In the important and seemingly endless health care debate, a crucial item that has rightly received much attention here is whether the Senate bill provides sufficient safeguards in the matter of not funding abortion on the part of the federal government.

Despite the strong counter-position taken by the Bishops Conference, I am sufficiently impressed by the careful analyses of people like Peter Nixon and Matthew Boudway to think that in this prudential judgment of how pro-life principles may be preserved and hopefully strengthened, I can, in conscience, support the Senate bill in this respect.

But I think it important to underline that this is a prudential judgment, based in part upon a personal, non-expert,  reading of the material, but also on personal trust placed in those who seem to be both extremely knowledgeable and deeply committed to moral principles in keeping with the Catholic tradition. I certainly do not escape responsibility for that prudential judgment. May I also, respectfully, suggest that those who advocate for such a decision, in favor of the Senate bill, also bear an added responsibility for their advocacy.

It might be of help, then, if all sides were to acknowledge the fallibility of their prudential judgment, and that it is entered upon with a certain salutary “fear and trembling,” since so much is at stake.

That said, there are other aspects to the bill that also merit attention, as this story from today’s Washington Post indicates:

virtually everything House Democrats want to achieve in their package costs money. For example, Obama and House leaders have promised to increase government subsidies to help lower-income people purchase insurance, to fully close the coverage gap known as the doughnut hole in the Medicare prescription drug program, and to extend to all states the deal cut with Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson (D), under which the federal government would pay for a proposed expansion of Medicaid.Meanwhile, House leaders want to dramatically scale back one of the most powerful deficit-reduction tools in the Senate bill: a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost insurance policies. Obama has proposed to delay implementation of the tax until 2018 and to limit the number of policies that would be subject to the tax.

Obama and House Democrats have proposed to pay for their changes by raising Medicare taxes on the wealthy. They were hoping to reduce deficits further by incorporating Obama’s plan to overhaul the federal student loan program to cut out private lenders.

Those changes are unlikely to match the long-term savings proposed in the Senate bill, aides and lawmakers said, leaving House leaders scrambling to come up with additional sources of cash. Failure to comply with the reconciliation rules would imperil the package in the Senate and could cause big problems in the House, where the votes of many fiscally conservative Democrats hinge on the ability of health-care legislation to rein in soaring budget deficits.

Perriello, a social justice, pro-life Democrat, made headlines in fall 2008 when he won a Virginia seat dominated by Republicans. He is extremely vulnerable for this fall (think of him as the Democratic version of Louisiana’s GOP freshman, Anh “Joseph” Cao) but today indicated he might support the Senate bill. Most important, he said the Senate’s abortion funding provisions were as solid as those in the House bill, which he had previously backed.

My take at PoliticsDaily is here. Below are key grafs from his statement:

“As health care experts and pro-life leaders agree, the abortion language in the Senate bill upholds the Hyde Amendment standard. The Senate health care bill prevents federal taxpayer dollars from funding abortions, as the Catholic Hospital Association and legal experts have recently stated and as my own research has confirmed.”

“Furthermore, several key yet unadvertised provisions of the bill are likely to reduce the number of abortions in this country in ways that move beyond politics toward a real impact on the culture of life in our country, such as those that provide $250 million for programs to support vulnerable pregnant women and increase the adoption tax credit, also making it refundable, so that lower income families can access it fully…”

“…”I have plenty of serious problems with the Senate bill and, until I see the final language, I cannot take a position on final passage. But the existing language on abortion in the current Senate bill meets the pledge I made to ensure no federal funding for abortion in this health care bill.”

We’ve just wrapped up our March 26 issue, but we thought you’d like to see the editorial right away. Our take on the “prolife” push to halt the Senate health-care reform bill is online here.

One needs a good reason to oppose a bill that would cover 30 million uninsured Americans and greatly improve insurance for those who already have it. If the Senate bill did clearly authorize the federal government to pay for elective abortions, prolife Americans might have such a reason. To conclude the bill does this, however, requires one to believe that every ambiguity—every possible complication the bill doesn’t explicitly address—is a ploy by prochoice politicians to sneak abortion funding into the system. President Barack Obama and his party’s leadership have promised the bill won’t be used in this way. Their critics instruct us to presume that they’re lying.

Read the whole thing.

