Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune featured an op-ed by Anne Burke, former interim chair of the National Review Board.

Money quote:

It appears that even after years of investigation of child abuse by priests, the cover-up of that abuse has been further institutionalized. Some of the alleged crimes in Philadelphia transpired while the National Review Board of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, on which I served, was trying to get to the truth of the scandal.

She concludes that, in light of the events in Philadelphia, it’s now clear that despite assurances to the contrary, “little has changed” with regard to real reform after the scandal.

Burke led the board after the resignation of its first chairman, former OK Gov. Frank Keating, who compared the behavior of some (not all) of the bishops to that of the Mafia. Back in ’03, he said; “To resist grand jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away; that is the model of a criminal organization, not my church.”

HT: Bob Nunz

The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has a new website with non-subscription access through August 31st.

Here is the weekly English edition.

And here is the link for those who would like to read Sunday’s Italian edition of the daily paper.

Yesterday a friend and I exchanged emails on the topic of newspapers’ use of unnamed sources and the tactic of trying to compensate for that by providing a brief (and often ridiculous) explanation for their anonymity. My friend had alerted me to one of the sillier of these formulas appearing in that morning’s New York Times. A story on Egypt’s recent shifts in foreign policy quoted an official who remained anonymous “because the issues were still under discussion in diplomatic circles.”

Now I’m not sure whether the hue and cry about citing anonymous sources, although I strenuously avoided it in my reporting days, isn’t overdone. But surely this kind of virtually meaningless justification for anonymity is ripe for parody, and I suggested as much to my friend.

In no time at all, he came back with a litany of improvements on the current fashion:

“Blah, blah, blah, etc., etc., etc.,’’ the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because …

…he didn’t know what he was talking about.

…he didn’t want to alert his wife that he wasn’t where he said he’d be.

…he didn’t plan to tell the truth.

…he did plan to tell the truth.

…he is suffering from short term amnesia and isn’t quite sure who he is.

…he was embarrassed that if his name were used everyone reading the story would think “Who’s he?”

…he was saying off the record the exact opposite of what he said on the record yesterday.

…this reporter is ashamed to admit that the highest “official” that would talk to him was the doorman.

Enjoy, or devise your own. By the way, my friend is a priest and former communications director of a prominent Catholic organization that has the words “United States” and “conference of Catholic bishops” in its title. He has been granted anonymity because he wants to avoid the appearance of having a sense of humor.

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity. Amen.

“Watch, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Mt 24: 42) – these words remind me of the last call that will come at whatever time the Lord desires. I want to follow Him and I want all that is part of my earthly life to prepare me for this moment. I do not know when it will come but I place this moment, like all other things, in the hands of the Mother of my Master: Totus Tuus. In these same motherly hands I leave everything and Everyone with whom my life and my vocation have brought me into contact. In these Hands I above all leave the Church, and also my Nation and all humankind. I thank everyone. I ask forgiveness of everyone. I also ask for prayers, so that God’s Mercy may prove greater than my own weakness and unworthiness.

So I’m breezing through recent issues of The New Republic and I’m jolted out of my chair by the following:

Opposition to abortion in the late 1960s and early 1970s was “drummed up, exacerbated, and orchestrated by elites at the highest levels of the Catholic Church and the right wing of the Republican party.”

Thus concludes the third paragraph of a lengthy review of three recent books on abortion by University of Chicago historian Christine Stansell.

Stansell is in fact a distinguished historian, and I’ve frequently assigned her excellent American Moderns a study of Greenwich village bohemians in the early twentieth century.

But this essay — and not just that sentence — gets a great deal wrong. Small factual errors — Pius XII permitted the rhythm method in 1952, well before Paul VI endorsed it in 1968 — are less important than the tone, which implies that Catholic opposition to abortion was somehow cajoled out of an unwilling Catholic populace by a conniving hierarchy. Note the language: opposition to abortion was “drummed up, exacerbated and orchestrated.” Or later: the bishops finessed a “rhetorical sleight of hand” by shifting attention away from birth control to abortion. Or later still: a “Catholic vendetta” (really?) made abortion a constant issue in national politics. Or one more time: “the deep resources and coffers” of Catholicism fed the campaign to make the fetus “an icon to rally believers.”

All of this is unfortunate. Stansell is right to see significant connections between the intense, decades long and agonized Catholic discussion of contraception and the emergence of abortion as a national issue in the mid-1960s. I tried to make these connections in my
Catholicism and American Freedom.

But Stansell’s conspiratorial tone is disappointing. Her dubious assumption that absent the Catholic bishops abortion would “have ended up as legal, available, something seldom discussed as a personal matter” is actually the mirror image of arguments made by Catholic conservatives such as George Weigel: that Catholic dissent over birth control might have been quashed if only bishops had resolutely defrocked clergy willingly to publicly venture their disagreement with Humanae Vitae.

