Headline (NYTimes): Cuomo will seek to lift ban on hyraulic fracturing: “The Cuomo administration is expected to lift what has been, in effect, a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, a controversial technology used to extract natural gas from shale, people briefed on the administration’s discussions said on Thursday.”

Headline (Politico): Andrew Cuomo hit by liberal backlash: “While the first-term Democrat became an instant national hero of the left and talk began about a potential 2016 presidential campaign, the liberal world is out to remind its voters that, other than on gay marriage, his record veers closer to Chris Christie than typical Democratic standard-bearers.”

Here is the letter filed by Caplin & Drysdale with the Federal Election Commissionon behalf of Stephen Colbert, who is in D.C. testifying before that body today. It’s very funny-especially for a legal document.

I can only say that there are some very lucky summer associates at Caplin who get to be in on this one!

I hope they get to go to New York for a taping.

One of my sisters sent me today this intriguing poem by Linda Pastan, “On the Question of Free Will”:

Sometimes,
noticing the skeleton
embossed
on every leaf

and how the lion’s mouth
and antelope’s neck
fit perfectly

I wonder
at God’s plan
had Eve refused
the apple.

Nate Silver the numbers cruncher at the Times has configured a probability scale on the future of same-sex marriage and/or bans on such. Pretty wonky. But those who have not completely exhausted themselves on this subject may find it interesting–or not. Think we’ll keep the comments off. Discuss it with your significant other! Here.

And then there’s this, which is one of the funniest papal videos I’ve seen since the gymnasts…performed:

The New York governor and flavor-of-the-day for Democrats in 2016 talks to Maureen Dowd. Andrew Cuomo has certainly been impressive in his first months as governor, and there is something appealing (to a wonk like me, I guess) about the possibility of a presidential matchup in 2016 with his trans-Hudson rival, New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Two Northeasterners, two Catholics, two governors — cool. (Well, one Northeasterner and one Mid-Atlantic-er, I guess.)

In light of the topic du jour, gay marriage and Cuomo’s successful shepherding of the issue through the state legislature and the resulting teeth-gnashing by the Catholic hierarchy, MoDo went straight to the religious stuff, and Cuomo’s responses seem likely to resonate with one segment of the Church while they will just as likely repel another segment:

“So, Governor,” I asked, “are you afraid you’re going to hell?”

Andrew Cuomo, inculcated at Immaculate Conception grade school, Archbishop Molloy High School and Fordham University, chuckled. “There are forms of hell, Maureen,” he answered. “The question is, which level?”

He’s his father’s son, all right.

“It’s troubling for me as a Catholic to be at odds with the church,” he began, before dissolving into a wry laugh. “Having said that, it seems that my entire political life, the tension with the church has come up again and again.”

Just as his father seized a social issue and established himself in opposition to the church with his Notre Dame speech on abortion, now the son has seized a social issue and established himself in opposition to the church with gay marriage.

Is it genetic, I wonder.

“I have a portrait of Saint Thomas More in my office,” the governor said, calling from the statehouse in Albany. It is a picture Mario Cuomo once kept in his office. He gave it to Andrew as a present when he graduated from Albany Law School, and the younger Cuomo has kept it with him for 30 years as he moved from job to job and city to city. “It’s not the first time there is a tension between the teachings of the church and the administration of the law, for my father and for myself.” Dryly, he adds: “I haven’t lost my head yet.”

Far from it. The New York governor says he still goes to church with his three teenage daughters. He received Communion at his Inaugural Day Mass, but mostly abstains. He has managed to stay on good terms with New York’s pugnacious archbishop, Timothy Dolan, who waged a relatively muted battle against gay marriage that Cuomo calls “reasonable.”

When I asked if the archbishop would preside over the ceremony if the governor decides to tie the knot with the Food Network glamour girl Sandra Lee, Cuomo says it couldn’t happen “because I’m divorced.”

Another keeper was his characterization of Ed Peters, a canon lawyer in Detroit and popular conservative Catholic blogger, who won some notoriety for arguing that Catholics should call Cuomo’s live-in girlfriend a “concubine,” because that is the correct descriptive term.

“He was a blogger, not from my state,” Cuomo  said of Peters. “I didn’t want to give it too much credibility.”

