You have heard what Christ prayed for, what he desired: “Father, I wish that those whom you gave me may be where I am. I wish,” he says, “that where I am they too may be.” O happy home! O safe homeland! It has no enemy; it has no plague. We will live safely there; we won’t seek to migrate; we will not find a safer place….

You cannot migrate from this evil place to that good place unless you act well in this evil place. It is a place where no one is hungry. If you wish to dwell in that good place where no one hungers, then in this evil place share your bread with the hungry. No one is a stranger in that blessed place; all are living in their own homeland. If then you wish to be in that good place where no one is a stranger, in this evil place receive those who have no home to enter. Offer hospitality to a stranger in this evil place so that you may come to the good place where you cannot be a host. In that good place no one lacks clothing; there is no cold there, and no heat, so what need of a roof is there, what need of clothing? There will be no roof there, but there will be shelter….”Beneath the shadow of your wings I shall hope” (Ps 56:2). In this evil place, then, offer a roof to the homeless so that you may be in that good place where you will have such shelter that you will not have to repair it because no rain drips there. There is a perpetual fountain of truth, but that rain brings joy not dampness; that rain is the fountain of life itself. What else do these texts mean: “With you is the fountain of life” (Ps 35:10) and “The Word was with God” (Jn 1:l)?      (Augustine, Sermon 217, 2; PL 38, 1083)

A friend alerted me to this interview with John Allen on NPR regarding the abuse scandal.  His parting words, which I think are right on:  The church has been dealing with its priest problem, but the issue going forward is what is Benedict going to do about the bishop problem.

I read today Augustine sermon (Sermon 216; PL 38, 1076-1082) for the competentes, that is, the people who had enrolled their names for baptism during the Easter Vigil. Some things that struck me:

Early on, he calls them contirones mei, my fellow recruits, a nice touch, found elsewhere when he says that he and the members of his congregation are classmates in the same school whose teacher is Christ. A first metaphor for them to consider:

At the auction, the market place, of faith the kingdom of heaven is offered on sale to you. Take a look at it, and put together the resources of your conscience, gather the treasures of your hearts. And yet, you are buying without cost if you recognize the free grace that is being offered to you. You spend nothing, and yet you acquire something great. Don’t hold yourselves cheap if the Creator of all things, your Creator, considers you so dear that everyday he pours out the most precious blood of his own Son for you. You will not be cheap if you distinguish the precious from the cheap, if you serve the Creator, not the creature.

At a later point, he contrasts the two cities:

Take on the world, be reshaped for God. May your Babylonian captivity now disgust you. Look: there is Jerusalem, that heavenly city, cheerfully coming to meet you on the way, and begging you to choose life and to desire to see good days, days like none you have ever had nor ever will have in this world.

The maternal image is picked up still later, but with different resonance:

Hope in God, the entire group of the new people, the people who are being born, the people whom the Lord has made. Strive to be born in healthy condition lest you be aborted and die. See the womb of Mother Church; see how she groans in her labor so that she may give birth to you, bring you out into the light of faith. Don’t by your impatience disturb her maternal womb and narrow the gates through which you must pass. O people, who are being created, praise your God; praise, you who are being created, praise your Lord…. As it is written: Make your father glad by your progress in wisdom, and don’t by your failure sadden your mother (see Prov 10:1; 15-20).

Here, as elsewhere, Mother Church is the Church that will give birth at the baptism of the new believers. They are nearing their birth-day, and she is already groaning as her labor draws near. St. Augustine meant all this very concretely. As he said in another sermon: Individually, we are all children of Mother Church; taken together, we are Mother Church. Do we think of ourselves, together, as about to give birth at the Easter Vigil?

There is a very interesting article on the last stages of preparation for baptism in the time of St. Augustine: http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~james.p.burns/chroma/baptism/merdbapt.html

George Weigel’s column on the First Things blog summarizes the case being made in many quarters that The New York Times has been biased in its recent coverage of Pope Benedict’s handling of cases of clergy sexual abuse. He writes:

“… the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line.”

I don’t agree with his analysis. The reason goes back to something I told the U.S. bishops when I was invited to address them at a closed session of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Pittsburgh in the late 1990s: that journalists aren’t especially interested in individual cases of sexual abuse, but are very interested in stories about cover-ups in powerful institutions. In other words, the best course for the bishops was to be truthful.

This is what has made clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church the subject of so many scathing reports, whether from the news media or grand juries: that a cover-up occurred at high levels in many dioceses. When a scandal of this proportion is uncovered, journalists will naturally want to see how far it goes – the basis for the latest round of stories. To say that sexual abuse in other churches or other sectors of society does not get the same media attention misses the point. The issue isn’t that Catholic priests are allegedly prone to commit sexual abuse, but that a small percentage of them were freed to do so, again and again, due to gross mismanagement, secrecy and lack of accountability on the part of church authorities. However dated most of the sexual abuse cases are, this story still calls out to be covered because some of those who failed to stop repeat abusers remain in positions of authority.

