UPDATE: Show’s over, folks, but feel free to continue the discussion below. The USCCB meeting page is here.

Another issue of Commonweal is headed for your mailbox and available now online. Free for everyone to read:

• John Connelly’s cover story on how one East German town helped bring down the Berlin Wall, and what the citizens have learned in twenty years: “The Price of Freedom“
• Celia Wren’s review of a new production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Cate Blanchett: “Mind Games“
• Our editorial on this week’s USCCB general assembly: “When Bishops Meet“

Subscribers can log in to read Stephen M. Barr’s article on the false belief in physical determinism (and the idea that human free will is an “illusion”), “More Than Machines.” Todd Flowerday (who may be familiar to dotCommonwealers) explains how the Church ought to be promoting adoption: “Children First.” Columnist John Garvey reacts to the Vatican’s new plan for Anglican converts, and E. J. Dionne argues that politicians ought to be making the case for government spending.

Tina Beattie reviews Miri Rubin’s Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary; David Fergusson reviews Jennifer A. Herdt’s Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Virtues; and Charles R. Morris reviews Robert Skidelsky’s Keynes: The Return of the Master. Film critic Rand Richards Cooper checks out a handful of scary movies (including the not-so-frightening new adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are). Christine Neulieb contributes a “Last Word” about her experience living in community with other women as a grad student. And the letters cover same-sex marriage, the Vatican visitation of U.S. nuns, and health-care reform.

Not a subscriber? Sign up now and join us for our eighty-sixth year of covering religion, politics, and culture! And while you’re thinking about holiday shopping: don’t forget, a subscription to Commonweal makes a great gift.

It was 20 years ago today that 6 Jesuits, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter were killed at the University of Central America in San Salvador. I marked the anniversary at UCA with a delegation of students and faculty from my school.

Romero is also widely memorialized too, and the 4 American churchwomen who were also martyred. Most of all, we must remember the thousands and thousands of Salvadorans who were caught up in the horrors of that time, both those killed and those left with deeply painful memories of loved ones lost to the casual savagery of others.

As I ponder the UCA martyrs, though, I am brought back to what I imagine to have been the texture of their daily lives. Classes to teach, papers to grade, another faculty meeting, an essay overdue, laundry to do, a group to work with at a base commuity, another meal to cook for the community, and so on and so on. The small joys and hassles, the tiredness, the happinesses and the worries–not least the stark fear of violence–that made up their days. The massacre that ended their lives causes the rest of us to be silent and take note of the causes for which they lived. Their challenge, I think, is less that we each be willing to die for a cause, than that we live for one. In and through the daily stuff, the warp and woof of our lives, is the martyrs’ question:”Yes, and through it all, animating it all–with whom and for whom do you stand?” I am grateful for their question.

An interesting start to the bishops’ fall meeting, as Cardinal George delivered a strongly-worded opening address on episcopal authority and confirmed the “open secret” of a kind of Catholic identity project that he is hatching. My take is at PoliticsDaily. The lead:

BALTIMORE — The leader of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States on Monday launched a new effort to rein in Catholic debates and dissidents and to remind the flock that the bishops will be the arbiters of what it means to be a Catholic.

In remarks at the opening of the hierarchy’s annual meeting in Baltimore, Chicago Cardinal Francis George made it clear that after years of repeated questions about the bishops’ credibility, it was time for the bishops to clarify just who can and cannot speak for the church. He also confirmed that he had set up three committees of bishops to develop guidelines for determining what will be considered legitimate Catholic entities.

“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,” George, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, told some 300 of his fellow bishops. “The purpose of our reflections, therefore, is to clarify questions of truth of faith and of accountability or community among all those who claim to be part of the Catholic communion.”

And we move on from there to Ignatius of Antioch.

BTW, Rocco posts a USCCB Facebook page foto of the payoff from the Dolan-Rigali World Series bet, and notes that yours truly–a Mets fan, ouch!–is in the background, emerging too late to catch the lead item of the day. As we used to say at my last paper, “If it’s news, it’s news to us.”

H/T: Grant Gallicho

This semester, I have been doing something I swore I’d never do–using powerpoint to teach my Contracts class.  It was a necessity during the first half of the semester–I couldn’t walk to the board to scribble unintelligibly.  And then, well, since I started, I thought I might as well finish.

Some things are fun–you can pull in pictures easily.  Today, for example, I have a picture of Job –complete with boils–to illustrate the patience of one party to a contract before pulling the plug due to repeated breach by the other party.

And then I started thinking about religion and imagery and visual aides.  Can we  imagine  preaching with power points slides?  (I was thinking how you’d power point Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”)  Now that would be entertaining.

But there’s still part of me that wonders if powerpoint is really that helpful a teaching device. It’s becoming ubiquitous at professional presentations. Does it have a place in religious communication  Is it  a way of integrating word and image? Is it a distraction?  Any thoughts?

Niall Ferguson of Harvard and Moritz Schularick of Berlin have a piece in today’s New York Times: “The Great Wallop.” Here’s the beginning:

A few years ago we came up with the term “Chimerica” to describe the combination of the Chinese and American economies, which together had become the key driver of the global economy. With a combined 13 percent of the world’s land surface and around a quarter of its population, Chimerica nevertheless accounted for a third of global economic output and two-fifths of worldwide growth from 1998 to 2007.

And here’s the conclusion:

Right now, Chimerica clearly serves China better than America. Call it the 10:10 deal: the Chinese get 10 percent growth; America gets 10 percent unemployment. The deal is even worse for the rest of the world — and that includes some of America’s biggest export markets and most loyal allies. The question is: What can the United States offer to make the Chinese abandon the dollar peg that has served them so well?

The authorities in Beijing must be made to see that any book losses on its reserve assets resulting from changes in the exchange rate will be a modest price to pay for the advantages they reaped from the Chimerica model: the transformation from third-world poverty to superpower status in less than 15 years. In any case, these losses would be more than compensated for by the increase in the dollar value of China’s huge stock of renminbi assets.

