John Thavis reports:

The norms on sexual abuse of minors by priests now stipulate:

– The church law’s statute of limitations on accusations of sexual abuse has been extended, from 10 years after the alleged victim’s 18th birthday to 20 years. For several years, Vatican officials have been routinely granting exceptions to the 10-year statute of limitations. Exceptions to the 20-year limit will be possible, too, but the Vatican rejected a suggestion to do away with the statute of limitations altogether, sources said.

– Use of child pornography now falls under the category of clerical sexual abuse of minors, and offenders can be dismissed from the priesthood. This norm applies to “the acquisition, possession, or distribution by a cleric of pornographic images of minors under the age of 14, for purposes of sexual gratification, by whatever means or using whatever technology.”

– Sexual abuse of mentally disabled adults will be considered equivalent to abuse of minors. The norms define such a person as someone “who habitually lacks the use of reason.”

(…)

– In the most serious and clear cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests, the doctrinal congregation may proceed directly to laicize a priest without going through an ecclesiastical trial. In these instances, the final decision for dismissal from the clerical state and dispensation from the obligations of celibacy is made by the pope.

– The doctrinal congregation can dispense with using the formal judicial process in church law in favor of the “extrajudicial process.” In effect, this allows a bishop to remove an accused priest from ministry without going through a formal trial.

– The doctrinal congregation can dispense from church rules requiring only priests with doctorates in canon law to serve on church tribunals in trials of priests accused of abusing minors. This means qualified lay experts, including those without a canon law doctorate, can be on the tribunal staff, or act as lawyers or prosecutors.

– The doctrinal congregation’s competency in such cases means it has the right to judge cardinals, patriarchs and bishops as well as priests. Vatican sources said this norm, which originates from a decision by Pope John Paul II in 2004, indicates that if the pope authorizes a trial or penal process against such persons for sex abuse or another of the “more grave crimes,” the doctrinal congregation would be the tribunal and could also make preliminary investigations.

And, yes, as Thavis previously reported, attempted women’s ordination is now called a grave canonical crime. Vatican officials stress that simply because sexual abuse and women’s ordination are treated in the same document doesn’t mean Rome views them as equivalent.

“There are two types of ‘delicta graviora’: those concerning the celebration of the sacraments, and those concerning morals. The two types are essentially different and their gravity is on different levels,” said Msgr. Charles Scicluna, an official of the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation.

The new norms also cover the violation of confession, “simulated” celebration of the Eucharist, heresy, apostasy, and, of course, schism.

Read the rest right here.

The registration is now open for the conference on abortion at Princeton this fall, which will bring together a range of voices and perspectives for honest but civil conversation.

Here’s a link to the program, speaker bios, and other information.

Congratulations to Charlie Camosy and the rest of the organizing committee for putting together such a wonderful event!

Yesterday the National Right to Life Committee fired off a press release warning that the Department of Health and Human Services had approved the federal funding of elective abortions in Pennsylvania:

The Obama Administration will give Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new “high-risk” insurance program under a provision of the federal health care legislation enacted in March — and has quietly approved a plan submitted by an appointee of Governor Edward Rendell (D) under which the new program will cover any abortion that is legal in Pennsylvania.

According to Douglas Johnson, NRLC’s legislative director, “Under the Rendell-Sebelius plan, federal funds will subsidize coverage of abortion performed for any reason, except sex selection. The Pennsylvania proposal conspicuously lacks language that would prevent funding of abortions performed as a method of birth control or for any other reason, except sex selection — and the Obama Administration has now approved this.”

As noted at Faith in Public Life’s blog Bold Faith Type, NRLC’s claim was promptly parroted by the Family Research Council and House Minority Leader John Boehner. But are they right? Here’s what the Pennsylvania high-risk insurance pool plan actually says:

Abortions: Includes only abortions and contraceptives that satisfy the requirements of 18 Pa.C.S. § 3204-3206 and 35 P.S. §§10101, 10103-10105.

