The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called today for the Senate to ratify the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, during its lame-duck session. Since the story is being ignored by news organizations (except for Catholic news services such as Zenit and CNS) we’ll call your attention to it here.

Writing to each senator in behalf of the  bishops’ conference, Bishop Howard Hubbard of Albany framed the issue in terms of the sanctity of human life. Hubbard, who heads the bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, wrote:

Both the Holy See and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops support the New START Treaty because it is a modest step toward a world with greater respect for human life.

Ratification of the New START Treaty is critical because verification ensures transparency and transparency builds trust. The earlier verification and monitoring requirements expired one year ago. Without a new treaty there is no verification requirement in place, a disturbing and potentially dangerous situation our nation has not faced in decades.

The Church’s concern for nuclear weapons grows out of its commitment to the sanctity of human life.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the conference, added his voice to a USCCB statement on the letter to the Senate.

Statements such as this are often overlooked in the news media, which (along with not a few bishops) prefer to emphasize the bishops’ opposition to abortion and gay rights and not their stands on social justice or war and peace. This statement  probably will be overlooked, too, although it’s quite newsworthy when leaders of the nation’s largest religious denomination speak out at a crucial point in a major policy debate such as this, seeking to cast the issue in moral terms. As the bishops portray it, President Obama is trying to get Republicans to pass a treaty that raises respect for human life and “makes our nation and world safer by reducing nuclear weapons in a verifiable way.”

There are  signs that some Republicans may be willing to vote for the treaty, which needs 67 votes to be ratified in the Senate. But the debate is far from over. If the bishops really want to bring the considerable body of church teaching on reducing nuclear weaponry to bear in this debate, they’ll need to go further than issuing a statement and talk about it in their individual dioceses.

Wiki Update 12/1/10: 2:50 pm: MJ Rosenberg on the Saudis, Israel and Iran: ”The revelation that the Saudi royals agree with the Israeli position adds exactly nothing to the case for war. The House of Saud? Whom exactly do they speak for? Not even the Saudi people, let alone anybody else in the Muslim world. In fact, the Saudi endorsement could be the kiss of death for Netanyahu’s plans.”  http://politicalcorrection.org/fpmatters/201012010009

Wikileaks Quote of the Day (Wednesday):

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Paris, February 8, 2010: “… the Saudis always want to ‘fight the Iranians to the last American…’ “  HT: Juan Cole http://www.juancole.com/2010/12/gates-saudis-want-to-fight-iran-to-the-last-american.html

Stephen Walt who comments at Foreign Policy and is a “realist” in these matters has an even-handed and amusing take on the wikileaks. Some of the highlights, but worth reading the whole thing, especially those who are really excited about the leaks.

“It is still striking how many pies the United States has its fingers in, and how others keep expecting us to supply the ingredients, do most of the baking, and clean up the kitchen afterwards.”

More: Read the rest of this entry »

There is no church tradition that cannot be saved, or at least a brave Pittsburgh priest who is resurrecting the “Printers Mass” hopes that is the case. Via The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, one of two dailies left (barely) in the Steel City, which once had seven:

At parishioners’ suggestion, Father [Carmen] D’Amico is going to offer a pre-dawn liturgy at 2:30 a.m. Sunday to see what kind of crowd the special service draws. The church, at Centre Avenue and Washington Place, stands in front of the new Consol Energy Center.

First celebrated on April 30, 1905, the printers’ Mass attracted employees from seven daily newspapers who opened the church doors and lit the candles. Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph workers wanted to take Communion after finishing their shift at 2 a.m. Pittsburgh Press truck drivers often served on the altar, then began delivering papers at 3 a.m.

With two main daily papers left today, there are far fewer printers, but Father D’Amico hopes to attract local college students who are up late and looking for a quiet alternative to the raucous night life on weekends in some parts of the city. As the administrator of three parishes — St. Mary of Mercy, Downtown; St. Benedict the Moor, Hill District; and Epiphany — the priest already ministers to many people.

But he’s eager to help a few more, so fliers about the liturgy have been distributed to local colleges.

If enough students turn up, the weekly printers’ Mass may be revived. The priest also hopes young people will be interested in organizing an informal coffeehouse before the Mass.

Get ‘em to read newspapers while they’re at it, says I.