It is also in China’s interest to kick its currency-intervention habit. A heavily undervalued renminbi is the key financial distortion in the world economy today. If it persists for much longer, China risks losing the very foundation of its economic success: an open global trading regime.

And this is exactly what President Obama can offer in return for a substantial currency revaluation of, say, 20 percent to 30 percent over the next 12 months: a clear commitment to globalization and free trade, and an end to the nascent Chinese-American tariff war.

For as long as the People’s Republic has existed, the United States has been the principal upholder of a world economic order based on the free movement of goods and, more recently, capital. It has also picked up the tab for policing the oil-rich but unstable Middle East. No country has benefited more from these arrangements than China, and it should now pay for them through a stronger Chinese currency. Chimerica was always a chimera — an economic monster. Revaluing the renminbi will give this monster the peaceful death it deserves.

And a lot of sobering stuff in-between.

They actually look pretty nice–made in Italy, no surprise:

The terracotta dispenser, used in the northern town of Fornaci di Briosco, functions like an automatic soap dispenser in public washrooms — a churchgoer waves his or her hand under a sensor and the machine spurts out holy water.

“It has been a bit of a novelty. People initially were a bit shocked by this technological innovation but then they welcomed it with great enthusiasm and joy. The members of this parish have got used to it,” said Father Pierangelo Motta.

H/T: RNS blog.

I thought I had a decent knowledge of history, yet I never knew that the Nazis had been wooing the Poles:

The Nazi foreign minister had lost his patience with the Poles. ‘You are stubborn on these maritime questions,’ he told Polish diplomats in January 1939. ‘The Black Sea is also a sea!” Joachim von Ribbentrop had been trying for years to induce Poland to join Germany in a war against the Soviet Union. Germany would annex from Poland districts by the Baltic Sea; the two countries would invade the USSR; and Poland would be compensated with conquered Soviet territory on the Black Sea.

So begins a fascinating review, “Nazis, Soviets, Poles, Jews,” in the current New York Review of Books (subscription required) by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale. He adds: “That Germany and Poland did not make an alliance and that Germany and the Soviet Union did, is perhaps the single crucial fact about the war.” And Snyder concludes:

The further study of the war and its victims will require a firmer grasp of the history of the peoples who lived alongside the Jews. In this important respect, the history of the Holocaust has yet to be written.

In between the reviewer gives details about the Polish resistance and the destruction of Warsaw that cast a new light for me upon those dark times. Professor Snyder is at work on a book, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, that, on the basis of this review, promises to be must reading.

This is hilarious. Sort of…

The Republican National Committee will no longer offer employees an insurance plan that covers abortion after POLITICO reported Thursday that the anti-abortion RNC’s policy has covered the procedure since 1991.

“Money from our loyal donors should not be used for this purpose,” Chairman Michael Steele said in a statement. “I don’t know why this policy existed in the past, but it will not exist under my administration. Consider this issue settled.”

Steele has told the committee’s director of administration to opt out of coverage for elective abortion in the policy it uses from Cigna.

Or as the adage goes, “Do as I say, not as I do…”

H/T: Swampland

Two new biographies of Ayn Rand were published recently, and I have no intention of reading either. But I find I can’t get enough of the reviews and essays they’ve occasioned. I’ve rounded up my favorites below — but first, a little background on my own encounter with Objectivism.

In the latest New Yorker, Thomas Mallon writes: “Most readers make their first and last trip to Galt’s Gulch — the hidden-valley paradise of born-again capitalists featured in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ its solid-gold dollar sign standing like a Maypole — sometime between leaving Middle-earth and packing for college.” That was certainly true for me, except that I never made it to Galt’s Gulch. For me it was The Fountainhead, and I don’t mind saying I had no idea what I was getting into. I’d never heard of Rand when my eleventh-grade English teacher handed me a brochure with information about this essay contest sponsored by the Ayn Rand Institute. I’d surprised her earlier that year by winning another, compulsory essay contest (alas, not worth $10,000), so when she got the announcement about this one she passed it along to me. “I don’t usually bother with this,” she said, “but you might be interested.” I have a feeling she didn’t know much about Objectivism either. She just knew that prize money could go a long way.

When I bought The Fountainhead, I remember being impressed by how light — literally lightweight — the book was, despite its tremendous thickness. If I were a character in an Ayn Rand novel, that impression would have been symbolic. But since I’m not, I’m forced to admit that the book sucked me in. I had never read anything like it at that point – no economic or political philosophy, and not much didactic fiction. Animal Farm and Brave New World bewitched me in junior high, and this book appealed to the same eager but underdeveloped parts of my brain. Plus, of course, there was the sheer satisfaction of reading all those pages. Even before you get to its endorsement of untrammeled egotism, The Fountainhead flatters you by being so long and so deadly serious. You must be smart if you can conquer it! The essay contest, I now realize, operates on the same principle – make teenagers feel important and intellectual by offering them truly fantastic amounts of money for absorbing your ideology and regurgitating it in 1,600 words.

A lot of teenagers are taken in by Rand, at least for a few months – many people have admitted it in the course of reviewing these books. Why? I can’t put it better than this comment I read on Matthew Yglesias’s blog, from “tomemos”: “Ayn Rand has the most straightforwardly understandable, didactic philosophy of just about any twentieth-century thinker, which is probably one reason why young people are into it. It has the disadvantages of being obviously false and morally monstrous, but it is clear.” It’s also immensely flattering, as it suggests that feeling misunderstood and underappreciated is a sign that you are, in fact, superior to those around you.