1. Elective abortions are not covered. Services rendered to treat illness or injuries resulting from an elective abortion are covered.

NRLC is convinced that “elective abortions are not covered” is simply false because, they argue, Pennsylvania’s health-exception is too permissive.

In response, the Department of Health and Human Services issued the following clarification:

Under the Affordable Care Act and the President’s related Executive Order, federal funds made available to states for the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan may not be used to fund abortion. We will reiterate this policy in guidance to those running the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan at both the state and federal levels.

Saint Bonaventure, whose feast the Church celebrates on July 15th, begins his famous Mind’s Journey to God, by invoking Blessed Francis, whose vision of the Six-Winged Seraph structures Bonaventure’s reflection. Of Francis he says:

his preaching was the annunciation of peace both in the beginning and in the end, wishing for peace in every greeting, yearning for ecstatic peace in every moment of contemplation.

Here is the great painting of Francis in Ecstasy by Giovanni Bellini:

Recently discovered as the excavation of the editor’s old office continues, a form letter to Commonweal‘s book reviewers:

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to enhance the book review section by printing brief, interesting and representative passages from the books being reviewed.

We would appreciate it, therefore, if you would include with your review, on a separate page, a passage from 50 to 75 words which you think the readers would enjoy.

Also, if you are working from a computer, and if it is either McIntosh or uses MS-DOS system, it would be helpful if you would send us both your print-out and your floppy disk (which we would be sure to return to you).

Oops.

Update: Uh oh, Jean Raber. We found more disks. I hope you’re ready to have your world rocked:

Animals Without Backbones is the  title of a book used for generations in college biology courses. A website on its new edition says that it was “considered a classic among biology textbooks since it was first published to great acclaim in 1938. It was the first biology textbook ever reviewed by Time and was also featured with illustrations in Life.” I don’t remember whether we used it in my college courses, but the name was familiar to me and returned to my consciousness when I read a paragraph in a book of conversations with Fr. Yves Congar that appeared in a work published late in his life under the title Entretiens d’automne. Read the rest of this entry »

Eight U.S. soldiers were killed in Taliban attacks in Afghanistan yesterday. The cost of the “war on terror” keeps rising, most devastatingly in the widespread loss of human life, but also in terms of defense spending and government debt, and lost opportunities in other areas. In the latest Commonweal, Ronald Osborn tallies the enormous cost of “our permanent war economy”: A Reckoning

Other highlights, free for all to read:

* The Editors on the Supreme Court and the competing ideologies that shape its decisions: Politics & the Court

* Matthew Boudway reviews the traveling art exhibit The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from Burgundy: Mourning Glory

* Patrick J. Ryan, SJ, reviews Paul Berman’s book The Flight of the Intellectuals: Fellow Travelers?

Subscribers can read our cover story by Richard Alleva — a study of The Catholic Hitchcock — as well as David Bentley Hart’s review of a new translation of Orlando Furioso and lots of other highlights. Subscribe now — in print or online — for access to everything on our Web site.

The cover article in the Boston Globe Magazine for this week, by Charles Pierce.

I have said before that I believe that the definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” are incoherent. It is not that they have no principles. It is that the principles they claim to have are often not principles at all. At the level of the specific things they claim to support (or oppose) the relationship to “liberal” or “conservative” is often contrived and arbitrary.

Here is an article written in the American Prospect about one such contrivance. The American Prospect has the phrase ”Liberal Intelligence” on its masthead. But this article is a critique of a developing conservative meme and is written by Brink Lindsey, a vice-president of the Cato Institute.

“America faces a new culture war,” declares Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in the opening sentence of his new book The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future. “This is not the culture war of the 1990s. This is not a fight over guns, abortions, religion, or gays. … Rather, it is a struggle between two competing visions of America’s future. In one, America will continue to be a unique and exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism.”