As for whether Lee was hurt by the crude, archaic term, he conceded, “It was not a pleasant conversation for anyone.”

Peters is routinely described as a “Vatican adviser” because he is a consultor to a curial committee, and while that counts for something, even Peters has indicated that the characterizations indicate a level of Roman connectivity that may not reflect reality.

Read the rest here.

On the cover of the most recent issue of Faith & Family, a magazine for Catholic families until recently owned by the Legionnaries of Christ,  is a picture of a beautiful child with Down’s Syndrome. The idea  is to further the pro-life cause by showing children with disabilities in a positive light.

I know the motive is good.  But the fact is many children with disabilities do not meet the standards of physical and mental normalcy.  And Catholics who tend to be concerned with the pretty picture of a holy domestic life can be pretty ruthless when it comes to maintaining the integrity of that picture. I know from my mother, who was long active in religious education for the mentally handicapped, that some priests and nuns and DREs and parents didn’t want such children receiving first communion with the rest of the class, precisely because they would ruin the perfect photograph.

But I have even stronger worries about making the case for carrying children with disabilities to term on the grounds of the cuteness of small children. In fact, one of the biggest worries that face parents of children with disabilities is what will happen to them when they are no longer small, young, and cute. The older man with schizophrenia, the twenty-five year old girl with both Down’s Syndrome and an Autism spectrum disorder are still someone’s child–they are the children of their parents on earth, or in heaven, they are the children of Mary, the mother of us all, and they are the children of God.  They are too frequently seen as ugly annoyances, impediments to those who present themselves as modeling a beautiful life of faith & family.

“Cute” fades–for us all. Rather than trying to fit those with disabilities within conventional notions of beauty, I think a little bit of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics is in order–the life and death of Jesus Christ actually ought to reconstitute our notion of what counts as beautiful.

I was in Rhode Island last weekend, and came across an article about an innovative state program to help people with disabilities live independently in the community.  It’s far more cost effective than group homes. It integrates them into the community in a more natural way. It’s good for the college student caregivers. It’s good for the families. And it’s under deep threat in the current budget crisis.

Supporting programs like this because they contribute to the common good–the good of us all, of each and every one of us– is  part of what it means to build a culture of life. I hope Bishop Tobin agrees.

From our editorial on the debt-ceiling debate:

The compromises required by democracy often involve some brinkmanship. But many are now worried that the Tea Party has taken possession of enough Republicans to drive the whole party—and with it the country—over the brink. The Treasury Department is worried. The Fed is worried. Wall Street and even the Chamber of Commerce are worried. Brinkmanship is one thing, extortion another. It’s unlikely that most Republican politicians really believe spending cuts would help the economy more than defaulting on our debt would hurt it, but it’s beginning to look as if at least some of them wouldn’t mind seeing the economy continue to limp if it would help them win back the White House and the Senate in 2012. They’re confident voters will blame the president for whatever happens until then. The only constituency the GOP is sure it needs to help before the next election is the one that fills its campaign coffers.

Another tribute to retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and explicit mention of the war he, and other Pentagon officials, have prevented. From Stephen Walt: “As  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates cleans out his desk and heads for retirement, Ido Oren of the University of Florida highlights what might have been his most important accomplishment: preventing a war with Iran. Money quotation:

‘This scenario [of war with Iran] failed to materialize because the political forces pushing for active consideration of the military option — Vice President Dick Cheney’s camp in the George W. Bush White House, hawkish pundits, key congressional leaders and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — have been outmaneuvered by an informal antiwar coalition that included the Pentagon, the military’s top brass, the intelligence community and the Department of State.’”

Walt continues: “This coalition was ably led by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who is stepping down from his post at the end of the month. If one person were to receive the top credit for preventing an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it would be Gates. This non-incident also reminds us that sometimes policymakers succeed not by achieving some positive goal, but by helping produce a “non-event”; in this case, preventing the dogs of war from barking. Those who’d like the United States to be at odds with the entire Muslim world for the next century or so are probably disappointed that we didn’t add Iran to the list that now includes Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya (and arguably, Pakistan), but the rest of us should be grateful for this rare bit of sanity.”

The New Yorker‘s George Packer on the biggest insider-trading case in history.

