“Nun Has Refused to Meet with Doctrine Committee, Cardinal Wuerl Reveals.” That’s the headline of a Catholic Culture story reporting on a press release put out on Friday by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine. There’s one problem with that headline. None of it is true.

A common criticism of the Committee on Doctrine’s conduct during l’affaire Johnson is that the bishops failed to engage her in dialogue before slamming her book Quest for the Living God. As the Catholic Theological Society of America board and membership have pointed out, the committee’s refusal to discuss its concerns with Johnson before issuing its critique violates the bishops’ own guidelines for handling such conflicts. Indeed, in her response to the committee’s most recent statement on the controversy, Elizabeth Johnson points out that “both publicly and privately I made clear my willingness to meet with Cardinal Wuerl and the committee to discuss these matters at any time…. No invitation was forthcoming to meet and discuss with the committee in person.”

On Friday–in what may be the shortest press release ever issued by the USCCB–Cardinal Wuerl claimed that he had offered to meet with Johnson on three occasions, and that “Sister Johnson did not respond to any of the offers.” You can see why Catholic Culture might interpret that as “Johnson refuses to meet with Committee on Doctrine.” But, according to correspondence I have obtained, not only were the offers to meet with Wuerl alone, rather than with the full committee, but each of the offers came after the committee had already finished composing its critiques of Johnson. Perhaps more troubling, the correspondence shows that Johnson did in fact respond to Wuerl, as recently as October 26.  Read the rest of this entry »

…by a vote on Monday of 107 to 14, with 52 abstentions.

On Tuesday Juan Cole has a helpful analysis along with a good question: What if the Palestinians apply to join the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency)? What would we do then? His over-all point: The U.S. is downgrading its influence in the international arena. Juan Cole.

And the always knowledgeable Ha’aretz has the answer:”With UNESCO membership granted, Palesinians seek to join 16 more UN agencies.

And for those able to absorb more on this subject, two other commentators:

M.J. Rosenberg: “The UNESCO Mess. It was bound to happen sooner or later. At some point, both the president and Congress would be faced with a clear choice between U.S. national interests and the demands made by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his powerful Washington lobby.”

Bernard Avishai: “…the thing nobody seems able to explain is what possible interest Israel, or even the Netanyahu government, has in keeping Palestinians out of an organization that focuses on the the sharing of scientific information and universal artistic and cultural values?”

And the inevitable lemming-rush over the cliff: “Senator predict massive U.S. withdrawal from international organizations.” Let’s see, will that include the Red Cross? Boy Scouts? Girl Scouts? WHO? Interpol?

Okay this is the last one: Victoria Nuland, State Dept. Spokesperson explains U.S. vote on UNESCO! Here. Theater of the Absurd under the heading, “Middle East Peace.”

I’m not sure how I wound up on the list, but I received a robo-call first thing this morning from the National Rifle Association. The NRA executive urged that I oppose the Arms Trade Treaty the United Nations is working toward to regulate international trafficking in conventional arms.

I thank the NRA for focusing my attention on the issue. It seems to have passed me by that in 2006, the Bush administration made the United States the only dissenter in a 153-1 General Assembly vote to explore a treaty. The Obama administration reversed that position in 2009.

The NRA’s phone call ended with a question that I was supposed to answer by pushing “1″ or “2″ on my phone: “Do you think it’s OK for the UN to be on American soil attacking our gun rights?”

I didn’t answer; the question is based on a false premise. The treaty would be aimed at setting standards for the poorly regulated market in importing and exporting conventional arms, not at weapons laws within any country. As a group of UN experts put it in a 2008 report: “Exclusively internal transfers or national ownership provisions, including national constitutional protections on private ownership within the State’s territory, should not fall under an arms trade treaty.”

From the standpoint of Catholic teaching, weapons control is a moral issue. That is how the Vatican framed it in a statement at a meeting on the arms treaty in New York in July: Read the rest of this entry »

In June, Fordham theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, responded [.pdf] to the USCCB Committee on Doctrine’s critique [.pdf] of her book Quest for the Living God. (Read our coverage of the controversy here.) Today the committee has released its reply [.pdf] to Johnson. It follows a familiar tune.