The Times coverage in recent days has explored this. Weigel’s column and much of the outcry over the paper’s coverage focuses on a March 25 story about a priest from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. There is some information late in the story – the timing of the priest’s death, especially – that should have been higher in the article, in my view. I would have preferred that the story let the documents speak more for themselves rather than declare in the second paragraph that the internal correspondence shows that church officials’ “highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.” That judgment should have been left to the reader.

It’s disconcerting to see a pope questioned in this way, but I think The Times has done a service to Catholics by bringing the documentation for this case to light. It opens a window on the process.

Our friends at Dissent have started their own group blog. They call it ”Arguing the World”; David Marcus, their online editor, explains why:

“Arguing the World” takes its name from Joseph Dorman’s documentary about four young radicals who gathered in a City College cafeteria to debate politics and literature. One of them was Irving Howe, who became a founding editor of Dissent; the others—Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Nathan Glazer—went on to edit the Public Interest. Each went his own political direction—Bell once quipped that he was a “liberal in politics, a conservative in culture, and a socialist in economics”—but taken together they represented a particular way of thinking, and arguing, and worrying, out loud.

The posts on “Arguing the World” will follow in this style. They will not have the honed polish of our print and Web articles but will capture a particular mode of thinking and arguing out loud. We will have short musings on literature and film, riffs on politics on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific, critiques and celebrations and close readings of articles found in our own pages and elsewhere. “Arguing the World” will be a place of conversation: an argument among friends and colleagues, and an argument with the world, over the direction of contemporary politics and culture.

Among the contributors to “Arguing the World” are Michael Walzer, Richard Wolin, David Bromwich, Alan Johnson, and Todd Gitlin. So far, most of the posts have been very short, well written essays — too short for print, but more substantial and less link-locked than most blog posts. Lots of dissent, little snark.

[Avigdor Lieberman] “does not give many newspaper interviews, preferring public comments and speeches. In Maariv, his radical views were on display. He said, for example, that the only hope for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was not a negotiated two-state solution but a land swap and population exchange in which Palestinian citizens of Israel would end up in a Palestinian state.

“Asked how he expected the international community to accept that, he said, “The world will accept anything that we rally around.” He added: “The world is fed up with us. They want a solution by all possible means. We have become a global headache.”

“Mr. Lieberman, who lives in a West Bank settlement, said he had no intention of taking his party out of the coalition even if his approach was rejected by the government….

“On the question of Washington’s demands regarding East Jerusalem, he said he was certain Israel could convince the administration that curbing Jewish building was unreasonable. Asked what he would do if he was unsuccessful, he replied, “There will be no choice but to insist, to pay the price even if it is high.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/world/middleeast/30mideast.html?hp

Who does FM Lieberman think will pay the price?

I’m no fan of Ross Douthat, but his column in the Times (March 29) brings a welcome reality check to the frenzy over Benedict and the crisis. It begins:

“During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

Douthat then exercises a Commonweal maneuver… on the one hand, on the other… all sides bear some responsibility for this…. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/opinion/29douthat.html?ref=opinion

In her thread on the Legion of Christ’s disavowal of Maciel, Mollie linked to an important piece by Sandro Magister, “Legionaries: The ‘Nomenklatura’ that Must Disappear.” Next month, the five bishops who led investigations of the the Legion–Archbishop Chaput in the United States–will present their findings to Vatican officials. Magister details the maneuverings of Legion leadership in advance of those meetings. Rome will likely place the Legionaries under the authority of an “external commissioner endowed with full powers,” yet, according to Magister, the group’s leaders–all with close ties to Maciel, several of whom alleged to have knowledge of Maciel’s double life–are “anything but resigned to giving way.”

Freed from the annoyance of the visitors, and not yet subjected to the command of the commissioner, during this interim period which they are hoping will last for “several months” they are doing everything they can to consolidate their power and win the support of the majority of the 800 priests of the Legion, and of the other religious and lay members.

Who are these men? The Legion’s director, vicar, and general council members were elected in January 2005, during the most recent chapter meeting of the congregation. By that time Maciel had been “invited” by Pope Benedict to a “reserved life of penitence and prayer, relinquishing any form of public ministry.”

But the current leadership group’s ascent to power in the congregation dates back to the previous general chapter, the second, held in Rome in 1992.

On that occasion, founder Maciel was defended [against decades-old charges of sexual abuse] by the two who are still the big men of the Legion: fathers [Director General Alvara] Corcuera and [Vicar General Luis] Garza [Medina], and by the latter more than the former, together with a group of diehard faithful, almost all of whose names are found in the current “nomenklatura.”

