In following the debate over whether a Islamic house of worship should be built at Ground Zero in New York, I was reminded of the debate many years ago about whether it was appropriate for a community of Carmelite nuns to locate themselves near the Auschwitz concentration camp.  In both cases, it is suggested by some that the presence of these communities would be an act of reconciliation.  Others, of course, saw the presence of these communities as causing pain to the families of the victims.

Does anyone else see a parallel here?  If the two cases are different, why are they different?  If similar, why are they similar?  Is it possible to acknowledge a right in the abstract while questioning the wisdom of its exercise in a particular case?  Discuss….

Feel safer in the era of security cameras and GPS technology? Think again. In this intriguing, readable article from Philosophy Now, scholar Emrys Westacott lays out an unnerving argument: “Ubiquitous surveillance is like a magnetic force that changes the trajectory of our moral aspiration.” The article begins:

Imagine that right after briefing Adam about which fruit was allowed and which forbidden, God had installed a closed-circuit television camera in the garden of Eden, trained on the tree of knowledge. Think how this might have changed things for the better. The serpent sidles up to Eve and urges her to try the forbidden fruit. Eve reaches her hand out – in paradise the fruit is always conveniently within reach – but at the last second she notices the CCTV….

The August 2 New Yorker (the one with that great article by Atul Gawande) has a writeup of Marilynne Robinson’s new book, Absence of Mind, in its “Briefly Noted” column. Commonweal published an excerpt from the book, “Thinking Again,” in May. The unsigned review in the New Yorker ends this way:

Robinson is eloquent in her defense of the mind’s prerogatives, but her call for a renewed metaphysics might be better served by rereading Heidegger than by dusting off the Psalms.

I often get the feeling that there aren’t many Bibles, dusty or otherwise, in the New Yorker‘s offices. Exhibit B, from the July 12 issue, is this unhelpful visual from an otherwise very perceptive review of Ann Carson’s new book, Nox, by Meghan O’Rourke:

The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

So…somewhere between this and this, I guess?

By the way, did you know it’s possible to purchase a “slightly imperfect” Bible? The site doesn’t specify what the imperfections are for any given item, but here’s hoping they just left out those dusty old Psalms.

“Why Charles Rangel is surviving”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40474.html

And there’s this: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/why-charlie-rangel-will-likely-survive/

Now that Obama has suggested that Rangel resign, you can be sure he won’t, and that if he runs he’ll win! I know my district. Witness the Obamians trying to get David Patterson to resign as governor. That didn’t work either though he dropped out of the governor’s  race.

Anne Rice

Or so the novelist, who had returned to the Catholicism of her childhood, said on her Facebook fan page. Her explanation:

“In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”

To which Rod Dreher responds:

“I’m sorry, but this is weak, and makes me wonder what really happened. Surely a woman of her age and experience cannot possibly believe that the entirety of Christianity, current and past, can be reduced to the cultural politics of the United States of America in the 21st century. Does she really know no liberal Christians? Has she never picked up a copy of Commonweal?”

Indeed.

President Obama touted his education policies today in a speech at the 100th anniversary convention of the National Urban League. His much-hyped “Race to the Top” still sounds to me more like a TV reality program than a program that will advance education. It invests heavily in funding charter schools, which offer no more than mixed results while at the same time  furthering the demise of inner-city Catholic schools.

In his speech, Obama continued the push for teacher accountability, which is all well and good until one considers that accountability is defined by improved scores on standardized tests. The fallacy of this approach is underscored by stories in New York newspapers today. The state’s education department acknowledged that improving test scores were illusory because the tests had been getting easier. The state is a little late with this – Mayor Michael Bloomberg trumpeted the improved scores in his re-election campaign.

Such number games are a problem across the country, fostered by the No Child Left Behind Act, which set a strict requirement for states to improve reading and math scores but left it to each state to set its standard.

Nonetheless, Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are charging forward with their reform agenda – basically a continuation of the Bush administration’s business-centric approach.

