” (Sermo CCXLI, 2: PL 38, 1134).

Dear brothers and sisters, may the Lord help us to rediscover the way of beauty as one of the ways, perhaps the most attractive and fascinating, to come to encounter and love God.

Sandro Magister provides further background and the full text of the Pope’s Audience Address here.

Update:

The Pope met with some two hundred fifty artists in the Sistine Chapel this morning. With the great frescoes of Michelangelo as incomparable setting, Pope Benedict said:

Dear friends, let us allow these frescoes to speak to us today, drawing us towards the ultimate goal of human history. The Last Judgement, which you see behind me, reminds us that human history is movement and ascent, a continuing tension towards fullness, towards human happiness, towards a horizon that always transcends the present moment even as the two coincide. Yet the dramatic scene portrayed in this fresco also places before our eyes the risk of man’s definitive fall, a risk that threatens to engulf him whenever he allows himself to be led astray by the forces of evil. So the fresco issues a strong prophetic cry against evil, against every form of injustice. For believers, though, the Risen Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life. For his faithful followers, he is the Door through which we are brought to that “face-to-face” vision of God from which limitless, full and definitive happiness flows. Thus Michelangelo presents to our gaze the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End of history, and he invites us to walk the path of life with joy, courage and hope. The dramatic beauty of Michelangelo’s painting, its colours and forms, becomes a proclamation of hope, an invitation to raise our gaze to the ultimate horizon.

And the Pope concludes:

Dear artists, as I draw to a conclusion, I too would like to make a cordial, friendly and impassioned appeal to you, as did my Predecessor. You are the custodians of beauty: thanks to your talent, you have the opportunity to speak to the heart of humanity, to touch individual and collective sensibilities, to call forth dreams and hopes, to broaden the horizons of knowledge and of human engagement. Be grateful, then, for the gifts you have received and be fully conscious of your great responsibility to communicate beauty, to communicate in and through beauty! Through your art, you yourselves are to be heralds and witnesses of hope for humanity! And do not be afraid to approach the first and last source of beauty, to enter into dialogue with believers, with those who, like yourselves, consider that they are pilgrims in this world and in history towards infinite Beauty! Faith takes nothing away from your genius or your art: on the contrary, it exalts them and nourishes them, it encourages them to cross the threshold and to contemplate with fascination and emotion the ultimate and definitive goal, the sun that does not set, the sun that illumines this present moment and makes it beautiful.

Sandro Magister has already posted the full text here.

 If you have a group of Catholics over for a dinner party, and they’ve stayed a bit too late but you don’t want to be rude by pointedly winding the alarm clock in front of them, one thing that always works to clear the room is to bring up in conversation the efficacy of prayer and people’s individual prayer lives.  We all believe that people should pray and we may even believe that everyone does pray.  And probably no one would deny that the question of opening channels of communication to God is “a very important thing”.  But nothing makes people start looking at their watches faster than bringing up prayer in conversation.

For those of you who have stayed with me to the end to the end of the last paragraph, let me try to tantalize you with this.  For a full 35 years, I didn’t think that I could pray.  This changed a few years ago.  If you are interested in knowing what happened, continue reading below the fold.  For the rest of you, don’t worry about the plates and cups and have a safe trip home.

Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times has a helpful interactive chart comparing the various provisions and stipulations of the House and Senate health-care reform bills. Here’s how they break down the abortion issue:

HOUSE VERSION

• Health plans could choose whether to cover abortion.
• Low- and middle-income people who receive federal subsidies to buy insurance could not choose a health plan that covers elective abortions.
• The public plan would not provide abortion coverage.

SENATE VERSION

• Health plans could choose whether to cover abortion. In each state, there would have to be at least one plan that covers abortions and one that does not.
• Low- and middle-income people who receive federal subsidies to buy insurance could enroll in health plans that cover abortion. But insurers would be required to segregate their federal subsidies into separate accounts and use only the premium money and co-payments contributed by consumers to cover the procedure.
• The public plan could provide abortion coverage but would have to segregate federal dollars, just like the private plans.

P.S. Does anybody know why American Indians are exempted (alongside “people with religious objections and people who can show financial hardship”) when it comes to the individual mandate to have health insurance?

Has anyone seen the Coen brothers’ latest movie, A Serious Man?

We saw it last week-end in our Upper West Side movie theatre. The story opens with a Yiddish language prologue, which many in the audience seemed to understand–leading me to an obvious conclusion: the audience was largely Jewish and found the movie [a Job story] very funny. And it is–it guess. It’s a satire.

On the other hand, I felt uncomfortable and uncertain about the humor, which rests on a multitude of stereotypes about Jews, about rabbis, and a few about gentiles. I couldn’t really laugh.

