It was not all work and no play at the Second Vatican Council. While speeches, momentous, portentous, and dull were being delivered in very differently accented Latin, a few bishops kept themselves awake by composing limericks, that distinctively English literary genre. At my blog I have gathered as many of these as I could find in a variety of sources. They vary considerably in quality, and sometimes one needs to know the incidents that prompted them to appreciate them; but still they may be of general interest. I have added two pages on various attempts at humor during the Council. To entice you in, here is a limerick about four major figures at the Council; I’ve seen it in four or five different versions, including one in Latin.

Of Congar and Rahner and Küng
The praises are everywhere süng.
But Ottaviani
One fine domani
Will see that they’re properly hüng.

Over at NCR, Michael Sean Winters praises Notre Dame President John Jenkins for the letter (pdf) he sent on Wednesday to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in which he claims that new mandates for the coverage of contraception would put the University and other religious institutions in “an impossible position.” Jenkins says:

“This would compel Notre Dame to either pay for contraception and sterilization in violation of the church’s moral teaching, or to discontinue our employee and student health care plans in violation of the church’s social teaching. It is an impossible position.”

Winters is impressed by this line of reasoning, writing:

“Father Jenkins makes a point that had not previously occurred to me – or to anyone else whose writings on this topic I have seen. It is just as morally objectionable to stop providing health care coverage as it is to provide coverage for procedures we find morally objectionable.”

He then goes on to ask why the Obama administration would allow Planned Parenthood and others to pressure it into putting such good friends in such a moral and, apparently, logical quagmire. But, are these two things, the Church’s moral teaching and its social teaching really in direct contradiction? Is making contraception available to individuals acting on their conscience who choose to take advantage of such services ”just as“ objectionable as denying healthcare access to an entire workforce?

Read the rest of this entry »

I know we’ve gone over the death penalty issue a bit lately, and in the past have discussed Antonin Scalia’s support for capital punishment and how that squares with his Catholicism.

But Justice Scalia’s remarks last weekend in a talk at Duquesne University Law School left me scratching my head — not an unusual occurrence.

The Supreme Court’s longest-serving justice said, among other things:

“If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign. I could not be a part of a system that imposes it.”

The categorical nature of the comments at Duquesne (in response to a handful of protesters he’d seen outside) seems to challenge the increasingly clear teaching of the Catholic Church that the death penalty is indeed immoral — a point reiterated by a Vatican official in this Catholic News Service story:

[Tommaso] Di Ruzza [of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace] said the divergence of many Catholics in the United States from the church’s current position is a sign that “the universal church must also accompany the particular churches a little bit” and help guide them on this “journey of purification,” which is more a process of “maturity rather than a revolution or change in tradition.” Without reading Popes John Paul and Benedict’s clear condemnations of the death penalty, the catechism will “unfortunately have the risk of being ambiguous or taken out of context,” he said.

So, does this mean Scalia should step down? While one could find the tiniest of loopholes in the catechism for the possibility of allowing for executions, consecutive popes and the bishops and theologians have made it clear that it is plainly unjustified and wrong.

As Rick Garnett points out at MOJ, Michael Perry recently argued that capital punishment is “cruel and unusual” as well, which would seem to make it problematic from a non-sectarian constitutional standpoint.

In May 2002, Scalia wrote that he did not believe the church’s teaching on the death penalty had changed (or that it could, apparently). He clearly seems to have been wrong on that point.

So the options are dissent or resignation. Thoughts?

During the years Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York, his administration was on the losing end of a long string of First Amendment lawsuits. It got to the point that a federal appeals court noted the “relentless onslaught” of such cases, resulting in 18 decisions against the city.

I had thought that having a media executive as mayor would lead to greater respect in City Hall for the First Amendment. Michael Bloomberg’s response to the arrests of more than 1,800 peaceful protesters at the Republican National Convention in 2004 – largely just to get them off the street for as long as 36 hours – demonstrated otherwise.

This background makes it less shocking than it should be that there is now a controversy over the video-verified fact that a high-ranking police official – a deputy inspector – squirted pepper spray on Chelsea Elliott, 25, a woman taking part in the ongoing Occupy Wall Street demonstration. Perhaps the various videos don’t tell the whole story, but from the look of it, Elliott was doing no more than exercising her right to free speech at the time.

Jim Dwyer does a good job in today’s Times of providing the broader context – a Police Department with a growing power that is unchecked.

Unchecked by whom? The list could be lengthy, since a variety of local, state and federal authorities  have official oversight responsibilities, and others – the news media – have an unofficial role. But I would start the list with Mayor Bloomberg.

Former New Orleans Archbishop Philip Hannan’s words, his last, after receiving absolution at a mass around his deathbed celebrated by current New Orleans archbishop, Gregory Aymond:

Aymond said Hannan had already been anointed several times with the Sacrament of the Sick. This final Mass, the last of uncounted thousands in Hannan’s life, would be his last reception of the Eucharist.

In the early part of the ritual, Aymond and the others jointly confessed their sins in prayer, and as part of the rite, Aymond said he granted Hannan absolution from his sins in the name of Jesus.

