From the Daily Show, by the comic Lewis Black. I don’t normally like his segments–he yells too much. And he’s rude. But this segment really exposed the absurdity of overdoing the Nazi analogies.

From The Cloud of Unknowing:

Christ ascended physically in the presence of all his disciples and sent the Holy Spirit as he had promised; and you feel that all this proves that you should literally direct your mind upward during prayer. We do indeed believe that Christ in his risen humanity ascended to his Father, but let me try to explain again why this should not be misconstrued in a literal sense. I will speak as plainly as I can, though my explanation may not yet be adequate.

Yes, Christ did ascend upward and from on high sent the Holy Spirit. But he rose upward  because this was more appropriate than to descend or to move to left or right. Beyond the superior symbolic value of rising upward, however, the direction of his movement is quite incidental to the spiritual reality.

For, in the realm of the spirit, heaven is as near up as it is down, behind as before, to left or to right. The access to heaven is through desire. He who longs to be there is really there in spirit. The path to heaven is measured by desire and not by miles. For this reason Saint Paul says in one of his epistles, “Although our bodies are presently on earth, our life is in heaven.”

Love and desire constitute the life of the spirit. And the spirit abides where its love abides, as surely as it abides in the body which it fills with life. We need not strain our spirit in all directions to reach heaven, for we dwell there already by love and desire.

In which Congressman Bart Stupak briefly tells the story of “the most grueling period in my nearly twenty years on the hill.” That may sound hyperbolic. It’s not. Read the whole thing. He has body guards. His wife unplugs the phone because drunks harass the family at all hours and from all states (note to self: prolife not the same as prosleep). He’s still getting death threats.

And why? Because he compromised. On Sunday, March 21, the day of the reconciliation vote, Stupak and his coalition of prolifers gathered to work out the language of the executive order President Obama promised them. The clock was ticking. They phoned the USCCB for some last-minute guidance.

No, no, no, no, they said. We need statutory law. But an executive order can have the full force of law, I said. Lincoln used one to free the slaves. George W. Bush used one to block stem-cell research using human embryos. And President Obama assures me that this is “ironclad.” Besides, I said, it’s time to negotiate or lose our chance to shape the bill. Help me with it? No, they said. Won’t you at least look at it? No.

That call changed my relationship with the pro-life movement. In the 18 years I’ve been in Congress, pro-life Democrats like me have delivered, working out compromises that protect human life. Now we had the most important piece of legislation for our movement yet—with pregnancy prevention, prenatal and postnatal care, and care for kids—and we couldn’t get support.

Presumably he means that Richard Doerflinger, or someone in the USCCB’s prolife office, wouldn’t even look at the proposed language of the executive order–language that was being drafted by Bart Stupak and his prolife allies, the very people Doerflinger and the bishops who repeated his arguments had thrown their weight behind until it became clear that the House bill wasn’t going to make it into law without revisions. (Although I’m still not sure how many of them grasped that political reality.) And they wouldn’t even look at it? Astonishing.

It isn’t hard to read between these lines:

Ultimately, what stings the most isn’t the hatred….  It’s that people tried to use abortion as a tool to stop health-care reform, even after protections were added. That realization has stayed with me in the weeks since…. My decision not to seek reelection isn’t about anything other than it being time to do something else with my life. The truth is that I’ve been thinking of a career change for more than six years. I was glad that I stayed to fight the bull. Now I’m glad the fight is over.

Congratulations to all the winners of the Associated Church Press Awards. You can check out Commonweal‘s awards right here.

There have been several references in threads below about the address by Archbishop Martin of Dublin. It is receiving acclaim from across the spectrum of Catholic opinion, and is worth a separate post.

Each will find in it something particularly cogent; but as a whole, it is powerful indeed.

Here is the conclusion:

The Catholic Church in Ireland, as I said, will have to find its place in a very different, much more secularised culture, at times even in a hostile culture. It will have to find that place by being authentic and faithful to the person and the message of Jesus Christ.  The agenda for change in the Church must be one that comes from its message and not from pressure from outside and from people who do not have the true good of the Church at heart. We all have reasons to be discouraged and to be angry. There is a sense, however, in which true reform of the Church will spring only from those who love the Church, with a love like that of Jesus which is prepared also to suffer for the Church and to give oneself for the Church.

Thank God there are many who love their Church: lay persons, religious and clergy. We love the Church because the Church is our home, the place where we encounter the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ and where we gather in love to break bread in his memory.

Pope Benedict to reporters on the flight to Lisbon:

Attacks on the pope and the church come not only from outside the church, but the suffering of the church comes from inside the church, from sins that exist inside the church. This we have always known but today we see it in a really terrifying way.