Michael Lewis on The Autobiography of Mark Twain in the New Republic (subscription required).

Ross Douthat’s column about abortion and sex selection in today’s Times.

An old piece on same-sex marriage and the church by Commonweal contributor Paul J. Griffiths.

I posted this morning about a NYT elegy for a Catholic school in the Bronx. I’ve just finished reading, in the July/August issue of the Washington Monthly, a fascinating profile of another face of American Catholic education: Kevin Carey’s article “The Trinity Sisters,” about the proud history and powerful alumnae of Washington, D.C.’s Trinity College.

Carey’s story focuses particularly on two Trinity grads, Nancy Pelosi and Kathleen Sebelius, who were instrumental in getting the Affordable Care Act signed into law. I know some might take that as evidence of the failure of Catholic higher ed, but the college is obviously proud of its daughters’ achievements, and both women told Carey how inspiring and empowering they found their time at Trinity. Their comments echo the sort of praise you often hear from graduates of other selective women’s colleges — a sign that Trinity had fulfilled its original mission “to take our young Catholic women to a higher plane than has been so far reached by our Catholic schools; in a word do for them what Vassar and Wellesley and Bryn Mawr are doing for American women.”

In tracing the history of Trinity College, Carey also tells the story of its founding order, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, and explains how their particular charism has played out in the life of the college. Like parish schools, Trinity has had to adjust to changing realities — in this case, the opening of schools like Catholic U. and Georgetown to women as well as men, and of course a general relaxing of social barriers that kept promising Catholic students away from non-Catholic schools. Carey’s article looks at how the sisters have responded, bringing Trinity into the present while remaining in touch with its past. Read the whole story here.

TV reporters greeted the archbishop after Mass yesterday (of course), and the archbishop did his best to seem positive–even conciliatory–while admitting that he’s been “down a little recently, as you might imagine”:

H/T Rocco Palmo

Perhaps only Stephen Colbert, aided by his Catholic imagination, could link this trinity, and make it work for the graduating class of 2011 at Northwestern, his alma mater. Colbert’s recent commencement address is going viral, and Christian Century blogger Steve Thorngate says it may not be as funny as Conan O’Brien’s at Dartmouth “but the inevitable ‘now I’m serious kids, please keep listening’ section was far better — it was pretty much a hard-hitting sermon.”

Actually, I thought Colbert was as funny as Conan, and Conan’s kicker about failure was a pretty powerful message. But Colbert (transcript here) did take that idea further:

Whatever your dream is right now, if you don’t achieve it, you haven’t failed, and you’re not some loser. But just as importantly–and this is the part I may not get right and you may not listen to–if you do get your dream, you are not a winner.

After I graduated from here, I moved down to Chicago and did improv. Now there are very few rules to improvisation, but one of the things I was taught early on is that you are not the most important person in the scene. Everybody else is. And if they are the most important people in the scene, you will naturally pay attention to them and serve them . . . . You cannot “win” improv.

And life is an improvisation. You have no idea what’s going to happen next, and you are mostly just making things up as you go along. And like improv, you cannot win your life…

In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because, as the prophet says, service is love made visible.

If you love friends, you will serve your friends.

If you love community, you will serve your community.

If you love money, you will serve your money.

And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself.

So no more winning. Instead, try to love others and serve others, and hopefully find those who love and serve you in return.

Watch the whole thing here:

Via NPR.

Yesterday’s New York Times had a moving tribute to St. Martin of Tours, a Catholic grade school in the Bronx that is closing after eighty-six years of service. The author, David Gonzalez, is an alum, and he touches on the many factors that are leading to the closure of schools like St. Martin: a shortage of women religious; the weaknesses of the parish-sponsored-school system; shifting populations and declining enrollment. “The era when thriving congregations could support large schools staffed by nuns is long gone, taking with it the very concept of a parochial school,” Gonzalez writes. But he also calls attention to the school’s fidelity to its mission over the years, giving much-deserved credit to its lay faculty and the sisters who have kept it going.

This school has long been a sanctuary amid uncertainty — as it was for me starting in 1964, when my parents fled Hunts Point for the safety of Crotona. The fires followed a few years later, and we moved away in 1969. But I still took two buses from Morris Heights — past blocks reduced to rubble — until I graduated.