H/T to the indispensable RNS daily roundup

I don’t know whether it’s a cause or a symptom of the demise of printed newspapers in general, but either way, newspaper opinion columnists are slowly losing the authority, respect, and general prominence they once enjoyed. This is partly because the Internet has made informed and incisive commentary much easier to come by. (It has also made virulent partisan trollery easier to come by, but that’s not a threat to the old patterns; it’s more of an amplification.) That doesn’t mean editors and gatekeepers are obsolete — you need to find the good stuff somewhere — but it does mean opinion-page editors have to be more demanding and more competent than your average civilian with an interest and a blog, because the Internet has also made laziness, error, and inconsistency much easier to expose. My impression is that many young people can’t see the point of reading, say, George Will on climate change when they can easily access the opinions of someone who knows much more about it. And when it emerges that someone like George Will has misrepresented scientific findings to support his opinion — as was the case earlier this year — and when it further becomes clear that dishonesty and error will go unacknowledged and uncorrected so long as it can be chalked up to “opinion” — then you can hardly be surprised that young readers approach “established” pundits with skepticism and mistrust.

Alex Pareene, a blogger for Salon, holds pundits to much higher standards of accuracy and insight than their editors usually do. This is another danger of the Internet: it keeps records. And people like Pareene have long memories. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s our own David Gibson on the Pope, condoms, and Catholic moral reasoning.

Condomonium = Pandemonium about Condoms

Amy Davidson of the New Yorker is good on the latest Wikileaks disclosures.

My own nominee for startling fact: Saudi leaders urging an American military attack on Iran.

Dark. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is “dark,” the “darkest” of the Harry Potter movies. Reviewers used the adjectives to describe but also to praise. That is not unusual. I might not have even noticed except for wondering whether certain youngsters in my circle would be seeing the movie and what its impact might be. (To be sure, one certain youngster has not only read the book but could relate it scene by scene.) Dark means serious. Dark means shadows. Dark means not evading the sad and inexplicable complexities of life—or even worse. Dark is grownup.

I was mulling this when I read a short piece in the November 25 New York Review of Books about a previously unpublished confessional poem that Ted Hughes wrote but never finished before his death in 1998. It dwells on whom he was sleeping with, and where, on the weekend when his estranged wife Sylvia Plath committed suicide. Don’t count me among those fascinated by either Plath’s death or Hughes’s infidelities, any more than among those obsessed with whether the Rosenbergs were guilty. Those are special tastes.

But Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s current poet laureate, did get my attention by praising the poem as “the darkest poem that he wrote about the death of Sylvia Plath,” one that “seems to touch a deeper, darker place than poem he’s ever written.”

Actually the NYRB article, by Mark Ford, leaves a rather different impression, of a man’s desperate effort to exorcise the memory of squalid, shameful behavior. Even before I read enough to entertain that conclusion, however, I was wondering how shopworn our praise of darkness has become, or how much it tells us about the conventional thinking of a post-Christian culture.

Profound = deeper = darker. I understand the subterranean metaphor. But could we turn it around? What of the image of light? Though darkness is inescapable in our faith, could we write, even if somewhat paradoxically, that a poem touched a deeper, brighter place than any before it?

“Let us then throw off the works of darkness,” Paul told us this morning, “and put on the armor of light.” I am sure that Harry Potter will. Maybe some reviewers will take up the challenge.

There are, no doubt, mixed views among us about the wikileaks of U.S. diplomatic correspondence.  I’d be interested in hearing the pros and cons. A quick look at what the NYTimes has posted seems to confirm much that rattles around in the papers anyway. The one new thing I learned was that “apparently” North Korea has supplied Iran with medium-range missiles.

While waiting to hear the pros and cons, I chuckle over the Times toing and froing about why and how they published what they published–by no means all of the material.

Here is their justificatory paragraph: “Of course, most of these documents will be made public regardless of what The Times decides. WikiLeaks has shared the entire archive of secret cables with at least four European publications, has promised country-specific documents to many other news outlets, and has said it plans to ultimately post its trove online. For The Times to ignore this material would be to deny its own readers the careful reporting and thoughtful analysis they expect when this kind of information becomes public.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29editornote.html?hp

And the front page story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html?hp

The discussion regarding Pope Benedict’s new book, Light of the World, will doubtless be engaged at many levels over the coming weeks. In the up-till-now most cited passsage, the part that I found particularly typical of the Pope was this:

this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization,  a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants.

Reading it, one of the thoughts that struck me was that moral theology needs to be intimately connected with spirituality: that living the Christian life depends on an ongoing intimate relation with Christ. But this is a never-completed journey in spiritual maturation — at least while we are “in statu viatoris.”

I was further reminded of this when I re-read today  a chapter from Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth. In chapter five, reflecting upon “The Lord’s Prayer,” Benedict writes:

We are not ready-made children of God from the start, but we are meant to become so increasingly  by growing more and more deeply in communion with Jesus. Our sonship turns out to be identical with following Christ. To name God as Father thus becomes a summons to us: to live as a “child,” as a son or daughter.