In its original statement about Quest, the Committee on Doctrine accused Johnson of failing to “take the faith of the church as its starting point.” Instead, the committee claimed, Johnson uses “standards from outside the faith to criticize and to revise in a radical fashion the conception of God revealed in Scripture and taught by the magisterium.” In her response, Johnson pointed out how badly the committee had misread her. And the latest response from the Committee on Doctrine finally affirms what anyone who had taken the time to read Johnson’s book carefully would have already known:

The Committee on Doctrine acknowledges that in the Observations Sr. Elizabeth Johnson agrees that theological investigation should begin and end with the faith of the Church. The Committee commends Sr. Elizabeth Johnson for her stated intention to help the Church progress in her understanding of divine realities as described by the Second Vatican Council in Dei Verbum, no. 8.

The locution is odd–acknowledging her “stated intention” and that “in the Observations” Johnson agrees that theology begins and ends with the faith of the church–because the committee goes on to say that its members still think Quest fails to “sufficiently ground itself in the Catholic theological tradition as its starting point.” I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised by the committee’s refusal to accept Johnson’s rebuttal. After all, these are the same bishops who, in their first pass at critiquing Quest, claimed that the book lacked “any sense of the essential centrality of divine relation as the basis of Christian theology” [emphasis mine]. Never mind Johnson’s repeated citations of Scripture as the basis for any number of avenues she pursues in the book. Read the rest of this entry »

St. Francis and the sultan of Egypt. Sculpture by Arnaldo Zocchi (1909), in downtown Cairo.

At a gathering of religious leaders in Assisi today, Pope Benedict XVI confronted the question of whether religion is cause for violence or a force for peace. In doing so, he looked back on the history of his own church:

As a Christian I want to say at this point: yes, it is true, in the course of history, force has also been used in the name of the Christian faith. We acknowledge it with great shame. But it is utterly clear that this was an abuse of the Christian faith, one that evidently contradicts its true nature.

This blanket disavowal of all violence perpetrated in the name of the Christian faith seems to me very significant, given the efforts among conservative Catholic apologists to justify the Crusades. (Some might think that Pope John Paul II resolved the issue, but it’s not clear that he apologized for the Crusades.)

It’s appropriate that the pope’s remarks were made in the home town of St. Francis, who quietly opposed the Crusade (as Benedict has written) and befriended the enemy’s commander, Egypt’s Sultan Malik al-Kamil, in the midst of the Fifth Crusade.

Benedict offered a carefully reasoned argument that religiously motivated terrorism plays into the hands of enemies of religion:

The post-Enlightenment critique of religion has repeatedly maintained that religion is a cause of violence and in this way it has fuelled hostility towards religions. The fact that, in the case we are considering here, religion really does motivate violence should be profoundly disturbing to us as religious persons. In a way that is more subtle but no less cruel, we also see religion as the cause of violence when force is used by the defenders of one religion against others. The religious delegates who were assembled in Assisi in 1986 wanted to say, and we now repeat it emphatically and firmly: this is not the true nature of religion. It is the antithesis of religion and contributes to its destruction.

One hopes that this finds a broad and receptive audience.

In the current issue of the magazine, John Schwenkler and David Cloutier revisit the pope’s encyclical on economics, Caritas in veritate, and argue that, if we’re looking for ways to make our economy more humane and sustainable, we should begin with food:

We are used to thinking of love and care as domestic rather than ecomomic virtues. But as Pope Benedict has written in Caritas in veritate, “authentically human social relationships of friendship, solidarity, and reciprocity can also be conducted within economic activity, and not only outside it or ‘after’ it.” In other words, Christian caritas (from which we get both the words “care” and “charity”) is not merely a private affair “outside” economic relations, or even an add-on of charitable giving that occurs after the market has done its work. Rather, love belongs within the relations of the marketplace. The pope calls for economic forms that go beyond “the exclusively binary model of market-plus-state.” What is needed, Benedict writes, is “a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise.” He recommends “mutualist” or “cooperative” economic principles and organizations that embody the twin goods of solidarity and subsidiarity.