If you saw the movie, what was your reaction?

At their meeting this week, the bishops approved a revision to Directive 58 of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care services.  The Catholic Health Association has summarized the change here. The core of the change is summarized by the CHAUSA as follows:

The new Directive 58 makes three points:

1. There is a general moral obligation to provide patients with food and water, including medically administered nutrition and hydration for those who cannot take food orally.
2. This general obligation extends to patients in a persistent vegetative state because of their fundamental human dignity. However, the Directive explains that this obligation ceases and the measures become “morally optional” when the measures cannot reasonably be expected to prolong the patient’s life or when they become excessively burdensome. (This provision incorporates into the Directive the teaching of Pope John Paul II and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding medically assisted nutrition and hydration to persons in a persistent vegetative state. Catholic health care facilities have already addressed the implications of these statements).
3. The Directive also distinguishes between patients in a chronic state and those who are dying. This distinction has implications for the use of medically administered nutrition and hydration. For dying patients, medically administered nutrition and hydration may no longer be of benefit and may, in fact, impose significant burdens.

Traditionally, the standard for optional life-sustaining treatment was that if the treatment offered no reasonable hope of benefit and the treatment was excessively burdensome, it could be stopped.  Directive 58 now interprets no reasonable hope of benefit as no reasonable hope of prolonging life.  Someone in a persistent vegetative state may live 30 years irreversibly comatose and without the capacity to interact with others.  I am not saying that such a life has no value, but it is hard to see how prolonging life through a surgically implanted feeding tube benefits anyone.

Big news from the AP:

A preliminary report commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops on the roots of the clergy sex-abuse scandal found no evidence that gay priests were more likely than heterosexual clergy to molest children, the study’s lead authors said yesterday.

The full $2 million study by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice won’t be completed until the end of 2010. But the authors said their evidence to date found no data indicating that homosexuality was a predictor of abuse.

UPDATE: Longer analysis by David Gibson over at Politics Daily.

“What we are suggesting is that the idea of sexual identity be separated from the problem of sexual abuse,” said Margaret Smith, a researcher from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which is conducting an independent study of sexual abuse in the priesthood from 1950 up to 2002. “At this point, we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and an increased likelihood of sexual abuse.”

A second researcher, Karen Terry, also cautioned the bishops against making a correlation between homosexuality in the priesthood and the high incidence of abuse by priests against boys rather than girls — a ratio found to be about 80-20.

“It’s important to separate the sexual identity and the behavior,” Terry said. “Someone can commit sexual acts that might be of a homosexual nature but not have a homosexual identity.” Terry said factors such as greater access to boys is one reason for the skewed ratio. Smith also raised the analogy of prison populations where homosexual behavior is common even though the prisoners are not necessarily homosexuals, or cultures where men are rigidly segregated from women until adulthood, and homosexual activity is accepted and then ceases after marriage.

(…)

When asked by a bishop at Tuesday’s meeting whether homosexuality should be a factor in excluding men from the seminary, Smith responded, “If that exclusion were based on the fact that that person would be more probable than any other candidate to abuse, we do not find that at this time.”

As the USCCB continues to discuss the new liturgical translations, perhaps you’d be interested in reading a backgrounder on the controversy, courtesy of John Wilkins, former editor of the Tablet of London.

On December 4, 1963, at the end of the council’s second session, the [Constitution on Sacred Liturgy] was passed by a massive majority: there were only four dissenting votes. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who would later lead a schismatic movement against the council’s work, is said to have been in favor of it.

The overwhelming consensus was achieved in part because the opening to the vernacular was endorsed in guarded terms. “The use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites,” the document cautioned, before opening up the way ahead: “But since the use of the mother tongue, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or other parts of the liturgy, may frequently be of great advantage to the people, the limits of its employment may be extended.” This passage was followed immediately by the commissioning of bishops’ conferences to put the council’s wishes into practice. It was the local bishops who had the responsibility “to decide whether, and to what extent, the vernacular language is to be used.” Their decrees must then be confirmed by Rome, the document said.

So from the first, local bishops were clearly understood to be in control of the liturgical translations. This approach was in line with one of Vatican II’s key achievements, confirmed by a vote of the whole council on October 30, 1963. On that day, by a huge majority, the bishops affirmed that the church must be seen to be governed on the model of Peter and the Eleven. Leadership therefore belongs to the whole college of bishops, with and under the pope. Each bishop is a vicar of Christ in his own diocese. Sharing of authority, within Catholic unity, is proper to the church. As with the liturgy, though, this necessary counterbalance to Vatican I’s emphasis on papal and Roman power was a reform easier to approve in principle than to implement in practice.