Alan Jacobs, always worth reading, writes of a new book on the 18th Century that seems to paint it so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insist on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only:

Religion, he says, had become more purely moralistic than it had been in the Reformation era, and otherwise was primarily devoted to meeting the needs of the self. Deism was becoming more commonplace. Belief in the essential goodness of humanity became more and more prevalent. English men and women of the time were sure they had a stronger social conscience than their ancestors — more care for children and for the poor — and felt that progress was certain. Of course, the age’s confidence in its own virtue may not have been fully warranted: “Tears for the exploited, the unfortunate and the afflicted flowed freely, but sympathy cost little, and was only occasionally translated into action.”

Certainly there were major changes in child-rearing from the practices of previous ages: “Many ladies abandoned the wet nurse and experimented with breast-feeding; swaddling disappeared, partly in response to mothers’ new-found desire to fondle, dandle and dress their infants. … Though groups such as the Wesleyans kept faith with flogging, enlightened parents laid off the rod, trying reason, coaxing and kindness instead. Infants were hugged and petted more.” The spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child model of parental discipline was increasingly seen as benighted and cruel. But, Porter comments, “In polite society, greater attention towards the young perhaps led to over-protective parental anxiety” — the 18th-century version of “helicopter parents”.

There were few atheists, but also not so many orthodox Christians. “Many Georgians rarely went through a church porch between their christening and burial. Yet practically everyone, in his own fashion, had faith. Much of it was a fig leaf of Christianity covering a body of inherited magic and superstition, little more than Nature worship (the polite, doctrinally correct form of this was known as ‘natural religion’). But everyone had his own vision of a Creator, of a ‘place’ in Heaven, and convictions of Good and Evil, reward and punishment.” One might say that the typical 18th-century Englishman was “spiritual but not religious”.

Is any of this sounding familiar yet?

I thrill to such parallels, and am fortunate enough not to have the historical chops to knock holes in them.

If it was a Republican prayer-sayer, then you might have had the best performance, as they’ve had more practice:

“[T]here are few other behaviors that so neatly cleave the body politic in half than the habit of saying grace before meals — and there are few other behaviors that so clearly telegraph your partisan preference.

According to David Campbell and Robert Putnam, authors of “American Grace: How Religion Divides And Unites Us,” a sweeping new survey of faith in the United States, 44 percent of Americans report saying grace or a similar blessing almost every day before eating while 46 percent almost never say it. There is hardly any middle ground on this issue, and, they write, “few things about a person correspond as tightly to partisanship as saying grace.”

“The more often you say grace, the more likely you are to find a home in the Republican Party, and the less likely you are to identify with the Democrats,” Campbell and Putnam write.

As Campbell explained to me, it’s not that saying grace makes you a Republican, or not saying grace makes you a Democrat. It’s that abortion and homosexuality, the hot-button issues that drive so much political coverage and religious behavior, are also the same issues have driven Americans into two separate camps on personal devotions like saying grace before meals.

On the other hand, if it was NASCAR Republican, you may have had this keeper:

If it’s Thanksgiving, it’s Meet the Les.

In case you missed it, yesterday we posted “Boycotting the Poor Box,” our editorial for the December 3 issue. Here’s how it starts:

In mid-November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops discussed a report detailing an extensive “review and renewal” of its domestic-poverty program, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. The reevaluation came in response to complaints that the CCHD’s grant recipients were involved in efforts that contradict Catholic teaching.

In 1969, the bishops established the Campaign to help the poor “develop economic strength and political power,” and to educate Catholics about the causes of poverty. Since its founding, the program has disbursed about $290 million—all with the approval of grantees’ local bishops. Grants are funded by an annual parish collection before Thanksgiving. For years, the Campaign has faced influential critics who questioned where the grant money ended up. Some of them lobbied for an end to the Campaign, and urged Catholics to boycott the annual collection. In recent years, as many as ten bishops have refused to allow the collection to take place in their dioceses.

As political and ecclesial polarization has intensified over the past decade, so has criticism of this crucial social-justice program. Last summer, the protest group Reform CCHD Now sent a report to all U.S. dioceses alleging that about fifty of the 2009 grantees had ties to organizations that promote abortion, gay marriage, or—strangely—socialism. In response, CCHD conducted a review that found 6 of the 270 recipients had violated its grant requirements, which stipulate that funding be withheld from organizations that act in conflict with Catholic teaching or engage in partisan political efforts. The Campaign apologized for the errors, withdrew funding from the offending groups, and published a fifteen-page report presenting reforms designed to safeguard the Catholic character of the program.

Of course, some critics won’t ever be satisfied. And, given the amount of disinformation floating around, that’s not surprising. On last week’s The World Over, for example, Raymond Arroyo peddled a few half-truths about CCHD. At the end of the following clip, he offers his own solution to the domestic-poverty crisis. Wait for it:

If only you could eat a Catholic education.

Alerted by the review in Commonweal and intrigued by the title, I purchased Wendell Berry’s volume of essays: Imagination in Place.