I didn’t know any of that in high school, but I embraced the challenge. I lugged The Fountainhead around, taking notes that I hoped would lead me toward one of the prescribed essay topics. As I read, I couldn’t quite shake the impression that Rand was endorsing selfishness. That can’t be right, I thought. But the comeuppance I expected for her egotistical heroes never came; it was almost as though she wanted me to think the impulse to help others was bad, something to be resisted. In retrospect I think my reaction to the book was similar to what Commonweal film critic Philip T. Hartung wrote about the movie adaptation in July 1949: “The Fountainhead, based on Ayn Rand’s humdinger about lust and architecture, has the most pretentious combination of sense and nonsense to appear in a supposedly serious movie in a long time. While it offers a glowing defense of integrity and high standards in art, it also asks us to be impressed by a group of characters whose morals sink to a new low.”

Unfortunately I didn’t have Hartung’s help in working through my confusion. By the time I got to the end of the book I thought I must have missed something important. I took a stab at writing the essay anyway. I haven’t looked at it since – even if I could track it down, I’m too embarrassed to read it. But I’m pretty sure I wrote about how Rand obviously didn’t think altruism was bad, even though it might seem that way; she just wanted to say that, under certain circumstances, self-interest could sometimes be a good thing.

Clearly I was not a promising disciple for the Ayn Rand Institute. I didn’t win anything, of course, and when I read the winning essay I discovered how off-base I had been. (Sample sentence from this year’s winner: “Roark’s life affirms that a collective entity, no matter how hostile to those of ability, is impotent against the primacy of the individual.”) And so I was one of those for whom Objectivism didn’t “take.” Was it my firm grounding in the Gospel that kept me pure, despite all the near occasions of sin? Ayn Rand would say my faulty premises prevented me from comprehending the truth. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t manage to have a proper Ayn-Rand phase. I never even picked up Atlas Shrugged.

Why, then, am I so fascinated by all the ink spilled over the release of these two biographies? It’s not just because I’m grateful that I passed through the valley of the shadow of Objectivism unharmed. It turns out reading about Rand and her cult of personality is also extremely entertaining. Here are a few of my favorite review-essays, each with its own approach and its own collection of outrageous anecdotes. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Reese’s column on DC and Catholics should be read in full; don’t think it got a fair plug below.

Catholic Charities, gays and DC ‘ s poor

By Thomas J. Reese, S.J.

If you believed what you read on blogs and in newspapers, you would conclude that the archdiocese of Washington is threatening to withdraw money for food and shelter from the poor in the District of Columbia in order to get its way on gay marriage.

What are the facts?

For decades, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington has received money from the District of Columbia to operate programs helping the poor. This is common throughout the country where the Catholic Church is the second largest provider of services to the poor, second only to the government. Catholic Charities competes with private and nonprofit agencies for these contracts with the government deciding which organization will provide the best services for the money. This is a good deal for state and local governments because these Catholic Charities programs are efficiently and effectively run with both professionals and volunteers.

Meanwhile, the City Council for the District of Columbia has decided to enact legislation forbidding discrimination against those in gay marriages. This legislation would not force churches to perform gay marriages or to change their moral doctrines, but it would require any organization with a contract with the District to provide medical benefits to a gay partner just like it provides them to the heterosexual partner in a marriage. It would also require adoption agencies to sponsor children to gay couples if the agency is under contract with the city.

The archdiocese says that it cannot do this because of its moral opposition to gay marriage. This is not new. The Archdiocese to San Francisco had the same fight with its city council, and the adoption programs of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts were shut down because the state legislature insisted that they sponsor adoptions to gay couples while the bishops insisted they would not.

It should be clear from this review of the facts that the church is not threatening to withdraw its money from the poor. It is simply pointing out that it cannot observe these new requirements and therefore the city will cancel its contracts. It is in fact the city council that is closing down these programs, not the archdiocese.

Not surprisingly, the members of the city council are much better at spinning this story with the media than is the archdiocese. The Catholic Church’s PR skills are dismal. Perhaps it was caught by surprise by the vehemence of the attack. The dispute is being portrayed as the Catholic Church versus gay rights even though everyone knows that Black ministers in Washington are also opposed to this legislation.

Let ‘s be clear. The city has a right to set whatever conditions it wants on agencies that receive money from it. But the church also has a right to say, “Sorry, we can ‘ t accept money under those rules.”

Some people on the city council think that is fine. Good riddance. They think they can find other people to run these programs as well as Catholic Charities. I doubt it, but they have the power and the money so they can try. If they fail, it is their responsibility.

So far I have been defending the archdiocese, but in fact I regret that the U.S. Catholic bishops have an obsession with opposing the legalization of gay marriage. This is an issue that at most deserves one letter of opposition from the bishop and then they should let it go. Spending millions of church dollars to oppose gay marriage in California, Massachusetts and Maine was a waste of resources and a case of misplaced priorities.

I have never bought the argument that gay marriage is a threat to families. Legalizing gay marriage is not going to cause millions of people in heterosexual marriages to suddenly decide to leave their spouses for a same-sex partner. It could be argued that gay marriage might help heterosexual marriages. For example, in an apartment building filled with unmarried couples in New York City , the gays who get married may inspire the heterosexuals to do the same thing.

With regards to medical benefits, the real answer is that whether a person gets health care should not depend on their marital status or where they are employed. We should have universal health care for everyone that is not dependent on employers. But in the meantime, can the Catholic Church give health care benefits to gay partners of its employees? The archdiocese says it cannot because gay marriage is against its teachings.

However, remarrying after a divorce is also against Catholic teaching, yet the church gives health care benefits to divorced and remarried couples. No one believes that the church has changed its teaching on divorce. No one will believe that the church has changed its teaching on gay sex if it provides medical benefits to gay couples.

What is needed right now is a toning down of the attacks against the church by those who support the city council’s position. Both sides need to look for compromise. An exemption from the law for religious organizations would affect very few people and would allow the church to continue working with the city on behalf of the poor. The city council could always revisit the issue in the future, but the middle of a deep recession is not a good time to fire the best provider of social services in the city.

Thomas J. Reese, S.J., is a Senior Fellow, Woodstock Theological Center , Georgetown University .