According to some of the testimonies given to the apostolic visitors in recent months, some in this group knew about the founder’s double life, about the carnal acts he performed with many of his seminarians over the span of decades, about his lovers, his children, his drug use. But in spite of that, a fortress was built around Maciel in defense of his virtues, devotion to him was fostered among his followers, all of them unaware of the truth, his talents were emphasized, even among the upper hierarchy of the Church. This exaltation of the figure of the founder was so effective that even today it inspires the sense of belonging to the Legion among many of its priests and religious.

The cohesion of the leadership group, originating from its decades-long connection with Maciel, endures today in the bond that binds and subordinates everyone to Corcuera, and even more to Garza….[who is] the creator and absolute master of Grupo Integer, the holding company that acts as treasury and administrative center for all the works of the Legion in the world, with assets totaling an estimated 25 billion euros.

Given that history, Magister asks, “how trustworthy is this distancing of the Legion’s leaders from their founder, and in particular from the ‘sudden revelation’ – or so they say – of his misdeeds?” If the testimony Magister reports proves true, Maciel may not be the only Legion leader who deserves the group’s disavowal.

Read the rest of Magister’s report right here.

Tim Rutton at the LA Times chimes in, noting that Benedict’s tough talk to the Irish bishops, if applied closer to home, well….

A couple points:
1. The core of the really corrosive moral problem is the cover-up by bishops and, perhaps, the Vatican. Positions that offer access to vulnerable people will draw those who want to victimize them. Simple as that. The question is what you do with them. When the scandal broke in MA, someone from another, much smaller, denomination (I’m sorry I forget which,) was asked “Do you have pedophiles among your ministers?” The response was “Yes, two–they’re in jail.” Only now, with the resignation of one Irish bishop, are we beginning to see anything like real accountability. (Or will that Irish bishop also get a comfy sinecure in Rome like Cardinal Law did? Remember, most or all of Cardinal Law’s enforcers were promoted to their own dioceses.)
2. Andrew Sullivan draws an indirect connection to celibacy as a part of the problem, arguing from a psychological stance. But this is a matter of the priestly culture, afflicting the group, not just the individual.

But these indicate the need for a systemic approach to a systemic problem. I think it would involve real reform of the power structure, maiking it less unidirectionally top-down.

I think it would involve re-thinking our theology of ordination from one of ontological change, construed as elevation of the priest above the status of mere mortals, to one of functionality, wherein a priest is a person who does what a priest does, not a special, more Christ-like person.

What else would need to change?
I’m not talking procedural change here, (things like better screening of seminarians, windows in doors where priests are alone with people,) but structural, institutional change. People are calling for accountability, and structural change seems to be the key. So….what’s needed?

Two testimonies to ponder as Holy Week begins:

Vain trifles and trivialities, my old loves held me back. They tugged at the garment of my flesh and whispered: “Are you getting rid of us? From this moment shall we never be with you again?” … They were not confronting me face to face, but whispering behind my back, as if they were furtively tugging at me as I was leaving, trying to persuade me to look back. Nevertheless they held me back. I hesitated to detach myself, to be rid of them, to make the leap upwards on the way I was being called.  Meanwhile the overwhelming force of habit was saying to me: “Do you think you can live without them?” (Augustine of Hippo)

“I tried to stop and I couldn’t stop. It was horrific. Part of what I learned in treatment, being there for 45 days you learn a lot. You strip away the denial, the rationalization, and you come to the truth, and the truth is very painful at times. To stare at yourself and look at the person you’ve become . . . you become disgusted. I was living a life of a lie. I really was. I was doing a lot of things that hurt a lot of people.’’ (Tiger Woods)

John Schwenkler is right about this post by Ross Douthat. It is, as Schwenkler says, honest and charitable. (Douthat’s writing almost always is.) But on his way to making a good point about the relationship of the prolife movement to America’s two major political parties, Douthat rather too casually dismisses Commonweal‘s position.

According to Douthat, Bart Stupak deserves some prolife sympathy because he fought the good fight until the very last moment, when he finally capitulated by adopting the position of liberal Catholics like us and E. J. Dionne:

Here was a politician who embodies what a half-century ago would have been considered the sensible center in American politics — economically liberal, socially conservative — and whose politics represent a good faith effort to live out the social teaching of America’s largest religious body, the Roman Catholic Church. Yet who, in the political arena, really seemed to be on his side? Not the pro-choice left, obviously, which was willing to sacrifice the entire health care bill to the principle that nobody should have to pay for an abortion out of pocket. Not Stupak’s fellow liberal Catholics (E.J. Dionne, the editors of Commonweal, etc.) whose attitude seemed to be, “c’mon, Stupak, just get with the program, and sign up for the compromise that a pro-choice White House wants you to live with.”