“But as the stalemate continues — envoy George Mitchell just canceled his trip to Israel — Democratic critics have begun to question the White House’s public pressure on Netanyahu to reverse plans for controversial new housing and make other, unspecified concessions. The pro-Israel group AIPAC and others have been lobbying Congress to rein in the administration, and the Democrats join Republicans and Senator Joe Lieberman, whose intense criticism of the administration’s Mideast policy has been a constant.”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0310/Democrats_begin_to_criticize_Obama_on_Israel.html

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, …will hold a meeting with Jewish members of Congress on Tuesday, Hill and diplomatic sources said…. “Some Hill staffers said the Jewish members’ invitation to meet Netanyahu did not constitute a leaning to him in the current dispute, though the lone Jewish Republican member of Congress Eric Cantor (R-Va.) issued a statement calling on the White House to lay off the tough public rhetoric on Israel, as have several other members. And the Israeli government has summoned all hands on deck to try to ease and counter the Obama administration’s rebukes, replete with suggested talking points [see below].”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0310/Netanyahu_to_meet_Jewish_Congress_members.html

The Talking Points of the Israeli Government: http://www.politico.com/static/PPM143_100316_bnia.html

And already: the counter-counter offensive (we should always remember that the sharpest critics of the Israeli government are Israeli’s themselves). “To the delight of Mahmoud Zahar [Hamas official] and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel’s homemade weapons of mass destruction – pro-settlement bureaucrats with conflicts of financial and ideological interest – have done in one meeting what Israel’s foes have sought for generations: driving a stake through the heart of Israel’s relationship with the White House.
“We should have known. But in the swamp of anomaly and impossibility that is Jerusalem, you can easily lose sight of, and belief in, the basics:  One of the curses of endless war, is the tendency to become one’s own worst enemy – in every sense. ”
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1156827.html

Nick Baumann, who covers national politics for Mother Jones (and is the son of Commonweal‘s editor, Paul Baumann), explains here why the Senate bill fails to explicitly apply the Hyde Amendment to the new funding for community health centers.

The pro-lifers are wrong. The Senate bill won’t lead to government directly funding abortions.  But the Democrats screwed up. They could have easily prevented this particular line of attack. All it would have taken is a single line of text.

Peter Nixon’s comment on Matt Boudway’s Jost post is worth highlighting here:

I worked in Washington DC for ten years and am familiar with… “worst case scenarioism,” where opponents of legislation come up with increasingly bizzare predictions of how a particular bill could lead to disastrous unintended consequences. The idea that the Senate bill will enable CHCs [community health centers] to perform abortions falls into this category. It comes across as a desperate ploy rather than reasoned legislative analysis.

Jost’s analysis is accurate and compelling. As I and others have argued at length, the Senate language, while different from the House, provides sufficient protection of current abortion policy to meet the USCCB’s stated test that health care reform be “neutral” with respect to current law. What deficiencies remain are not of the magnitude to justify defeating a measure that will extend health insurance to tens of millions of low-income families.

It seems to me, though, that many of the bishops and their lobbyists are increasingly closed to any dialogue on this. Stupak and only Stupak will do. It’s bad enough that the USSCB–for all its protestations to the contrary–is perilously close to becoming a single issue lobby. But its degeneration into a single amendment lobby would be comic if the consequences for the nation’s millions of uninsured were not so serious.

March Madness is here, and the New York Times marks the occasion with a profile of Sr. Rose Ann Fleming, SNDdeN, the academic adviser to the men’s basketball team at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

Xavier, a Jesuit university in Cincinnati, is entering the N.C.A.A. tournament seeded sixth in the West Region with a 24-8 record. But Sister Rose Ann Fleming is a perfect 77-0. Since she became the academic adviser for Xavier athletics in 1985, every men’s basketball player who has played as a senior has left with a diploma.

…

“Our alumni over the years have told me that they’re so proud of the graduation rates,” Fleming said over a post-Mass coffee at Starbucks last week during the Atlantic 10 Conference tournament in Atlantic City. “They don’t want to hear about Xavier, or any university, using students athletically and then dumping them without a degree.”

Of course, you can’t write about women religious without invoking the usual cliches (she’s not one of those nuns who hit people with rulers — she even smiles!). But for the most part, the article (by John Branch) is a positive look at how religious women are still putting their experience in education to work — and, more broadly, at what ministry can mean for modern sisters. (Compare the paragraph on Sr. Fleming’s daily routine with the limited perspective on apostolic religious life Oprah offered last month.) It’s also an interesting look at how Catholic colleges hold themselves accountable to their mission, even in athletics.

On Day 7, our last episode, Joe Petit raised a question about the Palestinian right of return. This raises a fundamental question about the future of the one-state, two-state solution. Here is my take on that fraught subject (corrections welcome).

The question about the right of return points to another “solution” of the conflict, one that has increasingly come to the fore, namely the one-state solution, i.e, the people now living between the sea and the Jordan comprising Israel, Gaza and the West Bank would become one state. Would it remain a Jewish state? Would it remain a democracy? Would it be a bi-national state, i.e., Jewish and Palestinian? If it remains a democracy, the Palestinians would be the majority.

When people like Livni (the Kadema candidate in the last elections) point to one-state as the outcome if a settlement is not reached for a two-state solution, she is pointing to a probable outcome of the failure to end the conflict; she favored the two-state solution.

Lieberman the current foreign minister in the Netanyahu government, during the election campaign raised the threat of expelling Arabs now living in Israel (who are Israeli citizens) to ensure the Jewishness of Israel. To the original Zionists this would have been unacceptable (though this is what happened to in the 1948 war–the source of the refugees and the “right of return” issue). As Israel’s population has become more extreme politically, such proposals seem to get a more sympathetic hearing in the Israeli electorate.

