When parallel lines intersect:

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Identical twins Julian and Adrian Riester were born seconds apart 92 years ago. They died hours apart this week.

The Buffalo-born brothers were also brothers in the Roman Catholic Order of Friars Minor. Professed friars for 65 years, they spent much of that time working together at St. Bonaventure University, doing carpentry work, gardening and driving visitors to and from the airport and around town…

They died Wednesday at St. Anthony Hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., Brother Julian in the morning and Brother Adrian in the evening.

Both died of heart failure, said Father James Toal, guardian of St. Anthony Friary in St. Petersburg, where the inseparable twins lived since moving from western New York in 2008.

After a blizzard last December 26, it became national news that New York City sanitation workers supposedly engaged in a slowdown that stymied the city’s snow-removal effort. The claims immediately fueled attacks on “Big Labor.” Now, the city’s Department of Investigation has completed a thorough report that rejects those allegations.

It’s worth looking back  on the story because it reveals what has become a well-shoveled path for bogus controversies. It began with a story in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, was picked up immediately at Murdoch’s Fox News, and then was followed, sometimes breathlessly and usually with not much skepticism, by the rest of the news media. (The New York Times questioned the claims in a carefully reported January 26 story.)

Daniel Halloran, a freshman Republican councilman from Queens who was elected with Tea Party support, claimed to the Post that three sanitation workers and two city transportation supervisor had told him about a slowdown scheme. The Post pumped up these claims into a citywide conspiracy and reported them as fact, not allegations, in a  a December 30 story:

These garbage men really stink.

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts – a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

The next day, the Post claimed that sanitation workers had targeted certain neighborhoods for a slowdown for political reasons:

There was a method to their madness.

The selfish Sanitation bosses who sabotaged the blizzard cleanup to fire a salvo at City Hall targeted politically connected and well-heeled neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn to get their twisted message across loud and clear, The Post has learned.

Another story speculated that the supposed slowdown caused the deaths of people who couldn’t get to a hospital because of snow-clogged streets. “There may be blood on their hands,” it began.

Commentators piled on. Michelle Malkin: “Let the snow-choked streets of New York be a lesson for the rest of the nation: It’s time to put the Big Chill on Big Labor-run municipal services.”  Juan Williams on Fox: “…  it’s an evidence of the mindset of the unions. They feel entitled. They feel as if, you know what? You can’t budget cut or lay people off in the public sector any more without feeling they are legitimate in punishing you, the mayor and the people of the city of New York.” And so forth – jokes on late-night TV, etc.

But even Halloran said the union wasn’t part of the purported scheme; he claimed some recently demoted sanitation supervisors were the culprits. As it turned out, Halloran refused to reveal the names of the three sanitation workers he claims spoke with him; the two transportation supervisors said he had twisted their conversation, the city Investigation Department found. Beyond that, the report found, there was no evidence of a  slowdown.

In other words, a snow job.

Last year at this time, I was getting ready to go to a marvelous conference in Trent, Italy, with moral theologians from around the globe.

The conversation that we had was remarkable.  I found the conference an invaluable, living reminder of the fact that the Catholic Church–and the questions that it deals with–are indeed, global in nature.

The participants were so enthusiastic about the new conversations enabled by the conference that we were insistent that that they not be allowed to wither on the vine–or more precisely, without the wine from the vine at the wonderful trattorias in Trento!

One fruit of the project is a website that serves as a clearinghouse and notice board for the ongoing work of expanding the community and the concerns of moral theologians to be truly global.

It’s open–check it out.

Meir Dagan, the recently retired head of Israeli intelligence, Mossad: “The man who ran Israel’s Mossad spy agency until January contends that Israel’s top leaders lack judgment and that anticipated pressures of international isolation as the Palestinians campaign for statehood could lead to rash decisions — like an airstrike on Iran.” Whole story here: NYTimes

And from Ha’aretz implications for the U.S.: “The conclusion is that between the end of June and Gates’ retirement, and the end of September and Mullen’s retirement, the danger that Netanyahu and Barak will aim at a surprise in Iran is especially great, especially since this would divert attention from the Palestinian issue.”

Stephen Schneck of the Catholic University of America offers a good post on the much-abused term:

“Subsidiarity refers to the appropriate balancing of responsibilities and functions among the parts of a social order. It has its origin in the Catholic understanding of community, which perceives a community not as so many individuals connected by contracts, but as a corporate whole—a moral and cultural body that, like any body, is comprised of limbs and parts the differences of which contribute to the good of the whole. The ethic that pertains to the unity of the body is called solidarity. The ethic that pertains to the role of the parts is subsidiarity. And the good of the whole by which solidarity and subsidiarity are measured is called the common good.”

Read the rest right here.

As complement to David Gibson’s post on the Lord’s Resurrection, here, from the “Epilogue” to volume two of Jesus of Nazareth, is some of Pope Benedict’s meditation on the Ascension.