Forget the cheap jokes about ruler-swinging nuns gliding through the aisles in full-length habits. For those of us who saw our neighborhood almost vanish in smoke from arson or crack pipes, Sister Nora [McArt, OP, the principal] stands as a reminder of the sacrifices made happily and gifts given freely by women religious. Through word and deed they taught us the works of mercy: to feed the poor, clothe the naked and educate the ignorant.

To comfort the afflicted.

And now — 40 years after I walked down the aisle clutching my diploma — I returned to fulfill a final work of mercy: to bury the dead.

Read the whole thing here. There is also a video (really a narrated slide show) with some powerful images: “The Last Days of St. Martin of Tours.”

There are several interesting details in the story in which the NYTimes portrays the brilliant strategizing of Governor Andrew Cuomo and nominates him for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. Cuomo according to the story did a deft job of herding the gerbils in favor of the legislation, suggesting that past efforts may have failed as much because of gay rights coalitions going in different directions as from the opposition forces lobbying Republicans and conservative Democrats.

Featured high in the story is Cuomo’s bringing several Wall Street types (by implication Republicans) into the effort. According to the story, these bankers, hedge fund managers, etc. responded by contributing to the pro-legislation coalition, and also by promising Republican legislators threatened with defeat next election that they would support them. Example: “A major target was James S. Alesi, a Republican from suburban Rochester, who seemed tormented by his 2009 vote….The coalition approached him from every angle. The Republican donors invited him to a meeting on Park Avenue, telling him they would eagerly support him if he backed same-sex marriage. ‘That’s not the kind of lily pad I normally hop on,’ Mr. Alesi recalled.” This time he did. Was that vote purchased?

And then the interesting case of the marital status of two big guns, Andrew Cuomo and Carl Krueger, both of whom might be described as post-marriage. What resonance did opponents of the legislation have in their thinking and life experience?

And then in a second Times story on the religious exemptions there is this information: “Finally, the legislation contained what is known as an inseverability clause. If a court found any part of the act to be invalid, the entire legislation would also be invalid. The clause is an important provision to Republicans because it means that the marriage legislation would be at risk if the religious exemptions were successfully challenged in court.” And the New York Civil Liberties Union approved!  The exemptions seem to have been the work of State Senator Stephen Saland, previously discussed below.

This is why pundits describe the legislative process as sausage making.

This new initiative, housed at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina, seems like the kind of witness the Catholic Church should be highlighting. Via Catholic News Service:

BELMONT, N.C. (CNS) — Belmont Abbey College broke ground June 20 on a campus pregnancy and aftercare maternity home called Room at the Inn.

The project’s organizers say the center is the first college-based maternity center in the nation.

The 10,000-square-foot maternity home will be located on four acres donated by the Benedictine monks at Belmont Abbey. The facility is adjacent to Belmont Abbey monastery and the campus of Belmont Abbey College.

Room at the Inn, an initiative of a nonprofit maternity and aftercare center of the same name based in Charlotte, will have two residential wings, one for maternity and one for aftercare, and will be able to house up to 15 mothers, 15 infants and eight toddlers for free for up to two years. Each mother will have a private bedroom and bathroom and share the kitchen, dining room and laundry room with other residents. Administrative and counseling offices and quarters for residential managers also will be on site.

Staff and volunteers at Room at the Inn in Charlotte have long dreamed of a place where college-age pregnant women could find shelter for themselves and their children while finishing their studies.

Participants don’t have to be Catholic or Christian or students at Belmont Abbey College to be accepted. They are required to be in school, adhere to a curfew, submit goal sheets and take classes in life skills, parenting, cooking, meal planning, financial planning and nondenominational Bible study, among others. In exchange, they receive free room and board and counseling and supplies they need for their babies, such as car seats, clothes and furniture.

Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life put it well, I think, when he said the center should be a model for the rest of the country. “Every Catholic campus, every parish, every Catholic school, needs to be the place of first resort. When a young woman or a man feels that a new baby in their life is throwing everything out of control, they need to see that the church is the anchor, the place they can go to find help for themselves and their child.”

But I think one of the most important points was left for the walkaway line:

William Thierfelder, president of Belmont Abbey College, said he hoped the home would help students understand what it means to put their faith into action.