It is tempting to dismiss this vision as a pipe dream: What would it mean, for example, for large-scale investment banking to be animated by “gratuitousness” and love? There may be good answers to that question, but they aren’t obvious. Our food economy, by contrast, is a case in which we already have before us a range of opportunities to incorporate the logic of caritas into our ordinary routines. Not only are organic and sustainable farming methods better for the environment, not only are the foods they produce better for our bodies, but the forms of economic exchange they enable tend to be ones in which “authentically human social relationships” can take root. At farmers markets, producers meet consumers, consumers meet one another, and products are bought and sold in ways that sustain local communities rather than international corporations. (One study found that customers have ten times more conversations at farmers markets than they do at supermarkets.) Similarly, community gardens and CSA programs bring people together and connect them even more directly with the source of their food, while grocery cooperatives embody a business model that seeks the common good and supports local economies on a scale beyond that of farmers markets. In all this there is the possibility of restoring care to a sector of life where the imperatives for  growth have done so much to exclude it.

Behind the problems of industrial agriculture, Schwenkler and Cloutier write, is the problem of our society’s simplistic attitude toward technology:

Despite a lot of evidence that, at a certain point, labor-replacing technology can create more problems than it solves, we continue to believe in it without reservations: the more technology, the better. The essayist (and Methodist Sunday school teacher) Bill McKibben jokes that our society is like a person who drinks two beers, feels good, and therefore decides that drinking ten beers will make him feel five times better. What we need is a technology that operates on the two-beer scale, what the economist E. F. Schumacher called a “human-scale technology,” which enables small producers to work effectively—and with nature rather than against it. One well-known example in the food world is the development of small mobile chicken coops and pig pens, which allow a farmer to move animals gradually around between grazing grounds (to prevent overgrazing), while also allowing the animals’ waste to refertilize the same ground that feeds them.

Does this mean that traditional and small-scale methods of food production will once more be able to “feed the world,” as proponents of industrial agriculture claim only their methods can? This is an empirical question, and we don’t yet know enough to be certain of the answer. But we can be certain of this: In a rich and fertile country like the United States, we could do much more local, small-scale agriculture without courting calamity. To begin with, we could try to chart a course between the extremes of bioengineered monocultures and a purist emphasis on the “organic” label, each of which presents its own set of problems.

If you’re a subscriber, you can read the whole article here. (And if you’re not, what are you waiting for?)

To some people, Western European “socialism” looks like a nanny state where capitalist assets which should  be private are redistributed widely through society in the form of a social safety net. Safety net implies charity; the holder of the net clearly cannot be in the same boat as those who are falling. When we live in the United States where working without a net is preferred, because people are seen to fall out of personal weakness and a good bounce is considered a character building experience, a European style safety net at the least can look like an unnecessary and unwarranted diversion of investment funds and at the most like a means of weakening the social fabric (since if people know that there is a net, it somehow follows that they will become careless when walking the wire).

When a social safety net is viewed as a form of charity, we can argue all day whether people deserve it or not. But I think that a safety net has very little to do with charity. Furthermore, while having or not having a strong safety net is of course a political issue, what underlies the issue is something intrinsic to modern capitalism as an economy.

One word that we Americans like to use (and often misuse) is “invest.” We know that corporations invest and that people invest in corporations. But we also talk about investing in our “homes”, our education, and our jobs. Building a new school or a new road or a new water filtration plant is an “investment.” I have a friend who likes Beanie Babies, but she refers to her collection as an investment. We like to use the word investment because in our society investments are thought to be things that appreciate in value. We buy things to use and enjoy, but in our universal mercantile sensibilities we like to believe that the things we use and enjoy might also somehow grow in value all by themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Pope Benedict XVI told representatives of the world’s religions – as well as non-believers – gathered today in Assisi that all faiths must continue to “purify” themselves of any tendency to violence and terrorism, and that goes for the Catholic Church as well:

“It is the task of all who bear responsibility for the Christian faith to purify the religion of Christians again and again from its very heart, so that it truly serves as an instrument of God’s peace in the world, despite the fallibility of humans.”

It’s a strong and interesting address, IMHO. The pontiff also pointed to the “denial of God” as a cause of “violence that knows no bounds,” but perhaps his most interesting comments, to me, were in his welcome to agnostics, who he said “ask questions of both sides” and are “pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace.”

The interfaith gathering with some 300 other believers and a few agnostics comes 25 years after the late John Paul II launched the first international prayer meeting for peace in the birthplace of St. Francis.

Benedict was not a fan of the way that first encounter unfolded, especially with its interreligious optics, and he made sure there would be no joint prayer at this event. Just a joint “pilgrimage.”