In other words, Stupak only became an appeaser at the end, whereas we had been appeasers all along, so intent on promoting the Democrats’ health-care reform that we were willing to settle for whatever compromise the Most Prochoice President in History was willing to toss us.

In the context of the larger discussion now going on among prolifers, this is actually a fairly moderate position — and it is even moderately fair, at least to Stupak. But it gets this magazine’s position wrong by assuming that we understood the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act the way Douthat seems to:

Yes, the executive order that Stupak accepted as cover for his pivotal health care vote is probably meaningless. And yes, the health care bill, as passed, effectively tilts public policy in a more pro-choice direction: The fact that women are required to write a separate check for abortion coverage means that public money isn’t literally paying for abortion, but it doesn’t change the fact that federal dollars are being spent in ways that make it much easier to obtain abortion-covering insurance.

Adverbs are doing a lot of work here. The executive order is “probably” meaningless; the bill “effectively” tilts public policy in a more prochoice direction; and though the federal funds won’t “literally” pay for abortion, they may as well, since it will now be easier to obtain abortion coverage.

I understand Douthat’s reluctance to offer apodictic judgments about what the new law will do. It’s a very complicated piece of legislation. Much will depend on how it’s implemented, and on how insurance companies and their customers respond to its provisions.

Read the rest of this entry »

The results of the now-concluded apostolic visitation of the Legion of Christ are still to come. But the Legion is already formally distancing itself from its disgraced founder, Marcial Maciel, after many years of resisting ugly truths about his life. A “communique” from the order’s leaders is on their Web site:

We had thought and hoped that the accusations brought against our founder were false and unfounded, since they conflicted with our experience of him personally and his work. However, on May 19, 2006, the Holy See’s Press Office issued a communiqué as the conclusion of a canonical investigation that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) had begun in 2004. At that time, the CDF reached sufficient moral certainty to impose serious canonical sanctions related to the accusations made against Fr Maciel, which included the sexual abuse of minor seminarians. Therefore, though it causes us consternation, we have to say that these acts did take place….

Read the rest of this entry »

A moving lament that most of us non-Italian-Americans don’t meditate on often enough:

“When news spread the other day that work crews were draping black steel netting over the facade of Our Lady of Loreto Church [MOBS: in Brooklyn, the one in Manhattan is already "disappeared"]  the people fighting to save the building from demolition found themselves stymied — and reflecting on a yearlong campaign at the brink…. “Why don’t we Italian-Americans have the kind of clout that other ethnic groups have?” asked Mario Toglia, a retired New York City schoolteacher from Long Island. “The Irish, the Jewish, the African-American and Latinos — all these other groups have an ability to come together around a cause and fight. But not us.”

The whole story (with a wonderful irony embedded in it that perhaps only Manahttan West Siders will grasp): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/nyregion/27metjournal.html?hp

From David Brooks’s column in today’s New York Times:

Economics achieved coherence as a science by amputating most of human nature. Now economists are starting with those parts of emotional life that they can count and model (the activities that make them economists). But once they’re in this terrain, they’ll surely find that the processes that make up the inner life are not amenable to the methodologies of social science. The moral and social yearnings of fully realized human beings are not reducible to universal laws and cannot be studied like physics.

Once this is accepted, economics would again become a subsection of history and moral philosophy.

Speaking of responsible journalism and under-edited opinion pages, here’s a fun guessing game: which major U.S. newspaper published an op-ed piece on the Church’s sexual abuse scandal by — wait for it — Sinead O’Connor?

If you guessed the Washington Post, you’re absolutely right! Gosh, I wonder what her opinion might be? (As they said at the Awl, “No prizes for guessing.”)

Turns out he knew more than the Vatican or the Munich archdiocese averred, according to the latest in a series of revelations that are growing worse by the day, if not the hour. Here’s the NY Times account:

MUNICH — The future Pope Benedict XVI was kept more closely apprised of a sexual abuse case in Germany than previous church statements have suggested, raising fresh questions about his handling of a scandal unfolding under his direct supervision before he rose to the top of the church’s hierarchy.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope and archbishop in Munich at the time, was copied on a memo that informed him that a priest, whom he had approved sending to therapy in 1980 to overcome pedophilia, would be returned to pastoral work within days of beginning psychiatric treatment. The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in another parish.

An initial statement on the matter issued earlier this month by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising placed full responsibility for the decision to allow the priest to resume his duties on Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, the Rev. Gerhard Gruber. But the memo, whose existence was confirmed by two church officials, shows that the future pope not only led a meeting on Jan. 15, 1980, approving the transfer of the priest, but was also kept informed about the priest’s reassignment.

What part he played in the decision making, and how much interest he showed in the case of the troubled priest, who had molested multiple boys in his previous job, remains unclear. But the personnel chief who handled the matter from the beginning, the Rev. Friedrich Fahr, “always remained personally, exceptionally connected” to Cardinal Ratzinger, the church said.