“The students who live on this campus will get to see the reality, get to see that there are options,” he said.

They will also get to see that the church puts its time, talent and treasure where its mouth is, and the impact on those who see such programs can be as important as what such ministries do for the women and children who live at the Inn.

Colbert and Jack White go mano a mano, and hilarity, and an odd sort of catechesis, ensues:

Check their answers, make yourself feel good. “Censure”? Censer? Thurible?

Today is the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist.  I was reflecting this morning about the location of the feast in the annual liturgical cycle.  The date of June 24^th reflects Luke’s testimony (Lk 1:36-37) that John was conceived six months before Jesus.

It’s interesting, though, that this feast comes so soon after the close of the Easter season.  I suspect most of us are a bit exhausted after the march through Lent, the Triduum, Ascension, and Pentecost!  Right at the point where we are tempted to bed down for a nice long summer nap through Ordinary Time, John is there, calling us to repentance and reminding us of He who is to come.  This feast also comes at the beginning of summer, the longest day of the year.  It’s a caution against complacency.  Dark days lie ahead and the Son of Man is a sign that will be contradicted.

I also found these thoughts from the Orthodox priest Robert Arida that are worth considering:

Barrenness and prophesy are two interconnected themes which permeate the feast of the Baptist’s nativity. Elizabeth’s barrenness is used by God to reveal his love for the entire creation. This divine love, expressed in divine power and glory, enables the cousin of the Virgin to conceive. The conception and birth of St. John points to the termination not only of the barrenness of Zachariah and Elizabeth but also that of cosmic barrenness. Sin and death had rendered the creation incapable of nurturing and sustaining life. For the reign of death, traced back to Adam’s fall, aborted all life which was destined from all eternity to abide in the bosom of God.

Today we celebrate and bear witness to the unfolding of the creation’s renewal now affirmed in the birth of John the Baptist. Previously bound to death, the creation begins to reflect its true identity. From the barrenness of Elizabeth emerges the forerunner of the one who is life.

Celebrating the nativity of St. John should be an expression of our thanks to God who has delivered us from the horrible barrenness of death, which not only robs us of our biological existence but strives to impair and ultimately smother the creative powers of the mind and heart. Consequently, human creativity, now imbued with hope and life, is urged on by divine love to transcend its inherent limitations. Finding its highest expression in true worship human creativity is joined to divine life. The human person and his unique energy gradually, through ascetic effort, achieves harmony with the divine energy and hence the unfolding of the eternal ascent into the kingdom which is to come.

General David Petraeus in testimony before Congress took his distance from the president’s decision to reduce U.S. troops in Afghanistan (which, of course, the president had said he would do when committing to the “surge” in 2009).

If confirmed as head of the CIA, Mr. Petraeus will be overseeing judgments on the outcome of his own strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not sure that’s such a good idea. Others?

Karen J. Terry, who led the John Jay College study into the causes of  clergy sex abuse of minors in the Catholic Church, has criticized news coverage that she said reduced her complex findings to a single point summarized in news reports as “blame Woodstock” – the idea that the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s helped to cause the scandal.

Dr. Terry made her comments in an article on the Web site The Crime Report, a resource for criminal justice journalists. She wrote:

A study of this complexity does not easily lend itself to an accurate sound bite.

Nevertheless, one early media report in a national paper attributed the explanation of social factors as a “Blame Woodstock” excuse, a phrase that went viral and was cited more than 14,000 times within the next two days.

The truth is, at no point in the report did we “blame” Woodstock or simplify the explanation of the abuse crisis to the “swinging sixties,” as some papers reported.

It’s true that the report never singles out the cultural mores of the 1960s as the sole cause of an increase in clergy sex abuse of minors, but it is a significant part of the report. For example, the “Findings” section in the executive summary begins:

No single `cause’ of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is identified as a result of our research. Social and cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s manifested in increased levels of deviant behavior in the general society and also among priests of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Similarly, where the report lists the possible causes to be studied, the culture of the Sixties is first on the list, with the researchers to examine  “general cultural factors, including the impact social changes in the 1960s and 1970s had on individual priests’ attitudes and behavior and on organizational life, including social stratification, emphasis on individualism, and social movements.” Later, the report said that  “Social movements, such as the sexual revolution and development of understanding about sexual victimization and harm, necessarily had an influence on those within organizations just as they did on those in the general society.”