Though weak and perhaps not entirely alert, Aymond said Hannan whispered a response.

They are what so far are his last recorded words:

He said: “Sounds good to me.”

Maybe not as traditional as some would expect, but seems in character for the former archbishop of New Orleans, who died on Thursday.

Reading the news from Libya everyday has it sounding like a basket case. Fighting in Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte has taken center stage in the reporting, probably because that’s where all the reporters are. But here from Daniel Serwer of Reuters is a “boring” story about how well things are working in Tripoli and how generally optimistic its citizens are.

“In the weeks since, the new, unpaid local administration has achieved a great deal. It sent technicians hundreds of kilometers to the south with support from local tribesmen to reactivate the wells that pump water into Qaddafi’s “Great Man-made River,” which supplies Tripoli and other population centers. The national government is making the usual social welfare payments. Flour and oil subsidies have been maintained, so bread is cheap and available. Only partial withdrawal of salaries from banks is permitted, but Libyans are confident about the country’s economic future, based on its oil and gas resources.”

I imagine everyone remembers the horrific shooting massacre at the Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. That was five years ago already, Oct. 2, 2006. The story of how the parents of the shooting victims (five girls dead, five girls wounded) gathered to publicly forgive the shooter, Charles Carl Roberts IV, who had also killed himself, made news around the world.

My RNS colleague Dan Burke has another, unsung aspect of this story — the deeply affecting journey of the parents of the shooter, in particular the mother, Terri Roberts, who has begun telling church groups how her life has come to be intertwined with those of her son’s victims and their families:

Three months after the shooting, Chuck and Terri Roberts began visiting the victims and their families.

Terri invited the surviving girls and their mothers to picnics and tea parties at her home.

At one tea, Terri asked the mothers to sit in a circle and share the highest and lowest points of their lives. She yearned to connect with Mary Liz King, the mother of a paralyzed girl named Rosanna.

King explained how her trials were different than the rest of the victims. Their daughters had died or healed, whereas Rosanna, unable to move most of her body, requires constant care.

She cannot walk, talk or eat, yet Rosanna is aware of her surroundings and attends an Amish school, her father, Christ King, said in an interview.

At the tea, Terri approached Mary Liz and offered to help care for Rosanna.

Almost every Thursday evening since, Terri has visited the Kings for several hours, singing to Rosanna, cleaning her bedclothes, bathing her limp body and reading her Bible stories.

After the first few visits, Terri cried all the way home. “Lord, I can’t do this,” she said. But she went back the next week, and the next.

“She’s got to be an awful strong woman to be able to do that,” said Christ King. “Some of the evenings that Terri is there, Rosanna has a rough time or cries a lot. You can’t help but think about what happened and why she is like she is. I don’t know that I’d be that strong.”

I don’t know that I would be, could be. Read the rest here.

Jesus Colina, founder and editorial director of a news agency sponsored by the Legion of Christ, has been asked to step down. According to a letter Colina sent to Zenit employees, the Legion of Christ asked him to step down after he resisted efforts to more closely identify Zenit with the Legion. Colina also wrote that the Legion hid “relevant facts” from him about the scandalous behavior of Fr. Marcial Maciel. John Thavis of Catholic News Service has the story:

The founder and editorial director of the Catholic news agency Zenit has resigned, citing problems of trust and transparency with Zenit’s sponsoring organization, the Legionaries of Christ.

Spanish journalist Jesus Colina, who established Zenit in 1997 and helped build it into a seven-language agency with about 450,000 email subscribers around the world, said he had been asked to resign because he resisted pressures to identify the agency and its work more closely with the Legionaries order.

(…)

Colina said one issue of contention was that Legionary officials were less than candid with Zenit about the facts regarding the scandal surrounding the late Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries, who was discovered to have sexually abused seminarians and fathered children.

Colina said his resignation was requested by Legionary Father Oscar Nader, the new president of Zenit’s governing council. The reason given, Colina said, was that “my activity in the world of Catholic communications does not demonstrate the institutional dependence of the agency on the congregation of the Legionaries of Christ, an identity that will from now on be underlined.”

(…)

Another issue, Colina said, was a debate over the financial transparency of Zenit. He said that two years ago, Zenit had asked that its finances be clearly separated from the Legionaries order; the concern was that accusations of financial scandal connected with the Father Maciel case could undermine the trust needed in its annual fundraising efforts.

It’s not as though the news about Maciel is just breaking, so what took Colina so long remains unclear. What is new, however, is that the Legion is planning to be more upfront about its sponsorship of Zenit. The casual reader learning about Maciel from Zenit would hardly know the agency is sponsored by the order he founded. Step one in this new era of transparency might be adding more than two references to the Legion of Christ in Zenit’s FAQ.

My close friend died on August 30^th of a liver cancer that came upon him so quickly that he didn’t have time to know his life was over.  The cancer sat on a liver that he had destroyed in a slow suicide of almost 40 years of hard drinking and smoking.  It was a suicide that I had watched and yet when the time came he was dead only a couple of hours after I heard that he was even sick.