Jimmy Carter was pilloried for using the word, “apartheid,” to describe the current divisions in which there is one state, Israel, which controls another nation/people in Gaza and the West Bank. But that is the situation in which Israel finds itself. We can argue about who’s at fault–both Israelis and Palestinians to varying degrees. But that doesn’t resolve the conundrum in which both find themselves.

Israel’s ties to the United States (“the indispensable nation!”) not only support and protect it. Those ties have also allowed Israel to avoid facing it’s true existential situation (which is not Iran). Israel must make peace or rule over a hostile population forever. That is its true existential threat as a democracy.

UPDATE: According to Ha’aretz these are the three conditions that the U.S. has put on the Israeli table. “Israel must reverse its approval for construction in Ramat Shlomo, make a “substantial gesture” towards the Palestinians and publicly declare that all of the “core issues” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the status of Jerusalem, be included in upcoming talks.”    http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2010/03/us_envoy_cancels_mideast_trip_israel_feud_deepens.php

From this morning’s Washington Post:

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic — known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass” — has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

“It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. “But I like it,” she said, “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.”

A “deem and pass” — is that what philosophers call a “performative utterance” and theologians call a “Hail Mary pass?”

Until today, this memo by Timothy Stoltzfus Jost of Washington and Lee law school, was the best analysis of the Senate bill’s abortion language I had seen. Now the best analysis I’ve seen is his response to the USCCB’s critique of that memo. (Strangely, the USCCB’s critique was posted not on their own Web site but on that of the National Right to Life Committee.) Jost’s response is a model of courtesy, scruple, and analytical sobriety. He looks at every feverish speculation advanced by prolife opponents of the Senate bill and heads it off at the pass. He offers the economic and historical context without which it is impossible to understand what’s really at stake. He offers good prolife reasons to support the Senate bill (now the only bill worth talking about). And all the while he manages, quite remarkably, not to lose his temper with those who have made and repeated dubious claims even after they’ve been corrected.

Read the rest of this entry »

NCR‘s Tom Fox has an exclusive interview with the lesbian couple whose children are no longer welcome in the Archdiocese of Denver’s Catholic schools.

What happened? It all began two weeks ago:

“I went in to turn in our daughter’s kindergarten application and was called into the principal’s office. That’s when, she said, she got “blind sided.”

“She sat me down and told me we were no longer accepted here any more. She said it was not going to be a good fit for our child and that she would encourage us to look elsewhere,” Martha went on, explaining the principal said she was worried there could be confusion when the teachers teach about the family unit.

“Her main point was she was concerned about our child, about her well-being. She never came out and said we were not welcomed to stay. But she pretty much told us it was time for us to move on.”

That evening the women discussed what was said adding they were upset and so they decided they wanted clarification because the principal had stopped short of saying their daughter could not enroll, just that it would not be wise to do so.

Mary said she called the principal and asked for clarification. She recalls asking: “Are you just worried about how this is going to be for my child because of the church’s stance on homosexuality?” She said she told the principal that if that was the case the women could handle it. I told her we did not expect any accommodations for our children based on our family situation. She then asked directly: “Are you telling us we are not allowed?”

At that point, Mary said, the principal replied that she needed to call the archdiocese. The next day, with the principal and the pastor of Sacred Heart parish, Fr. William Breslin, on the line, the women were told that their daughters could stay one more year in school and after that they would be out.

That came as a shock because for the past three years the nature of their relationship had never been an issue. “When we first enrolled our daughter in pre-school we told the school administrators our daughter had two moms. We asked if this was going to be a problem. We said that if it was going to be a problem we could go else where. We were very open and they said it would not be a problem.”

Who went to the press? Apparently a Sacred Heart teacher. “It didn’t come from us.”

Are they on a mission to change the church’s teaching on marriage and homosexuality? No. “We did not feel then and we still don’t feel now that pushing the church to change its mind would be in our children’s best interests.” They don’t consider themselves gay activists: “You have never seen us at protests or marching in parades. We never intended to pave the way for gays in the Catholic church. We just wanted to be a normal family.”

Why would a lesbian couple want to send their kids to a Catholic school? They’re Catholic. They were raised Catholic. One of them attended Catholic schools from preschool through high school. The other is a Domer. One of them has a mother who taught in Catholic school for twenty-five years. The other’s aunt was a Catholic-school teacher for decades. “We have a lot of history with the Catholic school system. It is what we are familiar with. It is what we are comfortable with. We value what a Catholic education can do for our kids.”

Why Sacred Heart? They’re Mass-going parishioners. They value the moral foundation provided by a Sacred Heart education. “We want our kids to learn about religion. We feel religion is really important. And they love it. They love God. They love their school. They love their friends. They love their teachers.”