Both Stansell and Weigel overestimate episcopal influence. By the mid-1960s, the overwhelming majority of Catholic couples, priests (as evidenced in Leslie Tentler’s fine study) and, perhaps, even bishops, were either ignoring Church teaching on contraception or fervently hoping that this teaching would change. When it did not, Catholic couples resolved to simply ignore church teaching, as they do today, over forty years and innumerable episcopal statements later. Many of today’s more conservative priests and seminarians claim to fully endorse church teaching on contraception. But theirs is an easy orthodoxy unavailable to priests fifty years ago, forced to grapple with the issue on a less abstract plane, as they listened to endless anguished couples discussing dilemmas of contraception, sex and family in the confessional.

Abortion was different. The rapid change in laws on abortion — illegal almost everywhere in 1962, legal at any point in the pregnancy and for any reason after Roe — produced a major popular reaction. This reaction came primarily from within the Catholic community but not because bishops ordered it. Instead bishops, Catholic intellectuals seasoned (and traumatized) by the contraception debate and a wide swath of Catholic opinion found the radical quality of Roe and some of the state laws that preceded Roe startling. Catholic public opinion in its broadest sense on abortion is not significantly different than the general public. But the most mobilized Catholics in the late 1960s and early 1970s — many of them liberals and not, as Stansell assumes, all Republican conservatives — were appalled by the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to permit any restrictions on abortion. (That the Justices, like the bishops, are an unelected “elite” does not trouble Stansell.) Stansell cannot bear to use the term pro-life without revealing scare quotes, and she cannot credit opposition to legal abortion as a genuinely popular movement. She is uninterested, for example, in polling data suggesting young people are more opposed to abortion than than their parents.

She concludes her essay dwelling, a bit wishfully in my estimation, on the “adamantine” fact that most Americans are pro-choice in that they still favor legal abortion. They are and they do. But not in the last months of a pregnancy. Not to select fetuses based on gender. Not with government funds.

The more interesting and accurate historical story is exactly this complexity. Stansell might have turned her talents toward helping us understand this complexity. But she hasn’t, and the soundbite quality of the essay is both a pity and a missed opportunity.

A continuation of this story from last Friday.

The plan was for Paul to meet his friend Ed Doherty in front of the TNT Tap, which unlike most of the other taverns in the neighborhood was located in the middle of a residential side street next to a railroad viaduct.  Ed was late, as usual, and Paul had to stand in front of the tavern as the neighborhood men entered after having had their dinner at home.  They liked his costume very much and almost all of them invited him in to show Ryan the bartender.  But Grandma Jane had categorically forbidden him under pain of mortal sin to ever set foot in a tavern.  In any case, Paul had very mixed feelings about this tavern.  There was a rumor that his grandfather had shot someone there once.  Not shot dead and not shot on purpose, but while he was messing around with a World War I revolver that someone had brought in.  Still, it had seriously shaken his grandfather up.  Grandma Jane said that it had probably taken 8 or 10 years off of grandpa’s life and had added thousands of years of Purgatory to his sentence that would now have to be worked off by her.  Grandpa hadn’t gone to jail of course.  The police hadn’t even been called.   It was an Irish tavern and probably a good quarter of the men in the place were police anyway.  But it had been a close thing.  And for the rest of Paul’s grandfather’s life you could tell when he ran into a drinking buddy on the street, because the invariable greeting was “Hey Charley, I didn’t know you were out of the joint!” to which his grandpa would sort of laugh.

Doherty was coming and Paul was shocked to see that Ed’s mother had dressed him up like Aunt Jemima, with a huge bosom stuffed with pillows, a red dress with many petticoats, a white head scarf, and a charcoal black face. 

Ed’s mother was considered odd, as was her son Ed.   For one thing, Ed’s mother was actually from Ireland and had a college degree from some place in Cork.  For another, she considered herself an artist rather than a housewife and she came from a relatively well-to-do family and liked to say that she definitely had not immigrated to America in search of potatoes.  She did watercolors of soft looking foreign places.  She was known for having a wicked sense of humor.

Ed was short and a bit pudgy and tended to remind people of a Teddy Bear.  But his voice was deeper than the other boys’ and he spoke with an upper class Irish accent that made him sound almost, but not quite, English.  His mother had not only taught him to speak well, but with irony.  Hanging around with him was sort of like hanging around a fat old Irish poet and hearing his distinctive voice coming out of Aunt Jemima’s face was doubly strange.

 —Good evening Beirne, he said to Paul.  Nice day for it.

Ed always called Paul “Beirne” and always insisted on being called by his own last name as well.

—Yes, that’s a costume you have on there, Doherty.  Did your father see it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Rev. Kevin Gray, a priest in the Archdiocese of  Hartford, has been sentenced to three years in prison after pleading no-contest to charges that he stole more than $1 million to fund  a lavish secret life. Bills for restaurants, hotels, clothes and male escort services were paid from a parish account funded from his parishioners’ pockets, authorities say.

Even so, according to one news report, the prosecutor said Gray won’t have to pay any money back to the church because the Archdiocese of Hartford has not sought restitution. And the Archdiocese said he may be able to continue serving as a priest after serving his sentence, according to another news account.