Shock, grief, painful nostalgia; I felt all of these but almost the first thing I found myself doing was ripping out a section of a comedy I am writing and substituting this instead:

Professor M was tall and barrel-chested with the ramrod posture and forbidding look of a kind of bartender who is so intimidating that people naturally feel compelled to suck up to him to get his approval and to keep the drinks flowing.  His brilliant ascent in the foggy world of post-modernism studies had been so rapid that he still dressed like a graduate student; hemming his trousers with his office stapler and affecting tuxedo shirts that were very crisply starched but so seldom washed that they had developed a disturbing smooth gray patina that one might find on a toilet one stumbled across in a long abandoned factory.  Like most tenured professors, he did not like to teach undergraduates.  However, unlike most tenured professors he did not postpone the inevitable to as late in the day as possible.  He always took the earliest class.  “Teaching these kids is like nursing a hangover.  And since I already have one in the morning anyway I might as kill two birds with one stone” he would say.  This explained the sun glasses at seven in the morning and the four cans of ice cold Dr. Nutt, beading sweat as he was, lined up in a row on his desk.  These were the cudgels he used to do battle with his aching head, quaffing one every 15 minutes with military precision.  He has taken to heart the words of a wise old emeritus who had explained that he secret of the truly great teachers was to treat students solely as a source of entertainment.  So Professor M contrived to be entertained, which the students found entertaining.  Which was why Professor M’s class on Business French for Reading Knowledge was one of the most popular classes on campus.

While this was a fair description of my friend when he was younger, it wasn’t until I read it over that I realized how vicious it was and how angry I was at him.  Oh, there was the fact that he had died rather young (he was 56).  And people seemed quick to remind me that the death of a contemporary is very much like having a bullet whizzing past one’s own ear.  But aside from the pure waste of his death, I was angry that the predominant emotion that I felt after grief was liberation.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Church finally weighs in against the disastrous reign of Italian Playboy-PM (and erstwhile Vatican ally) Silvio Berlusconi. Apparently it was a strip-tease by a young woman dressed as a nun that pushed the vox dei over to the vox populi. And of course Berlusconi’s people aren’t taking it well.

Quote of the day from The New York Times account:

[O]n Wednesday, Umberto Bossi, the leader of the Northern League and a key Berlusconi ally, said that instead of chiding the government, “bishops should say more masses.”

Bossi, indeed. Give me Marcello Mastroianni any giorno.

This story out of Ledyard, New York, which is a very small town just up the lake from Ithaca, is interesting for a number of reasons.  The gist of it is that the town clerk, a self-described “Bible-believing Christian,” believes that signing the marriage licenses of same-sex couples would violate her religious convictions.  Since New York law requires her to issue those licenses, she has delegated the task of signing them to a deputy clerk.  As a result, marriage licenses are only available in Ledyard with a prior appointment.  A lesbian couple moved into town from Miami, sought a marriage license and then refused to wait for an appointment, preferring instead to file a lawsuit.  On one side is People for the American Way, representing the couple.  On the other side is the Alliance Defense Fund.

So, first off, this is one of those stories that makes you just sigh, for lots of reasons, which I won’t go into because they seem pretty obvious.  What the story does bring out, though, is something that will be very different about same-sex couples’ push for civil rights from other civil rights movements we’ve seen over the past few decades.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday our Theology Issue (October 7) went live on our site. Here’s what’s free:

* Our editorial on Israel and the question of Palestinian statehood.

* Michael W. Higgins’s piece on Marshall McLuhan’s “post-curial Catholicism.”

* Thomas Baker’s review of Fr. Robert Barron’s Catholicism project.

These feature articles are available only to subscribers (not a subscriber? Sign up here):

* Luke Timothy Johnson explains why the Devil is no joke.

* Jerry Ryan tells the story of his friend the exorcist.

* Lawrence S. Cunningham demystifies mysticism.

Check out the rest of the issue right here.

Here’s a provocative take on unions, collective bargaining, the social net, and the decline thereof in the United States. The author, Lew Daly, writing in Democracy, has much to say about the Catholic social tradition as the impetus for their development in the thirties, forties, and fifties, and the role of conservative politics, market liberalism, and the separation of church and state for their demise in recent decades.

A taste: “The twist at the end of this story is that collective bargaining is, ultimately, a victim not just of America’s right-leaning politics and market liberalism, but of America’s pervasive institutional and legal secularism—our so-called “wall of separation” between church and state. Contrary to the mythology of American religious exceptionalism, no democratic country (not even France, at least in some key respects) has been more extreme in its policing of the church-state divide and its privatization of religious faith, and at the same time none has been more hostile to the collective rights of labor and labor’s dignity in a religious sense. It is no coincidence that the country with the strictest separation of church and state also has the lowest collective bargaining rates. In the United States, religious bodies were increasingly excluded from public life even as collective bargaining, as a public right, went into terminal decline.”