The children were baptized Catholic. They go to Sunday school and Mass. And a local priest suggested they raise the kids Episcopalian. “We are trying to live up to the promises we make to raise our kids as Catholics and now the church we made the promise to is sort of undermining our attempts to do so.”

Their pastor explained that the family could remain in the parish and that the children could still attend CCD. Tom Fox writes: “’Isn’t the doctrine the same?’ they asked. They felt Breslin was not able to provide an understandable answer.”

And so they will find another school for their kids. A non-Catholic one. But they worry what their children will lose as a result of Archbishop Chaput’s decision:

Last week they were driving home from school having just picked up their children in the car. Recalled Martha: “In the car, our older daughter was helping our younger daughter with words from the “Our Father.” They were both trying to get the words right. Then they began the “Hail Mary” and we listened we had tears in our eyes.”

Read all of Tom Fox’s report right here.

“If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it’s needed, she’s more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn’t it obvious?” — Cardinal Basil Hume to T. R. Reid, as reported in Reid’s Washington Post column, “Universal Health Care Tends to Cut the Abortion Rate.”

The Petraeus briefing: Biden’s embarrassment is not the whole story

“On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) “too old, too slow … and too late.”

Should we worry that the military is dabbling in foreign policy directly (not the first time, I know), or should we applaud their forthrightness in bringing home the bad news? (From Foreign Policy)

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/14/the_petraeus_briefing_biden_s_embarrassment_is_not_the_whole_story

Notre Dame has announced that the recipient of this year’s Laetare Medal will be Dana Gioia — the first poet to receive the honor.

“In his vocation as poet and avocation as arts administrator, Dana Gioia has given vivid witness to the mutual flourishing of faith and culture,” said Notre Dame’s president, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. “By awarding him our University’s highest honor we hope both to celebrate and participate in that witness.”

Gioia served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under President George W. Bush. In 2003, Commonweal published a profile of Gioia, written by Cynthia Haven. Read it here to get acquainted, or reacquainted, with his achievements and his outlook. A taste:

He speaks about how the chasm between art and religion in contemporary culture has impoverished both. “Art is one of the ways we can call people back into the church.” He says that the arts have always been congenial to the Catholic worldview, because Catholicism is a faith which believes that transcendent truths are incarnated. “The sacraments are models of this. They are outward signs that symbolize an inward turn of grace. The Catholic, literally from birth, when he or she is baptized, is raised in a culture that understands symbols and signs. And it also trains you in understanding the relationship between the visible and the invisible. Consequently, allegory finds its greatest realization in Catholic artists like Dante.”

…He speculates that “one of the ways to foster a healthier view of Catholic arts is by creating opportunities, commissions—by having magazines like Commonweal. Commonweal has an extremely important place in American intellectual life because it represents one of the doorways between religious and secular culture.”

Obviously a man of wisdom. Read the whole thing here. And for more background about the Laetare Medal, check out Cathleen Kaveny’s informative blog post from 2008.

Reported in Ha’aretz: “U.S. President Barack Obama did not hold back in condemning the humiliation caused to Joe Biden with the Israeli announcement of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem during what was supposed to be the vice president’s friendly visit to Israel.

“Instead of accepting Netanyahu’s partial apology and letting bygones be bygones, Obama issued a stern warning to the Israeli prime minister and is now demanding that he take “specific actions” to show he is “committed” to the U.S.-Israel relationship and to the peace process itself.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1156251.html

And here’s Tom Friedman (headline: “Driving Drunk in Jerusalem”)–a little behind the curve, but going the right direction: “I am a big Joe Biden fan. The vice president is an indefatigable defender of U.S. interests abroad. So it pains me to say that on his recent trip to Israel, when Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s government rubbed his nose in some new housing plans for contested East Jerusalem, the vice president missed a chance to send a powerful public signal: He should have snapped his notebook shut, gotten right back on Air Force Two, flown home and left the following scribbled note behind: “Message from America to the Israeli government: Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And right now, you’re driving drunk. You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality. Call us when you’re serious. We need to focus on building our country.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14friedman.html

From Sr. Carol Keehan, DC:

The insurance reforms will make the lives of millions more secure, and their coverage more affordable. The reforms will eventually make affordable health insurance available to 31 million of the 47 million Americans currently without coverage.

CHA has a major concern on life issues. We said there could not be any federal funding for abortions and there had to be strong funding for maternity care, especially for vulnerable women. The bill now being considered allows people buying insurance through an exchange to use federal dollars in the form of tax credits and their own dollars to buy a policy that covers their health care. If they choose a policy with abortion coverage, then they must write a separate personal check for the cost of that coverage.

There is a requirement that the insurance companies be audited annually to assure that the payment for abortion coverage fully covers the administrative and clinical costs, that the payment is held in a separate account from other premiums, and that there are no federal dollars used.