I often see television commercials for a cancer-treatment center in which “patients” rave about the caring treatment they received there, and compare it to the hopelessness they felt before they checked in. “My doctor told me there was nothing he could do,” they say. “The doctor said I had a few months to live. He wanted to give up.” The manipulation in these ads strikes me as distastefully blatant — the difference between death and survival, they imply, is how much your doctor is willing to fight. Terminal diagnoses come from doctors who don’t care enough to save your life.

Refusing to accept a death sentence is sometimes a good idea. But a doctor who gives his patients a frank diagnosis is not necessarily heartless — and in fact, the failure to be upfront can be harmful to a patient’s well-being. Atul Gawande examines the paradoxes of end-of-life care and treatment for terminal illness in an excellent article, “Letting Go,” in the August 2 New Yorker. Gawande is a surgeon and a med-school professor, and his thoughtful articles on health care are a major reason I subscribe to the New Yorker. This one covers a lot of ground in looking at how medical technology has changed our notion of “dying,” and what improving patient care might actually mean.

Dying used to be accompanied by a prescribed set of customs. Guides to ars moriendi, the art of dying, were extraordinarily popular; a 1415 medieval Latin text was reprinted in more than a hundred editions across Europe. Reaffirming one’s faith, repenting one’s sins, and letting go of one’s worldly possessions and desires were crucial, and the guides provided families with prayers and questions for the dying in order to put them in the right frame of mind during their final hours. Last words came to hold a particular place of reverence.

These days, swift catastrophic illness is the exception; for most people, death comes only after long medical struggle with an incurable condition—advanced cancer, progressive organ failure (usually the heart, kidney, or liver), or the multiple debilities of very old age. In all such cases, death is certain, but the timing isn’t. So everyone struggles with this uncertainty—with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost. As for last words, they hardly seem to exist anymore. Technology sustains our organs until we are well past the point of awareness and coherence. Besides, how do you attend to the thoughts and concerns of the dying when medicine has made it almost impossible to be sure who the dying even are?

The article looks at how hospice care is “helping to negotiate an ars moriendi for our age. But doing so represents a struggle—not only against suffering but also against the seemingly unstoppable momentum of medical treatment.” Gawande points to a study that showed that doctors are actually far more likely to overestimate a terminally ill patient’s survival time than to underestimate — and that’s when they’re willing to make a guess at all, which they are understandably reluctant to do. No one wants to talk about death, and patients are liable to feel betrayed by a doctor who tries to get them focused on quality over quantity with the time they have left. Gawande knows this from experience as well as from statistics.

The article is long and often grim, but very much worth reading and pondering. I was struck by Gawande’s reference to Stephen Jay Gould, who argued in his 1985 essay “The Median Isn’t the Message” that “it has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity.” Gould preferred to rage against the dying of the light, and that worked for him — he survived a grim cancer diagnosis. But, Gawande says, “The trouble is that we’ve built our medical system and culture around the long tail” — that is, around the thin possibility of survival. “Hope is not a plan,” Gawande writes, “but hope is our plan.”

As Christians we have a broader definition of “hope” than simply “hoping to stave off death.” When it comes to facing death, in a spiritual sense, hope is our plan. How do we apply that to the realities Gawande’s article discusses?

P.S. You can read a transcript of a live chat with Atul Gawande about end-of-life care that took place yesterday afternoon. The very first question touches on something I thought about as I read: what is the role of hospital chaplains in preparing patients to discuss end-of-life issues?

P.P.S. In the comments, Jean Raber mentions a Commonweal article by Mary Lee Freeman that you might want to read (or reread) in conjunction with Gawande’s piece: “Caring for the Dying: My Patients, My Work, My Faith.”

A federal judge has issued an injunction that bars some of the most controversial aspects of Arizona’s immigration law from taking effect. The ruling preserves parts of the law, however. The law, challenged by the Obama administration, has been  described by Cardinal Roger Mahony as “retrogressive, mean-spirited and useless.”