Even the press release John Jay College issued on the report focused on the Sixties immediately after announcing no single cause had been found. Dr.  Terry’s quote, contained in the second paragraph:

“The bulk of cases occurred decades ago,” said Karen Terry, PhD., John Jay’s principal investigator for the report. “The increased frequency of abuse in the 1960s and 1970s was consistent with the patterns of increased deviance of society during that time. She also stated that “social influences intersected with vulnerabilities of individual priests whose preparation for a life of celibacy was inadequate at that time.”

I think Dr. Terry is mistaken to blame the news media for focusing on what was new and interesting in the study – the same aspects played up in her  press release. The story was that the report showed the abuse peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, and  why. But the claim that the sexual revolution helped cause increased clergy sex abuse of minors was the weak link in the study because it’s speculation.  The report otherwise consists of  a lot of very useful data.

I suspect few war-mongers come here, so I don’t want to alarm anyone, but…. Secretary of Defense Robert Gate’s “exit” interview with Jim Lehrer on the PBS Newshour (June 23) was impressive. The man is sane and even balanced! He spoke of the troops’ exhaustion; he seemed a little exhausted himself–time to become the dispensable nation?

There is a transcript posted here. Dare I say, far more impressive than his predecessor–what’s his name.

A new multi-lingual website has been opened by Andrea Tornielli in assocation with the Italian newspaper La Stampa. It appears to be interested in things other than inside-the-Vatican gossip.  Here’s the link to the English version.

For those who continue to follow the situation in Israel, here is an informed background piece by Yoram Peri on the struggle between Israeli PM Netanyahu and retired Mossad head Dagan, but really as the piece points out it is a deep division between politicians and military and intelligence professionals.

“This tumult, which just began to unfold in recent weeks, has many consequences. One of them is that Prime Minister Netanyahu returned from his last trip to Washington a national hero. His performance in Congress and contrarian positioning vis-à-vis President Obama have added to his popularity on the Israeli street, as a man who is seen not to be afraid of standing up for Israel’s security interests. Now it turns out that it is in fact the upper echelons of the defense establishment in Israel — which has an acute understanding of Israel’s actual security interests — that sees the Prime Minister in a very different light.

“The Dagan Affair is not a case of one officer ridiculing politicians, as General Stanley McChrystal did a year ago and who was then fired by President Obama. It reveals deep-seated disputes regarding Israel’s existence between the professional elite of the defense establishment and the politicians who manage it. We should therefore not view the conflict as circus slapstick and let ourselves be distracted by personalities. This time its outcome could determine Israel’s fate.”

Peri, an Israeli-American academic at the University of Maryland, sets out the context for the recent controversy, which we have discussed here and here.

I don’t really know how the legislative fight in New York over gay marriage will turn out this year.  I am almost certain, however, of how it will turn out 10 years from now.   By then, I would be extremely surprised if gay marriage has not been legalized in most of the Northeast and West Coast.  Within 25 years, I expect that the number of states where gay marriage is legal will outnumber those where it is illegal

The bottom line is that opponents of gay marriage—among whom I would include the U.S. bishops—are going to lose this fight.  They may win this year and perhaps even the next few years.  But judging from the polling data I’ve seen, their ultimate defeat is as certain as the passage of time.

This isn’t surprising.  From the sale of contraceptives to abortion to the introduction of no-fault divorce, the Catholic Church has tended to lose most of its high profile fights over social issues.   To the extent that one sees these struggles as a form of witness the Gospel, victory or defeat may well be beside the point.

There’s losing, though, and then there’s losing ugly.  The way in which the Catholic Church loses this particular campaign will have an impact on its ability to communicate the Gospel to younger Catholics, to say nothing of the broader culture.

Some sense of the difficulties the Church faces can be gleaned by reading UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity, a 2007 book by Barna Group president David Kinnaman.  The Barna Group conducted a number of surveys and focus groups with adults and young people, both Christians and those he calls “outsiders” to the faith.  Kinnaman summarized his findings under a number of descriptive terms that the respondents tended to apply to Christians.