I had only read occasional essays by Berry and did not really know his work. But this volume strongly struck me by its deep sense of the “sacramentality” of the particular, both places and persons. In this I was happily reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins stress upon “haecceitas:” the “thisness” of things.

One of the essays, “The Uses of Adversity,” is a splendid reading of two plays of Shakespeare, As You Like It and, especially, King Lear. It drove me to re-read Lear, as a “relief” from grading quizzes. Talk about the uses of adversity!

But the essays are also a rich tribute to friends and fellow poets, like Hayden Carruth, James Baker Hall, and Wallace Stegner. In his essay on Stegner, he quotes from one of his favorite Stegner essays, : “Letter, Much Too Late.” Berry writes:

It is a letter to his mother, dead fifty-five years, in which he tells her how much he owes her and how much he loves her. It is a settling of an account, an act of justice. But for anyone who knew Wallace Stegner, it is more than that. He was, as he knew and said himself, a reticent man; it was hard for him to say straight out, what he felt. But in this essay — without, I think, the least diminution of dignity — the reticence is suddenly swept away, and reading the essay is like overhearing a conversation between two souls. For death too is swept away. “Death,” he says, “is a convention, a certification to the end of pain … not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.” Death is brushed aside like a hanging cobweb, and the voice of the essay continues out of time, speaking of memories and regrets, calling up visions, telling his mother, with the utmost candor of gratitude and affection, all that he has come to understand, until finally he can say to her as she was, and is: “Any minute now I will hear you singing.”

The utmost candor of gratitude and affection.

When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope, I read Salt of the Earth, one of the previous volumes of interviews with Peter Seewald, and was very struck by what Ratzinger, circa 1996, had to say about contraception.  You can find it on pp. 200-203 of the English-language edition published by Ignatius Press.  Perhaps one of the more than a hundred commenters on the previous post on Benedict’s statement on condoms in the new Seewald volume of interviews has already pointed this out.  If so, it’s worth bringing to the fore anyway.  

In Salt of the Earth, Ratzinger was sympathetic to the difficulty that many Catholics had in understanding the church’s teaching on contraception.  “We ought to look less at the casuistry of individual cases,” he said, “and more at the major objectives that the Church has in mind.”

He described those objectives as three.  “The first and most fundamental is to insist on the value of the child in society. . . . to recover the original, true view that the child, the new human being, is a blessing,”  in contrast to a contemporary view of children as threats and burdens.

The second was to oppose a separation of sexuality from procreation, which he illustrated with a reference to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World  “in which sexuality is something completely detached from procreation.”   Children become products, quite apart from the relationships of men and women.

The third was the concern that humans not imagine they can “resolve great moral problems simply with techniques, with chemistry” rather than by how we live. 

When I read this back in 2005, I was struck by the fact that none of these concerns bears on what for many Catholics was the crucial difficulty of Humana Vitae, its insistence that each and every act of sexual intercourse had to be open to the transmission of life or at least not deliberately prevent it, and that to do the latter would be seriously sinful.  Openness to children as blessings,  refusal of a drastic separation of sexuality from procreation, recognition that moral problems cannot be resolved by technique or technological manipulation — all of these “major objectives” are compatible with using contraception under some circumstances and to some extent.  Certainly they do not imply the never-ever of Humanae Vitae.

My impression that Ratzinger had a more flexible view on the matter than did the encyclical (or John Paul II) was confirmed by the closing exchange between Seewald and the then-head of the Holy office;

Seewald:  “The question remains whether you can reproach someone, say a couple who already have several children, for not having a positive attitude toward children.”

Ratzinger: “No, of course not, and that shouldn’t happen either.”

Seewald: “But must these people neverthless have the idea that they are living in some sort of sin if they . . . ”

Ratzinger: “I would say that those are questions that ought to be discussed with one’s spiritual director, with one’s priest, because they can’t be projected into the abstract.”   

Is it possible that Benedict’s statement on condoms now getting such publicity is rooted in convictions that the pope has long had, convictions that look more to the general standards and orientation by which people and societies live and less to absolute principles regarding individual acts?

Christians who oppose the modern welfare state and, more generally, ”handouts”  sometimes cite St. Paul’s instruction to the Thessalonians, “If anyone will not work, let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). In a recent thread, a commenter misquoted this verse, revealingly, as “He who does not work shall not eat” (emphasis mine). This is not just a difference of tense. The “will” in the Revised Standard Version’s translation is not an auxiliary; it is a separate verb, ”to be willing” — in St. Jerome’s Latin, vult (“si quis non vult operari nec manducet”). 