Arizona is likely to appeal the ruling, which relies heavily on the 1941  Supreme Court case Hines v. Davidowitz. That case struck down a state alien-registration law. Judge Susan Bolton quoted a passage from the Hines ruling that declared Congress had “manifested a purpose to [regulate immigration] in such a way as to protect the personal liberties of law-abiding aliens through one uniform national . . . system  and to leave them free from the possibility of inquisitorial practices and police surveillance.”

One interesting point in the ruling is that the judge essentially found that the Arizona law would interfere with national security because of an unfunded mandate it contains. The statute would require Arizona authorities to determine the immigration status of every person arrested, which would lead them to swamp the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Law Enforcement Support Center with requests it is bound by federal law to answer. According to federal officials, an overload of requests  from Arizona would make it more difficult to respond to national-security-sensitive requests from the FBI and other agencies.

I know that many readers here have had the experience of writing a masters’ thesis.  It’s an odd thing.  You slave over the thing for a year or more, defend it, and then…well, nothing. It gets bound and is placed in the library of your graduate institution (at the GTU, it’s called the “thesis cage,” a wonderful image).  Perhaps a few friends interested in the topic read it.  At least with a PhD, you often end up revising it into a book, which ensures a slightly larger audience.

Through a happy set of circumstances and the support of Fr. Anthony Ruff, OSB at St. John’s Abbey, my master’s thesis has been sprung from the thesis cage.  A Crisis of Reception: The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy and the Debate Over the Translation of the Roman Missal has been posted, more or less in its entirety, on the Pray Tell weblog. The thesis focuses on the long-running dispute over the translation of the Roman Missal into English.

A fair warning that the tone is horribly pedantic.  However, several friends who aren’t liturgy nerds (yes, I have a few) tell me that they have found it a good introduction to the dispute for those who want to know what all the shouting is about.

And, yes, I’m ruthlessly cross-posting material from other sites because I’m terribly short of time to blog right now…:-)

I have been curious about how the citizens of New Orleans are assessing the BP oil spill and its aftermath. I remembered Ann Olivier once saying that she lived there, so I asked her what was going on. Her reply:

Yes, I’m a native New Orleanian, still here in spite of all.

The only impact on my immediate neighborhood so far is that there are no oysters for sale. If the unavailability of seafood continues for long it could impact tourism badly. People come here mainly to eat.

The Churches, including New Orleans Catholic Charities, are very active on the coast, and the word from them is that people are suffering both physical and mental problems, due in large part to the stress of all the uncertainty, both short-term and long-term. The ecologists don’t know how long it will take for the coast to heal, and they don’t know when drilling will start again. South Louisianians have always been sensitive to ecological threats (we’re big on both hunting and fishing), and we’re also aware that the edges of the state are being washed away rapidly — two football fields per hour these days, or so I just read. And, of course, we never know when another great hurricane will hit. So the politicians have to deal with a great deal of anger, anxiety and depression. Read the rest of this entry »

The fireflies are gone. Two lonely lag-behinds spotted the other evening. They have been replaced by a black bear. He/she made its presence known by knocking over the grill on the deck. A loud bang on the door sent it away ambling down the path to the meadow. Forensic investigation leads to the conclusion that he/she was after the wire brush used to clean the grill; it is black and ugly and rich with carnal fat. The bear was not a cub and not an adult–somewhat adolescent in its insolence. Would not want to meet him/her in the woods. Presumably there are siblings and parents in the neighborhood.

Roman Catholics know that our church is universal–catholic with a small “c”, embracing people of every race, region, color, and tongue. Most of the time, however, that knowledge is abstract, and even undermined by immediate evidence, rather like the knowledge that the earth is round. Many Catholics see the church in people who look and sound more or less like they do. Even if they are fortunate to live in a big city or a border town, they are presented with only slightly more evidence of the global scope of Catholicism.

On rare occasions, however, the catholicity of the church reveals itself not merely abstractly, but with vivid immediacy–rather like the roundness of the earth must have manifested itself to the first astronauts orbiting the globe. That’s the best analogy I can think of for my experience right now, at a conference on “Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church,” entitled “In the Currents of History: from Trent to the Future.” It is the brainchild of the indefatigable James Keenan, S.J. a professor of moral theology at Boston College.