Before the liturgy constitution was promulgated, the English-speaking bishops, who were the first to see the advantages of pooling their resources, had established the core of ICEL. In a formal meeting at the English College in Rome on October 17, 1963, ten English-speaking conferences agreed to share the translation work: those of Australia, Canada, England and Wales, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Scotland, South Africa, and the United States. By the time the council ended in 1965, the ICEL secretariat had been opened in Washington, D.C. In 1967 the Philippines became the eleventh ICEL member; there were also fifteen associated conferences of countries that used English in the liturgy without its being the predominant language. A vast task awaited them: the translation of several thousand texts in some thirty distinct liturgical books. And that “full, conscious, and active participation” desired by the council would turn out to be a far more complicated undertaking than anyone had envisaged.

(…)

In June 1998…ICEL’s episcopal board was holding its annual meeting in Washington. They were anticipating the arrival of Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of Chicago, who was now the American representative on the board. Cardinal George was coming from Rome.

There was as usual a full agenda. The bishops had finished morning prayer and had just started their discussions when George arrived. As soon as the then-ICEL chairman, Bishop Maurice Taylor of Galloway, Scotland, had finished welcoming him, George asked that the order of the agenda be changed. He wanted immediate discussion of the relations between ICEL and the Vatican congregation. The bishops froze.

Bishop Taylor brokered a compromise. The agenda should be adhered to, he said, but provision would be made for the cardinal to address the meeting toward the end of the day. When the time came for Cardinal George to speak, in the late afternoon, he warned the participants that the commission was in danger. They were at a turning point. The principles that had governed ICEL’s approach to translation had been rethought. Rome wanted a vernacular, he said, that was different from the vernacular of the contemporary marketplace, so as to lead worshipers into the nuances and deepest meanings of the texts.

The project as ICEL understood it was no longer considered legitimate. According to George, the commission’s thoroughgoing use of inclusive language in its translation of the Psalter had been one of the reasons for disillusionment among the American bishops. There was a pent-up impatience with the commission. If ICEL gave the impression that it owned the Second Vatican Council or the liturgy, it would make bad matters worse, he said. It had to change both its attitude and, in some cases, its personnel. Otherwise it was finished. If necessary, the American bishops would strike out on their own. George spoke vehemently.

Next morning, Archbishop Hurley made a frank and formal response, speaking from a script that he had written out in longhand. The ICEL board was grateful for the message, said Hurley, but disturbed by it. It appeared from what the cardinal had said that a fundamental change had occurred in the attitude of the Congregation for Divine Worship to translation theory. Instead of conveying an equivalence of meaning between the Latin and English texts, as had been ICEL’s practice hitherto, the congregation now wanted translations that conveyed an equivalence of individual words.

This is interesting for several reasons, not the least of which is that about an hour ago Bishop Trautman stood at the bishops’ meeting to ask Cardinal George why he had signed a letter giving Rome permission to translate the antiphons without consulting the body of bishops. That was “not a collegial way to handle this,” Trautman said.

Read the rest of Wilkins’s piece right here.

About a week ago, in a post responding to Bob Imbelli’s thread on the Stupak amendment, David Cloutier chastised progressives for exaggerating the implications of the amendment.  He wrote, “When people say, ‘oh, what’s next, birth control, etc.’ this is just like Republicans claiming that this bill is a ‘government takeover’ and [that] Dems want government to run people’s lives and decide who lives and who dies. It’s just silly.”

This comment got me to wondering about the status of contraception and whether it would be covered under the health-care reform bill.  As far as I can tell, the answer is no.  I can’t help wondering why not. In the process of hunting around, I found some interesting facts.

In a study conducted in July and August of this year, the Guttmacher Institute surveyed 947 women aged 18-34 to explore how these women’s reproductive behaviors have been influenced by the recession. (This report can be found here; it’s under reports and the title is “A Real-Time Look at the Impact of the Recession on Women’s Family Planning and Pregnancy Decisions.”) Here are a few of its findings:

-       Eight percent of women report that they sometimes did not use birth control in order to save money.

-       Among women using the pill, 18% report inconsistent use as a means of saving money.

-       Nearly one out of four women report having put off a gynecological or birth control visit to save money in the past year.

When states have tried to mandate insurance coverage for contraceptives, the Catholic Church has opposed these actions.  For example,the Catholic Church fought to overturn New York’s “Women’s Health and Wellness Act,” which required employers who offer prescription drug plans to provide coverage of FDA-approved contraceptives for women, it doesn’t seem “silly” to ask whether there isn’t a slippery slope here.  Will those who gushed about the Stupak amendment also gush about an amendment eliminating prescription coverage for contraception? (For NYTimes piece on the New York law, click here.)