Well put?  Consistent? Coherent?  Lindsey notes:

But Brooks’ book isn’t about policy; it’s about ideology and how to engage in politics. And it is, I’m sorry to say, a thoroughly wrongheaded way to approach these questions. The attempt to turn economic policy disputes into a populist cultural crusade rests on deep-seated confusion about the nature of those disputes and how best to effect constructive policy change. Brooks’ key move is to cast our “free enterprise system” as an instance of American exceptionalism — in contrast to the social democracy of Europe and other advanced nations. Thus, economic policy becomes fodder for cultural politics: Supporters of free markets are defending a unique and precious American heritage, while members of the “30 percent coalition” have thrown in with the foreigners — worst of all, with effete, decadent Europeans.

When we fight what we think are the culture wars we often do not ask what the underlying principle we are defending really is. Nor whether a political position in its entirety can really be derived from it. Nor what the struggle for power (for that is what a culture war is) does to our arguments as we try to frame our positions to greatest advantage. The late political theorist Alan Bloom said in The Closing of the American Mind that one of the curses of the modern age, if not the curse, was what he called “moral indignation.” He of course was referring to what he thought of as the modern (or post modern) left. But the mud sticks to everyone, doesn’t it?

Here are excerpts from three sermons in which St. Augustine explored the richness of today’s Gospel:

With this Psalm we have exhorted you to practice mercy, for that is how you will ascend, and you know that it those who sing the song of steps who ascend. Remember this: do not choose to go down and not to go up; think rather about going up. The one who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho fell among robbers. If he hadn’t gone down, he wouldn’t have fallen among them. Adam went down and fell among thieves, for we all are Adam. A priest went by and ignored him; a Levite went by and ignored him: the Law could not heal him. A certain Samaritan went by, that is, Our Lord Jesus Christ. It was said to him, “Are we not right to say that you are a Samaritan and have a devil?” He did not say, “I am not a Samaritan,” but rather “I do not have a devil” (John 8:48-49). “Samaritan” means “Guardian,” and if he had said, “I am not a Samaritan,” he would have been saying, “I am not a guardian.” And who else would guard us? “A Samaritan went by and took pity on him,” as you know. He was lying wounded in the road because he had gone down. The Samaritan going by did not ignore us: he took care of us; he lifted us up onto his beast, in our flesh; he brought us to an inn, that is, to the Church; he entrusted us to the innkeeper, the Apostle; he gave him two denarii for our care, the love of God and the love of neighbor, for on these two commandments the entire Law and the prophets depend” (Mt 22:37-40)…. If we have gone down and been wounded, let us now go up and make progress so that we may finally arrive. (Augustine, Enar. in Ps 125,15)

The inn is the Church. It’s an inn now because as long as we live we are on the way; it will be a house from which we will never move when we have been healed and reach the Kingdom of heaven. Meanwhile, let us gladly be healed in the inn; let us not boast of being healed while we are still ill. (Sermon 131, 6)

Who is so distant and yet so near except the one who by his mercy became a neighbor to us? … The man who went down was an Israelite…. The priest who passed by was a neighbor by birth or race, but he left the man lying there. The Levite who went by was also a neighbor by birth or race, but he too ignored the man lying there. A Samaritan came by, distant by birth, but a neighbor by mercy, and did what you know from the parable. … The Lord is near, because he became a neighbor to us (Sermon 171, 1-2)

Though the liturgy of the Lord’s day preempts the feast of saints, today the Church also celebrates the feast of Saint Benedict.

I have several times referred to the wonderful book of the Australian Cistercian monk Michael Casey: Fully Human, Fully Divine. Casey has another work that I’ve been reading to commemorate today’s feast: Living in the Truth: Saint Benedict’s Teaching on Humility.