More than 150 Catholic theologians, scholars, and social-justice advocates have signed a letter calling for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States. It begins:

There were two state-sanctioned executions in the United States on September 21, 2011. In Georgia, Troy Anthony Davis, an African American man, was put to death for the 1989 murder of Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail. In Texas, Lawrence Brewer, a white supremacist, was executed for his participation in the racist hate crime dragging murder of James Byrd in Jasper in 1998. As theologians, scholars, and social justice advocates who participate in the public discussion of Catholic theology, we protest the state-sanctioned killings of both of these men, and we call for the abolition of the death penalty in the US.

Davis’ execution is particularly troubling for it shines a stark light upon many longstanding concerns about capital punishment in the US. We mourn the death of Officer MacPhail and express our deepest sympathies to his family for their tragic loss. However, we believe that a grave miscarriage of justice took place with Davis’ execution. As many legal experts have pointed out, including former FBI Director and federal judge and prosecutor William S. Sessions, serious doubt remains about Davis’ guilt. Until his last breath he maintained his innocence. The failure of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, a Federal Appeals Judge, the Georgia Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court to grant Davis a new trial reveals a deeply flawed justice system. We therefore call upon lawmakers and President Obama to immediately repeal the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which created the legal conditions for executing a man whose guilt was not established beyond reasonable doubt.

Citing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 2005 statement against capital punishment (.pdf) and John Paul II, the letter reads, “In earlier eras, Roman Catholic tradition acknowledged the necessity of capital punishment, in rare cases, to protect citizens from threats to the common good. In recent times, with more secure prison facilities that give us the means to offer such protection without executions, our church leaders have affirmed the need to eradicate the death penalty.”

Read the whole thing here. And be sure to check out E. J. Dionne’s most recent column, “How to End Capital Punishment.”

Shorter Douthat:  We can’t stop executing people, because if there’s no risk of occasionally killing an innocent person, my friends (who didn’t care about killing Troy Davis) won’t worry about locking innocent people up for life.  Also, too, life in prison is worse than death.

In the last two issues of the New York Review of Books (available on-line to subscribers), Frederick Crews resumes his thirty-years war against psychoanalysis in general and Sigmond Freud in particular. Crews first became known as a literary critic who made much use of psychoanalysis, for example, in a study of Hawthorne. He lost his faith, however, and became increasingly critical of what he came to think was unverified, indeed unverifiable, pseudo-science. He was an eager and vigorous participant in the “Freud Wars” of the 1990s when the Founding Father’s person and views came under fundamental attack. Crews was also a powerful critic of “recovered memory” therapies.

His latest essay discusses Freud’s use of cocaine not only for therapeutic purposes (at times with disastrous results) but also for personal satisfaction. Crews argues that cocaine was in good part responsible for Freud’s sense of himself as a heroic pioneer and perhaps even for elements of his most famous psychoanalytic theories. Crews ends the two-part essay with these comments about “the Columbus of the unconscious”:

Freud’s triumph in reaching that pinnacle without the aid of any confirmed discoveries or cures may be the most amazing chapter in the entire history of self-promotion. Neither Rousseau nor Nietzsche enjoyed such success in reconstituting the intellectual world to match his idiosyncracies. But Freud’s own transformation was remarkable as well. Without cocaine, the polite and unhappy young doctor of April 1884 might never have become so reckless, so adamant, so sex preoccupied, and so convinced of his own importance that the contagion was caught by millions. Cocaine, along with nicotine, was Freud’s drug of choice–but in the century to come, the opiate of the educated classes would be psychoanalysis.

I must say that I am very sympathetic to Crews’s critiques. I had always wondered whether Freud’s theory, particularly his trinity of Id, Ego, and Super-Ego, were reifications, and how it could ever be verified. I think that one of the great puzzles of twentieth-century intellectual history is how Freud’s reputation survived his Moses and Monotheism.

NCR reports the approval of pentobarbital as part of a drug cocktail for executing prisoners in Florida. The state joins OK, AL, AZ, MS, OH, TX, SC and GA in permitting the use of pentobarbital, which has been used in 22 executions so far.

As a (licensed, but non-practicing) veterinarian, I’ve long been puzzled by the controversy over drug cocktails for this purpose. Put simply, humane euthanasia is not rocket science. All that is required is to reliably render the patient (in the veterinary context) deeply unconscious before the principal drug or another drug or technique results in death. High-dose barbiturates do this, and most veterinary euthanasia drugs are pentobarbital-based, sometimes combined with phenytoin, which, like pentobarbital, is also used in cases of severe seizure activity.

No ethical veterinarian would use a drug combination where there was any risk of causing the animal pain in the process. I cannot imagine any well-trained veterinarian using on animals the 3-drug cocktail that has been used until recently in executions. That cocktail contained an anesthetic (sodium thiopental or pentobarbital) followed by a muscle relaxant, (pancuronium bromide) that paralyzes skeletal muscle, including the diaphragm, followed by potassium chloride to stop the heart. The drugs were administered in sequence–the barbiturate followed by the paralytic followed by the potassium, and, at least in the movies, without stopping in between to assess the patient’s state of consciousness or the patency of the catheters through which the drugs were given. Conceivably, a prisoner could receive an insufficient dose of the barbiturate to produce a deep plane of anesthesia, perhaps because one of two catheters became clotted or kinked, or perhaps the drug is not given enough time to reach its maximum effect before the paralytic takes hold. If the muscle relaxant is given without deep enough anesthesia, the patient is unable to move or to struggle or to breathe, despite being at least partially conscious. Worse still, if for some reason the potassium solution is given to a conscious patient, it causes the heart to stop in a conscious patient, which can be excruciating. The second two drugs were given to ensure a “smooth” execution, in part because the prisoner would be incapable of objecting.