Jesus led his followers into the vicinity of Bethany, we are told. “Lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven” (Lk 24:50&51). Jesus departs in the act of blessing. He goes while blessing, and he remains in that gesture of blessing…

The gesture of hands outstretched in blessing expresses Jesus’ continuing relationship to his disciples, to the world. In departing he comes to us, in order to raise us up above ourselves, and to open up the world to God. That is why the disciples could return home from Bethany rejoicing. In faith we know that Jesus holds his hands stretched out in blessing over us. That is the lasting motive of Christian joy.

Sursum corda!

Our own Daniel Callahan has a notable article written with Sherwin B. Nuland in the June 9 issue of The New Republic: “The Quagmire: How American Medicine Is Destroying Itself.” (It’s subscriber-only on their Web site.) They begin by asking a broad question about our outlook on medical progress: “What if we are refusing to confront the painful likelihood that our biological nature is not nearly as resilient or open to endless improvement as we have long believed?”

According to the authors, endless improvement is not on the horizon. But in pursuit of it, we have created new problems:

In the war against disease, we have unwittingly created a kind of medicine that is barely affordable now and forbiddingly unaffordable in the long run. The Affordable Care Act might ease the burden, but it will not eliminate it. Ours is now a medicine that may doom most of us to an old age that will end badly: with our declining bodies falling apart as they always have but devilishly—and expensively—stretching out the suffering and decay. Can we conceptualize something better?

Yes, Callahan and Nuland conclude—we can do better. “But it will require—to use a religious term in a secular way—something like a conversion experience on the part of physicians, researchers, industry, and our nation as a whole.” The details of that “conversion experience” are laid out in the rest of the article, and they track with some of the things Callahan has written in Commonweal (for example, “America’s Blind Spot: Health Care and the Common Good”). Worth reading and discussing — and feel free to use religious terms where appropriate.

As long as I’m recommending articles only subscribers can read online, let me mention a couple other recent gems you might want to seek out: first, Rachel Aviv’s article “God Knows Where I Am” in the May 30 issue of the New Yorker. Aviv uses the story of one mentally ill woman to explore the difficulties in treating patients who won’t admit that they’re sick. I found it haunting. Second, the latest Harper’s features a collection of tributes to the King James Bible on the occasion of its 400th anniversary. I didn’t care for most of the contributions, but a notable exception is Marilynne Robinson’s fine essay “What We May Be.” Look for it at a newsstand near you!

Coverage of the second volume of Pope Benedict’s “Jesus of Nazareth” series (a third is rumored) largely focused on what the pontiff had to say about Jews and the death of Jesus. That was understandable, given Joseph Ratzinger’s personal history and the fact that the Vatican released excerpts related to those issues to gin up interest in the book.

As I tried to find another good hook to write about the rest of the book on its release date, I flipped first to Benedict’s treatment of the Resurrection. I found the entire volume to be very impressive, filled with so much scholarship, easily synthesized (though somewhat dated, I think) and spiritual wisdom that I confess to experiencing one of those episodes of ecclesial pride that the temporal head of the church would also have such authorial chops. It’s sort of the way I want to proclaim kinship with the Anglicans when I read Rowan Williams or N.T. Wright. (There’s a good argument to be made, however, that these fellows should all spend more time governing than writing, and indeed Wright gave up his Durham see because he hated the adminstrative part.)

Papa Ratzinger does slip in his pet peeves here and there, but those tend to disappear beneath the whole of the work (to me, at least) much as they did when I read “Introduction to Christianity” way back when. And this second volume on the Jesus of history and faith doesn’t have quite the zip (again, for me) that the first one did, or perhaps the first book benefited from the frisson of novelty.

While this book focuses on Holy Week, it is a rather bloodless re-telling, certainly no Mel Gibson (no relation, swear) version. Indeed, it seems to me that portraying or explaining the Resurrection is the toughest challenge for an author or cinematographer or homilist or even an evangelist. (The scene of Jesus walking from the tomb to martial music in “Passion of the Christ” was not a highlight, I thought, though the entire film is not a fave of mine.) In his book, Benedict notes that none of the gospels present the event itself, because it “defies description” since “by its very nature it lies outside human experience.”

But the pope gives it a shot — he has to — and I turned to Benedict’s account of the Resurrection, wondering how he would present it. It turned out to be the most memorable part of the book for me (though not made for a news story, alas) especially for its description of the Resurrection as an “evolutionary leap,” a characterization which the pope concedes might have problematic connotations:

Read the rest of this entry »

My June 17 Commonweal column asks some question about the whys and wherefores of “humanitarian intervention.” Exactly how humanitarian has it been in Libya?

When Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi is finally deposed, the world may agree that “all’s well that ends well.” But first, some questions: Why did France and Britain lead the way? Why did the United States join the effort? How humanitarian is this humanitarian intervention? Is Qaddafi’s fitting end being achieved by doubtful means?

A somewhat wonky analysis of why “Qaddafi won’t go: Libyan Limbo: Six reasons why it’s been so tough to get Qaddafi to quit.” Foreign Policy

When I went to the Midwestern university hospital to apply for a job as a wheelchair pusher to support my ABD lifestyle habit and instead they offered me the directorship of that department as well as of the Volunteer Service, I thought that I was either just lucky or I that looked good in a suit.  At the fried chicken and slab cake welcome reception held for me the following week by my fellow directors, I discovered that it was the suit.  What made me look good in it was that I appeared to be a clean-cut conservative looking white guy wearing it.  At the reception, I was taken aside by several people who “expressed their concern” that my predecessor (a Black woman) had been taking on too many volunteers of an “undesirable socio-economic status”.  Specifically, she had been recruiting them not from the university neighborhood, but from the poor surrounding neighborhoods.  “This wasn’t about race” my concerned informants were quick to add.  It was about the hospital’s image with the suburbanites it wished to draw as customers.

But they were telling me that there were too many Black volunteers.  If I had been a braver, tougher, more righteous person, I should probably have resigned on the spot.  But I had already packed up my apartment for the move to the local neighborhood.  And to be brutally honest, one of the perks of the job was access to the famous university library that the hospital was attached to and I wanted to get my hands on it.

Quickly groping for a rationalization, I decided that even if I did quit, they would only keep looking for someone pliable.  On the other hand, if I stayed, maybe I could help change things.  Not in a brave throw-myself-in-front-of-a-train way, but in the subtle, cunning, and vicious way that I had operated with graduate school politics.  And after all, not everyone at the reception had taken me aside for a private chat.  The fact that the racists did this told me that they were by no means the majority in the place.  So I stayed on and decided to undermine their concerns instead.

Read the rest of this entry »

At America’s blog, Vincent Miller has a terrific post up that pretty much captures my own views on Dolan’s letter to Rep. Ryan:

On matters concerning abortion, and now marriage, the bishops are quick to react and don’t shy from direct public confrontation.  In 2008, when Nancy Pelosi opined on her understanding of the Church’s teaching on abortion in the patristic period, a sharply worded correction was issued within 48 hours signed by the chairs of the USCCB committees on Pro-Life Activities and Doctrine.

Under Cardinal George, the USCCB waded fully into the weeds of policy interpretation and lobbied heavily against passage of the Senate version of the Affordable Care Act.  Experts in the field were skeptical of their legal interpretation.  But even as they publically argued against the legislation around the clock and lobbied Rep. Stupak and others to reject a compromise based on an executive order, no public pressure was brought to bear on Catholic Republicans in the Senate, who could have easily provided the votes to include the Stupak amendment in the Senate bill, and voted for cloture to allow Democrats to pass it.

One side always receives loud, pointed, public criticism; the other always gets a free pass.

I think this about sums it up.  It’s well and good to point out — as Dolan rightly does — that resolving issues of economic policy almost always call for the exercise of prudential reason.  But, as I’ve argued before, there must be some economic policy proposals whose alleged tendency to benefit the poor is so implausible that those who support them bear a heavy burden of justifying their professed belief that the proposals are consistent with the preferential option for the poor.  (And here, I mean justified both in the sense of proving that they are not lying when they claim that their primary interest is in helping the poor and of demonstrating that, even if they are not lying about their motives, their beliefs meet some minimum threshold of rationality.)

Ryan’s plan seems to fit the bill for a set of proposals that calls for the application of this heavy burden, if anything does.  To cut taxes for the rich and for corporations while effectively eliminating two of the pillars of the post-War social safety net is, on its face, a policy that appears to favor the interests of the rich over those of the poor.  The only argument to the contrary appears to be that  (1) addressing the national debt is essential to the long-term well-being of the poor and (2) the standard supply-side mantra that the best way to accomplish (1) is by cutting taxes, which will unleash economic energy, creating a rising economic tide that will lift all boats, and reducing the national debt at the same time.  Although (1) is probably correct, the real heart of the matter is (2).  And there is simply no credible empirical support for the idea that, given the baseline of present levels of taxation in this country, cutting taxes on the rich will benefit the poor in any meaningful sense.

The weak tea that Dolan offers in response to the Ryan plan suggests that, unlike issues of sexual morality, when it comes to economic policy, politicians mouthing the words of Catholic social teaching is enough to satisfy many in the hierarchy, no matter how much the actual details of the proposed economic policies appear to belie claims of fidelity to the principles that lie at the heart of that teaching.  As Miller observes, and Dolan’s protestations notwithstanding, that imbalanced approach is hardly likely to make both political parties unhappy.