Catholic moralists from over seventy countries are gathering in the city of Trent, the same city in which the Council held 450 years ago decisively shaped the outline of our discipline by creating the field of moral theology for seminary training of future confessors. Since the Second Vatican Council, that field has expanded tremendously in both participants and scope. It now includes not only priests, but also women religious and lay men and women. (More than a few babies and toddlers attended the conference with their moral theologian moms or dads.) And the concerns which animate the field are not merely the sins of individuals, but broad patterns of collective action and policies affecting the common good. Read the rest of this entry »

Mathis Landwehr as Lasko.

I’m back from a vacation in Assisi, where I spent some time at the various sites that are steeped in the generous spirit of St. Francis. Against that background, it was all the more strange to tune in one night to a TV show that featured a fictional order of Catholic monks who serve  the church as kung fu warriors. What made it especially jarring was that these monks wore a brown outfit that closely resembles the habit of the Franciscan order.

Since I had trouble following the Italian, it took me a while to figure out that these were not Franciscans but rather members of the secret religious order “Pugnus Dei,” or Fist of God. The plot was Dan Brown meets Bruce Lee, with a hunky blond monk named Lasko kicking, flipping, flying and scampering up and down walls to defend a bishop against a hit squad of hi-tech gangsters. The image of a kung fu fighter in what appeared to be Franciscan clothing was truly bizarre. St. Francis made a point of surrendering to any violence done to him, after all.

The show is a popular German TV series, Lasko: Die Faust Gottes, which is based on an earlier movie. In the Italian-translated episode I chanced on, the monk Lasko, played by German martial-arts actor Mathis Landwehr, used his kung fu moves to beat up  bad guys as he fought to get to Rome to report to a cardinal on the activity of a crime syndicate bent on attacking the church. In one scene, he leaps from a bridge to a hovering helicopter to subdue a gunman who was spraying a bishop’s car with gunfire. According to Variety, Lasko is one of Germany’s highest-rated TV series.

What to make of this? I think the show’s popularity suggests a nostalgia for the imagined church of the Middle Ages, of  Templars and Crusades, of power and righteousness – an escape from both the secularism of today’s Europe and the moral problems of the contemporary church.

I have always heard ascribed to Peter Maurin the dictum: “The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor.” The London Catholic Worker website echoes it: “Houses of hospitality are centers for learning to do the acts of love, so that the poor can receive what is, in justice, theirs, the second coat in our closet, the spare room in our home, a place at our table. Anything beyond what we immediately need belongs to those who go without.”

But now I wonder whether Peter Maurin was echoing a paragraph of St. Basil the Great’s homily on next Sunday’s Gospel (Lk 12: 13-21); Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently, American Spectator blogger Jeffrey Lord didn’t get the memo that, after the original Breitbart smear was revealed to be a fraud, the plan was to argue that this was never about Sherrod but rather about racism within the NAACP.  Lord decided to pen an article attacking Sherrod as a liar for saying in her now famous NAACP speech that a relative had been “lynched” by the sheriff and a mob when, in fact, he was only beaten to death by the sheriff and a mob.   I’m not making this up.  Ironically, Lord is not just disgusting, but also wrong, since (as I had wrongly assumed was common knowledge) the definition of the word “lynch” includes forms of murder other than hanging. (HT Adam Serwer)

Earlier this month, when the New York Times published a story about the CDF and its jurisdiction over clergy sex-abuse cases, Grant Gallicho asked Nicholas Cafardi, a canon lawyer quoted in the article, to comment on the “news.” Cafardi’s very helpful explanation was posted on our blog.

Now we have published a longer article by Cafardi, “The Scandal of Secrecy: Canon Law & the Sexual-Abuse Crisis.” It explains how “secret” laws complicated and exacerbated the crisis in the church, and dispels some misconceptions about the nature of the secrecy required by Crimen sollicitationis.