How can this be? I called the public-relations spokeswoman for the Archdiocese to see if there is some explanation, and she released the following statement:

Fr. Kevin Gray’s plea demonstrates that he is fully aware and responsible for the severity of his wrongdoing, and is repentant. After he completes his sentence, if devoted to his priestly commitment, he will be eligible to continue serving as a priest, but will never be placed in a position where he will manage finances. Despite conflicting reports, he will be expected to make some type of restitution to Sacred Heart-Sagrado Corazon Parish.

The spokeswoman, Maria Zone, declined to answer questions.

I don’t know what Father Gray may have said at the sentencing, but his decision to plead  nolo contendere rather than guilty doesn’t signal repentance. Pleading “no contest” could conceivably help to avoid civil liability. Note also that Gray’s lawyer reportedly said the charges were exaggerated.

The brief statement from the Archdiocese minimizes the wrongdoing  by saying that Gray will not “manage finances” if he returns to service as a priest. What about the multiple layers of lies authorities said he told to conceal his double life from his Waterbury parishioners and staff?  An affidavit police filed when he was arrested lays out  a sweeping panorama of deception. To reduce the case to an inability to “manage finances” is to miss the point, to say the least.

For all who want to keep abreast of the rip tides in Israel-U.S. relations and Israel-Middle East relations, here is a collection of arguments that  you might want to know about.

Paul Pillar, entitled “The Kind of Israel the ME Needs More of.”

Leslie Gelb: “The Israel-Palestine UN Statehood Vote Igniting the Mideast.”

Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., “The Ultimate Ally.”

Stephen Walt critiques Oren’s analysis: “Whiff of Desperation.”

Elliott Abrams, “Bibi’s Choice.”   Ari Shavit in Haaretz: Netanyahu Must Choose State over Land.

Tom Durkin, who has been the voice of the Kentucky Derby for years, tells the New York Times that the anxiety over calling the big race has become too much:

Instead, the prospect of calling the race has, every year, prompted months of anguish as Durkin tried to muster the serenity to hold it together and conjure an accurate and evocative word picture for the chaos that is 20 horses thundering around a mile-and-a-quarter oval. Last year in Louisville, in fact, Durkin was stretched out on a psychiatrist’s couch days before the race undergoing hypnosis in the hope of conquering his performance anxiety.

He has taken medication, tried prayer and breathing exercises, and has read everything and anything about what, for him, has been a paralyzing dread — including how Sir Laurence Olivier developed stage fright in his fifties and often was shoved onto the stage.

“I’ve even, heaven forbid, tried diet and exercise,” said Durkin, a big and gregarious man.

Terrifying. How do you get to the other side of that? Good for him for opening up about it.It’s such a common affliction, made worse when it’s on such a big stage, and the source of one’s livelihood.

Here in CA, we’re being informed by a local pastor of the imminent end of the world:

Of course, the sentiment isn’t universally shared:

And yes, previous determinations of the end of the world have proven to be, well, inaccurate. (The fellow behind this iteration, Christian radio personality Harold Camping, had previously predicted that Christ would return Sept. 6, 1994. Oops.)

Myself, I’m fond of the comment attributed, (apocryphally, alas!) to Martin Luther: “If I knew that tomorrow was the end of the world, I would plant an apple tree today.” And my garden’s just planted, with all the anxious anticipation that goes with entrusting seeds to soil and hoping for the best. So not an apple tree, but some tomatoes zucchini, and a few other veggies. Same idea.

Any plans for May 22?

John Allen reports on the situation in Ireland in advance of another government report on Church handling of the sex abuse crisis, this one focused in the diocese of Cloyne.

Sounds a lot like the situation in Philadelphia:

the Irish bishops adopted a groundbreaking set of policies in 1996, among other things pledging to report alleged abuse to police and prosecutors. The new report apparently shows that those commitments were not honored in Cloyne as recently as 2008.

At a conference at the Milltown Institute in April, Marie Keenan, a social worker and psychotherapist at University College Dublin specializing in child sexual abuse

said that clinical work with priest-abusers has shown that many live “sex-obsessed lives of terror,” which is a product of the organizational culture out of which they emerged.
In fact, Keenan hinted, the church is lucky that the crisis isn’t worse. Given a theology of sexuality that can fuel “self-hatred and shame,” she argued, coupled with a theology of priesthood that “sets them apart in an unhealthy manner,” the question isn’t why so many priests abused; it’s why more didn’t.
Keenan offered a series of proposals:
A new theology of priesthood that would treat the distinction between the clerical and lay states as “more symbolic and less literal”;
A new ecclesiology that would treat Catholicism more as a “moral and social proposition” and less as a “power apparatus”;
A “serious study of decision-making procedures within the Catholic hierarchy”;
Rather than creating its own child safety protection offices and review boards, which Keenan said are fast becoming “bureaucratic, legalistic and costly,” the church should instead “cooperate fully with the state” and independent bodies devoted to child welfare.

OK, Keenan’s a psychotherapist, not a theologian. But she seems to have hit on a lot of the issues raised at dotCommonweal (and elsewhere) on the crisis. Maybe this would be a good next topic for the National Lay Review Board–to sponsor a series of talks on the fundamentals they’ve identified as contributing to the crisis. Thoughts?