He even pledged to a friend to “do everything I can to make a syncretistic or relativistic interpretation of the event impossible,” and to make sure everyone knows that the Catholic Church is the only true path to salvation.

I doubt that will be enough to please the Traditionalists of the SSPX, and I’m not sure the pope’s efforts are enough to overshadow the interreligious optics of this event, either. Or the content of his address today.

DotCommonweal‘s clout clearly at work (with a little help from the Boston Globe):

The Joint Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure is expected to schedule an oversight hearing on seafood substitution in the coming weeks. The Patrick administration and members of the state’s congressional delegation – including both senators – also are reviewing the matter. And a prominent local restaurateur said he will change his menu in response to the Globe’s findings.

“Fish mislabeling has become an accepted practice,’’ said state Representative Ted Speliotis, the Danvers Democrat and cochairman of the joint committee. “There appears to be overlapping responsibility but no one is taking action. This needs to change.’’

Next stop: George Carlin Boulevard!

There’s a story in today’s Times about the effort to rename 121^st Street between Broadway and Amsterdam after the late comedian George Carlin. Carlin grew up in the neighborhood, attending Corpus Christi Church and its parish school which share the same handsome building on that block. In his early career, he often made bitter jokes about Catholicism and the education he received. His animosity toward the Catholic Church, and religion in general, was hardly a secret. In fact, it was a staple of his comedy.

Corpus Christi’s current pastor, Raymond Rafferty, is a vocal opponent of the effort to honor Carlin in this fashion. “His early comedy made mockery of Corpus Christi parish and its priests,” Rafferty told the Times. “This is not someone who was oppressed.”

Corpus Christi, which is just around the corner from Commonweal’s offices, is perhaps best known as the church where Thomas Merton was received into the Catholic Church in 1938. Ray Rafferty is a good friend, a man of great hospitality and judicious opinions. It is not hard to understand his resistance to having the street where he lives named after a comedian widely celebrated for his vulgarity and impiety. Read the rest of this entry »

The NY Times has a story today on the push for a “Personhood Amendment” in Mississippi. Such amendments, which would define a fertilized egg as a legal person, have been pushed in other states, and failed twice in Colorado. They have often divided pro-lifers, with more pragmatic campaigners like the Catholic bishops arguing that the “all-or-nothing” roll of the dice could leave abortion opponents with less than nothing.

But the amendment apparently has a good chance of succeeding in Mississippi.

Could this lead us on the arc of Prohibition?

That’s the argument Michael Kazin made earlier this month in The New Republic, when he cited the new Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary on Prohibition and its eventual failure to make the “overreach” argument to abortion rights supporters — or the “wets” of our day:

“As the history of prohibition instructs, the surest way to defeat the right-to-life movement would be to make abortion illegal. Not solely because it would give the movement what it wants, but also because a firm majority of Americans still support the right to choose in all or most circumstances-just as a majority back in the 1920s probably thought it was all right to buy a drink (the polling business did not yet exist).”

“A reversal of Roe (much less a “pro-life” amendment) would quickly make heroes and heroines out of health workers who violated the law-much as this film, and most histories of the period, glamorize tipsy flappers and gangsters wielding submachine guns. The long history of prohibition unmistakably demonstrates that a divided public will quickly turn hostile when protestors with decent motives elect officials who carry out indecent assaults on individual freedom. In America, a movement of moralists is never so vulnerable as when it succeeds.”

David Frum also uses that Prohibition analogy, jumping off from Herman Cain’s confusing answer on abortion, and Andrew Sullivan expands.

Pro-lifers have generally struck me as in fact less dogmatic, as it were, in their political efforts to limit abortion, allowing all sorts of exceptions when they have to, going for small victories where they can get them, whereas pro-choicers have tended to be more all-or-nothing in their approach.

Is that changing?

The story of the powerful and deeply conservative Legion of Christ society is one of the most sordid tales of the Catholic Church’s recent past, with the Legion’s founder, the late Father Marciel Maciel having covered his crimes and insinuated himself in Rome through the use of pious rhetoric and lots of cash.

It was not until Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI that the longstanding cries of Maciel’s victims began to be heard.

Now the AP’s Nicole Winfield reports that the expected top-to-bottom reform of the Legion is not happening, and members are fleeing:

One year later, none of the Legion’s superiors has been held to account for facilitating the crimes of late founder Rev. Marciel Maciel, a drug addict who sexually abused his seminarians, fathered three children and created a cult-like movement within the church that damaged some of its members spiritually and emotionally.