The Guardian‘s Andrew Brown has linked to our article on his blog. His take sounds about right to me:

The conclusion [Cafardi] comes to is that the policy on secrecy really was so secret that the bishops did not realise it applied. Of course, the secrecy enjoined covered…the church’s internal tribunals, not the crimes themselves. Where those were not reported, as usually they weren’t, this was down to misguided and wicked institutional loyalty rather than formal policy.

…this is an account of the matter which makes a lot of sense. It requires no more than normal vanity, bureaucratic ass-covering, and indifference to other people’s suffering. That’s all that needed for evil to have a very good run. You don’t need the superhuman malevolence which some people attribute to the Vatican—even though we’ll hear a lot about that in the run up to the visit of the Pope.

Read Nicholas Cafardi’s article here.

I just finished reading Stanley Hauerwas’s engrossing new book, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir, which was recently treated by Peter Steinfels in the magazine. As with most things Hauerwas, I am left feeling both inspired and troubled by his account of what it is to be a theologian today. He presents his life as fundamentally defined by the titular Biblical story of Samuel, whose mother Hannah prayed that if God would grant her a son, she would dedicate him to the Lord’s service. Hauerwas reports that his own mother prayed this same prayer while trying to conceive him, and as a result, his life has been in many ways defined by the task of trying to live into this narrative of a figure caught in a “time of transition.” Samuel found himself wrapped up in Israel’s evolution from a federation of tribes held accountable to the Law by their spiritual elders, as presented in the Book of Judges, into a unified political entity governed by kings. Hauerwas understands his own “time of transition” as defined by the slow, agonizing decline of a post-Constantinian church trying to move forward into an uncertain future, while mostly remaining paralyzed by the nostalgia for its supposedly once-great cultural and political relevance.

Given such a self-understanding of the man and his time, it is not surprising that the “Stanley Hauerwas” that emerges in the memoir is a character caught in a number of “in-betweens”: church and world, congregation and university, identity and relevance, modernity and post-modernity, Catholic and protestant, peace-lover and provocateur. In the end, though, I think the “Stanley Hauerwas” that Hauerwas re-members is primarily a theologian’s theologian.  This is to say, that beyond any natural loyalties, which he admits that he does “disdain,” Hauerwas is committed to the craft of theology, which he calls “word work.”  Influenced by Wittgenstein and Barth, Hauerwas understands his job as a theologian as helping Christians learn the grammar of faith, so that they might better describe what a reality might look like that is defined by the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Such a description is necessary before we even begin to say anything normative about how we ought to live in this reality.  This is perhaps a strange self-understanding for a professional Christian ethicist, but Hauerwas says that “ethics is but a name for exposing the practical character of theological speech.”

It’s statements like these that have made his work so hard for some more pragmatically-minded interpreters to take. For example, it’s difficult to come up with a church position on same-sex marriage, when the resident theological ethicist wants to spend the whole time simply describing marriage itself. But this is what theologians love to do.  It’s hard to say what it is to live a life defined by the Gospel. What does such a life even look like? For all his distrust of foundational theology, no one seems more concerned about the “quiddity” of Christian life than Stanley Hauerwas. He says several times that the work of theology takes patience, the patience of a bricklayer who slowly learns the tools of the trade and endlessly perfects his craft one brick at a time. This patience is connected to his commitment to pacifism, which is predicated on the eschatological idea that only God has the clarity of mind to be able to act with such definitive and efficient violence. We, on the other hand, must live a life of continual discernment, always ready to rebuild the whole wall if we notice that even one brick is out of place.  And theologians love to build, tear down, and rebuild walls.

Read the rest of this entry »

When it came to assuring a favorable reception of the recent Vatican document on church law governing clerical sex abuse, the inclusion of a provision listing forbidden ordinations of women among “grievous crimes” was a stroke of genius.

Keep that person at work, and we can look forward to similar brilliant moves.

ROME, August 30 – Pope Benedict XVI capped his impassioned address yesterday on the moral obligation to prevent global warming with a severe condemnation of “clown Masses.” The two items were juxtaposed, a Vatican official later explained, because “the Holy Father considers them both questions of environmental pollution.”