I’ve made quite a study of conversion stories, written and oral, and I have to give Unagidon points for trying to express his religious experience.

But these types of narratives always defy the ability of language to convey what’s going on, so the experience sounds kind of vague and airy-fairy (”It’s your life that you have and a short time left to find yourself a home. Listen, push, read, ask harder, knock harder, listen again. Find something you can integrate yourself into. Find that place that your discouragement says does not exist. Trust God.”)  —Jean Raber

 I agree with Jean.  Accounts of grace are (in my experience) always airy-fairy.  There is no getting around it.  But as an amateur writer who has tried to write about grace, I have tried to get around it nonetheless.  I have found that there are two reasons why I can’t.

The first reason is that part of grace falls under a more general airy-fairy literary category called beauty.  We all agree that beauty exists.  But we don’t all agree on what is beautiful.  Something that catches me is four-dimensional state of rapture is highly likely to look like airy-fairiness to you should I try to describe it.  On the other hand, a reliable description of intimacy that I have seen in the literature of every country I have experience with, is when two people appreciate the beauty of the same thing in the same way at the same time.  The divide between what I know to be beautiful what and what others will call airy-fairy when I describe it is so strong and real that in some ways it divides people into classes who view the people they disagree with as savages or liberals.  I can probably capture more of the beauty of a sunset by saying “it was a beautiful sunset” and let you fill in the blanks than to start talking about streaming glorious rays of red and purple light filtering through the pink clouds blah blah blah.

So grace is hard to describe just as beauty is hard to describe, even though the question of whether beauty itself exists is not very controversial.  And for those of us who believe in the existence of grace, it is precisely for the same reason.  But grace itself has an additional aspect beyond beauty that also provides a second reason for making it hard to describe.  Grace (to me at least) has a sense of sinfulness in it as well, as in “grace is a gift from God where sinfulness is overcome by an appreciation of God’s beauty and is therefore a measure of God’s forgiveness.”

The problem is capturing “sinfulness” as opposed to just depicting sins.  Sinfulness is complex in the way that beauty is complex.  (Depicting sins themselves is a snap, if our entire American entertainment industry is anything to go by.)  Depicting sinfulness, which I will hold is absolutely necessary if one is going to depict grace, is really hard.  We can see this in standard literary conventions about evil.  Evil is the Nazi concentration camp officer who also enjoys torturing kittens and puppies.  True evil is the Nazi concentration camp officer who cries to the strains of a Mozart symphony while he enjoys torturing kittens and puppies.  Sinfulness is a complex evil; complex because it is mixed in with good.  Its complexity makes it as hard to capture as beauty.  For one thing, my own sinfulness might be your liberating night on the town.  My deep sinful mediocrity is your successfulness in climbing the corporate ladder through your pro-active actualization of ‘walking the talk’ as you leverage corporate assets for the shareholders.

When one talks about grace, one is talking about sinfulness and beauty.  It’s a double whammy to a writer.  Plus, as a writer, even writing under a pseudonym, I am definitely happy to bore you with my accounts of the beautiful, but I am not going to bare the true form of my sinfulness.  I may not be alone, which is why in my experience conversion stories take the form of the “before and after” (the transition from sinfulness to beauty) when in fact this isn’t what happens at all.  You are still a worm when you come out of the cocoon; just a different kind of worm.  (Ooops, there I go again.)

Grace is a species of love to the purely secular writer and is love itself to the religious writer.  A good novel about love includes a good description of what amounts to the sinfulness of the lovers.  This is what makes good love stories fascinating in literature and it is also why a good love story, even a simple one, usually takes hundreds of pages to tell.  Bad love literature, like bad conversion literature, tends to exclude much of the sinfulness.  The man is always Fabio of the Long Hair; the woman is always…Ashley or something.  I have seen pictures of romance novel covers with photo shop errors, where Fabio is portrayed with three arms rather than two.  This comes closer to capturing the real nature of love than anything inside of the book.

So grace is always going to look airy-fairy.  It’s about love.  I can tell you that I love my son, and you’ll get it, but if I attempted to describe my love for my son in a way that would make you love him precisely the way that I do, I would probably fail the airy-fairy test.

But the point is, the airy-fairyness of grace is also a quality of true love (since they are the same thing), not something that shows that grace may not exist or that it is even particularly hard to come by.  Maybe you just need to find better writers than I am.

One of the first things I saw coming to NYC in 1963 was a graffiti (also a first) painted on the granite steps in Morningside Park. It said “Madame Nhu Go Home!!” Madame Nhu’s obit is in the Times this morning and recalls her visit to the US in the fall of ’63 to bolster support for the Diem regime in Saigon (her brother-in-law and her husband). Didn’t work out.

The best article you’ll ever read about bribery, fiscal misprision, Greek misanthropy, and the monks of Mount Athos.