Here are some passages from the chapter “Humility as Truth:”

The process of divinization (as the ancient Church Fathers termed it) is beyond our control. The only means we have of furthering it is to cede control. This will happen only when we affirm with equal conviction that our spiritual giftedness is constantly under threat from an alternative government “that dwells in my members” (Rom 7:23). We cannot pass immediately to God because we are fragmented. At all stages we need God’s help. Humility is what inclines us to accept it.

One of the concomitants of humility is a sense of solidarity with other human beings, compassion, communion … Pride is the opposite of approachability; it denies every bond that links us with others. Not surprisingly, its power to disrupt community is considerable.

Humility does not mean denying gifts, it means making use of them in a spirit of thankfulness and celebration and avowing that what we have is something that has been freely given to us.

Humility is a kind of nakedness that allows us to be seen without the bulwarks of social conventions. We present ourselves to others transparently, in all our imperfection and vulnerability. We depend on their good will for acceptance and love, not on the success of our efforts at self-promotion.

Many will know the poetry of Carolyn Forché, much of it forged in the heat of awfulness witnessed and experienced in El Salvador, Guatemala, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. Here is the commencement speech she gave this past May at the University of Scranton, PA.  Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday afternoon, the jury announced their verdict in the trial of Bay Area Rail Transit (BART) police officer Johannes Mehserle.  Mehserle had been accused of second degree murder in the shooting death of Oscar Grant III, an unarmed African-American man who Mehserle was attempting to arrest following an altercation on a BART train on New Year’s Eve 2009.  The jury convicted Mehserle of a lesser offense, involuntary manslaughter.

I work in downtown Oakland, where many businesses were concerned that the announcement of the verdict would bring a repeat of the civil violence that accompanied the original shooting.  Shortly before the verdict was to be announced, we were asked to evacuate our office building.  I will confess I felt a great deal of ambivalence about this, but as a manager I felt responsible for the safety of our employees.  So I encouraged people to leave.

As I walked to the BART train entrance, the sidewalks were filled with office workers essentially fleeing the city.  I began to feel a sense of shame about this.  It was “white flight” on a concentrated and graphic scale.  I got in line to pass through the BART gates and even had my card out when I just stopped and got out of line.  “I can’t do this,” I thought.

I am probably the least spontaneous person you will ever meet.  The white board in my office has a “do list” ranging across three columns.  I don’t take a vacation without a carefully planned daily itinerary.  And yet there I was, making a last minute decision to remain in downtown Oakland at a time when many (white) commentators were convinced the place was about to explode in civil unrest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody relax. As widely expected, Rome is about to issue new rules for handling priests who sexually abuse minors, including those who view child pornography and abuse adults with mental disabilities, classifying such acts as grave canonical crimes. Oh, and the new document will include those who try to ordain women and women who try to get ordained.

Over to you, John Thavis:

The revisions were expected to extend the church law’s statute of limitations on accusations of sexual abuse, from 10 years after the alleged victim’s 18th birthday to 20 years. For several years, Vatican officials have been routinely granting exceptions to the 10-year statute of limitations.

The revisions also make it clear that use of child pornography would fall under the category of clerical sexual abuse of minors. In 2009, the Vatican determined that any instance of a priest downloading child pornography from the Internet would be a form of serious abuse that a bishop must report to the doctrinal congregation, which oversees cases of sexual abuse.

In addition, the revisions will make clear that abuse of mentally disabled adults will be considered equivalent to abuse of minors. In the law on the sexual abuse of minors, the term “minors” will include “persons of who suffer from permanent mental disability,” sources said.

And about those already self-excommunicated attempted ordainers of women and women who try to be ordained:

Pope John Paul’s 2001 document [adding sexual abuse to the list of delicta gravoria and giving the CDF jurisdiction over such crimes] distinguished between two types of “most grave crimes,” those committed in the celebration of the sacraments and those committed against morals. Among the sacramental crimes were such things as desecration of the Eucharist and violation of the seal of confession.

Under the new revisions, the “attempted ordination of women” will be listed among those crimes, as a serious violation of the sacrament of holy orders, informed sources said.