(…)

The greatest persecution of the church does not come from the enemies outside, but is born from sin inside the church. The church has a profound need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn on the one hand forgiveness but also the necessity of justice. And forgiveness does not substitute justice.

Read the rest of Rachel Donadio’s report here.

I didn’t notice it at the time, but Elie Wiesel took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post in order to post an open letter to President Obama pleading with him not to put pressure on Israel to stop settlements in Jerusalem. The text can be found here. The most recent issue of the New York Review of Books published a very critical response to Wiesel from some one hundred inhabitants of Jerusalem who accuse him of defending a “sentimental abstraction” quite different from the concrete reality of their daily lives. I don’t know anything about the group that arranged the reply, but I must say that in this case all my sympathies go with them.

The Washington Post on-line has an initial description of the criticisms that Elena Kagan is receiving from both left and right. If this holds up, it will make for a more interesting discussion than one focused on a single issue.

Back in 2004, the archdiocese of Boston announced the closure in one fell swoop of more than 18% of its parishes . In the midst of all the shock, sadness, anger and dismay, some parishes decided to refuse the order to close, and began to maintain round-the-clock vigils in the churches to keep them open. Saturday’s Boston Globe included a piece from a member of one such church. Money quote:

While the universal Catholic Church seems on the verge of imploding under the weight of its own moral crisis, the weekly gathering of this close-knit congregation generates a palpable spirituality that is rare and unique.
The St. James phenomenon (replicated across sister parishes in Massachusetts that also chose vigil over closure) is changing church culture by pioneering a post-institutional brand of grass-roots Catholicism.

I’m intrigued by this. We all know of situations of priestless parishes still under the auspices of various dioceses: a priest may zoom through to dispense the sacraments, but day-to-day pastoral care is carried out by non-ordained people. One troublesome point in these parishes is the separation of the practice of ministry from the celebration of the sacraments, in which the latter are rare special events run by strangers, not a regular part of the worship life of the community. A second concern is the lack of uniform standards for people running such churches–one parish might be run by a gifted lay minister with an M.Div., but the next might be run by a person without a shred of theological or pastoral training.

But these “Heavens, no, we won’t go” parishes are a different kettle of fish. Instead of divorcing ministry from sacraments, these communities have formed a new model of church with generally egalitarian leadership, continuing to celebrate Eucharist as the “source and summit of the Christian life,” and developing a vibrant sense of community. The divorce here is of the community from the hierarchy of the Church. (I still worry about the theological training of the leadership. But there are lots of qualified people thereabouts–if theologically-literate leadership is important to the community, they can find people with both vocation and education to lead and/or teach.)

We’re at a time of increasingly diverse “versions” of Catholic parish life, including the two I mention here. With or without the cooperation of Church leaders, the Church is changing.

We’re about to enter into the summer television season, which is increasingly a distinct season of new shows, rather than an endless series of repeats.  Still, there are repeats, and I do have a recommendation for any dotCommonweal reader who’s looking for something good to watch, whether as a refuge from baseball (yes, I said it!)  or to download onto your iPhone, iTouch, or iPad  to make flying more endurable.   That recommendation is CBS’s The Good Wife, starring Julinana Margulies.

Loosely based on recent politician scandals such as Eliot Spitzer’s, the show explores the life of the woman standing beside the disgraced politician.  In this case, the politician is Peter Florrick, a Chicago state’s attorney, who was jailed after a sex and corruption scandal.  (Florrick is played with the perfect degree of dissipated handsomeness by Christopher Noth–best known as “Mr. Big” on Sex and the City.)

Florrick’s wife, Alicia, is forced to back to work as an associate in a law firm to support the family, as well as to deal with the aftermath of her husband’s betrayal.  So roughly half of each episode deals with a client case and office politics, and roughly half deals with her interactions with her two teenage children, and her husband, who’s allowed  to live at home on house arrest in later episodes.

What makes the show interesting, in my view, is the level of sophistication of some of the questions it deals with.  No one is absolutely good or absolutely bad.  Nor are their motives entirely clear, to the audience, to their friends and relatives, or even to themselves. Can/should Alicia trust Peter’s promises of reform, or would she be a fool to do so?  Should she move on?  What about the children?  The elusive question of forgiveness comes in, too.  What is it?  Can you make yourself forgive?  Religion, incidentally, has a more prominent role in this series than in others, as Peter connects with a “Jeremiah-Wright” type pastor who’s forcing him to address his issues, not merely enabling him to get the desired photo op.  Is this conversion real?  Fake?  Or something more complicated–a fake conversion that is somehow taking real roots?