When they update the text books on how not to respond to crises, this will be prominent. John Allen got it exactly right a few days ago in a column titled, “Memo to Munich: Get it out now!”

The March 25 issue of the London Review of Books includes an interview with the historian Tony Judt, whose Ill Fares the Land has just been published by Penguin. We’ll have something to say about that important book both here and in the magazine. It’s the sort of book one wishes every college student, if not every voter, had to read. The LRB interview ranges over many topics, including the European union, the war in Afghanistan, and the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Judt’s remarks on this last subject are a useful addition to the ongoing conversation that Peggy Steinfels has been moderating here at dotCommonweal.

Is there anything Europe can do to exert pressure on Israel?

Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time, damaging Palestinians and damaging Israel without running any risk. However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage. If the EU said: ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t have the privileges of partial economic membership, you can’t have internal trading rights, you can’t be part of the EU market,’ this would be a huge issue in Israel, second only to losing American military aid. We don’t even have to talk about Gaza, just the Occupied Territories.

Why do Europeans not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of Israel, we can’t use our strength as a huge economic actor to pressure the Jewish state. Why? Because of Auschwitz.’ I understand this argument very well. Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz. However, this is ridiculous. Europe can’t live indefinitely on the credit of someone else’s crimes to justify a state that creates and commits its own crimes. If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed.

Let’s get one thing straight — this isn’t true:

The only way to prevent public funding for abortion was for [Stupak's] amendment to be added to the Senate bill.

Prolifers were understandably excited about Rep. Bart Stupak’s amendment to the House bill. Recall the standard we started out with: any health-care reform bill would have to preserve the “status quo” — that is, it would have to prohibit direct federal funding for abortion — in order to be acceptable to prolifers. Stupak’s amendment did that. But it wasn’t the only possible solution. As we’ve continued to point out around here, the Senate bill also included language that met the “status quo” requirement. Compared to Stupak, perhaps, it looked like a compromise — but preserving the status quo is itself a compromise. There was no reason, other than political expediency, to make Stupak’s amendment the baseline for what an acceptable bill had to look like. But once the Senate bill passed and was sent to the House, adding Stupak’s amendment to the Senate bill was a surefire way to stop health-care reform altogether. Which is, in large part, why it became such a popular cause among people who preferred not to see health-care reform pass.

The claim I quoted above is from today’s Washington Post column by Kathleen Parker. In her construction, Stupak is a “backstabber” who betrayed the prolife cause. “Ultimately, he was weak and overwhelmed by raw political power,” she pronounces. It’s a nasty column, and our friend (and her colleague) E. J. Dionne politely called her out for it on the Post‘s “PostPartisan” blog today. His defense of Bart Stupak is worth a read (especially since he has the good taste to keep on quoting Commonweal). It concludes:

The only people who can see Stupak as a sellout are those who were willing to see health reform die altogether. Kathleen and I, from what we have written, probably take a different view of the merits of the health-care bill that Obama signed into law. We will have plenty of time in the coming years to argue about which of us was right on the health-care issue itself. But I don’t think that difference justifies an attack on Stupak, who was prepared to enrage a majority of his Democratic colleagues to advance the pro-life cause that has been dear to him throughout his congressional career. What he did at the beginning of this battle and what he did at the end took courage.

He’s right that her attack on Stupak is “deeply unfair” — he might have added “incoherent” and “overly dependent on mismanaged metaphors.” Let’s take a look! Read the rest of this entry »

The bishops’ longtime spokesperson, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, has a blog post denouncing the violence and ugly epithets from opponents of health care reform. The USCCB was one of those opponents, and so is wise to distance itself so quickly from such actions, which are growing serious, as the WaPo reports. The GOP is rushing to do the same, though the bristly House Whip Eric Cantor isn’t sounding very apologetic:

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) angrily lashed out at Democratic leaders for their handling of reported threats against members of Congress Thursday, accusing them of “dangerously fanning the flames” by blaming the GOP and confiding that he has also been the recipient of threats.

I prefer the way Sister Mary Ann frames the problems:

The intolerance and incivility did not begin with legislation passed Sunday night. It is not unrelated to the divisions that exist in our country and, sadly, even in our church.

It starts with how we view others – as enemies rather than as fellow travelers on the journey of life. It includes whether or not we’re willing to give another the benefit of the doubt, accepting that their intentions are good, even if their goals differ from ours.

In involves accepting the fact that each of us is a child of God and precious to Him and our brother or sister.

She cites Cardinal George and his statement as an example of this approach, which may not ring true with many. But the fact that her message calls out so many HCR opponents inside and outside the church is a good start to a new chapter — let us hope.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has returned to Israel and President Obama is headed for Iowa. We can probably anticipate a cooling-off period. Sooooo this is the end of the series.