It will be interesting to see how the new norms and their accompanying documentation handle the issue of women’s ordination. Footnote? Bullet point? Boldfaced and highlighted? Whatever the case, why now? To fuel the suspicion that in the 1980s and ’90s the CDF was more interested in disciplining “liberal” doctrinal abusers than it was abuser priests?

(More from David Gibson here.)

I rediscovered this the other day on my computer. It was copied from a large book on Romanesque art in Spain.  I didn’t take note of the name of this martyr.  May it be of some comfort on difficult days! (Below is how it fit into context.)

The latest true crime novel from our friends the Aggrieved White Populists, via this WaPo story:

Mention the new “tan tax” in a major news outlet and cries of discrimination and reverse racism often follow.

The complaint surfaced on reader comment boards to blogs and news Web sites back in December, when it became clear that the levy — a 10 percent surcharge on the use of ultraviolet tanning beds — was likely to be included in the new health-care overhaul bill. Since then, it’s been repeated by conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Doc Thompson, a fill-in host for Glenn Beck who intoned in March, “I now know the pain of racism.”

And it hurts. So what will John Boehner and Sarah Palin do now?

We’ve all experienced the hassle of lost baggage on flights. Well not even world leaders are exempt … or at least their security details.

It seems that some Glock semi-automatic guns got lost in transit when Prime Minister Netanyahu visited the States recently.

Here’s the story from today’s Wall Street Journal:

Members of the prime minister’s security team flew on Israeli airline El Al Sunday into John F. Kennedy airport in New York, in advance of Mr. Netanyahu’s visit with President Barack Obama, according to officials with knowledge of the incident. After passing through customs, the Israeli security officers checked two hard carrying cases—one containing four .40-caliber Glock handguns and the other containing three Glocks—before boarding an American Airlines flight to Washington, the officials said.

The officials said Transportation Security Administration agents made sure the security officers had permits for the weapons and affixed stickers to the cases indicating clearance for the guns and their transport. The TSA agents then forwarded the cases to American Airlines baggage handlers to be loaded onto the plane, according to the officials.

The security officers arrived in Washington Sunday evening, but the case with the four guns didn’t, the officials said. American Airlines personnel found the case, with its Washington destination tag still on it, at a Los Angeles Airport terminal at around 4 p.m. on Tuesday in L.A., about two hours after Messrs. Obama and Netanyahu met at the White House to discuss U.S.-Israel relations.

The locked case—which wasn’t checked by the American personnel who found it in L.A. to see if it still had the weapons—was put on an American flight to Chicago and then to Washington, the officials said. When the security officers opened the case, they discovered that the four Glocks were missing, the officials said.

The denouement is predictable:

American spokesman Tim Wagner declined to comment on what he called “a potential security incident.” The TSA declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation. Officials at the Israeli Embassy in Washington deferred comment to U.S. law-enforcement agencies investigating the incident and to American. A spokesman for the Port Authority police declined to comment.

Any comments?

On Tuesday (July 6) the New York Times published a very long article on the tax-deductible contributions of Americans to settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. According to the story, some of these contributions meet IRS rules, while other do not. Most of them, however, are counter to U.S. policy opposing the settlements. Here is a discussion from a mostly Israeli perspective about the impact of these contributions.

Heat Wave! Anyone’s/Everyone’s best strategies for staying cool if you can’t actually escape to Northern Michigan.

On a post below I referred to the Valyermo Chroncile, published by St. Andrew’s Abbey. Another fine article in the current issue is “Why Sing Psalms?” by Dr. Paul Ford who teaches theology and liturgy at St. John’s Seminary, Camarillo. If I am not mistaken, Paul occasionally comments here at dotCommonweal.