In addition, there is a wonderful provision in the bill that provides $250 million over 10 years to pay for counseling, education, job training and housing for vulnerable women who are pregnant or parenting. Another provision provides a substantial increase in the adoption tax credit and funding for adoption assistance programs.

Read the rest right here.

“Clinton Rebukes Israel on Housing Announcement”
“In a tense, 43-minute phone call on Friday morning, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel’s plan for new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem sent a “deeply negative signal” about Israeli-American relations, and not just because it spoiled a visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr….

“Such blunt language toward Israel is very rare from an American administration, and several officials said Mrs. Clinton was relaying the anger of President Obama at the announcement, which was made by Israel’s Interior Ministry and which Mr. Netanyahu said caught him off guard….”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/world/middleeast/13diplo.html

Will 43 minutes do it?

In the meantime…..”Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon on Thursday defended Israel’s decision to approve construction of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, saying sovereignty over the capital has never been negotiable and that Israel would not make any more concessions for peace.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtVty.jhtml?sw=Deputy+Foreign+Minister&itemNo=1155755

Looks like it will take more than a 43-minute phone call!

And this from Abe Foxman, head of the ADL:  “The U.S. based Anti-Defamation League said late Friday that it was “stunned” by Clinton’s “dressing down” of Israel.
“We cannot remember an instance when such harsh language was directed at a friend and ally of the United States,” said Abraham Foxman, ….The ADL called Clinton’s remarks a “gross overreaction” to a “policy difference among friends.”
“One can only wonder how far the U.S. is prepared to go in distancing itself from Israel in order to placate the Palestinians in the hope they see it is in their interest to return to the negotiating table,” Foxman said.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1156070.html

Uri Avnery weighs in:

SOME WEEKS the news is dominated by a single word. This week’s word was “timing”.

“It’s all a matter of timing. The Government of Israel has insulted the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, one of the greatest “friends” of Israel (meaning: somebody totally subservient to AIPAC) and spat in the face of President Barack Obama. So what? It’s all a matter of timing.

“If the government had announced the building of 1600 new housing units in East Jerusalem a day earlier, it would have been OK. If it had announced it three days later, it would have been wonderful. But doing it exactly when Joe Biden was about to have dinner with Bibi and Sarah’le – that was really bad timing.

“The matter itself is not important. Another thousand housing units in East Jerusalem, or 10 thousand, or 100 thousand – what different does it make? The only thing that matters is the timing.

“As the Frenchman said: It’s worse than criminal, it’s stupid.” Read the rest….

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1268500889

Obviously, the investigation is ongoing, but this doesn’t look good:

A widening child sexual abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI, as a senior church official acknowledged Friday that a German archdiocese made “serious mistakes” in handling an abuse case while the pope served as its archbishop.  The archdiocese said that a priest accused of molesting boys was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties, before committing further abuses and being prosecuted. Pope Benedict, who at the time headed the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, approved the priest’s transfer for therapy. A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to later resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a statement.

What’s sort of surprising to me is that, even assuming the worst is true, anyone would be particularly surprised by this.  Although the Church leadership is fond of saying that all sorts of other institutions have experienced child sexual abuse, I cannot think of any organization that has had the same history of both (1) covering it up and (2) repeatedly sending the wolves back out to tend the sheep.  But that pattern seems to me to follow very naturally from the status of lay people within the Church’s bureaucracy.

Conservative legal scholars are constantly harping on what public choice theory teaches us about political structures and the perverse incentives they can create for public actors.  But conservative Catholic legal scholars — who are often very skeptical of government bureaucracies — seem extremely reluctant to apply those same insights to the Church’s hierarchy.  Given the nearly total lack of meaningful input into Church governance by lay people (short of the largely unutilized power to conditionally withhold donations), is it any real shock that the celibate clergy made decisions in the abuse scandal that largely track the interests of the celibate clergy.  And that the abuses were worse when the children involved had no families to look after them and were therefore particularly vulnerable?  For anyone who thinks that public choice theory offers even a modicum of insight (and, to be clear, I am skeptical of its reach), it would be surprising if it were any other way.

Why would the Church be exempt from the consequences of the perverse incentives created by a bureaucracy with almost no mechanism for democratic feedback?  The popes and bishops are, after all, human beings.  I suppose the argument is that the Holy Spirit is somehow looking out in a special way for the Church such that the normal tendencies of human motivation don’t apply.  The thing about providential arguments like that is that you can never tell where things are going to go next.  Perhaps the growing scandal rocking the Church is itself the work of providence and will put enough pressure on the institution to take a second or third look at its autocratic governance system.  If so, THAT will be the work of the Holy Spirit as well.

Last week I wrote here about a chart put together by Americans United for Life. The organization has responded to my comments here. The controversy about whether the Senate health-care bill funds abortion is complicated, tedious, and important. For those who still have a stomach for it, I answer AUL’s response below the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nicholas Cafardi, who served on the USCCB’s National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Youth and wrote a book, Before Dallas, about the sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic church, reports on Ireland’s scandal in the latest Commonweal. Cafardi finds plenty of similarities between the handling of abuse in Dublin, as detailed in the Murphy Report, and what was uncovered in the United States back in 2002. But the fallout has not been identical, and Cafardi suggests that the details are significant.