I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting Sister Doris Gottemoeller, R.S.M., when Cardinal Bernardin and Monsignor Philip Murnion began the discussions that eventually led to the launching of the Common Ground Initiative. She has been an ardent advocate of the Initiative in the years since, serving on its Board and contributing her time and considerable talents to its undertakings.

In the November 23rd issue of America Sister Doris has an article about the Vatican Visitation of Religious Communities of Women that seems to me a model of ecclesial discernment and charity. Here is its conclusion:

In “Vita Consecrata” Pope John Paul II wrote: “During these years of renewal, the consecrated life, like other ways of life in the church, has gone through a difficult and trying period. It has been a period full of hopes, new experiments and proposals aimed at giving fresh vigor to the profession of the evangelical counsels. But it has also been a time of tension and struggle, in which well-meaning endeavors have not always met with positive results” (No. 13). I have always been struck by the simple wisdom in those words, which apply not only to religious but to the whole people of God. Let us hope that a careful look at the endeavors of the past and their consequences will prompt fresh and wise new initiatives in the future

Suzette Kelo's home was moved because of court ruling. Photo: Christopher Capoziello for NY Times

I don’t know if the five U.S. Supreme Court justices who allowed the city of New London to seize the land where Suzette Kelo lived in a two-story, pink, wood-frame house and turn it over to Pfizer, Inc. for an economic development project are red-faced with embarrassment today, but they should be. As The New York Times reported on its front page today, Pfizer is leaving town, along with 1,400 jobs.

The majority in the court’s 5-4 ruling in 2005 in Kelo v. New London – justices Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy and Souter – ruled that it was an acceptable “public use” (under the Fifth Amendment) for government to seize one citizen’s property and give it to another if it served an economic development purpose that would benefit the broader public. The justices rejected the argument that such a use of eminent domain blurs the boundaries between public and private. “Quite simply, the government’s pursuit of a public purpose will often benefit individual private parties,” Justice Stevens wrote.

The justices also rejected the argument that officials should require a “reasonable certainty” that the promised benefits would actually come through. Anyone who has followed local economic development projects knows that the claims made to justify taxpayer subsidies often turn out to be inflated. But Stevens wrote:  “A constitutional rule that required postponement of the judicial approval of every condemnation until the likelihood of success of the plan had been assured would unquestionably impose a significant impediment to the successful consummation of many such plans.”

That  is to say: you have no protection if your local officials suddenly decide your front yard  is a good place for a shopping mall. I don’t think Justices O’Connor or Thomas exaggerated when, in their dissents, they said the court had effectively removed the “public use” protection from the Fifth Amendment.

For reasons I don’t understand, opposition to this excessive use of government authority has come more from the right than the left, whether on the Supreme Court or in terms of grassroots organizing. (Conservative Christian groups pushed a campaign against the Kelo ruling that contributed to the making of many state laws trimming the use of eminent domain.)

In New York, where I live, opponents of the use of eminent domain have largely been liberals, dating back to the days of Robert Moses. These battles continue; Mayor Bloomberg is a big supporter of unhindered governmental use of eminent domain, and had the city file a brief supporting New London in the Kelo case.

The Mormon Church throws its support behind a Salt Lake City law prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals in housing and employment (HT Andrew Sullivan):

The Mormon church for the first time has announced its support of gay rights legislation, an endorsement that helped gain unanimous approval for Salt Lake city laws banning discrimination against gays in housing and employment.  The Utah-based church’s support ahead of Tuesday night’s vote came despite its steadfast opposition to gay marriage, reflected in the high-profile role it played last year in California’s Proposition 8 ballot measure that barred such unions.  “The church supports these ordinances because they are fair and reasonable and do not do violence to the institution of marriage,” Michael Otterson, the director of public affairs for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. threatens to stop providing services for the homeless in response to a pending DC move to permit gay marriage, apparently (according to reports) because the law might prevent the Church from discriminating against homosexual couples in the provision of employee benefits:

Under the legislation, which the City Council is expected to pass next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey laws prohibiting discrimination against gays and lesbians.  Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.

I would really like to hear what these “other things” are that might be motivating the Church in D.C. to threaten this dramatic step.  I just cannot see how the power to refuse employee benefits to same-sex married couples constitutes the sort of fundamental issue of conscience (even given the Church’s stance on homosexuality) that justifies this threat.  The Church would likely say that it does not want to be forced to offer its implicit endorsement of same-sex unions by extending employee benefits to them — but it’s hard to see how being forced to provide benefits by law risks conveying any such message.  Its objection would seem to have to be to one of two things:  (1) the city’s legal requirement that such benefits be provided, which would send a message of endorsement; or (2) the notion that providing benefits to same-sex couples will cause some subset of those couples to remain in their relationship where they otherwise would have broken up (under financial stress?) such that the Church will be cooperating in what it perceives to be an evil relationship.  The first seems extremely dubious, since the endorsement comes from the law, not the Church’s compliance with the law, and so the message of endorsement is the same even if the Church is exempted from its reach.  The second seems highly attenuated as a factual matter — the cooperation required by the law is so remote and speculative that any claim of conscience based on it seems extremely weak to me.

Good for the Mormons!  Shame on us.

UPDATE:  Tom Reese says:

[C]an the Catholic Church give health care benefits to gay partners of its employees? The archdiocese says it cannot because gay marriage is against its teachings.

However, remarrying after a divorce is also against Catholic teaching, yet the church gives health care benefits to divorced and remarried couples. No one believes that the church has changed its teaching on divorce. No one will believe that the church has changed its teaching on gay sex if it provides medical benefits to gay couples.

What is needed right now is a toning down of the attacks against the church by those who support the city council’s position. Both sides need to look for compromise. An exemption from the law for religious organizations would affect very few people and would allow the church to continue working with the city on behalf of the poor. The city council could always revisit the issue in the future, but the middle of a deep recession is not a good time to fire the best provider of social services in the city.