All engrossing questions, at least to me.  And all questions we’ve talked about here.

Some decades ago, Albert Descamps, a fine Belgian scripture scholar and later rector of the Catholic University of Louvain, wrote a fine essay on teaching authority in the Church. With a fine touch of humor, he quoted from a verse of the Panis angelicus, “Per tuas semitas duc nos quo tendimus. Ad lucem quam inhabitas.” (“Along your paths lead us where we tend: To the light in which you dwell”), in order to make the point that there is a view that has no difficulty acknowledging the authority of a person who leads us where we already want to go–the Duc nos quo tendimus notion of authority. I thought of that when I observed how in a thread below the recently expressed views of Cardinal Schonborrn were attributed to the Holy Spirit, who blows where he will, and I hope David Gibson will forgive me for wondering whether the claim doesn’t illustrate that notion of authority. Others on the thread obviously disagree with what the Cardinal said and, not wishing to go where he leads, would also be likely to deny that the Holy Spirit was leading him.

Which all raises the question of discernment, on which there is an immense literature, starting perhaps with Jesus (“By their fruits shall you know them”; “every one who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light lest his works be reproved, while he who does the truth comes to the light so that his works may be made manifest because they are done in God”) and with St. Paul (“Extinguish not the spirit. Despise not prophecies. But test all things; hold fast that which is good; keep clear of whatever kind is evil”; I Thess 5:19-21; see 1 Thess 2:13– “we thank God that when you received from us the word of the message of God you accepted not a word of men but, what it really is, a word of God”– and the whole of 1 Cor 14) and continuing on throughout the Christian spiritual tradition. Different currents within the great river have devised their own rules for discernment, the best-known being perhaps those of St. Ignatius Loyola.

The ability to discern divine authority is itself a gift of God. The First Vatican Council, often dismissed as infected with a kind of theological rationalism, taught that saving faith is impossible without the light and inspiration of the Holy Spirit that make assenting to and believing the truth a free and meritorious act of which the word “suavitas” [pleasantness, delight] may be used. St. Augustine spoke of the need of “inner eyes”; St. Thomas said that the principal cause of faith is the inner impulse of the Holy Spirit; Pierre Rousselot wrote of “the eyes of faith” and Bernard Lonergan of faith as “the eyes of love.”

All of which I take to mean that nothing can take the place of conversion, intellectual, moral, and religious (Lonergan again). The converted are likely to discern correctly who may and should be trusted and to trust them; the unconverted are likely to trust the untrustworthy and not to trust the trustworthy. Unfortunately, it is also the case that people who occupy posts that only the trustworthy ought to occupy sometimes are not themselves trustworthy because they are not converted, intellectually, morally, religiously, and when that happens in the Church, a grave crisis can ensue. There really is no substitute for conversion, and that is the work of the Holy Spirit.

An interesting column on  John Allen’s account of the coming church by Jamie Manson, a young Catholic woman writing for National Catholic Reporter.  We discussed some of the same issues in a post below.

What struck me most was what I interpret as her call to the “Old Progressives” to offer a positive vision.  In context, it  seems to me that what she’s asking for is a realistic account of spiritual and moral life that is firmly rooted in the Catholic tradition, but not overly defensive about any departures from it on the common range of hot button issues (having to do with sex and gender).  Disagree politely and move on–don’t battle the issue to death, at the expense of doing something constructive.  Be for something.  And say what you’re for–not what you’re against.

“This, I believe, is where older progressive Catholics can be an extraordinary resource. These reformers spend a lot of time and energy worrying, analyzing, writing about, and arguing with the institutional church. I believe they would do well to take some of the energy behind their righteous anger, and engage those who are struggling to find meaning and spiritual development in a rootless world. This might be a better — and certainly more life-giving — use of their time than simply fighting a self-destructive institution.”

Or. . . in the immortal words of Tina Turner  (who’s over 70!). . . “I Don’t  Wanna Fight No More (Too Much Talkin’, Babe) . . . ”

Am I interpreting her correctly? What would this look like?

In other news from Lake Wobegone, Austrian Cardinal Christophe Schoenborn, a former student of Ratzinger’s who is close to the pope, gave some noteworthy comments to Austrian media — via the latest edition of The Tablet:

The head of the Austrian Church has launched an attack of one of the most senior cardinals in the Vatican, saying that Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, “deeply wronged” the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy when he dismissed media reports of the scandal. In a meeting with editors of the main Austrian daily newspapers last week, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, also said the Roman Curia was “urgently in need of reform”, and that lasting gay relationships deserved respect. He reiterated his view that the Church needs to reconsider its position on re-married divorcees.