So Paul’s point here is only about the willingness to work. If someone wants to work but doesn’t because he can’t — because he is disabled, perhaps, or because he can’t find a job — then Paul’s rule does not instruct us to let him starve. In fact, Paul’s rule comes pretty close to the Marxist rule for the socialist state: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” (Marx thought that once the intermediary socialist state had given way to full-blown communism, such a rule would no longer be necessary: technology, properly employed, would ensure such material abundance that no one would have to work much and everyone would have more than he needed.)

Notice that Paul’s instruction does not entail the rule, “Let a man eat only as much as his work allows him to pay for.” We know that the early Christian communities pooled their resources, that rich Christians paid for the needs of poor Christians. So a fully articulated version of Paul’s rule might look something like this: “As long as someone is willing to work — no matter whether he does work and no matter how much money he gets for his work — let him eat, and have enough to eat.”

By “work” Paul, a tentmaker, probably meant “labor.” It’s not clear that he would have regarded what a modern financier does as work in the sense he intended. And notice that Paul’s rule has nothing to do with what someone owns. To the idle, able-bodied heir to a fortune, Paul might say: “It doesn’t matter what you can afford. Get to work, real work, or you don’t eat either.” By commending work, Paul is not also defending the prerogatives of private property.

So where does that leave us? Obviously not with an early-apostolic warrant for the modern welfare state. Paul could not warrant, or condemn, what he did not anticipate. But I do think we can safely extrapolate a principle that should disturb Christians who support capitalism. Paul is rebuking those who are content to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labor. He was thinking of loafers and malingerers, but the overpaid CEO also answers to this description.

It’s good to know the newly minted president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops isn’t boycotting a newspaper whose coverage he finds wanting. In today’s New York Times, Laurie Goodstein has an interesting interview with Archbishop Dolan.

Of course, Goodstein had to ask about the condom business, and Dolan said, “You get the impression that the Holy See or the pope is like Congress and every once in a while says, ‘Oh, let’s change this law.’ We can’t.” No surprise there.

And Dolan’s assessment of the health-care-reform law isn’t quite so dour as his predecessor’s [PDF]:  ”Archbishop Dolan said the bishops ought to be ‘great cheerleaders’ for the expansion of health care coverage, and could possibly support a ‘refinement’ of the bill. He said he did not yet know whether the bishops would want to ‘overthrow’ the legislation completely.”

But, according to Goodstein, Dolan was most energetic when it came to the issue of attrition.

Archbishop Dolan leaned forward as he cited recent studies finding that only half of young Catholics marry in the church, and that weekly Mass attendance has dropped to about 35 percent of Catholics from a peak of 78 percent in the 1960s.

He said he was chagrined when he saw a long line of people last Sunday on Fifth Avenue. “I’m talking two blocks, a line of people waiting to get into …” he said, pausing for suspense. “Abercrombie and Fitch. And I thought, wow, there’s no line of people waiting to get into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the treasure in there is of eternal value. What can I do to help our great people appreciate that tradition?”

Sounds like he’s been reading Peter Steinfels in Commonweal.

Speaking of, indulge me while I post my favorite moment from the archbishop’s press conference following his election as president of the USCCB. Not to worry, we’re launching a fundraising effort to support our hitchhiking budget to and from USCCB meetings.

I like taking trains to get places. I like the train ride in general — sometimes a few hours of hopefully quiet sitting-still time is just what I need — and I also vastly prefer it to all of the other available options for travel (car, bus, and most of all plane). I will not be visiting an airport this holiday season, thank heaven, but part of me wonders whether the TSA’s new screening procedures are a government plot to drum up public support for high-speed rail. If so, please count me in.

I live in Manhattan, which means, when I take a train anywhere else, I have to start out from either the lovely Grand Central or the dingy and depressing Penn Station. Each time I set out with my rolling suitcase, I have to stop and recall which station I’m bound for, and when I realize it’s not Grand Central my heart sinks a bit. Grand Central is not as easy for me to get to, but I simply hate going to Penn Station. It’s dark, dirty, crowded, confusing. Whenever I’m there I can only think about getting out. And even that can be uniquely difficult, because of the way the express and local subways are split onto separate platforms there. (New Yorkers, can I get an amen?) A few weeks ago I took the train home from Boston, and the last leg of my trip — which involved waiting far too long for the erratic C train on a narrow platform filled with sports fans coming from Madison Square Garden — felt at least as long as the four-hour ride that preceded it.