I have nothing but the highest respect for Fr. Reese, but I couldn’t disagree more with his take on this.  In particular, that last suggestion is a total mystery to me.  After showing that the Church’s position does not appear to be one of consistent and sincere conscience on the extension of spousal benefits, he goes on to suggest an exemption because it will only unjustly harm a small number of gay married couples.   The requirement that the Church provide spousal benefits does not compel the Church to profess or believe anything.  This is different from the adoption example from Massachusetts, where the required cooperation was more direct and the threat to conscience therefore more palpable.  Here, the move to withdraw from dealing with the city extends to areas unrelated to adoption and therefore strikes me as punitive and, ultimately, indefensible.  Nor does the Church get off the hook (as Fr. Reese suggests earlier in his piece) by saying that it is the city that is refusing to deal with the Church and, therefore, that it is the city that is doing the threatening.  The Church is saying it will refuse to comply with the law.  Whether we characterize the threat as the withdrawal from the service contracts or as the refusal to comply with the law, it seems to me that the ball (and the wrong) is in the Church’s court.

Many readers of Commonweal are familiar with the great twentieth-century Catholic painter, Georges Rouault — the contemporary of Matisse and Picasso whose oeuvre combined elements of medieval stained glass and highly modern, Fauvist art. A search of this blog will turn up four references in just the last couple years.

But I wanted to draw your attention to an unusual exhibition that puts Rouault’s work in an interesting context.

Starting today at the Dillon Gallery in New York (555 West 25^th Street), you can take in “Georges Rouault / Makoto Fujimuira: Soliloquies,” which pairs the French artist’s work with that of a contemporary Japanese-American painter.

Fujimura, an evangelical, paints in the ancient Japanese Nihonga tradition, which uses crushed minerals. His work is abstract and semi-abstract and the pieces in this exhibition are part of a series he did in deliberate homage to Rouault.

To my eye, the dialogue between the two artists (visual and spiritual) is enriching and evocative. I hope you’ll get down to the Dillon Gallery to see it for yourself.

Georges Roualt, Automne

Makoto Fujimura, Soliloquies: Grace

The remnants of Hurricane Ida are lashing the East Coast, where I live. The skies have been dark, and the rain pelting, for about 48 hours. And given the recent solemnity of Veterans Day, and all the frightening and depressing developments in the news, I would like to share a little welcome highbrow humor.

Follow this link to the hilarious parody of T.S. Eliot by British writer Henry Reed. Be sure to listen to Dylan Thomas’s recitation of the parody (see the bottom of the page).  Thomas sounds exactly like Eliot reading “The Four Quartets.”

Th’ nearest anny man comes to a con−ciption iv his own death is lyin’ back in a comfortable coffin with his ears cocked f’r th’ flatthrin’ remarks iv th’ mourners.—Finley Peter Dunne

Right now, at this very moment, a friend of mine is dying in a hospice far away in Ireland.

In my biological family, people have always had a tendency to die suddenly.  There is usually little or no lingering.  My friend, on the other hand, is dying of emphysema, slowly and terribly where one false move leaves him choking for air for what he and the people around him keep thinking is the very last time.

This is the first lingering death that I have been exposed to in many years.  (He finally slipped into a coma last night, so he is no longer awake and alert.)  Aside from the fact that I have grown to love him over the years (he is my late brother’s father-in-law) there is something else that causes me to especially think about him as he dies.

He is an old fashioned, old school Irish believer, very devout and very sure in his faith.  He used to be a plumber, but a great plumber who instilled what I call a Christian sense of craft in his apprentices.  His apprentices in turn have been instilling this in their apprentices, a wonderful examply of how a touch of grace can radiate outwards.  He and his wife also adopted a number of children over the last 40 years up until today and raised them along side their own biological children despite the fact that this family is of average means.

But there is something else that has demanded my attention as he lay dying.  Twenty years ago he was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer.  It moved rapidly and painfully and in what seemed like no time, the doctors were standing at the foot of his bed telling him that they could do no more for him other than to keep him comfortable for the immanent end.

At this point, his best friend (a man whom I have always found rather irreverant) bundled him out of bed and dragged him off to the shrine at Knock, site of a possible appearance of the Blessed Virgin in the 19th century.

As it happened, a miracle occured and my friend was cured.  The cancer permanently disappeared, which is why he is now dying of something completely different.  Now my friend as far as I can tell was never the kind of man who needed miracles in order to trust and believe in God.  We of course can be sure of nothing, but the people that know him agree that if there is anyone who has little to worry about in the next life it is he.

Still, the prospect of dying soon has been as terrifying to him as I’m sure it would be for me.  I pray for him, earnestly, and I know that I should be happy for him as he stands on the threshold of eternal life.  But in a way, I’m not even sure what I am praying for.  Would I like him to have a little more time?  Would I like him to be healed again with  another miracle?  (He is a very old man now.)  Or do I think that at this point death is the greater blessing?

We are sometimes asked to remember as Catholics that this life is a vale of tears, especially when compared to the delights of heaven.  But we are human too; life is sweet.  If even Christ shed tears in the Garden of Gethsemane, how much harder is it for us to let go— let go of life and let go of each other.

Faced with this paradox, I see no easy resolution.  My friend Noel is so close to death that he may be gone by the time you read these words.  But I find as I compose my prayers for him, what I now ask for is simply strength; strength for him, strength for me, strength for us all.

There’s an interesting article today about the public rift playing out in Rhode Island between Patrick Kennedy (son of the late Senator) and his Bishop, Thomas Tobin.  Apart from its visibility, there’s nothing all that new here (at least by recent standards).  This quote from the Bishop did stand out to me, though:

“If you freely choose to be a Catholic, it means you believe certain things, you do certain things,” Bishop Tobin said on WPRO, a Providence radio station. “If you cannot do all that in conscience, then you should perhaps feel free to go somewhere else.”