More here.

It seems the Holy Spirit does blow where he, or she, will…

Brazilian Archbishop Dadeus Grings does his best Archie Bunker impersonation, seeming to wistfully recall the days when it was acceptable to discriminate against homosexuals.  (Via the Daily Telegraph, HT Andrew Sullivan):

“When sexuality is trivialized, it’s clear that this is going to affect all cases. Homosexuality is such a case. Before, the homosexual wasn’t spoken of. He was discriminated against.

“When we begin to say they have rights, rights to demonstrate publicly, pretty soon, we’ll find the rights of paedophiles,” he said.

• • •

Paul tells the Corinthians, “I show you a more excellent way” — not “I show you a more excellent way to talk about the things you were going to do anyway.” But isn’t this exactly what Christianity sometimes appears to consist of — another language in which to rationalize our old desires? New wineskins don’t improve the old wine.

• • •

In a crisis of faith, I have been tempted to say: “I no longer believe in God, but I still want to believe — and hardly know how to go about life as if I don’t.” But then I think, Maybe the opposite is truer: I still believe in God (no matter what I tell myself), but I don’t want to believe, because I don’t want to believe that God has let certain things happen — as if, by denying his existence, I would rescue him from some guilt. Of course, it is not a question of guilt…or not his anyway.

• • •

Our choices are always underdetermined by our reasons beforehand (no mere calculation forces us to do this rather than that) and overdetermined by our explanations afterward (a true justification would stop at sufficiency; but, sensing the artificiality of our justifications, we always overshoot the mark, adding two or three spare rationales: “It wasn’t just one thing”). We are afraid of our freedom because it makes us, and not our arguments, responsible.

Read the rest of this entry »

I apologize that this is the same piece to which Matt Boudway drew attention in a thread below.  I thought it was a new one.  So take out all references to repeating himself.

Anthony Grafton has another piece, this time in the NYRB, on Benedict XVI and the sex-abuse scandal. Repeating his claim that Benedict is “the greatest scholar to rule the Church since Innocent III,”–I think Benedict XIV ought to be taken into account–he describes and cricitizes a few of the cases on which Ratzinger/Benedict has had to take a stand. But then come the remarkable final three paragraphs of his essay:

But that is no reason for Catholics—or non-Catholic admirers of the Church, like the present writer—to despair. Over the centuries, the central institutions of the Church have often worked in counter-productive ways, emphasizing the powers and prerogatives of the institution over the spiritual life of the faithful. Again and again, Catholics have proved astonishingly resilient and inventive, and have come forward to offer what the hierarchical church was not providing. Under Innocent III, the Curia crystallized as a superbly effective institution, intent on rights and revenues, rather than tending to the poor and sick who were crowding into Europe’s rapidly growing industrial and trading cities.

But when Francis of Assisi founded an order of men who were willing to give up all they had and minister to the urban poor, and Dominic founded a second one of men dedicated to preaching the truth and rooting out heresies, Innocent III immediately gave both of them vital encouragement. Three centuries later, between 1534 and 1549, a very different pope, the politician and aesthete Paul III, offered warm support when Ignatius Loyola arrived in Rome with a few tattered followers and a plan to preach to former Catholics in Protestant lands and to non-Christians overseas, and when St Angela Merici created a new form of religious life for women.

It seems unlikely that Benedict is the man to transform the Church, so that it freely and frankly confronts what many priests have done to the children in their charge, and what many of their superiors did to conceal their crimes. Still less does he seem likely to remake the church into an institution that not only worships in an orderly, beautiful and theologically clear way, but also ministers to the world as it is now. But he is a great scholar, with a mind as crisp and deep as Innocent’s. He knows that the church, whatever its resources, needs its saints, and has often found them far outside the Curia. History matters to the Pope, and that gives some reason to hope that he is not looking for another Dominic, since he himself has played that role so well, and that he too will recognize the Francis or the Angela Merici of our time when he or she appears before him.

This gives an historian’s perspective analogous to the distinction that the contemporary journalist Nicholas D. Kristoff has given here and here in The New York Times, where he distinguishes the rigid all-male hierarchy and the grass-roots Church doing admirable work in places like Darfur.

Both of these approaches confirms me in my insistence that the word “Church” be preserved for the whole complex Catholic thing and not be identified with the hierarchy, whether in praise or in blame.