LONDON, September 19 – Preaching today at the beatification of John Henry Newman, one of the giants of modern Roman Catholic theology and spirituality, Pope Benedict XVI seized the opportunity to remind divorced and remarried Catholics that they were barred from receiving Communion unless they abstained from sexual relations.

UNITED NATIONS, December 16 – Diplomats here were puzzling over the Pope Benedict’s World Peace Day message, released to world leaders yesterday. Why, it was being asked, should a solemn statement on the limits of military means to combat terrorism also include effusive praise of Natural Family Planning and an appeal to worshipers not to create a tumult at Mass during the Greeting of Peace?

This week I was invited to contribute a brief reflection to the Patheos web site on the topic “The Future of Catholicism.”  Patheos bills itself as the “premier online destination to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality and to explore and experience the world’s beliefs.”  This week’s symposium featured contributions from, among others, Fr. Robert Barron, Fr. James Martin SJ, Sr. Mary Ann Walsh of the USCCB, and Kate Dugan and Jennifer Owens, authors of From the Pews in the Back.  The series was coordinated by Elizabeth Scalia, who blogs at First Things under the nom de plume of The Anchoress.

My own modest contribution can be found here (Patheos site) or here (Washington Post’s On Faith weblog).  Here is an excerpt:

The problem goes deeper than difficult doctrines or antiquated structures, problematic though these may sometimes be. Our children and grandchildren are abandoning the faith because they perceive — rightly — that its demands are at fundamental variance with the lives we have prepared them to lead. We have raised them to seek lives characterized by material comfort, sexual fulfillment, and freedom from any obligations that they have not personally chosen. Should it surprise us that they fail to take seriously our claims to follow one who embraced poverty, chastity, and obedience to the will of God?

A revival of the Church in our time will require believers who are willing to take risks on behalf of the Gospel. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Cardinal Law, rather than retiring to his sinecure in Rome, had instead made a penitential journey to Haiti and lived out his days in a hospital cleaning toilets and picking maggots from the wounds of street people. Some might have seen such a penance as inadequate to the offense, but it could not have been dismissed as an empty gesture. To renounce everything he had achieved for the sake of the Gospel would have been an act worthy of a follower of Jesus Christ.

Last night I finished The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. I bought it (on Kindle) despite good reviews in the Times Book Review and The New Yorker because it sounded more interesting than they tediously made it out to be. Set in Japan at the turn of the 19th century, on a foreign-trading island adjacent to mainland Nagasaki, the plot tracks back and forth between the Japanese on Nagasaki and the Dutch traders who live on the sequestered “island,” Dejima. It seems to me (not ever an English major) a picaresque novel in the vein of Pickwick Papers, i.e., a sequence of related stories that recount 20 years of history between the island and the mainland. Anyone else read it?

What a shameless jerk.

Shirley Sherrod should get her job back (though I wonder whether she even wants it at this point), and Tom Vilsack should publicly apologize to this woman.  It’s scandalous that anyone in this administration would push someone to resign based on a Fox News/Andrew Breitbart report without conducting a full investigation to ascertain the real facts.  The NAACP should also be ashamed [for condemning Sherrod before it bothered to get her story].  As for Breitbart and Fox, we already know they have no shame.

UPDATES:  Vilsack doubles down on stupid.  Breitbart admits he hasn’t even seen the whole video.  What a sorry, sordid episode.

UPDATE II:  Here’s a link to the entire video.  The relevant part begins at 16:00 or so.  Watch it for yourself.   After the part that appears in the edited video, she talks about how she ultimately managed to help the farmer save his farm.  She goes on to say:  “Working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t. They could be black, they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people, those who don’t have access the way others have.”  Clearly, the NAACP and Vilsack got punk’d by Breitbart and Fox.  At least the NAACP has the decency to admit it.