The casual dismissiveness of the Bishop’s attitude really struck a chord with me, because it reminded me of so many conversations I’ve had with conservative Catholics, both in the comments section here, and in other (mostly on-line) exchanges at other sites.

In recent years, I have, more than a few times, been asked to explain why I do not “go somewhere else.”  Most of the time, my disagreements with the hierarchy have centered around the Church’s treatment of contraception (particularly in the context of HIV prevention) and homosexuality, though I also have had occasion to disagree with the weight some bishops have assigned to the abortion issue (as well as the aforementioned issues) as against other questions (such as the environment, economic justice, war, torture, etc.).   Over the course of my adult life, the public face of the Church has become increasingly distant from my own political beliefs and priorities.  The days seem long past when the USCCB could publish a document like Economic Justice for All, or when I could (as I did when I was about 8 years old) march with my local archbishop (Hunthausen) in a nuclear freeze protest at the Bangor submarine base.  We on the Catholic left need to face the fact that the Church’s hierarchy simply feels much more comfortable with the political agenda of the Republican Party than it does with that of the Democrats.  Abortion, stem cells, and opposition to gay marriage just matter more to most of the bishops than universal health care or workers’ rights.  (Hence the full episcopal press on the Stupak amendment, followed by a pretty stony silence on the merits of the reform bill itself.)

Given the face the Church increasingly presents to the world, part of me agrees with Bishop Tobin when he says that to call oneself Catholic while rejecting this constellation of views and priorities is a form of “false advertising,” particularly when I have no intention of turning my back on views (e.g., that an HIV positive husband can and should use a condom when having sex with his wife) that my conscience tells me with no equivocation are correct.  And yet — to my occasional discomfort — I continue to call myself “Catholic.”  I attend mass at my parish every Sunday.  I even bring my kids, much to the  confusion of my Hindu wife, who frequently wonders out loud why I would pass on this sort of conflicted existence to the next generation of the Penalver family.  I share her bewilderment, and yet I find that I cannot do otherwise.  I certainly cannot see myself suddenly changing my path and attending services at the Episcopalian parish around the corner from St. James.

This is a long, very round-about way of getting to the point of this post.   Bishop Tobin’s attitude towards being Catholic — accept teachings X, Y, and Z, or go to another institution that does not affirm them — strikes me as nothing if not supremely un-Catholic in its ethos.  I’ve always (probably unfairly) associated Protestantism with the sort of “shop around or found a new denomination” mentality implicit in Tobin’s casually dismissive remark .  In contrast, I have always felt my identity as a Catholic to be far too organic and deeply rooted to be jettisoned because of my disagreements with the hieararchy, however important the issues.  (To be clear, I’m not saying that all Protestants approach things this way.  Indeed, I suspect that many Protestants have an equally deep connection to their particular denomination, or at least, to the idea of being Protestant.)  Being Catholic is not just about the way I relate to a laundry-list of authoritative teachings or to the bishops or to my parish priest (who I really love).  It’s also about how I relate to my mom and dad, my two sons, and (before they died) my grandparents; even how I relate to my identity as a Cuban-American.  This conflict between Catholic officialdom and Catholic identity is probably as old as the Church itself.  It’s certainly endemic within Latin American Catholicism — I think here of Jose Marti urging campesinos to baptize their own children rather than pay a priest to do it for them, not to mention all the travails of the Theology of Liberation.  It’s all very messy — like a big, extended family with lots of crazy uncles and embarrassing second-cousins.  And, in my mind, this messiness is very distinctively Catholic.  I’m not trying to make any deep theological point with this — I just want to challenge the wisdom of bishops being so quick to urge people to leave for greener pastures and expressing such cavalier attitudes about who counts as Catholic, and why.

UPDATE:  Andrew Sullivan comments on the Patrick Kennedy situation.  Here’s a taste:

I am struck by the emphases of the American hierarchy these past few months. On health insurance, there is far more public emphasis on preventing anyone who wants to get an insurance policy from the new government-run exchanges from getting an abortion (even if she pays for it herself) than on the core principle of health care as a human right (in Catholic doctrine).

I can see that both principles are valid, but the intensity of the campaign against one compared with the lackadaisical interest in the other seems unbalanced to me. The hierarchy’s growing fusion with fundamentalist Republican politics is becoming harder and harder to ignore. They can turn a blind eye to state-sanctioned torture, and to the suffering of those without healthcare, but when it comes to ensuring that gay couples are kept stigmatized or that non-Catholic women can’t have access to abortion in a secular society, they come alive. There are times when it appears the only real issue for the Catholic church is abortion.

An interesting article in the New York Times on the effects of job loss on family life seems to confirm the tradition of Catholic social thought about the importance of work–a living wage–to family life.

Also interesting is the apparent thesis that a mother’s job loss isn’t as devastating as a father’s loss of a job of comparable income.  It seems to be based on two things:  1) mothers spend more time with their kids –and they’re less harried; and 2) a father’s self-identity is more connected with being a provider.

Here’s a story from upstate that caught my eye (via CathNewsUSA): a brand-new, 65-year-old Sister of Mercy. She’s a mother and a grandmother, and she won’t do much for the order’s overall demographics. But her story may be a small reminder that the health and “quality” of religious life can’t be measured entirely in statistics.

I wonder whether this is something we’ll be seeing more of, as religious communities age and people enter retirement with (hopefully) many healthy years ahead? The demographic shift that (according to speculation) makes these orders less attractive to young women may make them more attractive to older women, as a way of dedicating their final decades more completely to Christ. The lay associates program is already popular — via the Sisters of Mercy Web site, I see that, in parts of the province this sister has joined, there are as many associates as there are sisters. And this woman started out as an associate, according to the story. Will those programs begin to feed more often into full membership in the order, or is this instance an unusual blessing?