At that moment, out of nowhere, Father Ephraim walks in. Round, with rosy cheeks and a white beard, he is more or less the spitting image of Santa Claus. He even has a twinkle in his eye. A few months before, he’d been hauled before the Greek Parliament to testify. One of his interrogators said that the Greek government had acted with incredible efficiency when it swapped Vatopaidi’s lake for the Ministry of Agriculture’s commercial properties. He asked Ephraim how he had done it.

“Don’t you believe in miracles?” Ephraim had said.

“I’m beginning to,” said the Greek M.P.

When we are introduced, Ephraim clasps my hand and holds it for a very long time. It crosses my mind that he is about to ask me what I want for Christmas. Instead he says, “What is your faith?” “Episcopalian,” I cough out. He nods; he calibrates: it could be worse; it probably is worse. “You are married?” he asks. “Yes.” “You have children?” I nod; he calibrates: I can work with this. He asks for their names …

And thanks to this segment from last Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes, you can now see Mount Athos for yourself.

You can find the second half of the segment, which features Vatopaidi and Father Ephraim, here.

Ross Douthat has an interesting column in the NY Times today on the importance of belief in hell for underwriting the possibility of meaningful human choice:

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

I think that there’s something to this, and Douthat goes on to argue that Tony Soprano is perhaps one modern illustration of the freedom to choose damnation, so to speak, just for the hell of it. But, of course, if we have the radical freedom to be evil, God has the radical freedom to be merciful. So, in the final analysis, God may also save us, just for the hell of it. This is to say that the real divine punishment might just be in not finding the freedom from God that we so willfully sought. After all, what’s worse than being loved by someone who just can’t take the hint, no matter how nasty you are? So, instead of wondering whether Tony Soprano is in heaven or hell, it might be better to wonder if, for one who so clearly didn’t want to be there, heaven wouldn’t simply be hell. In which case, it would make sense to say that such a person, like Douthat, might prefer the libertarian freedom of hell to the loving community of heaven.

America gives Sidney and Daniel Callahan the Matteo Ricci Award. Congratulations to them both, not least for their contributions to Commonweal too!

Here’s a great article about Dan by Paul Lauritzen.

Here’s a fascinating article by Dan and Peter Steinfels about Commonweal‘s earlier days.

And here’s a typically profound article by Sidney on Alzheimer’s Disease.

The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has sent troops to several places in the country and is reported to be shooting down people. Here is a report from Al Jazeera, which suggest that people are being shot and attacked apart from any demonstrations. Here is an analysis by Robert Worth of the NYTimes about the political factors  at work.

So far as we know, the Syrian protests have been non-violent (on the part of the protesters) and unlike Libya have not formed themselves into an insurrection and a transitional force bent on overthrowing the Assad government. Hence, the question: aren’t Syrian protesters even more deserving of international protection than the Libyans? Or do other political factors weigh so heavily here that no one proposes intervening?

Update: Josh Marshall of TPM has one theory: no one’s paying attention.

UPDATE: Council on Foreign Relation’s inverview with Jon Alterman: “there is considerable concern and uncertainty among U.S. officials about what will happen going forward, particularly should the country’s President Bashar al-Assad be ousted. Complicating U.S. policy on Syria, he adds, are the many U.S. allies in the region such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel that want to keep Assad in power.”

Said Claire, about joining a religious order:

My comment in the last thread lined up possible reasons against joining that immediately come to mind. On the other hand, what would be reasons for joining? What difference does it make to be a secular Franciscan? Is it an alternative Christian support network when parish and family do not provide enough? Are they basically a community, like a parish community, offering one another mutual support to help live a Christian life?

You love your Church, you love your flag, you love your family and the perch you have made yourself at work.

But you spend your time carving out that diminishing space for yourself where you can live under your control and do what you want to do

You will not assimilate.  You will not give it all up; no matter the money, the time demands, the fame and the glory.  You still need a small spot to stand that is yours.

But you find one day that that spot is a dream.  You surrendered a long time ago.  Their ideals are your ideals; their language is your language; their habits are your habits; their opinions are your opinions; theirs; theirs; yours.

It wouldn’t be so bad to be a sinner if you could be one on your own, with some guts and a little flash.  Your sins at least would be wholly yours and you could see at least where you yourself still had enough to be pushing against something.

But even your sins aren’t even entirely yours.  You aren’t even that together.  The mediocrity is literally that deep.  On that black day, if you are lucky to get the gift, you wake up to the fact that you are dead and you see that the black shadow hides you from both God and from yourself.

If you manage, then, to clear the surface into some sort of diffused light, support groups and committees looks like a sucker’s game.  No improved policy or new management is going to save you now.  You are soil.  You have disintegrated, far earlier than you expected when the priest pressed that thumb full of dust into your forehead.

You need to rebuild from scratch, atom by atom.  You need something that is more whole than anything you have seen before to become whole yourself again.  Associations, collectives, parishes, seminars just won’t do it any more.

Before, the ants looked like people.  Now the people (and you are one of them) look like ants.  You might just stumble into the right place, God willing.

But then again, you might not.

Something tells you that God didn’t reach in and pull you out of the shit so that you could join a club.  God wants you to go deep this time.  Should you board the Ark with Opus Dei?  Should you hang in prayer with the Hounds of God?  It’s your life that you have and a short time left to find yourself a home.  Listen, push, read, ask harder, knock harder, listen again.  Find something you can integrate yourself into.  Find that place that your discouragement says does not exist.