…there is one critical difference in the treatment bishops received on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In the Boston shipwreck, only one bishop resigned, Cardinal Bernard Law, and the notion that he has been punished seems dubious. Within months, he was in Rome, sheltered by friends, resident in the Apostolic Palace, and finally, in May 2004, appointed by Pope John Paul II to be archpriest and canon of the Basilica of St. Mary Major—where he still resides, in a grand apartment adjoining the Basilica, with a chauffeured Vatican limousine, living on income from the Basilica’s endowment, and serving as a member of the powerful Congregation for Bishops, which recommends episcopal appointments. Hardly a penitential retirement, in other words. In contrast, in Ireland, four of the five bishops named in the Murphy Report have tendered their resignations. Only Bishop Drennan, currently of Galway, has not—and he is under severe pressure to do so. (So far, Rome has accepted only one of the resignations.)

What accounts for this difference? Why did the Irish bishops who gave solace to pedophile priests step down, while the American bishops who did the same went on happily with their episcopal careers? The answer, in a phrase, is “fraternal correction.”

Read the whole thing for his take on what’s happened so far, and how we could act on what we’ve learned.

For those who are confused or concerned or feeling timid about VP Biden’s experiences in Israel, here is what the U.S. Jewish Daily Forward has to say in an editorial:   “There were the expected handshakes and bear hugs, the slaps on the back and supportive words amiably expressed before the media. Just what ought to happen when Israel welcomes the vice president of the United States, the second in command of its greatest ally and the highest-ranking official of a still-new administration to visit Jerusalem.

“Then, dafka, the proverbial stab in the back.”   http://forward.com/articles/126573/

In his post below Paul Moses helpfully links to the transcript of Pope Benedict’s Catechesis on Saint Bonaventure at last Wednesday’s general audience. This is the latest of his reflections on great ecclesial figures of the Middle Ages.

Here is the passage that I found of particular interest:

This does not mean that the Church is immobile, fixed in the past and that novelties cannot be exercised in her. “Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt,” the works of Christ do not go backward, do not fail, but progress, says the saint in the letter “De tribus quaestionibus.” Thus St. Bonaventure formulates explicitly the idea of progress, and this is a novelty in comparison with the Fathers of the Church and a great part of his contemporaries. For St. Bonaventure, Christ is no longer, as he was for the Fathers of the Church, the end, but the center of history; history does not end with Christ, but a new period begins. Another consequence is the following: prevailing up to that moment was the idea that the Fathers of the Church were at the absolute summit of theology, all the following generations could only be their disciples. Even St. Bonaventure recognizes the Fathers as teachers for ever, but the phenomenon of St. Francis gave him the certainty that the richness of the word of Christ is inexhaustible and that also new lights can appear in the new generations. The uniqueness of Christ also guarantees novelties and renewal in all the periods of history.

Certainly, the Franciscan Order — so he stresses — belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ, to the Apostolic Church, and cannot build itself on a utopian spiritualism. But, at the same time, the novelty of such an order is valid in comparison with classic monasticism, and St. Bonaventure — as I said in the preceding catechesis — defended this novelty against the attacks of the secular clergy of Paris. The Franciscans do not have a fixed monastery, they can be present everywhere to proclaim the Gospel. Precisely the break with stability, characteristic of monasticism, in favor of a new flexibility, restored to the Church her missionary dynamism.

I presume that the next figure to be discussed by the Pope is Saint Thomas Aquinas. Stay tuned.

Returning to a subject he wrote about early in his career, Pope Benedict spoke at his weekly audience about how St. Bonaventure firmly responded to heretical ideas he encountered within the Franciscan order when he served as its minister general starting in 1257. The problem Bonaventure faced was that some friars were taken with the notion that a new age of the spirit was to arrive in which the church hierarchy would no longer be needed. (For details, see the transcript of the pope’s remarks provided by Zenit.) These ideas were supposedly derived from Joachim, a mystic abbot from Calabria who died in 1202. To make a very complicated story short: Joachim envisioned three stages of history – Father, Son and Spirit – and, well after he died, some Franciscans saw St. Francis as the harbinger of the new age of the spirit.

To be fair to Joachim, the idea that the age of the spirit ended the need for a church hierarchy was not his but the work of some very imaginative imitators; Joachim was in good stead with church authorities in his lifetime.

In any case, it is especially interesting that Benedict likens the medieval friars who saw the third stage of history as bringing the end of the hierarchy to those who, with their “anarchic utopianism,” believed the Second Vatican Council meant “that the pre-conciliar Church was finished and that we would have another, totally `other’ Church.”