Speaking of the aging vowed-religious population: the “Share in the Care” collection is around the corner. While you’re considering your contribution, perhaps you might like to visit ThankYouSister.com, a Web site collecting messages from people about how they have been formed and helped by women religious. I could pen a letter or two to Sisters of Mercy, among so many others.

There are reports today that the Vatican has just held a symposium on the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the implications for the Church. In 1952 Fr. Francis J. Connell, C.Ss.R, was already giving thought to the question and gave a lecture that was accurately summed up in Time magazine. Teilhard de Chardin, on reading this account, bemoaned the low state of theology in the U.S.  Let’s hope that things have improved since.

The New York Times reports:

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

(…)

Four former executives said in interviews that Gary Jackson, who was then Blackwater’s president, had approved the bribes and that the money was sent from Amman, Jordan, where the company maintains an operations hub, to a top manager in Iraq. The executives, though, said they did not know whether the cash was delivered to Iraqi officials or the identities of the potential recipients.

Blackwater’s strategy of buying off the government officials, which would have been illegal under American law, created a deep rift inside the company, according to the former executives. They said that Cofer Black, who was then the company’s vice chairman and a former top C.I.A. and State Department official, learned of the plan from another Blackwater manager while he was in Baghdad discussing compensation for families of the shooting victims with United States Embassy officials.

(…)

Five Blackwater guards involved in the shooting are facing federal manslaughter charges, and their trial is scheduled to start in February in Washington. A sixth guard pleaded guilty in December. The company has never faced criminal charges in the case, although the Iraqi victims brought a civil lawsuit in federal court against Blackwater and Mr. Prince.

Separately, a federal grand jury in North Carolina, where the company has its headquarters, has been conducting a lengthy investigation into it. One of the former executives said that he had told federal prosecutors there about the plan to pay Iraqi officials to drop their inquiries into the Nisour Square case. If Blackwater followed through, the company or its officials could face charges of obstruction of justice and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribes to foreign officials.

I’ve been trying to figure out how abortion funding actually operates on the ground now–here are a few helpful resources, for those who are interested.

1.  Harris v. McRae–Supreme Court opinion on abortion funding.

2. Hyde Amendment– Current version from  pro-life source

3.  How the Hyde Amendment plays out in the various states:  from a pro-choice source

5. A  guide on how to handle the money=-how to separate funds –from a pro-choice source:

6.  The Stupak Amendment (New link)

The current issue of Commonweal has a conversation between editors past and present. In an initial discussion of how the magazine could attract more young Catholics, Peter Steinfels offered a typology of U.S. Catholics today:

I think there are basically four categories of Catholics middle-aged and younger. One consists of fundamentalist Catholics who want something, whether it’s the pope or particular texts or certain forms of ritual, that can be relied upon to provide their identity. For them, these things are not to be challenged; they’re to be taken literally. It may not be Scripture; it may be papal documents or other things. Then there is a neoconservative group that is much more questioning and intellectually adventurous, but whose identity is very much defined over against the secular liberal culture. And then there is a very large liberal group that has a Christian and Catholic commitment, but they are not willing to isolate themselves. They think that the secular liberal world-partly because of its Christian roots-has got a lot of good things in it. They want to be engaged with the culture and in conversation with it, not just in battle with it. They are not going to form their Catholic identity over against the secular culture. The fourth group is a more radical and political group that forms an identity largely around very personal, radical social-justice commitments.

I think that the third group is probably the Commonweal group of the future, merging into the fourth group.

I am grateful that there are four groups within Peter’s typology, and not the two who commonly appear, even in the work of sociologists (you know, us vs. them, good guys vs. bad guys, Cowboys vs. Indians). What do you think of Peter’s analysis? I was struck that the only designation of numerical strength was in his description of the third cohort as “very large”. I wonder how large it actually is and whether it is larger than the second group. Are there any natural affinities among the groups: e.g., between the first and the fourth in terms of fundamental religious commitment? between the second and the third in terms of intellectual adventurousness?

I’ve long wondered what the demographics of Commonweal subscribers is? For that matter, what the demographics of regular contributors to this blog is?

Those are the words of John Varley, chief executive of Barclays; they were addressed to an audience at the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Varley is one several bankers who are now taking the case for free-market capitalism to churchgoers. Brian Griffiths, an adviser to Goldman Sachs International, recently told listeners at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London that “the injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,” adding “we have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.” Why is that? Because, as Varley puts it, “talent is highly mobile.” If we don’t let talented bankers pay themselves outrageous amounts of money, they go will find someone who will let them: “If we fail to pay, or are constrained from paying, competitive rates, then that talent will move to another employer.” This old argument is now coming from the same people who are fighting against international regulations that would prevent financiers from going to “another employer” or another country that doesn’t limit executive compensation.

The claim that inequality is a necessary condition for a higher general standard of living is disputable; it depends on the strange claim that GDP is the best way to measure a country’s standard of living. But whatever the merits of this claim, it is one that sounds much better coming from an economist than from a banker. As the late G.A. Cohen pointed out, when financiers talk this way, it sounds a lot like extortion. One could argue, Cohen wrote, that parents should pay ransom to a kidnapper because, unless they do, he won’t return their child. But there’s one person who isn’t in a position to make this argument: the kidnapper himself — since, in making the argument, he would be offering not an innocent prediction but an ultimatum. Similarly, it may or may not make sense to allow bankers to be paid enormous sums in order to advance the material welfare of the rest of society, but there is no law of economics that requires bankers to accept or demand enormous sums. Those who, fulfilling their own prophecies, demand much, much more money than anyone needs violate a principle of distributive justice that does not depend on GDP. Jesus has nothing to do with it.

(The New York Times has the story about the bankers’ new gospel here.)

If you were to see me walk into a room and you reacted at all, you would likely think “White, middle-aged, businessman.  Nice tie.”  My liberal friends tend to think I’m a liberal and my conservative friends tend to think I’m a conservative.  But if a discussion really gets heated, and I really get pushed, I am sometimes apt to blurt out “I find it hard enough to be a good Catholic without also having to figure out how to be a good conservative or a good liberal too!”