The travails of the Greek debt crisis are probably not at the top of anybody’s worry list–there are so many! But Joseph Stiglitz who has a bent for counter-crowd thinking has this at the Guardian and dares to say things that haven’t made it into most of the U.S. coverage.

“Reform the euro or bin it: The Greek crisis puts the currency’s very survival at risk.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/05/reform-euro-or-bin-it-greece-germany

It appears that Paul Krugman is writing in the same vein: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/default-devaluation-or-what/  This one, “Greek End Game,”  http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/greek-end-game/

Sandro Magister has entered into dialogue with Joseph Komonchak on the “Chiesa” website. The issue is how to speak of the Church as holy, yet counting innumerable sinners among her members. Both refer to Joseph Ratzinger’s great work “Introduction to Christianity.” Here is the portion that Magister cites:

Is the Church not simply the continuation of God’s deliberate plunge into human wretchedness; is it not simply the continuation of Jesus’ habit of sitting at table with sinners, of his mingling with the misery of sin to the point where he actually seems to sink under its weight? Is there not revealed in the unholy holiness of the Church, as opposed to man’s expectation of purity, God’s true holiness, which is love, love which does not keep its distance in a sort of aristocratic, untouchable purity but mixes with the dirt of the world, in order thus to overcome it? Can therefore the holiness of the Church be anything else but the mutual support which comes, of course, from the fact that all of us are supported by Christ?

The rest of the exchange is here.

N.B. This is the second day in a row that Magister has referenced Commonweal. Yesterday, on his blog, “Settimo Cielo,” Magister referred to Ken Woodward’s article, in the print issue of the magazine, which he called: “la rivista “Commonweal”, espressione raffinata della cultura cattolica progressista americana, specie newyorkese.”

Since “raffinata” is feminine, he must mean Mollie!

My kind of guy. None of that Kumbaya krap:

Priest Religious, But Not Really Spiritual

BOSTON—Father Clancy Donahue of St. Michael Catholic Church told reporters Wednesday that while he believed in blindly adhering to the dogma and ceremonies of his faith, he tried not to get too bogged down by actual spirituality. “I’m not so much into having a relationship with God as I am into mechanically conducting various rituals,” Donahue said. “To me, it just feels empty to contemplate a higher power without blindly obeying canon law and protecting the church as an institution.” Donahue emphasized that although he did not personally agree with those who pondered the eternal, he had nothing against them.

Via The Onion, via the Dish. (This isn’t a real story, by the way. Or not too real.)

Judge Richard Goldstone addressed Jewish leaders [in South Africa] at a meeting held on Monday the 3rd of May 2010.

STATEMENT BY JUDGE RICHARD GOLDSTONE

I welcome this opportunity of meeting with you this afternoon.

At the outset let me say that I have taken no pleasure in seeing people around the world criticize the South African Jewish community and I commend the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and all responsible for bringing an end to the unfortunate public issues that had arisen relating to my grandson’s bar mitzvah. My family and I are delighted that I was able to attend the bar mitzvah on Saturday and that it was such a joyous and meaningful occasion. I am deeply grateful to Rabbi Suchard, the members of the committee and the congregation at Sandton Synagogue for having made this possible.

Without more, allow me to turn to the Gaza Report that has caused so much anger in this and other Jewish communities. It is well known that initially I refused to become involved with what I considered to be a mandate that was unfair to Israel by concentrating only on war crimes alleged to have been committed by the Israel Defense Force. When I was offered an even-handed mandate that included war crimes alleged to have been committed against Israel by Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza my position changed.

I have spent much of my professional life in the cause of international criminal justice. It would have been hypocritical for me to continue to speak out against violations of international law and impunity for war crimes around the world but remain silent when it came to Israel simply because I am Jewish. Read the rest of this entry »

“St. Thérèse Relics to Visit Africa for World Cup”

(Details here.)

Two veteran journalists tackle the question of the U.S. Jewish community and Israel.

Here’s Paul Vitello in the New York Times tackling the neuralgic subject: “On Israel, Jews and Leaders Often Disagree,” I found a bit of egg-walking here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/us/politics/06jews.html

And here is J.J. Goldberg of the Forward, writing in Ha’aretz (and not walking on eggs!): “The Vaudeville routine that has taken over American Jewry” http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/the-vaudeville-routine-that-has-taken-over-american-jewry-1.287611

I realize this event can be situated in the great tradition of American Christian circuit preachers and revivalists.  I also realize that the Catholic Church has a great tradition of itinerant preachers.  And St. Peter’s Church,  which it is sponsoring and  benefiting from the event,  seems to be concerned with the corporal and spiritual works of mercy–so it’s a worthy cause, IMHO.