Sometimes when barbiturates are used for euthanasia or anesthesia, a patient goes through “excitement phase,” and might move or vocalize as the barbiturate takes effect. I was taught that people recovering from barbiturate anesthesia in which they’d moved or vocalized during induction did not remember any discomfort. Assuming I was taught correctly, that means that the second two drugs–the problematic chemicals from the standpoint of humaneness–are given merely to make the process easier on those watching. Excitement phase is, in my experience, rare in veterinary euthanasia using pentobarbital or pentobarbital/phenytoin combinations. I warned clients about it, but cannot remember a single serious instance. If it were common, vets would not use that drug because it would be too hard on the owners.

Barbiturate alone would do the executioner’s job reliably and humanely. Various states seem to be figuring this out, and it is hard to imagine a barbiturate execution being considered cruel, since similar drugs are used for anesthesia as well as animal euthanasia.

The task of those of us opposed to capital punishment has to stop focusing on the drugs–to do so was, perhaps, a useful tactic to slow the states, but won’t be a convincing argument for death penalty abolition. We need to start a real conversation about matters like racial and economic injustice, errors and sometimes corruption in the legal system, and whether the concept of the dignity of human life applies even to those who have committed horrific acts. Beyond that, we need to ask ourselves a basic virtue question. Are we, individually and as a society, made better by killing evildoers? Are we gentler, kinder, more reverent of human life? Do we care more deeply about the injustices in our justice system, or do we just move on after each inmate is killed? Do we simply cheer that someone who did something awful–or at least was convicted of doing something awful–got theirs? Shouldn’t we, as Christians, be trying to do better? Shouldn’t we, as Americans, be trying to do better?

In his post below, Joe Komonchak wrote about the Pope’s latest attempt to defend natural law reasoning in the German Reichstag. Coincidentally, I have been reading what the late Paul Ramsey on the topic, in his book Nine Modern Moralists, written about fifty years ago.  In chapters Nine and Ten of the book, he attempts to retrieve and refurbish the natural law tradition for wider use, by correcting the impression that it is the narrow province of Roman Catholics.  At the same time, Ramsey (who was, after all, a Protestant) did not absolve Catholics of all guilt for the loss of credibility of the tradition as a tradition of reasoning. He writes:

“If there are inflexibilities and claims of absolute certainty and finality in a theory of natural law, these, you can be sure, do not ordinarily flow from the account actually given of the meaning of the law of nature, but from quite another point in Roman Catholic moral theology, namely, the claim that the natural law has been ‘republished’ in revelation, or given determinate and specific shape in Scripture as guarded and interpreted by the positive teachings of the Church.” (Nine Modern Moralists, p. 227).

For what it’s worth, Ramsey modeled his account of natural law on  what he considered the inductive approach of Jacques Maritain, along with the writings of Edmond Cahn (a mid-twentieth century American jurist) on the “sense of injustice.” It was important to Ramsey, if natural law were to have any viability outside of a narrowly Catholic context, that it did not attempt to shut down controversial questions prematurely, or attempt to have the last word in the public discussion. For that reason, he viewed the continuous argument embedded in the common law tradition as a better model of how it might operate than the manuals of moral theology.

I wonder how Ratzinger would respond to Ramsey.

This past summer I inherited a garden dedicated to birds and butterflies. Not much activity on that front, however. What did appear and take over is a plant known for good reason as “wormwood” (Artemisia absinthium), and worm its way it does. It had taken over much of the garden early on and I tried to salvage other things by beating it back, stomping on it, and pulling it up. Nonetheless, it is flourishing, worming its way along any place where it had just been removed. Gardeners: Any advice?

Yesterday Pope Benedict XVI gave a very interesting speech to the members of the German Parliament, choosing as his theme “The Listening Heart: Reflections on the Foundations of Law.”  His title was taken from the words of Solomon in reply to God’s invitation to make a request as he began his reign. Solomon asked for “a listening heart so that he may govern God’s people, and discern between good and evil” (cf. 1 Kg 3:9). And the Pope’s purpose, it seems, was to press on the legislators some of the ultimate questions presupposed by their work:

To serve right and to fight against the dominion of wrong is and remains the fundamental task of the politician. At a moment in history when man has acquired previously inconceivable power, this task takes on a particular urgency. Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, so to speak, make human beings and he can deny them their humanity. How do we recognize what is right? How can we discern between good and evil, between what is truly right and what may appear right? Even now, Solomon’s request remains the decisive issue facing politicians and politics today.