An Associated Press tally shows that disillusioned members are leaving the movement in droves as they lose faith that the Vatican will push through the changes needed. The collapse of the order, once one of the most influential in the church, has broader implications for Catholicism, which is shedding members in some places because the hierarchy covered up widespread sexual abuse by priests.

In an exclusive interview, the man tapped by Benedict to turn the Legion around insisted that the pope tasked him only with guiding the Legion and helping rewrite its norms – not “decapitating” its leadership or avenging wrongdoing.

Cardinal Velasio De Paolis ruled out any further investigation into the crimes of Maciel, who as a favorite of Pope John Paul II had been held up as a living saint despite well-founded allegations – later proven – that he was a pedophile.

“I don’t see what good would be served” by further inquiry into a coverup, the Italian cardinal said. “Rather, we would run the risk of finding ourselves in an intrigue with no end. Because these are things that are too private for me to go investigating.”

The outcome of this investigation will weigh heavily in the eventual verdict on Benedict’s approach to sexual abuse in the church. Read the rest here.

Some readers have suggested that I have it out for Herman Cain. Not so. I find him winning in many ways. Of course, I have some reservations. But after seeing his latest ad, maybe I should say I had reservations. How can you not vote for someone whose campaign produced the following?

You have to admire a candidate who, conventional wisdom be damned, isn’t afraid to put a cigarette in a TV spot. (At least I think it was a cigarette.) Which reminds me. Read the rest of this entry »

From the statement of someone in the Vatican on economic inequality:

The 41-page text was titled, “Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority.” Prepared by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, it was released Oct. 24 in several languages, including a provisional translation in English.

The document cited the teachings of popes over the last 40 years on the need for a universal public authority that would transcend national interests. The current economic crisis, which has seen growing inequality between the rich and poor of the world, underlines the necessity to take concrete steps toward creating such an authority, it said.

One major step, it said, should be reform of the international monetary system in a way that involves developing countries. The document foresaw creation of a “central world bank” that would regulate the flow of monetary exchanges.

The article appears to advocate some sort of international authority to achieve, among other things, the following:

– Taxation measures on financial transactions. Revenues could contribute to the creation of a “world reserve fund” to support the economies of countries his by crisis, it said.

– Forms of recapitalization of banks with public funds that make support conditional on “virtuous” behavior aimed at developing the real economy.

– More effective management of financial “shadow markets” that are largely uncontrolled today.

Much of the criticism of this seems to focus on the “world authority” part.  But what about these three items?  Should these be adopted and would we need a world authority to do it?

Yes, they should be adopted, but no, I don’t think we need a world authority to do it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember Central America in the 80s? to say nothing of Chile in the 70s? Back then it was their military and our CIA. Today it looks like  Mexico and their police and our DEA. Does anyone in DC ever remember ideas that didn’t work?

Here: NYTimes: And drill down in the story for more news of the amazing Iran terrorist connection to the drug dealer informant.

If there’s one thing CEO-of-Self Herman Cain is sure of — well, right after regressive tax policy — it’s his position on abortion. While some have accused him of oversimplifying difficult policy questions, the Hermanator’s views on abortion are not susceptible to such criticism. Three months ago, in a little-noticed interview with John Stossel, Cain revealed his logically innovative view of the matter:

Which reminds me. Read the rest of this entry »

In a move that will doubtless warm the heart of Fr. Robert Sirico and his comrades, the Vatican has just published a long-expected statement calling for major reforms to the global economic and financial system — including an international political authority to address the “inequalities and distortions of capitalist development.” (You can read the provisional English translation here, and the original Italian here.) The statement, issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was prepared as a response to the global financial crisis, which has, according to the document, laid bare “selfishness, collective greed and the hoarding of goods on a great scale.” As Tom Reese has noted, the Vatican statement makes proposals that are well to the left of Wall Street, the GOP — and President Barack Obama.

From John Thavis’s CNS report:

The document cited the teachings of popes over the last 40 years on the need for a universal public authority that would transcend national interests. The current economic crisis, which has seen growing inequality between the rich and poor of the world, underlines the necessity to take concrete steps toward creating such an authority, it said.