Restive Commonweal commentors who found some posts closed have written to tell me that they have more to say. Rather than opening those comments, here’s an open thread. Post what you have to say. Remember: Not too long; not too apocalyptic; go light on the trash.

I will not respond, but I will delete. And remember to read Ha’aretz, the Israeli newspaper that allows discussions more far-ranging than almost anything published in the U.S. http://www.haaretz.com/

Remarking on my earlier post, Robert George writes:

… someone “claiming the banner” of Catholicism who says, (1) “the plight of poor people who do not have access to health care is no concern of mine (except, perhaps, as a matter of private charity) and is not a legitimate subject of public deliberation and policy-making, and (2) “the unborn must be protected by law against being killed by abortion,” is being morally incoherent.  By the same token, someone who says (1) “we must reform the health care system to ensure that basic care is reasonably accessible to all members of the community,” and (2) “the unborn have no right to legal protection against being killed by abortion,” is being morally incoherent.

Or so it seems to me.

I don’t know whether John Schwenkler would agree.  I’m sure that Ross Douthat would.

Well yes, I do agree! But it also seems to me that I shouldn’t really have had to go through that ritual, given that not only does my dotComm bio indicate that I’ve gone through the sort of advanced study in philosophy that enables one to recognize that the charge of moral incoherence can be applied bidirectionally, but I also identified myself as pro-life in the very post Prof. George is discussing. At this point it strikes me that it might be permitted by the rules of the game to demand that Prof. George swear fidelity to Rome on such matters as transubstantiation and the Virgin Birth, but that would likely be taken as mere pertinacity.

Prof. George also reminds us, presumably bearing in mind my stated opposition to the Democrats’ health reform bill, that the question of how best to ensure access to adequate health care is a prudential one:

The Church (“that very same church”) teaches that efforts must be made to ensure that all members of the community, including the poor, have reasonable access to basic health care; but it does not prescribe a government run health insurance or health care system or a particular scheme or degree of government regulation of health care providers or insurers.  People can reasonably and responsibly “claim the banner of church teaching” while advocating different policies for the structure (or reform) of the health care system to make sure that as many members of the community as possible have reasonable access to basic care (and insurance against medical catastrophes).

Indeed they can, and in fact this is a point that I’ve argued at some length. But the fact that there can be health care policies that will do an equal (or better!) job than the Democrats’ of ensuring widespread access to health care does not alleviate the problem I was identifying, namely that of “conservatives’ stunning inability to propose a coherent and forward-looking agenda of their [read our] own to address this country’s very real need for serious health care reform”. Appeals to prudence are fine and good, but absent a political agenda that centers on more than simply saying “No” to the Democrats, mainstream conservatives are in a poor position to complain when they’re accused of incoherently regarding the bishops’ statements on health care with something less than the seriousness with which they treat their views on abortion.

Or so it seems to me.

I’m sure that Ross Douthat agrees; he says just this in the very post I was discussing. And I’ll assume for charity’s sake that Prof. George would, too.

I ‘ve been enjoying a Lenten journey on the Camino de Santiago – vicariously, that is, by following some pilgrims’ progress through their daily reports on BustedHalo.com. The interviews, photos, video and music  really bring the experience of hiking  northern Spain’s thousand-year-old pilgrimage route to life.

I recommend it not only for the pleasure of the journey but also as an example of interesting Catholic journalism,  a cutting-edge use of multi-media for purposes of connecting young adults to the church. I’m impressed that the peregrinos have the energy to transmit their photos, video and audio files after a long day of hiking. And who carries the laptop? It would weigh quite heavily after a few miles on the trail. This is the kind of energy the church needs.

The latest revelation, a direct hit on Joseph Ratzinger’s credibility in a New York Times story running tomorrow:

Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.

In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.

But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.

How much damage will this do? Read the rest of the story here.

We already know that Marc Thiessen’s case for the acceptability of “enhanced interrogation techniques” under Catholic moral teaching is a jumble of dubious assertions, glaring omissions, and outright falsehoods. You may not be surprised to learn that his new book, Courting Disaster — a fearmongering defense of the Bush Adminstration’s “war on terror” policies — is composed in precisely the same way. But it is stunning to realize just how obviously mendacious his argument is. For an overview, see Jane Mayer’s review in the March 29 New Yorker. Here’s an illustrative excerpt: Read the rest of this entry »

Ross Douthat has written an honest, charitable post that is the most thoughtful contribution I’ve so far seen a conservative commentator make to the debate over Bart Stupak’s stance on health care reform. Ross takes issue with certain of Stupak’s critics from the left and remains skeptical about the compromise he ended up striking, but he goes on to articulate many things that pro-life critics of the reform bill have been unwilling to acknowledge: that there is a reason why there are pro-life liberals; that Stupak’s failure to pass his amendment does not mean the end of such a bloc; that many of the pro-life conservatives who cheered Stupak on were secretly hoping that he’d fail in his efforts and drag the bill down with him; and that those very same conservatives have failed miserably in the task of proposing constructive alternatives to solve the very real problems that motivated the reform agenda they so enthusiastically opposed.