The article makes clear the Church’s indebtedness to Israel’s prayers: the Psalms. But Paul also includes a quote from Ann and Barry Ulanov that particularly struck me:

Prayer is the place where we sort out our desires and where we ourselves are sorted out by the desires we choose to follow …

Prayer enlarges our desire until it receives God’s desire for us. In prayer, we grow big enough to house God’s desire in us which is the Holy Spirit.

And the following from C.S. Lewis:

We must lay before God what is in us, not what ought to be in us … It may well be that the desire can be laid before God only as a sin to be repented; but one of the best ways of learning this is to lay it before God.

Careful readers of Laurie Goodstein and David Halbfinger’s “Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal” (discussed here) will recall seeing Nicholas P. Cafardi quoted in the piece. Nick is a canon lawyer and a professor of civil law at Duquesne. He was also one of the first members of the U.S. bishops’ National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People. (Read his recent Commonweal article on the scandal in Ireland here.) I asked him what he made of the Times piece and the canonical issues it raises. Here’s his response:

Read the rest of this entry »

Though I only stayed once at St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, California, I feel close to the community there through several friends who are actively involved in the life of the monastery and through reading its  quarterly “Chronicle.”

In the most recent issue there is this reflection by a longtime visitor who is a Missionary of Charity. Here is a portion:

As I dragged my steps wearily past the refectory I could see the light on in the kitchen. At that time the kitchen windows were still clear, not opaque as now, and I could see the little tramp alone inside. He had just finished the mopping, and he stood there for a few moments, surveying the counters, the stoves, the work-tables. Everything was in order, all the utensils in their drawers, all the surfaces tidy. He stood still for another moment, then quietly, reverently genuflected, went slowly to the door, turned off the lights and left.

His action woke me with a start from my headful of thoughts, fantasies, fears and worries.

God is truly here, palpably present in this very place, in this very moment. Christ is truly present in the kitchen, breathingly alive here where I stand outside, as the quail make their little night noises beneath the junipers. To genuflect, to bend the knee, is to proclaim one’s faiththat God becomes flesh in Jesus, abides with us tenderly in the Eucharist. But my little hobo finds him truly present in the empty scullery, feels him heart-breakingly near amid the quiet clicking of the ovens as they cool. It doesn’t matter what tomorrow brings, the Holy One is here, now. That’s all I need. Like my fellow wanderer, I am at peace. Whatever tomorrow brings, wherever the road leads, God is there. All days and all roads are encompassed in this moment in this desert night. Emmanuel, God-with-us, is evoked, recognized and adored in the humblest gesture of the least of his brothers. I am the witness, and for a moment I understand, I see.

The Abbey’s website is: http://www.saintandrewsabbey.com

The rest of the reflection can be found by clicking the link: “Valyermo Chronicle.”

A conference of moral theologians from around the globe will be taking place in Trent, Italy in a couple of weeks. The organizers have really worked hard to bring people from Africa, Asia, India, and Central and South America, as well as Europe and North America: 567 participants from 72 countries are represented.

Here’s the website.

Somehow The New York Times resisted the temptation to use that headline for this story. But I can resist anything except temptation:

An explosion of smart-phone software has placed an arsenal of trivia at the fingertips of every corner-bar debater, with talking points on sports, politics and how to kill a zombie. Now it is taking on the least trivial topic of all: God.

Publishers of Christian material have begun producing iPhone applications that can cough up quick comebacks and rhetorical strategies for believers who want to fight back against what they view as a new strain of strident atheism. And a competing crop of apps is arming nonbelievers for battle.

“Say someone calls you narrow-minded because you think Jesus is the only way to God,” says one top-selling application introduced in March by a Christian publishing company. “Your first answer should be: ‘What do you mean by narrow-minded?’ ”

For religious skeptics, the “BibleThumper” iPhone app boasts that it “allows the atheist to keep the most funny and irrational Bible verses right in their pocket” to be “always ready to confront fundamentalist Christians or have a little fun among friends.”

The war of ideas between believers and nonbelievers has been part of the Western tradition at least since Socrates. For the most part, it has been waged by intellectual giants: Augustine, Spinoza, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche.