If I had the opportunity, I would ask Benedict what he makes of Blessed John of Parma, a sainted man known for his goodness and simplicity. He preceded Bonaventure as the Franciscans’ minister-general, heading the order in the midst of the heresy scandal in the 1250s. According to historians, Bonaventure had a hand in convicting John of Parma of heresy and sentencing him to a life of imprisonment. John was taking the fall. He had no role in this heresy, as his eventual beatification indicates, and the penalty on him was so unfair that a cardinal intervened to help him against this unjust verdict and sentence. John of Parma was beatified in 1781.

I can understand why Benedict, given his views on authority in the church, would reflect on how the great and holy mystic Bonaventure coped with dissent against the hierarchy with a firm hand. Those who feel for the victims of overly harsh or unjust crackdowns by church authorities may well wish to reflect on Blessed John of Parma when his feast day arrives on March 20.

At Politics Daily, our own David Gibson has a helpful article on abortion and health-care reform. Gibson goes into details that most stories on the subject skip or just summarize, and he talks to a few people who actually seem to know what they’re talking about.  His conclusion: the Senate bill is not proabortion, no matter what some prolife organizations have been saying.

One of Gibson’s most important points has to do with the money the Senate bill authorizes for community health centers:

Perhaps the most eye-catching claim by anti-abortion forces is that upwards of $7 billion designated in the Senate bill ($11 billion in the president’s amended version) would be funneled directly to Community Health Centers (CHCs) which, as [Dr. Charmaine] Yoest wrote, “include Planned Parenthood clinics that provide abortions.” […]

This meme has become the unchallenged talking point for pro-life opponents of the health care reform bill. But it is mistaken on several points.

Most obviously, none of the 1,250 Federally Qualified Health Centers, or FQHCs, that would receive the billions in money through the reform bill offer abortion services. […]

As the National Association of Community Health Centers said in a statement this week, none of the health centers receiving money under the Senate bill “provide abortions to any of their patients, and we are not aware of any that have ever done so.” In addition, the statement said that “Health centers do not plan to, nor are they seeking to, become providers of abortion. On the contrary, last year health centers provided prenatal, perinatal, and post-natal/post-partum care to 1 of every 8 children born in the U.S.”

Do read the rest of the article (especially if you plan to criticize the part I’ve quoted).

Doesn’t seem like much to be scared of here.  Very cute. (HT Salon)

It appears that Mahmoud  Abbas, the Palestinian president, has refused to participate in the indirect talks that brought Mr. Biden to the ME in the first place. Abbas demands that the Israelis cancel the building plans announced on Tuesday and that threw a monkey wrench into Biden’s visit and the whole unpeace process.

Nontheless, VP Biden slogged on with his “best friends forever” views in a speech at an Israeli university, even while having attacked the housing decision while visiting President Abbas in Ramallah.  The report of his speech here: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1155720.html

Juan Cole’s sober assessment: Thursday, March 11, 2010: “Obama’s Mideast policy lies in tatters this morning and US credibility as a broker of any future settlement was deeply wounded.

“Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, announced Wednesday that he had been informed by Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that the latter has pulled out of indirect talks with Israel. Late Wednesday, the Arab League itself reversed its earlier cautious endorsement of the proximity talks, recommending that that support be dropped.”  http://www.juancole.com/

Jo Ann Mort offers this who, what, why of the housing announcement: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/11/building_for_ultra-orthodox_jews_in_jerusalem/#more

Via CNS, an interesting suggestion from Rome:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Homilies should be no longer than eight minutes — a listener’s average attention span, said the head of the synod office.

Priests and deacons should also avoid reading straight from a text and instead work from notes so that they can have eye contact with the people in the pews, said Archbishop Nikola Eterovic, secretary-general of the Synod of Bishops.

In a new book titled, “The Word of God,” the archbishop highlighted some tips that came out of the 2008 Synod of Bishops on the Bible. The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, reproduced a few passages from the book in its March 10 edition.

The archbishop wrote that it’s not unusual for preachers to recognize that they have less-than-perfect communications skills or that they struggle with preparing homilies. Everyone should spend an appropriate amount of time to craft a well-prepared and relevant sermon for Mass, he said.

He said Pope Benedict XVI starts working on his Sunday homilies on the preceding Monday so that there is plenty of time to reflect on the Scripture readings from which the homily will draw.

Papal homilies always seem to go over that, if I recall — not that there’s anything wrong with that, actually. I grew up with 50-minute sermons from lay preachers, so a nice 20 minute homily is fine by me. Though I thought 12 minutes was the general guideline. Bloody Vatican, always changing things!

Today’s Washington Post has an article on Chief Justice Roberts’s comments about President Obama’s remarks, in his State of the Union address, about the Supreme Court’s decision on campaign financing. Prescinding from the rightness or wrongness of the Court’s decision,  I must say that I agree with the Chief Justice about the appropriateness of the forum which the President chose for his comment.  As I recall, the President began his comments on the matter with a reference to the separation of powers, which to me indicates that he was aware of the ambiguity of his comments. Perhaps it would be just as well if the Supreme Court’s members simply did not attend this occasion, which more and more in recent years (decades) has become political theatre more than a serious engagement with the State of the Union.