It was not ever thus, of course. My office wall is decorated with an old-timey photo of the original Penn Station, reputed to have been one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. The closest I’ve ever gotten to really seeing it in all its three-dimensional glory is the studio-stage replica in Vincente Minelli’s wartime romance The Clock. If you are among those nostalgic for “the old Penn Station” — whether or not you ever saw it for yourself — or if you want to feel good about not having to visit the present incarnation, check out Choire Sicha and Tom Scocca’s wonderful essay in today’s New York Times, Miracle on 33rd Street. It’s a tongue-in-cheek paean to the current (and soon-to-be-former) Penn Station. I most appreciated this paragraph, which exactly captures my impression of the New York landmark I so hate to visit:

Because everyone agrees that Penn Station is a failure, nobody has ever tried to make it anything other than baffling to the outsider. That’s the famous welcoming spirit of New York! The Long Island Rail Road has no interest in telling anyone how to get to New Jersey Transit, and vice versa. No one is in charge of knitting it all together, or no one bothers to. It’s bad bureaucracy and bad faith, not bad design — though at least our bureaucracies reflect our metro-area standoffishness.

The subway stations in NYC are designed with a similar “welcoming spirit” — once you know where you’re going, you can get there, but if you don’t know, God help you, because the signs probably won’t. I will admit that the signs and information systems are getting better — which is good, because the weekend construction-related changes seem to be getting worse. But enough complaining. As Sicha and Scocca point out, the best thing about Penn Station is that it has many exits, and if you can find one you’ll be standing in the middle of New York City, very likely with a splendid view of the Empire State Building or ready-for-Christmas Macy’s, or perhaps the Post Office building (soon to house the new Penn Station). It’s enough to make you forget just how you got there.

Winner gets a free year’s subscription to Commonweal (via David Gibson) for a deserving, or undeserving, Catholic (or member of an ecclesial community) not themselves.

Which world renowned author and evangelist said this?

“I’ve collected 370 different hot sauces traveling the globe. The hotter the better. I don’t just believe in hell…I eat it.”

A) Pope Benedict XVI, speaking to German journalist Peter Seewald in a new book, “Light of the World,” officially released today, Tuesday.

B) Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., speaking in Twitter in a tweet posted last Thursday.

C) Other. Guesses welcome. (Tip: von Balthasar is incorrect, given his views on hell.)

First correct answer wins. No Googling allowed. Native German speakers not eligible. Check back in for results. H/T: RNS

The comment of the day comes from our own unagidon, who offers the following tutorial in answer to the vexing question, “Why do hospitals charge so much for an aspirin?”

The reason that hospitals charge so much for an aspirin is a rather simple one, and if I tell you why they do it might help me make my point better. (I will talk about hospitals here, but what I say will more or less apply to doctors and other kinds of medical professionals.)

If we categorize them in terms of how and how much they pay, there are five kinds of people that go to hospital. These are Medicare patients, commercial insurance patients, self-pay patients, Medicaid patients, and indigent patients.

Like any business, hospitals have a cost structure, which is the sum total of how much it costs them to perform whatever it is that they perform. Any good enterprise will include in their cost structure a “profit”. (It’s a profit if it is a for profit concern and it is a surplus if it is a not for profit concern. But it’s the same thing.)

To cover its costs, any concern will have what is called a “cost to charge ratio”, which is simply what it charges against its own costs. So for example if some concern wanted to break even, it would charge precisely what its costs are. That is, for every dollar it pays out for salaries or equipment or whatever, it would charge a dollar. In this case, the cost to charge ratio would be 1:1.

Read the rest of this entry »

I mentioned in another thread the advantages of reading a NT book straight through, at a single sitting, in order to appreciate it as a literary whole, something not possible when we read or hear them only in snippets. The practice also lends itself to another purpose. I used to assign my students a reading of the First Epistle to the Thessalonians and urged them to read it as if they knew nothing about the author or authors or about those to whom it was addressed nor anything about subsequent history. I wanted them to tell me what they could learn about the authors and the community. It was a way of getting them to recognize and to understand what this little letter tells about the genesis of the Christian Church. (I once used the idea at an ecumenical weekend retreat where I had them read and discuss successively 1 Thessalonians, Ephesians, and 1 Timothy. The conversations were very illuminating.)

Below are some notes that I drew up on 1 Thessalonians and its implicit ecclesiology. Read the rest of this entry »

An official communiqué from the Swiss headquarters of the Society of St. Pius X states that its Superior General. Bishop Bernard Fellay, learned from the press that Bishop Richard Williamson, ten days before he is to go on trial in Germany for denying the Holocaust, has fired his attorney and hired in his place a lawyer who is openly linked to the neo-Nazi movement in Germany. Fellay has issued a formal order to Williamson “to reverse this decision and not to allow himself to be used by political theses completely foreign to his mission as a Catholic bishop in the service of the Society of St. Pius X. Disobedience to this order will result in Bishop Williamson’s exclusion from the Society of St. Pius X.”

Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, thinks bribing Israel is a bad idea.