One major step, it said, should be reform of the international monetary system in a way that involves developing countries. The document foresaw creation of a “central world bank” that would regulate the flow of monetary exchanges.

The document also proposed:

– Taxation measures on financial transactions. Revenues could contribute to the creation of a “world reserve fund” to support the economies of countries his by crisis, it said.

– Forms of recapitalization of banks with public funds that make support conditional on “virtuous” behavior aimed at developing the real economy.

– More effective management of financial “shadow markets” that are largely uncontrolled today.

Read the rest of the story here.

BREAKING: Justice League president Bill Donohue has issued his own authoritative statement, declaring the document not that big a deal. After all, it’s not an encyclical. Heck, the pope didn’t even write it. Sure, in calling for the creation of a world political authority, it’s expanding on a theme of Benedict’s Caritas in veritate, but “the term ‘world political authority’ appears once in the encyclical,” so everybody just calm down. What’s more, “Today’s statement uses terms like ‘supranational Authority’ and ‘supranational Institution.’ These neologisms are purely the creation of the authors, Cardinal Peter Turkson and Mario Toso. They are not found in the pope’s encyclical.” Apparently Donohue has never heard the term “supranational” before. Not that this is his main point. No, what Donohue really wants is to get in a dig at Occupy Wall Street. “No matter, those who are comparing this text to the demands of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ crowd should first detail what exactly it is the urban campers want.” Donohue’s press release makes no mention of anti-Catholicism, supposedly the reason his outfit exists.

BROKEN: Right on cue, the Acton Institute’s Samuel Gregg has posted his critique of the Vatican statement to the National Review‘s blog the Corner. After pointing out that the document has no claim on Catholic consciences, Gregg goes on lacunae patrol: Why no mention of the moral hazard of gambling with other people’s money? What about public debt? Who’s going to pay for all this? You can’t seriously expect us to raise taxes? Oh, and how could the statement ignore the damaging loss of the gold standard? Dubious expertise, indeed.

I have a friend — let’s call him “Joe;” for years he’s bad-mouthed the poor Euro.

Now, it seems, the Euro’s poised to fall — if you believe the nigh-infallible Paul!

Krugman:

The bitter truth is that it’s looking more and more as if the euro system is doomed. And the even more bitter truth is that given the way that system has been performing, Europe might be better off if it collapses sooner rather than later.

The Face…. The Palestinian Authority having applied for full membership in UNESCO has put that organization at risk of losing the U.S. annual dues of $70 million dollars, 22 percent of its budget. But….President Obama, Secretary Clinton, et al, are opposed to the congressionally mandated cut-off. The only solution they’ve come up with is to have the PA withdraw its request. HMMM, wonder why?

In any case, the PA has come up with one request that may shake the torpor of Catholics, and other Christians, on THE ISSUE…The PA would like to have the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem declared a World Historical Site, one of UNESCO’s responsibilities; the designation would list the site as Palestinian. Maybe the Vatican can help make-up the short-fall in dues! New York Times October 24.

from Sunday’s Boston Globe:

The sliver of raw fish sold as white tuna at Skipjack’s in Foxborough was actually escolar, an oily, cheaper species banned in Japan because it can make people sick. The Alaskan butterfish at celebrity chef Ming Tsai’s Blue Ginger in Wellesley was really sablefish, traditionally a staple at Jewish delicatessens, not upscale dining establishments.

At Chau Chow Seafood Restaurant in Dorchester, the $23 flounder fillet turned out to be a Vietnamese catfish known as swai – nutritionally inferior and often priced under $4 a pound.

Those were among the findings of a five-month Globe investigation into the mislabeling of fish. It showed that Massachusetts consumers routinely and unwittingly overpay for less desirable, sometimes undesirable, species – or buy seafood that is simply not what it is advertised to be. In many cases, the fish was caught thousands of miles away and frozen, not hauled in by local fishermen, as the menu claimed. It may be perfectly palatable – just not what the customer ordered. But sometimes mislabeled seafood can cause allergic reactions, violate dietary restrictions, or contain chemicals banned in the United States.

The Globe collected fish from 134 restaurants, grocery stores, and seafood markets from Leominster to Provincetown, and hired a laboratory in Canada to conduct DNA testing on the samples. Analyses by the DNA lab and other scientists showed that 87 of 183 were sold with the wrong species name – 48 percent.