Chief among these terms was “antihomosexual.”  Among Americans aged 16-29 who were not churchgoers, 91 percent felt this term described Christianity “a lot” or “some.”   This far outpaced positive images like “has good values and principles” (26%), “consistently shows love to other people” (16%), “seems genuine and real” (11%), and “people you trust” (9%).  Kinnaman concludes that “when you introduce yourself as a Christian to a friend, neighbor, or business associate who is an outsider, you might as well have it tattooed on your arm: antihomosexual, gay-hater, homophobic.”

Kinnamon, a conservative evangelical, makes clear that he is not arguing that Christians can or should change their traditional teachings on sexual morality.  He does, however, argue strongly that young people who know gays and lesbians as family members, friends and co-workers simply will not respond to Christian rhetoric that paints them as uniquely disordered or that fails to acknowledge the complexity of their lives.

Comparing same-sex marriage to the actions of an authoritarian government like China and North Korea fails this test.   While the bishops have not only the right but the responsibility to bring Catholic teaching into the public square, they need to do so in ways that do not seem uniquely obsessed with the sins of gays and lesbians.

It might have been helpful, for example, if the bishops’ willingness to take on same-sex marriage has been coupled with an equally enthusiastic effort to reform no-fault divorce laws.  Given contemporary mores, such an effort would have had almost zero chance of success.  But coupling the issues would at least make it clear that the bishops understood that the most serious threats to marriage arise from the behavior of heterosexuals.

More fundamentally, I suspect that many young people who grow up within the Church sense that the ways that heterosexuals fall short of Church teaching—fornication, cohabitation, contraception, remarriage after divorce—are, in pastoral practice at least, taken less seriously than the sexual sins of gays and lesbians.  While I have no illusions that a more consistent application of the Church’s teaching would be “appealing,” it would at least immunize the Church against the charge of hypocrisy.  The emerging generation of young people may not be inclined to adhere to the Church’s sexual ethics, but it would be a measure of progress if they could at least respect them.

The June 16 episode of The World Over starring Raymond Arroyo featured an interview with Robert Bennett, one of the original members of the USCCB National Review Board (2002-04). The two discussed the bishops’ revisions to the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. The whole interview is worth watching (it begins at minute 8:45).

The Charter was not — pace Catholic News Service — extensively revised. Instead, the USCCB simply changed the document to conform to recent Vatican instructions, so that the possession of child pornography and the sexual abuse of adults with mental disabilities are now considered no different from abusing a minor. The revised Charter also obliges bishops to report allegations against bishops to the papal nuncio as well as to civil authorities. Not meaningless revisions, but hardly responsive to news out of Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Gallup, New Mexico — where it was revealed that the bishop has never met with his review board. (I offered some suggestions for the bishops and the National Review Board here.)

Read the rest of this entry »

A MODEST MOUND OF BONES

That short-sleeved man, our
          uncle owns
the farm next our farm, south
          and west of us, and
he butchers for a living, hand-to-mouth.
         Once walking on his land
we found a hill, topped by a flower,
         a hill of bones.

They were rain-scrubbed clean,
         lovely things.
Depending how the white
         sun struck, chips of col-
or — green, yellow, dove-blue, a light
         bay — flew off the sul-
len stilled turning there. To have seen
         those clickless rings,

those prisonerless
         ribs, complex
beyond the lathe’s loose jaws,
         convolute compounds
of knobs, rods, hooks, moons, absurd paws,
         subtle flats and rounds:
no man could conceive such finesse,
         concave or -vex.

Some warp like the belly
         of a wheeze.
As a cat thinks, some bend,
         or curve as if hunting
infinity, toward which to tend.
         How it sags! what bunting
is flesh to be hung from such ele-
         gant balconies?
                                    – John Updike

Dan Gilgoff at CNN.com has a fine examination of the religious outlook of Jon Huntsman, the latest Republican wannabe (and could be) to throw his hat into the presidential ring, and the second Mormon after presumptive leader Mitt Romney.

Huntsman has already received that usually lethal designation as the “media’s favorite Republican” (cf. McCain, John), though some believe that in this topsy-turvy field and political environment you can’t count anyone out. And Huntsman could benefit from the fact that economic concerns seem to be trumping “culture war” issues this year; Huntsman describes himself as pro-life but supports civil unions for gays.