Last week Public Discourse, an online journal sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute, posted a piece by Helen Alvaré titled “A Health Care Challenge to Commonweal and Timothy Jost.” Alvaré, who is an associate professor at George Mason University School of Law, criticized us and Professor Jost for daring to disagree with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Alvaré complained that “Commonweal‘s editors just don’t seem to trust the USCCB’s legal or policy analyses of the PPACA insofar as freedom of conscience or abortion are concerned.” Instead, she claimed, Commonweal had naively deferred to the judgments of its “apparent legal advisor,” Professor Jost, who, according to Alvaré, has “no record of cooperation with Catholic moral and policy interests along the consistent ethic of life.” (Take that, you Mennonite.)

Professor Jost doesn’t need us to defend him. Indeed, he has responded to Alvaré’s criticisms quite ably in a piece now available on our Web site. It’s true that we have found Jost’s analysis of the Affordable Care Act more convincing than that of the USCCB and some leading prolife organizations that opposed the health-care reform bill. This is not because Professor Jost is our “legal advisor” (he is not), or because we were predisposed to distrust the USCCB’s prolife office, or because we were so eager to support the president’s health-care reform that we were willing to bless “whatever the House majority decided to offer pro-life Americans while in the throes of desperate, last-minute negotiations” (to quote again from Alvaré’s complaint). In fact, it was not a question of trust. It was a question of judgment. We took the USCCB’s interpretation of the Affordable Care Act very seriously — and, after reading the relevant sections of the Act itself and the analysis of various experts, judged that interpretation to be incorrect.

Alvaré thinks our disagreement with the bishops conference shows us to be ”both arrogant and naive,” but as Richard R. Gaillardetz has pointed out, neither the bishops nor their lay advisers have an exclusive claim to competence when it comes to the technical evaluation of public policy. Nor can the bishops conference, despite its consistent and often heroic efforts on behalf of the unborn, fairly claim ownership of prolife principles. Professor Jost does not have less credibility as a prolifer because he is not a Catholic, or because he sometimes disagrees with the bishops conference about other issues. It is unbecoming of Alvaré and the editors of Public Discourse, a nonsectarian outfit, to try to turn this dispute into an ecclesial turf war.  It is possible for Mennonites — or Mormons or Zoroastrians — to construe a piece of legislation correctly and for Catholic bishops to misconstrue it.

Alvaré wonders why we don’t just endorse a clear statutory ban on funding for elective abortions at community health centers rather than relying on a dubious executive order signed by a prochoice president. Here she is pushing against an open door. We hope that the Hyde Amendment will be expanded so that it explicitly includes all the money the Department of Heath and Human Services spends on community health centers, including the money appropriated by the Affordable Care Act. (There is no reason to doubt that the Hyde Amendment will pass the next time it comes up for a vote, and there is no point in passing it if HHS is allowed to use some other source of funding to pay for elective abortions.) Because the Affordable Care Act does not provide for an administrative mechanism that would segregate the money it appropriates for community health centers from HHS funds that are covered by the Hyde Amendment, we and Professor Jost argued that the new funding was already implicitly covered by the amendment. President Obama’s executive order only confirmed this understanding. But Alvaré insists that only a statutory ban will have any real effect; that, on their own, the new law and the executive order will simply not be enough to keep the government from funding elective abortion. She rebukes us for the “growing implausibility” of our claim to the contrary. She doesn’t say how exactly that implausibility has grown, and it isn’t clear to us how it could grow without evidence that because of health-care reform the federal government has actually started funding abortions it didn’t fund before.

Alvaré’s description of the new legislation implies a verifiable prediction. So does ours. If she and the bishops conference have read the Affordable Care Act correctly, the courts will soon force community health centers to perform elective abortions paid for by the federal government. If we have read the act correctly, this won’t happen. As long as everyone remembers the conflicting predictions, the dispute should be easy enough to settle. If it turns out that we were wrong, we’ll acknowledge our error, and not pretend it was a small one. (No doubt our friends at the bishops conference and Public Discourse will be happy to help us acknowledge it.) But what will it take for them to acknowledge that they were wrong? If community health centers still haven’t performed taxpayer-funded elective abortions in five years’ time, what will prolife opponents of the Affordable Care Act say? “Just you wait — give it another five years”? Or “Maybe it didn’t happen, but the law itself gave us every right to expect it would. And, besides, you can never be too safe.” We’d like to think they’ll just say, “Oops. The Mennonite was right after all.” But it’s harder to say oops when you’re wearing a miter, which is why we hope the folks at Public Discourse will take off theirs.