What a wonderfully pretentious thing to say, you may be thinking.  And you are no doubt correct.  But as I try to be a good Catholic (and I am a Third Order (Secular) Franciscan candidate right now so I am called upon lately to really think about these things by my new family) I find that relative to right and left I am deeply confused.

I feel deeply conservative when I say that I oppose abortion even in cases of rape and incest.  I feel deeply liberal when I say that it does not follow from this that pregnancy is any kind of punishment that some women should endure for “mistakes”, nor that poor women should just be thrown to the dogs in our individualistic bootstrap society, nor that the bulk of the abortion problem will be solved if we can just put the issue back into the hands of the police.  I feel like a liberal when I say that we need some serious Federal support for universal health care.  But I feel like a conservative when I make an argument for this based on sound, capitalistic business principles.  But I feel like a liberal when I also make an argument for the same thing that appeals to charity.

When I think of the short list of authors whose new releases I will always purchase out of the gate, I feel like a total conservative when I say that I can’t walk past a book by John Lukacs or Ralph McIntyre and a total liberal when I say the same about Thomas Merton or Ivan Illich.  (My beloved Alasdair Macintyre, on the other hand, seems to straddle the divide, to few people’s complete satisfaction.)

When I say that when push comes to shove I’d have to say that I’m a Catholic first and an American second, I feel like a liberal.  When I say that I consider myself an America loving patriot precisely in John Lukac’s sense of the word, I feel like a conservative.  When I say that I think that American nationalism is at least as big a threat to Christian civilization as American secularism, I’m not sure what I feel like.

To mix this up further, I seem to possess certain wicked traits that seem to me more human than conservative or liberal.  For example, I have been known to feel a vicious little thrill when someone scores a snarky but witty point in a political discussion, especially when the person saying it is me.  I sometimes get angry at complete strangers on the internet and I have been even known to feel a little shiver of joy when I see some poor soul from a political group  that I don’t like get embroiled in a personal scandal.  Like all of us, I look for coherence.  But I just don’t see it on the left or the right.

I see a sloppiness everywhere, and most of all with myself.  The only thing I can think of to do, and not very consistently, is to tell myself that no matter how stupid, misguided, depraved or wicked someone seems to me to be in the political sphere, I am no less stupid, misguided, depraved or wicked myself.  Sometimes this allows me to keep myself in perspective.

Color me human.

The Vatican released the devilish details, though a quick glance by my non-expert eye doesn’t turn up anything terribly unexpected. The language does make it seem more than ever like Benedict is setting up a parallel Catholic Church, with bishops alongside other bishops in existing dioceses–details to be worked out later. It seems a recipe for problems on the ground, doctrine and tradition and such aside. It also appears celibacy will still be the norm for unmarried Anglican priests and seminarians, and that it will be the norm going forward, with currently married Anglican priests and seminarians being grandfathered in.

Anglican bishops cannot be bishops if they are married, and it appears John Hepworth, head of the TAC, the main ex-Anglican body seeking this exemption, will not be able to be a priest either as he was a Catholic priest before, became an Anglican priest later, married and divorced and remarried, and thus has too many impediments. It also appears that former Catholics who went to Canterbury cannot be members of the ordinariate unless they are member’s of the priest’s family! I suspect there are other quirks and elements to debate.

The text and norms and press release and official commentary is all here.

From the press release, my favorite bit, highlighted:

“This Apostolic Constitution opens a new avenue for the promotion of Christian unity while, at the same time, granting legitimate diversity in the expression of our common faith. It represents not an initiative on the part of the Holy See, but a generous response from the Holy Father to the legitimate aspirations of these Anglican groups. The provision of this new structure is consistent with the commitment to ecumenical dialogue, which continues to be a priority for the Catholic Church.”

Translation: “What could we do? Our hand was forced! They asked us for this!”

Calling all canonists…

Tom Friedman thinks the Middle East Peace Process is over. I read his last paragraph to say that we should stop subsidizing both sides. Is that a message Obama can deliver to Netanyahu when they meet in Washington tonight?

“If we are still begging Israel to stop building settlements, which is so manifestly idiotic, and the Palestinians to come to negotiations, which is so manifestly in their interest, and the Saudis to just give Israel a wink, which is so manifestly pathetic, we are in the wrong place. It’s time to call a halt to this dysfunctional “peace process,” which is only damaging the Obama team’s credibility.

“If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore. We need to fix America. If and when they get serious, they’ll find us. And when they do, we should put a detailed U.S. plan for a two-state solution, with borders, on the table. Let’s fight about something big.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opinion/08friedman.html

An interesting speech –on social ethics.

Not the filioque: sorry, all you systematic theologians.

In my class on mercy and justice, I have them read selections from D. Constanelos,

Byzantine Philosophy and Social Welfare. As he argues, Constantinople was meant to be society organized around the virtue of mercy–not justice.

The lone Republican vote for the House health care package, a former Jesuit seminarian who represents Louisiana’s second district. From his website:

“I read the versions of the House [health reform] bill.  I listened to the countless stories of Orleans and Jefferson Parish citizens whose health care costs are exploding – if they are able to obtain health care at all.  Louisianans needs real options for primary care, for mental health care, and for expanded health care for seniors and children…”

“I have always said that I would put aside partisan wrangling to do the business of the people.  My vote tonight was based on my priority of doing what is best for my constituents.”

He seems like a fellow who means it, and for a freshman rep to buck the entire party on this is pretty remarkable. Maybe this has something to do with it, from his Wikipedia entry:

Cao is the poorest member of Louisiana’s delegation (including the state’s two senators) in Congress: as of 2009 his assets were no greater than $195,000 and his potential liabilities mounting to $215,000, including student loans for himself and his wife.