“Here’s the offer that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is reported to have put on the table recently: The United States will provide a package of advanced weaponry and military assistance to Israel totaling several billion dollars, all in return for an Israeli commitment to freeze settlement construction for just three months, excluding construction in Jerusalem. During this period, the United States hopes Israel and the Palestinian Authority will negotiate an agreement on the final borders of a future Palestinian state. The Israeli cabinet is weighing the offer, having demanded a letter from Washington confirming the terms.

“This is a very bad idea. And while Washington will almost certainly come to regret bribing Israel, Israel may regret receiving such a bribe even more.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/19/AR2010111903000.html

And Netanyahu has this to say: “There is absolutely no agreement that within 90 days we would reach an agreement on the issue of borders,” Netanyahu said. “No request of the sort has been made and neither any commitment.”

“We will not hold separate conversations regarding the borders, but will rather discuss all the significant issues,” he added. “We plan to begin serious debate on all matters.” http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/netanyahu-u-s-settlement-freeze-offer-is-good-for-israel-1.325945

So what is the U.S. getting for this deal?

And then this: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has asked the US to release Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard as part of a series of gestures made to Israel in an effort to restart peace talks with the Palestinians, sources with knowledge of the talks told The Jerusalem Post over the weekend. http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=196093

And from our congressional lackies: “A congressional letter to President Obama urging clemency for Jonathan Pollard garnered 39 signatures, all Democrats.

“In comments at a press conference late Thursday, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said he initiated the letter, written in coordination with a broad array of Jewish groups, mostly out of humanitarian concerns for the convicted Israeli spy [Pollard], imprisoned 25 years, but also as a spur in the peace process.” http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=195988

Finally, blame Obama: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45471.html

Quotations from a new volume from Benedict XVI seem to reveal a shift in the direction of papal teaching on the use of condoms to limit the spread of HIV/AIDS. It’s hard to say, of course, without more context. But reporter Celine le Prioux lifts this line:

“In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection, it can nevertheless be a first step on the way to another, more humane sexuality.”

Curiously, the case the Pope uses is that of male prostitutes.

“There may be justified individual cases, for example when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be … a first bit of responsibility, to re-develop the understanding that not everything is permitted and that one may not do everything one wishes,”

Male prostitutes, of course, overwhelmingly service male clients. Perhaps the Pope sought to use an example that wasn’t complicated by the specter of contraception, as in the case of serodiscordant married couples, for which, seemingly, condom use to halt AIDS should long ago have been trumpeted as a classic case of double effect.

Whatever his reasoning, if indeed the context bears out that the pope has spoken of the use of condoms in some circumstances as “justified,” that’s a great step forward, literally life-saving.

HT: Alan Revering

There’s an interesting, if occasionally heady, piece on the website of the British journal Prospect: a feature on Aladair MacIntyre and a recent lecture he gave on globalization and capitalism at Cambridge University.

When it comes to the money-men, MacIntyre applies his metaphysical approach with unrelenting rigour. There are skills, he argues, like being a good burglar, that are inimical to the virtues. Those engaged in finance—particularly money trading—are, in MacIntyre’s view, like good burglars. Teaching ethics to traders is as pointless as reading Aristotle to your dog. The better the trader, the more morally despicable.

The article notes that MacIntyre is an important influence on Phillip Blond, the “Red Tory” adviser to Britain’s PM David Cameron.

Read the piece here.

It is worth reflecting on the contrast between our two New Testament readings today. The passage from St. Luke’s Gospel (Lk 23:35-43) describes a moment in the passion of Christ–but let us remember that “passion” means “suffering,” real, horrible suffering. Jesus was one of three men condemned to the worst form of torturing execution then known, one reserved for the worst of criminals or for people who represented a social or political threat. The focus of our story, of course, is on Jesus, the object of the mockery of the leaders of the people and of the soldiers, whose particular form of contempt was the sarcastic title they attached over his head: “This is the King of the Jews.” Perhaps our familiarity with the scene and the moment hides its horrific character from us.

But then, in our second reading (Col 1:12-20), we heard said of this same Jesus the extraordinary claims that he was an agent of creation, the one in whom, by whom, for whom all things were made; the one in whom all things hold together, and then that he not only is the first-born of all creation, but also the first-born from among the dead, in whom God’s fullness dwells, the agent of universal reconciliation, achieving peace through the blood of his cross.

Fifty years ago, C.F.D. Moule already expressed the wonder we ought to feel in moving from one text to the other.

It is worth the effort to recall that these stupendous words apply (if they are indeed St. Paul’s own) to one who, only some thirty years before (and possibly less), had been crucified. The identification of that historical person–the Nazarene who had been ignominiously executed–with the subject of this description is staggering, and fairly cries out for some explanation (C.F.D. Moule, Colossians and Philemon, 58-59).

The brief Epistle to the Colossians deserves to be read at a single sitting–it won’t take more than ten minutes to go through it. This is an exercise I used to recommend to my students whom I urged to read an epistle as if they had never read it before and knew nothing about Jesus or Paul or about Christianity, in other words, to let it strike them freshly.