The rest of the twinned tail is here.

Watch your sushi:

from the follow-up report in today’s Globe:

In the early-morning hours, workers at a …  warehouse in Boston load boxes of frozen escolar into vans for delivery to area sushi restaurants.

By the time the fish appears on diners’ plates, it has undergone a Cinderella-like transformation: the escolar, which can cause digestion problems, is presented as white tuna or albacore – more palatable and pricier fish.

Leslie Gelb former New York Timesman and no raving liberal has taken note of the Neo-conservative’s push for war with Iran.

Here are his opening lines: “They’re back! The neoconservatives who gave America clueless, unpaid-for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus a near doubling of military expenditures, during the Bush years have risen from their political graves. Someone, maybe a media tiring of President Obama’s interminable plight, pulled the stake from their heart. Now they’ve returned to the op-ed pages, the talk shows, the think-tank discussions, and the advisory ranks of Republican presidential candidates.

In a recent talk to Australian pilgrims, Pope Benedict XVI said that the task of parents educating children in the faith is to give them both roots and wings: I want to use this  image of “roots and wings” to narrow and focus the discussion from my post below and ask, positively, how do “Commonweal Catholics” think we give roots and wings to the next generations.

Some of  our more traditional brothers and sisters try to do this, as far as I can see, by trying to recreate a homogenous Catholic environment: homeschooling, Catholic school, carefully controlled exposure to other viewpoints.

But what about Catholics who think early exposure and going to school with people of different faiths is a good thing? What about Catholics who want to raise the next generation as Catholic while not fleeing a more pluralistic environment? What about Catholics who (gasp) actually think good public schools are a good option? I think that this is at least one strand of Commonweal Catholics. So what is the pedagogical strategy of Commonweal Catholics for handing on the faith with both roots and wings, even if those terms aren’t defined in quite the same way that the Pope does?

Please: no more griping about the church: let’s think of positive strategies.

Many generations of pilgrims have made their way to Rome from all over the Christian world, in order to venerate the tombs of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and thereby to deepen their communion in the one Church of Christ, founded on the Apostles. In so doing, they strengthen the roots of their faith; and roots, as we know, are the source of life-giving sustenance. In that sense, pilgrims to Rome should always feel at home here, and the Domus Australia will play an important part in creating a home for Australian pilgrims in the city of the Apostles. Yet roots are only a part of the story. According to a saying attributed to a great poet from my own country, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, there are two things that children should receive from their parents: roots and wings. From our holy Mother, the Church, we too receive both roots and wings: the faith of the Apostles, handed down from generation to generation, and the grace of the Holy Spirit, conveyed above all through the sacraments of the Church. Pilgrims to this city return to their homelands renewed and strengthened in their faith, and borne aloft by the Holy Spirit in the journey onward and upward to their heavenly home.My prayer today is that the pilgrims who pass through this house will indeed return to their homes with firmer faith, more joyful hope and more ardent love for the Lord, ready to commit themselves with fresh zeal to the task of bearing witness to Christ in the world in which they live and work. And I pray too that their visit to the See of Peter will deepen their love for the universal Church and unite them more closely with Peter’s Successor, charged with feeding and gathering into one the Lord’s flock from every corner of the world. Commending all of them, and all of you, to the intercession of Our Lady, Help of Christians and Saint Mary MacKillop, I gladly impart my Apostolic Blessing as a pledge of the joys that await us in our eternal home.

My head was encased in fog. I sat in my sister’s living room the Pacific Northwest with a cup of homemade Starbucks coffee, and it wasn’t doing the trick. I had to get on a plane back to the Midwest in a few hours, after attending my niece’s first communion ceremony the day before.

This was a Sunday morning last May –and my fog head was understandable, if not justified.  First communion season comes in the middle of final exam season. I was trying to remember what was waiting for me when I got back to work.

But the first communicant wandered out of the kitchen to talk to me.  No small talk for her–she was wide awake and ready to discuss complicated things.  “Aunt Cathy,” she said, “why do some people not go to church any more?”  By this she meant people we both know–family members–who moved heaven and earth to get to her first communion, but who don’t go to church every week. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably seen the headline: “Dangerous exotic animals deliberately freed in Ohio.”

The proprietor of an exotic-animal farm in Ohio apparently freed the animals before taking his own life. You don’t want to laugh at a story involving suicide and enormous dangerous irrational creatures, but what else can you do in the face of (non-hacked) highway signs like this?