Majority rule is not a sufficient criterion, he went on: “everyone in a position of responsibility must personally seek out the criteria to be followed when framing laws,” a task more difficult than ever today, not least of all in democracies: Read the rest of this entry »

The results of the recent congressional race in Anthony Weiner’s former district continue to be spun into a tale of how Jewish voters are supposedly abandoning President Obama for not being sufficiently pro-Israel. The facts show otherwise, though. And a case can be made that my new local representative, Republican Bob Turner, won on the Catholic vote.

I don’t think any exit polls were done for Turner’s race with David Weprin. So the most accurate information on how the vote came in by religious affiliation is found in a Siena College poll taken shortly before the election. It showed Turner with a six-point lead, pretty close to the outcome of the race.

The crosstabs show Jewish voters favoring Weprin, 51 percent to 45 percent for Turner. That’s a poor showing for a Democrat, no doubt, but consider how the Catholic vote broke down: 62 percent for Turner, 33 percent for Weprin.

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In the town where I grew up, there was a synagogue that had the distinction of having hired the first woman rabbi in the United States.  I grew up with friends who spoke openly of their affection for Israel, and I absorbed from this environment a strong belief in the necessity of its existence.

As I grew older, I came to recognize a measure of justice in the Palestinian cause.  But it was hard for me to separate the legitimate claims of the Palestinian people from the venality of the PLO, which I associated with acts like the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

While the demographics of my hometown may have been somewhat unique, I think that my viewpoint was relatively common among Americans who grew up in the last third of the 20^th century.  Israel was seen as an ally in the struggle against communism and a country that shared the liberal democratic values of the West.

Much has changed since that time.

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Barack Obama did himself no favors yesterday at the UN. He lost both his integrity and good chunks of the Jewish vote (along with the votes of many others). He heightened divisions in the Jewish community over the United States’ unstinting support of Israel’s seizure of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Scanning reactions today, it looks to me like Jews on the Left are appalled; Jews on the Right are gleeful. There’s a good chance the Left will sit at home in November 2012 and, in spite of Obama’s pandering, the right will go for the Republican presidential candidate.

The Palestinians have good reason to be deeply disappointed, but if they’re lucky, the peace process will pass from American hands and be taken up by others with more brains and more integrity.

“Obama speech was shattering to liberal Zionists.”

Kiss of death: “Lieberman Praises Obama’s UN General Assembly Speech.”

UPDATE and a few more items of interest: “Obama sold Israel Bunker-Buster Bombs.”

And a man who knows peace talks has this to say: Bill Clinton: Netanyahu isn’t interested in Mideast peace deal.

Henry Seligman always an incisive commentator on these matters has this to say: “The American insistence on aborting the Palestinians’ initiative and returning them to a peace process in which their fate remains dependent on Israel is shameful. It stains America’s honor. It will not succeed, for the Palestinian decision to defy the American demand is itself a declaration of independence; that genie cannot be returned to the bottle.”

Quasi-wonky but worth a read: “The Future of the U.S.-Israel Strategic Partnership” a study from CSIS that has the virtue of being honest about the issues. Available for download.

On the eve of Pope Benedict’s trip to Germany, Hans Küng spoke with Der Spiegel about the increasing bureaucratic banality of the Catholic Church:

SPIEGEL: You and Benedict are traveling along two different paths. You want to reform the Church to keep it alive. The pope is trying to seal off the Church from the outside world and increasingly restrict it to a conservative core, which may possibly survive.

Küng: Indeed. In the past, the Roman system was compared with the communist system, one in which one person had all the say. Today I wonder if we are not perhaps in a phase of “Putinization” of the Catholic Church. Of course I don’t want to compare the Holy Father, as a person, with the unholy Russian statesman. But there are many structural and political similarities. Putin also inherited a legacy of democratic reforms. But he did everything he could to reverse them. In the Church, we had the Council, which initiated renewal and ecumenical understanding. Even pessimists couldn’t have imagined that such setbacks were possible after that. The Polish pope’s restoration policy, beginning in the 1980s, made it possible for the like-minded head of the highly secretive Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), once known as the Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition — and it’s still an inquisition, despite its new name — to be elected pope.

SPIEGEL: That’s an audacious comparison.

Küng: It shouldn’t, of course, be overstretched. But unfortunately, even as we acknowledge the positive things, the negative developments that are taking place cannot be overlooked. Practically speaking, both Ratzinger and Putin placed their former associates in key positions and sidelined those they didn’t like. One could also draw other parallels: the disempowerment of the Russian parliament and the Vatican Synod of Bishops; the degradation of Russian provincial governors and of Catholic bishops to make them nothing but recipients of orders; a conformist “nomenclature”; and a resistance to real reforms.

He also wonders whether it isn’t time for a another Luther to lead the charge for reform:

SPIEGEL: What would be the treatment?

Küng: The base must gather its strength and make itself heard, so that the system can no longer circumvent it. I presented a comprehensive list of measures in my book.

SPIEGEL: More than a year ago, you wrote an open letter to all bishops in the world, in which you offered a detailed explanation of your criticism of the pope and the Roman system. What was the response?