Word of the Day for Saturday, November 20, 2010

weal \WEEL\, noun :

1. Well-being, prosperity, or happiness.
2. A raised mark on the surface of the body produced by a blow.
3. (Obsolete:) the state or body politic.

Our difference of opinion amounts to this, that you make the mainspring self-interest, while I suppose that interest in the common weal is bound to exist in every man of a certain age of achievement.
– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

The Prime Minister’s recent call on physicians to be more mindful about the health needs of the poor may have come from a genuine concern for the weal of the large swathes of people who fall under that head.
– Nerun Yakub, “Calling on physicians to perform better,” Financial Express, October, 2010

Weal shares the Old English root wela with welfare and a host of other English words. The ultimate source in Proto-Indo-European is wel- , which is also the ancestor of words related to will .
Dictionary.com <doctor@dictionary.com>

To adapt from Lloyd Bentsen: We remember Jack Kennedy, and Sarah Palin is no Jack Kennedy. And she doesn’t mind. In her new book she takes issue with John F. Kennedy’s famed 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.  JFK said:

I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic.

I do not speak for my church on public matters; and the church does not speak for me. Whatever issue may come before me as President, if I should be elected, on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject, I will make my decision in accordance with these views — in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

According to NPR:

Palin writes that when she was growing up, she was taught that JFK’s speech reconciled religion and public service without compromising either. But since she’s revisited the speech as an adult, she says, she’s realized that Kennedy “essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are.”

She praises Mitt Romney, a Mormon, for not “doing a JFK” during his campaign for the 2008 GOP nomination. “Where Kennedy seemed to want to run away from religion, Mitt Romney forthrightly embraced it,” she writes. She attributes the gulf not just to the difference between the men, but to the distance the country has come since 1960. Now, she says, America is “reawakening to the gift of our religious heritage.”

You can read the full text of JFK’s speech here. Did he make a case that  religion is so private as to be irrelevant, as Palin wrote? Or was his point that he would not allow pressure from the Catholic hierarchy lead him to make decisions that violate his conscience?

B16′s address to the 25th annual conference of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry broke no new ground in Catholic teaching, but summarized the church’s position on health care quite firmly — and also implictly challenged those Catholic conservatives in the GOP who are about to take over the House with a vow to repeal Obamacare.

ZENIT has the full text here, and here is my PoliticsDaily write-up:

“It is necessary to work with greater commitment at all levels so that the right to health is rendered effective, favoring access to primary health care,” Benedict said in a message on Thursday to the 25th annual conference of the Vatican office that promotes health care ministry.

“Health justice should be among the priorities of governments and international institutions,” he added.

The pope said that establishing this goal requires “a true distributive justice that guarantees to all, on the basis of objective needs, adequate care,” and he said “the social doctrine of the Church has always evidenced the importance of distributive justice and of social justice in the different sectors of human relations.”

Benedict’s secretary of state and second-in-command, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, read the papal statement to the annual conference of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry and then delivered remarks that were even clearer than the pontiff’s.

“Justice requires guaranteed universal access to health care,” Bertone said, adding that the provision of minimal levels of medical attention to all is “commonly accepted as a fundamental human right.”

WWJBD? What will John Boehner do? Not much, is my view, given that papal statements rarely effect Catholic politicians of either stripe, not even the pope-ier-than-thou Catholics on the right.

But I do note that there are conservative pro-life Catholic voices that take a line more in keeping with that of the pope’s, notably Valparaiso University law professor Richard Stith and R.R. Reno, who have both taken some heat at First Things for their columns proposing to remedy HCR rather than repeal it.

They say that alleged abortion funding in HCR (a position of some dispute, as we know) should be eliminated, and then they’d be good with it, like Benedict. The standard  conservative Catholic/GOP position, however, is that the whole principle of federalized health care policy is wrong.

Still, I wonder if the Stith-Reno-Benedict position would give Republicans cover if they fail on a full repeal, which they seem likely to do. That could work out well for them, as most Americans still favor HCR, and strong majorities favor almost all of its elements, except the individual mandate.

Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight turns his attention to  post-election polling finds:  ”this just in: Ms. Pelosi is not very popular with the American public.” http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/is-pelosi-americas-most-unpopular-politician/#more-3615

Still, she remains the Democratic party leader in the House; Johnathan Allen and John Harris detail “five reasons why what may look like a self-defeating move by Democrats actually made perfect sense to lawmakers gathered in the spacious caucus room of the Cannon House Office Building Monday.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45265.html#ixzz15kzs0Clb

My own view: if she were a white male, people would be drooling over what she accomplished against tremendous odds. She’s not a white male, sooo…..