Nonetheless, the little cartoon at the top of the advertisement sent a little chill down my spine:  a soldier/priest in an alb with a gun.  Or is it a cross?  Or is it a cross meant to look like a gun?

It’s bedtime.  I’m afraid I am going to have to sing “Kumbaya” just to get that image out of my head.  Sorry, Bob Imbelli and Kathy.

Kenneth L. Woodward’s “Church of the ‘Times’” (already under discussion here) is just one of the exciting offerings in the latest issue of Commonweal. Also free for all to read:

* “Thinking Again,” an essay by Marilynne Robinson on the attempt to determine what we mean by “the mind” — how (or whether) it’s distinct from the brain, and how that should affect our understanding of God and the human soul

* “Let ‘em Shrink,” our editorial on the need and the possibilities for financial regulation

Subscribers (online or in print) can log in to read:

* “A Bricklayer’s Son,” Peter Steinfels’s review essay on Stanley Hauerwas and his new memoir, Hannah’s Child

* “A Darkening,” Cathleen Kaveny’s report on the D’Souza-Hitchens debate at Notre Dame — and other, more formidable threats to Catholics’ faith

* “The Glory & the Grime,” Eve Tushnet’s review of an exhibit of Spanish religious art at the National Gallery in D.C.

* “Off the Page,” Richard Alleva’s review of the new movies The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Kick-Ass

* “Pernickety,” Harold Bordwell’s Last Word essay on French writer Charles Du Bos

* Book reviews for every taste: Bernard Bergonzi on the new biography Muriel Spark; Michael R. Marrus on Hubert Wolf’s study of the Pius XI archives; William Galston on Alan I. Abramowitz’s The Disappearing Center; Jesse Lander on the latest entry in the who-wrote-Shakespeare debate; and Anthony Domestico on Peter Carey’s Parrot & Olivier in America.

With May upon us, remember that a subscription to Commonweal makes a great gift for graduation, confirmation, or ordination!

What is to be found in this set of beads?

I bought my first rosary in 1960. It was plastic, cost a dime, and was pink. Our Catholic school had mandated that all first-graders purchase a rosary from the principal’s office on a certain day. But when that day came, only three of us arrived at school with ten cents in our pocket. (Could it be that pernicious secularization was at work even then?)

The principal’s assistant had two kinds of rosaries laid out on her desk; pink and black. I thought the pink one looked much better.

“Sorry, but the pink ones are for girls and the black ones are for boys. You are required to take the black one.”

“But the sisters’ rosaries are all black!”

“Good point” said the principal who had just walked in. “This boy is in first grade. I think we can give him a pink one if he wants it.”

Clutching my new pink rosary, I remember skipping down the hall back to my class.  (I don’t know what they would make of a boy skipping down the hall of a Catholic school with a pink rosary these days. But although they may have been less tolerant in those days, they also seemed less suspicious.)

If you want to know about the rosary I have in my pocket right now and how it came to be there, you’ll have to read after the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

Former U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato has a letter to the editor in today’s New York Times in which he reports that “As a Catholic, I am appalled at the now-daily assaults by the liberal media against the church.” An editor’s note adds that D’Amato is “a member of the board of the Friends of the Catholic Church, an informal group created to assist the Catholic Church when it comes under attack.”

I haven’t heard of this  group, but had it been around in 1992, it may well have faced the task of writing letters to the editor about Senator D’Amato.

At the time, D’Amato had given a broadcast interview in which he opined that Catholic social teaching is “wacky.” Covering the religion beat for Newsday, I asked various Catholic authorities to react and got nowhere. But Bill Reel, a columnist who sat next to me in the newsroom, took an interest in the story.

In a stinging column, he imagined D’Amato claiming that Luke must have misquoted what Jesus said about the poor.  Bill wrote that D’Amato “is ever the buffoon but never a fool” – that his remarks were calculated with an eye to political advantage.

Church officials evidently avoided criticizing D’Amato because they were thankful for his opposition to abortion. Bill, a conservative who supports the church position on abortion with much vigor, didn’t fall for that trap.  Maybe Friends of the Catholic Church should review his column. It ran on Feb. 26, 1992.

I regret to add a sad update to this posting: that Bill Reel died early this morning at his home in New Hampshire at the age of 71. I learned a lot by sitting next to Bill in the newsroom – he was a great craftsman and storyteller.