Küng: There are about 5,000 bishops in the world, but none of them dared to comment publicly. This clearly shows that something isn’t right. But if you talk to individual bishops, you often hear: “What you describe is fundamentally true, but nothing can be done about it.” It would be wonderful if a prominent bishop would just say: “This cannot go on. We cannot sacrifice the entire Church to please the Roman bureaucrats.” But so far no one has had the courage to do so. The ideal situation, in my view, would be a coalition of reformist theologians, lay people and pastors open to reform, and bishops prepared to support reform. Of course they would come into conflict with Rome, but they would have to endure that, in a spirit of critical loyalty.

SPIEGEL: That’s what led to the Reformation 500 years ago. But at the time, the Roman system was incapable of understanding the criticism from within the ranks.

Küng: After 500 years, we are surprised that the popes and bishops of the day did not realize that a reform was necessary. Luther didn’t want to divide the Church, but the pope and the bishops were blind. It seems that a similar situation applies today.

Over at Public Discourse, Christopher Kaczor, a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and the author of The Ethics of Abortion (Routlege), offers a thoughtful and persuasive response to Dennis O’Brien’s contribution to this discussion about abortion in the current issue of Commonweal. O’Brien detects an inconsistency, if not a contradiction, in the bishops’ opposition to severe criminal penalties for women who have abortions:

The moral rhetoric used by many bishops to condemn abortion does not seem to fit the criminal penalties that they apparently accept. Further, I find it hard to believe that the bishops would support severe criminal laws commensurate with the moral rhetoric of abortion as an “abominable crime.” When there is a serious disconnect between the gravity of moral condemnation and legal penalty, one or the other should give. Either the rhetoric is too severe or the law is too lenient.

To which Kaczor replies:

Putting aside the political reality that lessening a criminal penalty may be necessary for getting the legislation to pass, it should be noted that a penalty’s severity is not determined solely by the wrongness of the criminal act, but also by the likely consequences of that wrong for the community. Both the President of the United States and any other person have equal moral and legal rights not to be intentionally killed, and yet it makes sense to impose more stringent penalties on political assassins than on other killers. The difference in penalty is justified by the President’s leadership in society. Killing a political leader can threaten the democratic order, destabilize the geopolitical balance, and perhaps even prompt a world war. Killing the average citizen does none of those things.

Similarly, in the typical case of murder, someone’s life plans are thwarted, someone’s duties can no longer be discharged, and other people may fear for their lives. Though these factors might shape the penalty imposed on the murderer, they become irrelevant from the perspective of an unborn life that ends in abortion. So, one can hold that abortion and the murder of an adult both intentionally kill an innocent human being without being forced to also hold that abortion and the murder of an adult should be punished in exactly the same way by law.

This seems to me exactly right. But I wish Kaczor had mentioned another important distinction here: While abortion and the killing of an adult may both be described as the intentional killing of an innocent human being, their intentionality may yet be different in one important respect. Read the rest of this entry »

Another day, another speaker controversy at a Catholic university.

This time the school is St. Francis University in western Pennsylvania, and the speaker is syndicated columnist and author Ellen Goodman — who is also a well-known liberal and abortion rights advocate. According to a story from Ann Rodgers in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Saint Francis University in Loretto has canceled a lecture on civility by syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman after an advocacy group called attention to her strong public support for abortion rights.

“After careful consideration, the University feels that the body of your work has reflected statements that are not in close enough alignment with some Catholic teachings and with the values and mission of the university as required for an event of this stature,” Saint Francis provost Wayne Powel wrote to the retired Pulitzer Prize winner.

Ms. Goodman, who had been scheduled to speak Oct. 12 at the Cambria County campus, replied, “Imagine my disappointment at having my plea for civility returned with a pie in the face.”

On Sept. 13 the Cardinal Newman Society, a lay group in Virginia that monitors the adherence of Catholic colleges to church teaching, posted an objection to her appearance, citing her writings on abortion. On Tuesday, it praised the cancellation.

This raises two minor questions and, to my mind, a larger and more important issue.

First, how is it that no one at St. Francis knew beforehand anything about Ellen Goodman’s record? To be “shocked, shocked, I say,” that she is pro-choice seems disingenuous.

Second, how is it that a fairly fringe group like the Cardinal Newman Society gets to call the shots on who a Catholic university invites?

Most important, though, Goodman was coming to talk about civility, not to preach the gospel of abortion rights. It seems that a university (and a church) should be able to develop a culture that allows for genuine dialogue on tough issues, or at least a dialogue on the value of discussing tough issues in a civil way, and how to do that.

How does cancelling Ellen Goodman’s talk advance that?

2012 is shaping up to be the election year when both parties seek the endorsement of PM Benjamin Netanyahu and promise to throw Israel ever more money and support.