As a pro-life, pro-Stupak, anti-Obamacare conservative (yes, there is at least one of us here!) I agree with pretty much all of this. Whatever one’s opinions about the merits and demerits of the reform bill itself and the complicated moral and legal issues about federal (and non-federal) funding of abortion, there was always something deeply, darkly cynical about the ways that many pro-life conservatives were cheering Stupak along. (Full disclosure: I know this in part because I far too frequently went in for this sort of thing myself.) What the Stupak controversy had the chance to do was to make the pro-life movement into something more than an appendage of a political party, and while I’ve no doubt that some of Stupak’s pro-life supporters would have been genuinely happy if the reform bill had passed with his amendment attached, it’s hard to shake the sense that many of the loudest critics of Stupak’s eventual compromise originally viewed him as a useful idiot whom they could use to bring down a bill that was just a piece of evil Marxist redistributionism, anyway. In the present political climate, the pro-life movement needs Democrats every bit as much as Democrats need the pro-life movement, and if representatives of that movement insist on narrating Stupak’s story as a farce rather than – as Ross views it – a tragedy, it’s highly unlikely that Democrats like Stupak will want anything to do with them the next time around.

Meanwhile, and this is once again a point that Ross’s post helpfully emphasizes, the other strand in this tale of wasted opportunity arises from conservatives’ stunning inability to propose a coherent and forward-looking agenda of their own to address this country’s very real need for serious health care reform. Claiming the banner of church teaching when it comes to the protection of the unborn while ignoring the demands of that very same church concerning the adequate provision of health care is a gross moral incoherence; and until pro-life conservatives begin devoting more energies to improving the quality of those lives that they – we – are so intent to save, policy compromises like the one that Stupak struck with Obama are pretty much guaranteed to be the best we’re going to get.

As Ross puts it, these problems are not about to go away.

Jon Ward of the Daily Caller has a stunning interview with Bart Stupak:

“The [National] Right to Life and the bishops, in 2007 when George Bush signed the executive order on embryonic stem cell research, they all applauded the executive order,” Stupak said in an interview with The Daily Caller.

“The Democratic Congress passed [a bill] saying we’ll do embryonic stem cell research. Bush vetoed it in 2007. That same day he issued an executive order saying we will not do it, and all these groups applauded that he protected life,” Stupak said.

“So now President Obama’s going to sign an executive order protecting life and everyone’s condemning it. The hypocrisy is great,” he said.

What’s more, Stupak wonders: were the Catholic bishops and other prolife groups were really interested in protecting the sanctity of life “or did they want to defeat health care?”

Stupak also reveals that Speaker Pelosi had enough votes to pass the bill without his coalition. According to Stupak, it wasn’t until he and his prolife comrades were satisfied that Pelosi was able to release other more vulnerable Democrats to vote against the bill. “A number of them came up and thanked me … said, ‘Thanks for getting us off the hook.’” (The Speaker says she never does that.)

While the USCCB and other prolife groups have claimed that President Obama’s executive order won’t prevent federal dollars from funding abortion, demanding changes in the bill itself, Stupak says, “You can’t. [The executive order is] the next best thing.” And it wasn’t even Stupak’s idea. It was Rahm Emanuel’s.

“He said, ‘Will you take a sense of the House resolution?’ I said, ‘No I don’t like those.’”

“What about executive order?” Emanuel said.

“I don’t know about that. Let me see if I can research it more,” Stupak said.

The first draft of an executive order that was “described” to him, Stupak said, “didn’t do the job.”

So on Saturday, as Obama spoke to the House Democrats at the Capitol, Stupak was in his office, drafting the language himself, he said.

Finally, on Sunday, after Stupak and other prolife Democrats pow-wowed with Pennsylvania Democrat Rep. Mike Doyle over brunch, the group went to the Hill to read the final draft of the executive order. As Jon Ward reports, Doyle was instrumental in brokering the agreement, urging Stupak to “talk it out…. It’s easier if you can keep the dialogue going, you can usually reach a consensus. And Doyle never gave up on it.”