Commenting on the Psalm-verse, “I have been young and now am old, and I have not seen a just man forsaken nor his seed seeking bread” (Ps 36:25), St. Augustine expected that some would deny, from personal experience or even from biblical examples, that such is the case: just people have been forsaken and their children begging for bread. At which point Augustine gives a wonderful image of the preacher’s role in uncovering biblical texts and bringing people before Christ:

“When a person is thinking in this way, all his limbs are slack and unable to do what is good. Can we lift him up like a paralytic and open the roof of this Scriptural text and lower him before the Lord? You see that the text is obscure, and if it’s obscure, it has a roof over it. I see someone who is a paralytic in mind, and I see this roof, and under this roof I know that Christ is hidden. As much as I can I will do what was praised in those who opened the roof and lowered the paralytic before Christ so that he could say to him: “Be of good heart, son; your sins are forgiven you” (Mt 9:2). In this way he healed the inner man from his paralysis, forgiving his sins and strengthening his faith. But there were people there who did not have eyes to see that the man’s inner paralysis had already been healed, and they thought that the physician who had healed him was blaspheming. “Who is this,” they say, “who forgives sinns. He is blaspheming. Who except God can forgive sins?” And because he was God, he heard them thinking such things. They were thinking something true about God, but they could not see God present. That is why that physician did something for the paralytics’s body, too, so that he could also heal the inner paralysis of those who were saying such things. He did something they could see and gave them something they could believe. Well then, if you are so weak and ill that when you see examples of people suffering you wish to stop doing the good, you are suffering from an inner paralysis. Let us try, if we can, to remove the roof and lower you before the Lord” (Augustine, Enar. in Ps 36/3, 3; PL 36, 385).

Martha Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, has an essay in the April 30^th issue of the TLS, on the threat to liberal education represented by cuts to the humanities budgets of universities. (The TLS and the LRB have published several essays recently on the criteria for public endowment in England, which show scant respect for programs in the humanities.) Here are paragraphs from the beginning and the end of her essay, a preview of her forthcoming book, Not For Profit: Why democracy needs the humanities.

Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through. Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful, docile, technically trained machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements.

What are these radical changes? The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every nation of the world. Seen by policymakers as useless frills, at a time when nations must discard all useless things in order to stay competitive in the global market, they are rapidly losing their place in curricula, and also in the minds and hearts of parents and children. What we might call the humanistic aspects of science and social science – the imaginative, creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought – are also losing ground as nations prefer to pursue short-term profit by the cultivation of the useful and highly applied skills suited to profit-making….

During the era in which people began to demand democratic self-governance, education all over the world was remodelled to produce the sort of student who could function well in this demanding form of government: not a cultivated gentleman, stuffed with the wisdom of the ages, but an active, critical, reflective, and empathetic member of a community of equals, capable of exchanging ideas on a basis of respect and understanding with people from many different backgrounds. Today we still maintain that we like democracy and self-governance, and we also think that we like freedom of speech, respect for difference, and understanding of others. We give these values lip service, but we think far too little about what we need to do in order to transmit them to the next generation and ensure their survival.

No matter what you think of the question of illegal immigration, there’s no denying that the Arizona immigration law will have a huge impact on legal resident Latino immigrants, naturalized citizens and even U.S. born Latino citizens (and, although the focus has been on Latinos, the same would go for Asian-Americans as well).  In fact, U.S. born citizens and naturalized citizens are likely to feel the brunt of it most directly, because of two interlocking factors:  (1) they possess the phenotype and accents that police will inevitably rely on in identifying illegal immigrants and (2) since they are actually citizens, and therefore secure in their presence here, they are not in the habit of carrying around papers that would prove their citizenship.

This is what defenders of the Arizona law, who say that it is just an attempt to deal with illegal immigration by enforcing the law do not seem to understand.  The burden of this enforcement is not just going to fall on illegal immigrants.  Besides the actual illegal immigrants whose apprehension it will facilitate, the design of the law means that the burden it creates will fall exclusively on Latinos who are lawfully present in the United States.  This is exactly how the law differs from a law that, say, would require everyone to prove his or her lawful immigration status in certain contexts (e.g., as when we are required to show our SS card when we begin new employment).