There have been reports that PM Netanyahu will visit with Bob Turner (NY-9) while in New York. Turner you will recall out-pandered the Democratic candidate David Weprin on Israel. Rick Perry yesterday gave a speech that sounded like he might run for the Knesset and the Republicans are tripping all over themselves to actually make Israel the 51st state. Here

At 4 p.m. on Saturday, November 12, join us at NYU (map) for a panel discussion about faith and the writing life, featuring Commonweal contributors Paul Elie, Alice McDermott, Valerie Sayers, and Rand Richards Cooper. The event is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception for Commonweal Associates (if you’re an Associate and would like to attend the reception, please let us know). For more information, click here.

The New Republic writer takes after Obama’s self-defeating idealism and the anti-politics of the Republicans in an essay, “After Nobility.” It’s behind the paywall, but here is a taste:

“The politics of anti-politics is a great American comedy. Contempt for Washington has become one of the primary qualifications for elevation to Washington. Those who despise government are desperate to join it; those who despise politics are politicians. And those who cherish government and cherish politics are ominously instructed by their consultants to be silent.”

Or, as Yeats had it, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.” Wieseltier continues:

“I do not understand this confidence that history will be changed by popular epiphanies, or by the virtual epiphanies known as networks. Moral moments come and go. The tents go up, the tents come down. The square fills, the square empties. The only way to perpetuate the accomplishments of the square is to leave the square for politics. The romance of civil society may have gone too far. Anyway, the abdication of politics plays into the hands of forces that already have no use for it. As Evgeny Morozov has written, “You can’t simply join a revolution any time you want, contribute a comma to a random revolutionary decree, rephrase the guillotine manual, and then slack off for months. Revolutions prize centralization and require fully committed leaders, strict discipline, [and] absolute dedication.” There is no question but that politics is unlovely, and appeals to the vices as well as the virtues. Yet it is also the only way to put constraints on power, and to wield power reasonably and accountably. It is true that power is the end of innocence, but who wants innocence? We should want goodness, not innocence. (We should want also a proper definition of goodness.) Politics is all that stands between power and cruelty.”

Religion should as well. Does it?

Cross-posted at RNS.

The New York Times reports today that the Republican presidential candidates have decided to make their opposition to the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act a centerpiece of their campaigns. They complain about the effect of “regulatory uncertainty” on the economy, though it’s clear that the part of “regulatory uncertainty” that bothers them is not the uncertainty but the regulation. Three-quarters of the hundreds of regulations the act authorizes haven’t even been written yet. Obviously, the sooner they’re written and enforced, the less uncertainty there will be. So if “regulatory uncertainty” were the Republicans’ real concern, they would quickly get behind efforts to implement the act, which is designed to protect consumers from unscrupulous lending practices and taxpayers from more bailouts. Instead, of course, Republicans on Capitol Hill have been stalling, starving, and sabotaging the agencies charged with working out the details of the Dodd-Frank Act.

This controversy is not about uncertainty at all, but about risk, and who has to bear it. If taxpayers are going to be expected to bail out financial institutions that are too big to fail, then their elected representatives ought to do everything possible to make failure less likely, even if that also makes the institutions less profitable to their shareholders. The big banks obviously don’t like this. They would prefer that the government continue to let them take whatever risks they like — and continue to rescue them whenever their high-risk activities bring them to grief. The Republican presidential candidates, as well as the GOP congressional caucus, appear to believe that whatever keeps profits down on Wall Street is bad for Wall Street, and that whatever is bad for Wall Street is worse for the American economy. This commutative property of their discredited economic theory allows them to defend Wall Street’s interests without ever having to mention Wall Street itself: you will hear them warning that the financial-reform act will cost us jobs, not that it will make investment banking less lucrative (which it probably will, and probably should).

None of the Republican candidates dares to deny that the Dodd-Frank Act will make the financial industry safer, but there is some (mostly tacit) disagreement among them about what to do when the underregulated financial industry they wish to preserve explodes again as it did in 2008. Some of the candidates — call them the honorable fantasists — have been steadfastly opposed to bailouts: if the bankers run aground again, let them all drown; that’s capitalism. This position is honorable because it’s consistent. It’s fantasy because it fails to acknowledge a basic fact about modern economies like ours: what economists call “externalities.” If investment bankers and hedge-fund managers were the only ones who suffered from their recklessness, then it might makes sense to say, with Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann, that the government should just leave Wall Street alone, to get rich or go broke trying. But of course this is not what really happens. What happens is what happened just a couple of years ago — and what is still happening now, as the economy struggles to make up for all the jobs lost after the financial crisis. When the whole financial industry screws up, everyone suffers. Innocence offers no protection when microeconomic imperatives cause a macroeconomic meltdown. This is why it makes sense for an institution designed to protect everyone’s interests — namely, the federal government — to force Wall Street to account for Main Street externalities, and that means more rigorous regulation.

What about the Republican candidates who aren’t fantasists? Well, they’re also not honorable. The Mitt Romneys of the world want to have it both ways: minimal regulation but also maximal insurance for financiers, to be paid for by taxpayers. Romney supported TARP; he will no doubt support the next TARP, too. And let there be no doubt: the time will come for another TARP if the Republicans succeed in scuttling the Dodd-Frank Act. Mitt Romney represents the interests of those who, as the Irishman put it, know which side their bread is buttered on: both f**king sides.