And of course, Commonweal. Is there an app for that?

I suppose you’ve seen today’s front-page story in the New York Times, “Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal.” Reporters Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger say that, despite the impression the Vatican has given, the CDF actually had responsibility for sex-abuse cases since 1922.

The Vatican took action only after bishops from English-speaking nations became so concerned about resistance from top church officials that the Vatican convened a secret meeting to hear their complaints — an extraordinary example of prelates from across the globe collectively pressing their superiors for reform, and one that had not previously been revealed.

And the policy that resulted from that meeting, in contrast to the way it has been described by the Vatican, was not a sharp break with past practices. It was mainly a belated reaffirmation of longstanding church procedures that at least one bishop attending the meeting argued had been ignored for too long, according to church documents and interviews.

The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm. But for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere.

My impression is that this story does a better job than previous ones in conveying the complexity of church bureaucracy, and the not-necessarily-sinister role that complexity played in allowing this scandal to grow. It’s damning, especially in its revision of the “Benedict is the guy who gets it” narrative, but it may also foster a more productive conversation about what sort of reform needs to happen. This characterization seems fair to me: “The Vatican under Benedict is still responding to abuse by priests at its own pace, and it is being besieged by an outside world that wants it to move faster and more decisively.” The “outside world” doesn’t necessarily know what the Vatican should do, but we want to see some action, now, that reflects the enormity of the problem. But we can’t really talk about reform if we don’t understand the system we have now. On that level I found the detail in this article helpful.

Less helpful, I thought, was the roundup of what else the CDF was focused on under Ratzinger. I’m not sure how much that helps us (or at least the average NYT reader) evaluate what the CDF could and should have been doing to deal with clergy sex abuse. It seems intended to paint a picture of cardinals wasting their time on silly Catholic nonsense (Marian apparitions! Annulments!); something we can boo and hiss.

Anyway, go on and read the story — lots of detail to digest and discuss. What do you think? Helpful, or just discouraging?

Here’s John Allen’s latest diagnosis of the events in Rome.

And here’s my question or concern: The dichotomy he seems to pose is between the Church “calling the shots,” on the one hand, and being a threatened minority on the other.

Isn’t there a middle ground? Isn’t it possible to be a respected voice in the public square without calling the shots? What would “equal respect” look like?

Update: It seems to me, I guess that some careful distinctions are in order. For example, the Supreme Court only grants cert–agrees to hear–a tiny percentage of the appeals it receives. It generally only acts if there’s an important question of legal interpretation involved. If this case doesn’t involve such a question, than it’s not discrimination not to hear it–even if one party is the Vatican.

Moreover, the Church–here and abroad–is actually tying to advance a moral and political agenda. A secular politician voting against that agenda because she isn’t convinced by the arguments doesn’t mean per se that she is prejudiced against the Church. So not winning a debate in the public square can’t be equated with discrimination. It may mean no deference, it certainly means not “calling the shots.” But it doesn’t necessarily mean discrimination.

Now, if the Belgian police went after the cardinal in a way they wouldn’t have gone after another person with an accusation of the same level of credibility WOULD be discrimination. The key question is how they treat similar cases.

The Gospel of today’s  Eucharist concisely narrates Christ’s calling of St. Matthew. I cannot read it without “seeing” Caravaggio’s magnificent depiction of the scene in Rome’s church of San Luigi dei Francesi. When teaching, I encourage my students not to restrict theology to the prevalent conceptual mode, but to see it in painting and hear it in music.

I would be interested in learning what different viewers “see.”

I think this piece from the Daily Show captured some of the nostalgia for the Cold War experienced by some people when the news of the Russian spy ring broke:

A lighter note. . . for all of you who are inundated with Pottery Barn catalogues, here is a blog that imagines the lives of people who live in those imaginary rooms!

HT:  Daily Dish