But Huntsman has a particularly difficult needle to thread on religion, in that he is a Mormon, which makes him suspect to a large segment of voters. Yet he is also a Mormon of a different, stripe, as Gilgoff notes — one who is not “overly religious” and draws inspiration from many religions and philosophies. He and his wife are raising an adopted daughter from India in her native Hindu religion, and another daughter was married in an Episcopal Church (heaven forfend!).

I’m not sure whether it is harder to imagine a Republican candidate coping with such issues in a primary campaign or a Democrat trying to fend off Republican attacks if he or she had such a religious resume. Huntsman seems to have the worst of both worlds as a Mormon who isn’t all that observant. Or maybe he can make that work for him.

Paul Moses posted here and Eduardo Penalver posted here on the rather ham-fisted and thinly-argued efforts of New York’s bishops to thwart passage of a gay marriage law in the state, a tense battle that looks as though it will continue for a few more days.

It has always struck me that spending so much time and treasure and scarce episcopal credibility on campaigning against civil marriage for a fraction of a fairly tiny slice of the population is misguided at best, given the parlous state of marriage in America as a whole and sacramental marriage in the Church in particular.

On that last point, Our Sunday Visitor has a story by Mark Gray, numbers-cruncher extraordinaire at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown, that graphically shows the near-collapse of church marriages:

“The number of marriages celebrated in the Church has fallen from 415,487 in 1972 to 168,400 in 2010 — a decrease of nearly 60 percent — while the U.S. Catholic population has increased by almost 17 million,” Gray writes. “To put this another way, this is a shift from 8.6 marriages per 1,000 U.S. Catholics in 1972 to 2.6 marriages per 1,000 Catholics in 2010.”

OSV’s companion editorial argues that this “radical” decline “has potentially even greater long-term consequences [than the sexual abuse scandal] and yet is virtually ignored and unremarked on…”

OSV’s editors ding marriage prep programs but note that there is “a much deeper problem: Many Catholics seem unaware of what the Church means by a sacramental marriage, of its opportunities for grace and its advantages over civil marriage. The solution likely will need to be just as complicated as the problem, and involve every sector of the Church.”

I’d agree. There are plenty of horror stories about bad marriage prep programs and unwelcoming pastors, but that doesn’t seem to be the norm (in my experience) and the vast majority of priests I know really see a marriage as an opportunity to bring Catholics deeper into church life and perhaps introduce a non-Catholic spouse-to-be to the open embrace of the church.

The core problem seems to be that by the time young adults (in particular) think about marriage they don’t have the lifelong religious, spiritual and cultural connections to the church that would lead them to pursue a church wedding in the first place.

I’m not sure the bishops’ campaign against gay marriage is going to change that dynamic in any positive way. Indeed, it hurts the bishops’ witness against gay marriage when they can’t figure out how to promote straight marriage in their own house.

Remarks to Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Esther Brimmer, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of International Organization Affairs, Washington, DC, June 15, 2011

An example of our even-handed policy on nuclear matters in the ME:

Brimmer: “Last September we joined international partners to defeat a resolution at the IAEA that singled out Israel’s nuclear program for rebuke. Just last week, the IAEA Board of Governors, which includes the U.S., adopted a resolution finding Syria in noncompliance with its international nuclear obligations and referred the matter to the UN Security Council. Syria blatantly violated its nonproliferation safeguards obligations and has hindered the IAEA’s efforts to investigate the matter. Syria must fully cooperate with the IAEA and resolve all outstanding issues related to its noncompliance.

“We have also worked to isolate Iran at the UN Security Council, imposing tough sanctions that have set back its nuclear programs. We have been steadfast in calling on Iran to live up to its own commitments and its obligations under UN Security Council Resolutions, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and its IAEA Safeguards Agreement.”

http://www.state.gov/p/io/rm/2011/166223.htm

MORE 6/21/11: And as the campaign season picks up speed  throw this into the mix: “Barack Obama reassures Jewish donors.” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/57398.html and here: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/obama-tells-jewish-donors-that-u-s-israel-disagreements-are-only-tactical-1.368864