Trust God.

(Right after the reading of the Epistle, the celebrant would sing this Alleluia three times, elevating his voice for the second and third times, with the choir responding. I do not understand why it was dropped. I remember it as a thrilling moment in the Easter Mass. Et valde mane [And early in the morning] was also set to beautiful music and sung as an antiphon at Lauds. )

What did the Beloved Disciple see? What do we see? Here is what Bach saw.

Many know the extraordinary ancient homily that is read at “Tenebrae” on Holy Saturday. Just having read it in our parish church, I am struck anew by its depth and audacity. Those unfamiliar with it will, I hope, be as moved by it as I always am. It begins:

Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all”. Christ answered him: “And with your spirit”. He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light”.

The rest is here.

In the book of Genesis the Scriptures say: “And God saw the light, that it is good. And God divided the light and the darkness, and God called the light day and the darkness he called night.” (Gen 1:4-5). If God called the light day, then surely those to whom the Apostle Paul said, “You were once darkness, but now light in the Lord” (Eph 5:8), were the day, because he who commanded the light to shine out of darkness has shone upon them (2 Cor 4:6). These children (infantes), whom you see white in their outward dress and inwardly cleansed, whose bright clothing symbolizes the brilliance of their minds, were weighed down by the night of their sins. But now because they have been cleansed in the bath of mercy, because they have been watered by the fountain of wisdom, because they have been flooded by the light of righteousness: “This is the day the Lord has made: let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Ps 117:24). May the day of the Lord listen to us; may the day made by the Lord listen to us: may it listen and obey so that we may rejoice and be glad in it. For, as the Apostle says, this is our joy and our crown, if you stand fast in the Lord (Ph 4:1). Listen to us, then, O tender children of the chaste mother, listen to us, children of the virgin mother. Because “you were once darkness but now light in the Lord, walk as children of the light.” Cling to the children of light; let me put it more clearly: Cling to the good believers. For, unfortunately, there are evil believers. There are people called believers who aren’t believers. There are believers in whom the mysteries of Christ suffer injury, who live in such a way that they are perishing and causing others to perish, perishing because of their evil lives, causing others to perish by their bad example. But you, beloved, don’t join them. Seek out the good and cling to them. Be good yourselves. (Augustine, Sermon 223, Easter Vigil V, #1; PL 38, 1092)

Among the most prominent threads that make up the magnificent tapestry of the Gospel according to John is that of “the hour of Jesus.” “My hour has not yet come,” Jesus says to his mother.

The movement of the Gospel, then, is towards the full revelation of the hour of Jesus. And that revelation is consummated on the cross, where the eyes of faith see “the glory” of the Father’s uniquely-begotten.

Bach captures the complex consummation of  defeat and victory, death and life, in the great aria: “Es ist vollbracht!” of his St. John Passion:

It is accomplished: what comfort for suffering humanity!

I see the end of the night of affliction

The hero of Judah consummates his victorious combat.

It is accomplished.

The performance here is by Harnoncourt, and the aria is sung splendidly by a boy alto.

If Italians were officially despised by 12 year old Paul’s Chicago Irish relatives, everyone in his family seemed to have at least one Italian best friend. His grandmother Jane had two. Olivetta (a spinster who had held onto her virginity to care for her mother until the old crone had died at the age of 83 after a 47 year long terminal illness) was Grandma’s cemetery friend. Olivetta’s mother had thrown her house into perpetual mourning when Olivetta was three after Olivetta’s father had been killed in an industrial accident that no one would talk about. “He drowned after he fell into a giant vat of chocolate at the Cocobar factory” admitted Paul’s mother one day as she dipped a Christmas cookie into her scotch. “He was badly chopped up by the machine. At the wake, you could smell the nougat through the closed coffin.” The poor man’s wife had never forgiven him for having had such a ridiculous death. But she made the best of it in traditional Italian style and became a perpetual widow. The rooms were darkened and black crepe was hung around a startled looking husband hanging over the fireplace in the living room. This was the home environment of little Olivetta, who decorated her own dollhouse in deep mourning to the approval of her mother. As she grew up, she carried the somber darkness of her house with her in a tight-lipped and dignified manner, wrapping herself in the thick rich shadows of death and the creamy nougat center of perpetual mourning. She lived the destiny given to her as the daughter of a man who had been transformed into a chocolate bar before his time. Grandma Jane’s hobby was going to wakes. Olivetta’s hobby was going to the cemetery. When they finally found each other through the incense mists of a First Saturday Sorrowful Mother Novena, this happy confluence of possibilities made them realize how much they stood to expand each other’s horizons.

Read the rest of this entry »

And to the music and to the spoken and written word may be added the visual tribute of faith that is the magnificent twelfth-century mosaic in the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome. It represents the cross as the Tree of Life from which flow the streams of living water for which the hart longs, from which the tendrils of a vine grow out to encompass all of human life. Here is the Basilica’s website.