Read the whole thing.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. This past Saturday I found myself in a crowd of thousands who processed by candlelight through the streets of San Salvador to the National Cathedral where we celebrated a Mass in his memory. The crowd was Salvadoran and international, old and young. I was particularly heartened by the presence of Salvadorans who weren’t even born at the time of the civil war, yet who came to honor Romero. When the (recorded!) music at the Mass ran out, people began shouting “Romero vive!”and “Give us bishops who are close to the people!” (So then they replayed “Pescador des Hombres” for the third time…)

Romero, of course, is one of those great figures of conversion, a man who found himself drawn against his temperament and training into political speech because the outrages against the Salvadoran people were so great that, had he not spoken, “the very stones would have cried out.” Would that we all have that kind of conversion.

But I’m here visiting an immersion program for undergraduates who study while they “accompany” the poor. “Accompany” means they don’t imagine that they’re here to somehow “fix” El Salvador, or that the process they’re engaged in is a one-sided giving. Not at all. Accompaniment is mutual–we walk with each other, teach each other, hold each other, speak of our own and then each other’s struggles. Perhaps, in a world where the gap between rich and poor continues to widen–in El Salvador those who survived the death squads now die from poverty–accompaniment is the best first step to a true “ad-vocare,” advocacy, that is also mutual and global. The lessons of accompaniment are, perhaps, the words we are called to speak, lest we be inappropriately silent, and the very stones have to cry out.

Here is a map of the Israeli settlements around Jerusalem. The green line on the map is the 1967 1948 border. The settlements beyond the green line are in territory intended for a Palestinian state. You begin to see the difficulties! Sorry I’m not techy enough to post the map itself, but here’s the link.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/23/world/middleeast/jerusalem-map.html?ref=middleeast And per an earlier discussion you can see the area designated East Jerusalem.

UPDATE: I pooh-poohed TNR the other day, but here is a heartfelt lament by Leon Wieseltier about today’s subject:  “Why does the Israeli government allow the argument for a unified Jerusalem to be mistaken for the heartless revanchism of these settlers? Whatever arrangements about Jerusalem are eventually made in a peace agreement, and I no longer expect to see one in my lifetime, Jerusalem will remain both the capital of Israel and a demographically mottled city. It makes no sense to show contempt for the people with whom you are destined to live.”  http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/washington-diarist-mean-streets

UPDATE: Ha’aretz has this on the Obama/Netanyahu meeting Tuesday evening:     “In spite of attempts on both the Israeli and American sides to bring the crisis to an end, there is still lingering tension and lack of trust within the Obama administration toward Netanyahu.  An American source close to the administration said that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have decided to “test” Netanyahu and see whether he will carry out his promised gestures of good will toward the Palestinians.  According to an Israeli source who has discussed the matter with senior U.S. officials, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president are dissatisfied with a letter given to them by Netanyahu, in which he detailed steps he is willing to take to restore American confidence in his government.  The prime minister and his aides said that a meeting with Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden on Monday, which served as a preamble to the meeting with Obama, was conducted in excellent spirits.”   http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1158514.html

UPDATE on the East Jerusalem issue: “It is an approach that can be summed up as: “what’s mine is mine, and what you think is yours will hopefully be mine, too.” It discloses with stark clarity the underlying principle of Netanyahu’s Jerusalem policies: the status of Jerusalem and its borders will be determined by Israeli deeds rather than by negotiations. More bluntly, who needs agreement with Palestinians or recognition of the international community when “everybody knows”? ” http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/19/jerusalem_settlements_and_the_everybody_knows_fallacy

UPDATE: Ooops! Another timing problem:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/world/middleeast/25jerusalem.html?hp

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page is often the place where the opinions of the radical right assume the guise of cool rationality and realism. Unsurprisingly, the WSJ is now lending its pages to the effort to cast doubt on the allegiances and judgment of Justice Department lawyers who previously represented Guantanamo detainees in private practice. Last Monday, the paper ran an op-ed, by Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn, the first two thirds of which provide a loose history of Guantanamo lawyers’abetting the efforts of their “terrorist” clients not only to defend themselves before military tribunals but also to continue their jihadist agenda from within the walls of Camp X-Ray. The anecdotes are obviously meant to raise eyebrows, but they are, at worst, merely suggestive—less a history of systematic subversion of American interests in the war on terror than a litany of vague allegations resting on the presumption that military “justice” entitles detainees at Guantanamo to few of the rights civil justice guarantees. 

Read the rest of this entry »

A new column by E. J. Dionne just went up on our Web site.

Every nation needs an intelligent and constructive form of conservatism. The debate over the health-care bill, which mercifully came to a close on Sunday night, was not American conservatism’s finest hour.

In its current incarnation, conservatism has taken on an angry crankiness. It is caught up in a pseudo-populism that true conservatism should mistrust—what on earth would Bill Buckley have made of “death panels”? The creed is caught up in a suspicion of all reform that conservatives of the Edmund Burke stripe have always warned against. Authentic conservatism is better than this.

Read the rest for his take on why America needs a healthy conservative movement, and why the current state of affairs is troubling.