As blogged by Paul Moses here, a Catholic school in Boulder, Colorado, has told a lesbian couple that their children cannot re-enroll next year. Yesterday, in a column posted to the Web site of the Archdiocese of Denver, Archbishop Charles Chaput tried to explain that decision.

First, Archbishop Chaput says that the children–one in preschool and the other in kindergarten–are not being sent packing immediately. They’ve been invited not to return next year. So there’s that. And: “the policy applies to all Archdiocese of Denver schools.” Now we know: the children of same-sex couples are not welcome in schools run by the Archdiocese of Denver.

[Update: The archbishop's spokeswoman Jeanette DeMelo has informed me that "The policy doesn’t apply exclusively to homosexual couples. He does say that parents are meant to be partners in faith. 'If parents don’t respect the belief of the Church or live in a manner that openly rejects those beliefs, then partnering with those parents becomes very difficult if not impossible.' That is what the school decision was nothing more, nothing less." I've put some follow-up questions to Ms. DeMelo, and will post her reply.]

Then, after a brief detour into the history of Catholic education and a reminder of the fact that Catholic parents “pay twice” to educate their children in Catholic schools (presumably the archbishop recognizes that all parents who send their kids to private school “pay twice”), Chaput acknowledges that Catholic schools admit the children of divorced parents (even non-Catholics). “These students are always welcome so long as their parents support the Catholic mission of the school and do not offer a serious counter-witness to that mission in their actions.” The archbishop does not explain how he or his Catholic-school administrators are supposed to verify that their students’ parents are tilting the right end of the scale. He continues: “The idea that Catholic schools should require support for Catholic teaching for admission and a serious effort from school families to live their Catholic identity faithfully, is reasonable and just.” Again, he does not define “serious effort.”

The Church never looks for reasons to turn anyone away from a Catholic education.  But the Church can’t change her moral beliefs without undermining her mission and failing to serve the many families who believe in that mission.  If Catholics take their faith seriously, they naturally follow the teachings of the Church in matters of faith and morals; otherwise they take themselves outside the believing community.

No one is confused about church teaching on marriage. (Some Catholics may, however, be lost as to why the seriousness with which they take their faith doesn’t always naturally lead to morally pure behavior.) What many Catholics find perplexing is the way some bishops translate that teaching into policy positions–both internal and external to the church.

Chaput acknowledges that the church does not teach that gays and lesbians are “bad,” or that “their children are less loved by God. Quite the opposite.” (More loved by God?) But the church does teach against divorce and against sex outside of marriage. “The Church cannot change these teachings because, in the faith of Catholics, they are the teachings of Jesus Christ.” A curious observation, given that no one has reported that the parents of these kids had been lobbying the church to change its teachings.

Finally, Archbishop Chaput argues that this policy is really for everyone’s own good–parents and students alike. If parents don’t respect the beliefs of the church, or live in open rejection of them, he writes, they don’t have a place in the Catholic school system. After all, how can Catholic schools fully teach the faith ”if teachers need to worry about wounding the feelings of their students or about alienating students from their parents”?

This is about more than hurt feelings of course. This is about the nature of the church’s educational mission. If the Archbishop of Denver truly believes that the children of parents who fail to adequately support church teaching cannot be educated at Catholic schools, then he has more explaining to do. To the children of parents who  are divorced and remarried (without going through the annulment process–at which point the church needs to explain that process to the children of annulled marriages). To the children of parents who practice and even recommend birth control. To the children of non-Catholic parents–especially those who do not support the central dogmas of Catholicism, such as, say, the Incarnation. Is there no place in Catholic education for the children of those kinds of parents? Or is there no place for the children of gay couples? And if so, why doesn’t the archbishop want such children to encounter the truths of Catholic teaching? If it’s merely to avoid upsetting the children of straight, non-divorced, non-contracepting, non-racist, anti-torture, pro-life parents, then I’m afraid he’ll have to do better.

Here’s what everyone can read for free from our latest issue:

* “Fraternal Correction“: Nicholas P. Cafardi’s assessment of the Murphy Report, which evaluated the Irish church’s response to sexual abuse in Dublin. Cafardi, who served on the USCCB’s National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Youth, compares the abuse crisis and fallout in the United States and in Ireland.

* “‘Peaceful & Private’“: Cathleen Kaveny reports on the Montana Supreme Court’s troubling ruling legalizing physician-assisted suicide.

* “Holy Land“: Our editorial on the ongoing violence and prospects for peace in the Middle East.

Subscribers, log in to read David Kaiser’s cover story on America’s misadventures in Afghanistan; a new short story by Joan Sauro, CSJ; George Scialabba’s review of G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?; Peter Quinn’s reaction to the push to canonize Pius XII, and all the other highlights (full table of contents here).

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