And we have seen him, and he had no beauty nor comeliness (Is 53:2). Was our bridegroom ugly, then? Of course not…. It was to those persecuting him that he appeared ugly; if they had not thought him ugly, they would not have attacked him, they would not have beaten him with whips, they would not have crowned him with thorns, they would not have dishonored him with spit. They did all these things because he seemed ugly to them. They did not have eyes to see why he is beautiful. To what eyes does Christ appear beautiful? The kind of eyes Christ himself sought when he said to Philip: Have I been with you so long, and you still do not see me (Jn 14:9)? They are the eyes that have to be cleansed so that they can see that light, the eyes that when even slightly touched by his splendor, become inflamed with love and desire to be healed and enlightened. That you may know that Christ is beautiful, the prophet says of him: More beautiful than all the sons of men (Ps 44:3). His beauty surpasses all men.

What is it that we love in Christ? His crucified limbs? His pierced side? Or his love? When we hear that he suffered for us, what do we love? We love his love. He loved us so that we would love him in return, and so that we might love him in return, he has come to us with his Spirit. (Augustine, Enar. in Ps 127, 8)

And thoughts for the day from Newman:

It is the death of the Eternal Word of God made flesh, which is our great lesson how to think and how to speak of this world. His Cross has put its due value upon every thing which we see, upon all fortunes, all advantages, all ranks, all dignities, all pleasures; upon the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. It has set a price upon the excitements, the rivalries, the hopes, the fears, the desires, the efforts, the triumphs of mortal man. It has given a meaning to the various, shifting course, the trials, the temptations, the sufferings, of his earthly state. It has brought together and made consistent all that seemed discordant and aimless. It has taught us how to live, how to use this world, what to expect, what to desire, what to hope. It is the tone into which all the strains of this world’s music are ultimately to be resolved. (Newman, “The Cross of Christ the Measure of the World,” Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. VI, 84-85)

The seventh of Newman’s Lectures of Justification ends with a reflection on the necessity of our appropriating the cross of Christ. Two brief excerpts:

So also justification is wholly the work of God; it comes from God to us; it is a power exerted on our souls by Him, as the healing of the Israelites was a power exerted on their bodies. The gift must be brought near to us; it is not like the Brazen Serpent, a mere external, material, local sign; it is a spiritual gift, and, as being such, admits of being applied to us individually. Christ’s Cross does not justify by being looked at, but by being applied; not by as merely beheld by faith, but by being actually set up within us, and that not by our act, but by God’s invisible grace. Men sit, and gaze, and speak of the great Atonement, and think this is appropriating it; not more truly than kneeling to the material cross itself is appropriating it. Men say that faith is an apprehending and applying; faith cannot really apply the Atonement; man cannot make the Saviour of the world his own; the Cross must be brought home to us, not in word, but in power, and this is the work of the Spirit. This is justification; but when imparted to the soul, it draws blood, it heals, it purifies, it glorifies. …

Our crosses are the lengthened shadow of the Cross on Calvary. (Newman, Lectures on Justification, 177)

In Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two: Holy Week, Pope Benedict writes:

Saint John’s whole Passion narrative is built on this connection between humble service and glory (doxa): it is in Jesus’ downward path, in his abasement even to the Cross, that God’s glory is seen, that the Father and, in him, Jesus are glorified.

The great opening chorus of Bach’s Saint John Passion is a magnificent recapitulation of the Johannine vision:

Lord, our sovereign Lord, whose Glory fills the whole earth, show us by your Passion that You, the true Son of God, are glorified in every time, even in deepest need and humiliation.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt performs it here with the Toelzer Boys Choir.

Earlier this week I saw a new play on Broadway: High, by Matthew Lombardo. My intention was to review it for this magazine. This morning, however, I read in the Times that High will play its final performance on Sunday. So what follows is more of a eulogy. Still, I don’t want to miss the opportunity to comment on the show, because for all its shortcomings, it is a rare and valuable thing: a serious new play that takes religion seriously.

High is not really “about” religion; it is about addiction and recovery, forgiveness, pride, coping with pain, seeking redemption. But religion is part of how its characters face these challenges. The playwright understands that faith is not always defeated by suffering; that, in fact, pain and prayer are natural partners. The play does not apologize for the fact that its characters pray. No one winks at the audience to say “Of course, we’re not taking this God stuff seriously.” It’s an adult play familiar with the role religion can play in an adult’s life, and as such it is a refreshing experience. That’s not to give the impression that High is feel-good spiritual tonic. It’s freighted with pain (perhaps too much so), and it asks difficult questions that it doesn’t attempt to answer neatly.