Russ Douthaut has a column that every NYTimes reader should read if only to remind us of the “outer boroughs” and west of the Hudson. On the other hand, he pins his case on one study of elite institutions to explain why white, Christian America is so angry. That’s, of course, if “we” really are, “The roots of white anxiety”. Take a look. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/opinion/19douthat.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

And Paul Krugman has a few telling observations on the state of political discourse, “the pundit delusion”. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/opinion/19krugman.html?ref=opinion

1. The Famous Old Spice Commercial

2. The Brigham Young University Parody

HT: Joe Carter.

On July 18, 1610 the tormented genius Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio died forsaken in a small coastal town between Lazio and Tuscany. He had hoped to return to Rome, having fled some years earlier under penalty of death for the murder of a rival.

Here is part of an article that I wrote a few years back for Commonweal:

Few paintings in the Western tradition evoke such a sense of dread as Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath. In what was to be one of Caravaggio’s last works, the adolescent David holds the bloody, decapitated head of the giant, gazing on it with a mix of fascination and pity. This portrayal alone would make the painting memorable, but what makes it unforgettable is that the battered giant’s head is Caravaggio’s own, vacant eyes still staring, mouth agape.

The painting was intended as a gift to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an inducement to intercede with his uncle, Pope Paul V, for clemency to be shown the beleaguered, near-despairing Caravaggio. Contemplating the painting, the words of one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Terrible Sonnets” spring to mind: “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,/ More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.”

What, perhaps, forestalls total despair in the painting is that the pitying David is, according to some scholars, a representation of the young Caravaggio. His look of compassion is the lone sign of hope in the scene, one that unites the wounded humanity of both executioner and victim in a common yearning for redemption.

Tomorrow’s Gospel, the episode of Martha and Mary, was taken as early as Gregory the Great to symbolize the active and the contemplative lives, and the superiority of the latter to the former, since Mary chose “the better part.” It would even be taken to indicate the relative importance of active and contemplative religious communities and orders. Such interpretations, Joseph Fitzmyer says in his commentary, serve “to allegorize it beyond recognition and to introduce a distinction that was born only of later preoccupation.” Here is his interpretation: Read the rest of this entry »

Obituaries pointing to canonization have been leading New York papers this week. The subject? George Steinbrenner. Joe Nocera steps in with the big question: Was Steinbrenner just lucky?

“The truth is, though, that virtually anyone who bought a sports franchise in the United States in the last 30 years, and then held on to it, has made a pile of money. As sports teams have become trophy assets — playthings for wealthy men, really — their value has skyrocketed. Well-run team, poorly run team, big market, small market: they’ve all increased in value.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/business/17nocera.html?_r=1&ref=business

Among the highlights in our latest issue is a review by associate editor Matthew Boudway of The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy, an art exhibit touring the United States (and currently stopping in St. Louis).

Philip the Good had the statues made for the tomb of his father, John the Fearless, the second Valois duke of Burgundy. Sculpted between 1443 and 1457, they were set in an elaborate gothic arcade that circled the tomb under recumbent stone effigies of the duke and his wife. There the statues stood in single-file procession. Only one side of the them was ever meant to be seen, but visitors to this exhibition, who have the luxury of viewing them from several angles, might have trouble guessing which side, so carefully did the artists, Jean de la Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier, carve every exquisite detail. As the mourning procession was a ritual performed in the sight of God, so the statues were designed to be seen by the One who sees everything.

Such monuments were for death a little like what modern wedding albums are for marriage: treasured memorials of initiation into a mystery that time threatens to bury. The tomb was designed not to impress museum-goers but to remind the Carthusians at Champmol to keep praying for the duke in case he hadn’t yet made it to heaven. Until he did, the procession continued.

Read the whole thing here. And if you can’t make it to see the statues in person, you can get a good view on the exhibition’s Web site. Have you seen them? What did you think?