And a recent episode confirms the fear that the law is designed specifically to maximize the zone in which these intrusive police interactions will occur.  An email from Kris Korbach, a UMKC law professor who has been instrumental in shaping and defending the language of the Arizona law, confirms this.   When lawmakers recently tinkered with the statute’s language, ostensibly to limit the circumstances under which law enforcement would be required to demand papers, he sent an email to Russell Pearce, an Arizona State Senator involved in drafting the new language, asking him to be sure to do it in ways that would continue to  give police officers the ability to selectively target certain groups (e.g., those who have cars on blocks in the their front yards and those living with lots of people in a single apartment) for immigration inquiries by making violation of local ordinances one of the contexts in which police would be obligated to ask for proof of immigration status when they developed a reasonable suspicion that someone was here illegally:

When we drop out “lawful contact” and replace it with “a stop, detention, or rest, in the enforcement a violation of any title or section of the Arizona code” we need to add “or any county or municipal ordinance.” This will allow police to use violations of property codes (ie, cars on blocks in the yard) or rental codes (too many occupants of a rental accommodation) to initiate queries as well.

Korbach’s email suggests that the point of the law is not just to empower the police to question the immigration status of people they happen to encounter in the course of their normal law-enforcement duties.  That would be intrusive enough from the perspective of lawfully resident Latinos who find themselves in a situation of always being on the hook to prove their status.  As Korbach’s email makes clear, however, the goal is much more ambitious:  to give local law enforcement the mandate — and then use the other provisions of the law to pressure them to make use of it — to affirmatively target certain populations for intrusive immigration inquiries.

Interestingly, the very same group of people promoting the Arizona immigration law are generally (1) eager to avoid government intrusions on their “liberty” (e.g., the Real ID Act) and (2), as Frank Rich pointed out in his column this past Sunday, not satisfied by President Obama’s own proof of his U.S. birth, notwithstanding his Hawaiian birth certificate.  Why is that?  Given the racially tinged rhetoric of the current immigration discussion in some quarters, you could forgive Latinos for thinking that this law might have to do with a bit more than just enforcing immigration laws and might, in fact, be tied up with larger racial and cultural anxieties animating certain segments of the American Right.  (And, it should go without saying that if Obama’s birth certificate is not evidence for these people that he is a natural born US citizen, heaven help the rest of us.)

In light of all of this, this WSJ article, discussing the growing dissatisfaction with the GOP among conservative Latinos should come as no surprise.  Here’s the essence of it (but go read the whole thing):

Conservative Hispanic voters, in particular, say they feel betrayed by Republican Party leaders who have supported the law. ….  “When the Arizona law was passed, it quickly became the single most important issue to all Latinos in Arizona and nationwide,” said Matt Barreto, a political science professor at the University of Washington who studies Latino voting patterns. “Either party that pushes the issue too hard risks moving centrist voters in the other direction,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican strategist and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.  Massey Villarreal, a Houston businessman and past national chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, an independent group with chapters nationwide, said, “It’s insulting to have Republican leaders across the country applauding this racist law. I’m sure this is going to hurt the Republican Party.”

This law is quickly becoming a litmus test for Latinos of all political stripes.  So far, the GOP is failing it.

In yesterday’s Commencement Address, President Obama suggested that regular readers of the New York Times might occasionally scan the Wall Street Journal. Having subscribed to both for a good number of years, I heartily endorse the President’s proposal.

Transferred into a religious context (though, as another thread has suggested, the Times does tend to don an ecclesiastical mantel), one might invite readers of Commonweal to dip occasionally into First Things. (And, certe, vice versa.) Even more daringly, the partisans of dotCommonweal might intermingle (at least in cyberspace) with the proponents of First Things Online.

There they might chat amicably about a recent post by R.R. Reno. He reflects upon the influence exerted on him, and other graduate students of his era at Yale, by the work of the Jewish philosopher and theologian, Michael Wyschogrod. Here is some of what Reno writes:

Therein, perhaps, lay Wyschogrod’s more subtle influence over young Yale theologians of my generation. As did Robert Jenson, the Christian theologian most similar to him in style and substance, Wyschogrod performed postliberal theology rather than theorizing it. The Holy One, Blessed be He, is not a God of Particularity, not a God committed to History, not a God with narrative identity. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Therefore, according to Wyschogrod, “Jewish theology arises out of the existence of the Jewish people.” Such a theology cannot be theory-driven, because the specific gravity of the Jewish people is more primitive and primary, and the career of that people in the flesh remained open and finished. This does not prevent Wyschogrod from undertaking an ambitious analysis of basic concepts in theology and philosophy. But it means that all his reflections are constellated around the thatness of God’s choice of the children of Abraham as his beloved people.

Christians believe that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. It is our Easter faith, a conviction invested in the carnal realities of life, perhaps to a degree even greater than the Jewish doctrine of the election of Israel. After all, what could be more frightfully fleshly than the hungry worms awaiting us in the damp soil of our death-darkened graves? Where and how does this carnal reality make itself seen and felt in Christian piety and practice?