The central character of High is a Catholic sister, played in this production by Kathleen Turner. (Hard to imagine? Decades ago, perhaps, but I assure you she cuts a plausible figure in sensible nun-clothes now.) Sr. Jamison is an addiction counselor at a church-run facility, St. Francis, justly proud of her excellent record there (and frank about her own struggles with alcoholism). As the play begins she receives a new charge: a particularly hopeless drug addict, nineteen-year-old Cody (Evan Jonigkeit), recommended to her care by Fr. Michael (Stephen Kunken), the administrator of St. Francis. The rest of the play is a three-way struggle: Sr. Jamie doesn’t want the job, since she knows Cody isn’t committed to getting clean; Fr. Michael has his own motives for wanting to protect the boy; Cody is battling more demons than can fit comfortably into a single drama. Read the rest of this entry »

Over at the Washington Examiner, David Freddoso takes issue with my post on Ayn Rand-fan Paul Ryan’s plan to reduce the debt by cutting taxes on the rich and then dismantling Medicare and Medicaid. He says my argument rests on the assumptions (1) that there is some ideal tax rate mandated by Catholic social teaching and (2) that the current tax rates in this country fall below it.

Freddoso misunderstands my argument. The central purpose of my post was to observe that applying the wrong principles to produce policy suggestions that would otherwise fall within the ambit of permissible prudential disagreement is not itself within the boundaries of that permissible prudential disagreement (as the hierarchs have defined those boundaries). In other words, from the standpoint of a Catholic politician, at least, the principles matter. Nothing in Freddoso’s attempted take-down of my post even addresses this question. Instead, he chooses to attack a strawman.

Admittedly, my post was not as clear as it might of have been, but I suspect from his rhetoric that Freddoso was not interested in trying very hard to read it in the most generous light. The most interesting question to me — and the reason I wrote the post –  is why someone like Ryan shouldn’t come in for the same treatment pro-choice Catholic politicians have often received.  In his case, it would be more than just the question whether a Catholic can in good faith support his plan (back to that question in a second). There are also specific things about Ryan’s relationship to Randian libertarianism — his strange habit of requiring his staff to read Rand’s work, his statement that Rand was his reason for entering public service — that call into question his motives in structuring his plan the way he has (i.e., as “helping” with the national debt by cutting taxes on the rich and gutting two important entitlement programs for the poor and elderly). I think it is worthwhile for Catholics to call attention to the utter irreconcilability of Rand’s political philosophy, such as it is, with basic principles of Catholic teaching, and the apparent harmony of Rand’s philosophy with the basic architecture of the Ryan plan. Though I admit it’s not decisive, that harmony, combined with the other evidence of Ryan’s Rand-worship and the implausibility of Ryan’s empirical assumptions, seem like relevant data points for the inquiry into his likely principles.

Can Catholics in good faith support the Ryan plan? I have no doubt that, subjectively speaking, they can. On the other hand, I think it’s an important challenge to Catholics who are prone to accept the assumptions that would be necessary to justify support for that plan (e.g., that handing billions in dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans against the current baseline of historically — and comparatively — high inequality and low taxation rates would actually redound to the benefit of the poorest over the long run compared to the available alternative policies) to engage with the empirical support (or lack of such support) for those counterintuitive assertions. Moreover, given a Catholic commitment to social policy that is fundamentally oriented toward the well being of the poorest, I think its fair to hold a plan that appears on its face to simply transfer burdens from the richer to the poorer to a higher empirical standard than a plan that on its face appears to do the opposite. That last point is probably controversial, but it is in a way independent from my bottom line, which is that I don’t think the idea of “prudential judgment” should be allowed to absolve Catholics of various political stripes of the responsibility to do the work of evaluating a plan like Ryan’s against the principles of Catholic social teaching and the relevant standards of sound empirical analysis.

But apart from that moral understanding of the passage, we remember that the way in which we commended to your attention the depth of this act of the Lord’s was that in washing the feet of disciples who were already washed and clean, the Lord was symbolizing something: that we should know that, no matter what progress we have made in apprehending righteousness, we are not without sin because of the human feelings that occupy us on earth, and that he then washes away that sin by interceding for us when we pray the Father, who is in heaven, to “forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors” (Mt 6:12). How can we relate to this interpretation what he himself says afterwards when he explains the reason for his action: “If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you”? Can we say that even a brother may cleanse a brother from the contagion of his wrongdoing? Yes, we can: we know that we were also admonished by the deep meaning of this work of the Lord’s, that we should confess our faults to one another and pray for one another, just as Christ also intercedes for us (Rm 8:34). Let us listen to the Apostle James stating this precept very clearly, “Confess your faults to one another, and pray for one another (Jas 5:16). For the Lord gave an example of this, too. For if he who neither has, nor had, nor will have any sin, prays for our sins, how much more ought we to pray for one another’s in turn! And if he whom we have nothing to forgive forgives us, how much more ought we who are unable to live here without sin to forgive one another! For when the Lord says, “For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you,” what else does he apparently mean than what the apostle says most openly, “Forgiving one another, if anyone has a quarrel against someone, even as Christ forgave you, so you also” (Col 3:13)? Let us therefore forgive one another’s faults and pray for one another’s faults, and thus in a way wash one another’s feet. It is our part, by God’s grace, to perform this service of love and humility: it is God’s part to hear us and to cleanse us from all the corruption of our sins through Christ and in Christ, so that what we forgive to others, that is, loose on earth, may be loosed in heaven. (Augustine, Tr. in Ioannem, 58, 5)