And quotes like this?

“We just had a huge tiger, an adult tiger that must’ve weighed 300 pounds that was very aggressive,” [County Sheriff] Lutz said. “We got a tranquilizer in it, and this thing just went crazy.”

(They’re now shooting to kill.)
And video like this, featuring TV personality Jack Hanna (wait till the end)?

“This is like…Noah’s Ark filled with tigers and lions and all leopards and a few monkeys or whatever and it crashes here and all of a sudden they’re out there.”

Well, if you’re Jonathan Chait, you barely blink: “The dull truth is that the presence of diseased monkeys running loose in the streets does not change things much in Ohio.”

Having warned its liberal readers not to get too close to the crazy radicals of Occupy Wall Street, the New Republic has posted a series of responses on its Web site. Todd Gitlin — who, as a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, knows a thing or two about protest movements — expresses disappointment at TNR’s Beltway scrupulosity:

TNR’s editorial clucking at Occupy Wall Street suffers from weak sociological imagination compounded by wrongheaded stuffiness. Stamping your foot and demanding that the world conform to your standards—cram its demands into the formula you prefer, dress as you prefer, enunciate as you prefer, curb its radicals as you prefer—before you go out to play with it may be, to use the buzzword du jour, “understandable,” but it’s neither adequate to the situation nor helpful. In fact, it’s counterproductive. You do politics in the society you have, not the society you wish you had.

William Galston, a frequent TNR (and Commonweal) contributor, considers it a mistake to focus on the worthiness of Occupy Wall Street as a vehicle for discontent with the financial industry. It is, he argues, the discontent itself we ought to focus on instead — and the possibility that it might be channeled toward useful reform. The OWS protesters remind us of something that Rawlsian liberals and leftist radicals ought to be able to agree on: that the privileges enjoyed by the elite are intolerable if they come at the expense of the general welfare. Of course, radicals would say they usually or always do come at the expense of the general welfare; Rawlsian liberals would insist that they needn’t and often don’t — that the poor may be less poor in a society with some wealth inequality than in a society with none. But both sides agree with a majority of Americans that in the last decade at least the elites have failed the nonelites: for the most part, only the rich have become richer while many of the nonrich have become poorer. It is no longer enough for those at the top to assume that whatever makes them more comfortable will end up helping everyone else, too; they must demonstrate this. Galston puts it better:

Every community of any appreciable size has an elite—often more than one. Elites are tolerated, even respected, if the rest of the population sees them as using their wealth, power, prestige, and talents on behalf of the community’s interests, as well as their own. Elites are not expected to be saintly altruists, but they are expected to care about the rest of society, not just themselves.And that is the nub of today’s populist revolt.

It is very difficult to find anyone outside a couple of Manhattan zip codes who believes that the financial sector has added value to America’s economy and society over the past two decades. Financial “innovations” ended up expanding risk, not opportunity; the Masters of the Universe redivided the pie without noticeably expanding it. While wages stagnated, financial elites became untethered from the real economy and sailed off into the stratosphere of nine and ten-figure wealth. A capitalist economy loses credibility when its results diverge too far from public sentiments about decency and fairness.[...]

In 2009, at a time when one might have expected maximum feasible humility from financial leaders, Lloyd Blankfein opined that Goldman Sachs was doing “God’s work.” While he was limning a previously unnoticed theological equivalence between himself and Mother Theresa, Brian Griffiths, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International and also chairman of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lambeth Fund, was invoking John Rawls’s Difference Principle. In a 2009 discussion at St. Paul’s Cathedral, he had this to say about compensation in the financial sector: “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.” And so we would, if it did. But where is the evidence that it does? I’m not even sure that Griffiths’ proposition was intended as a statement of fact. It seems, rather, like a ritual incantation designed to ward off evil spirits. If so, it has lost its protective powers.

Maybe Rome is ahead of the U.S. bishops when it comes to the economy.

Catholic News Service reports:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Vatican has prepared a document on reform of the global financial system and the potential role of a public regulatory authority.

The document, prepared by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was to be released Oct. 24 in four languages, and presented the same day at a Vatican news conference by Cardinal Peter Turkson, head of the council.

The Vatican said the document would address “reform of the international financial system with a view toward a general public authority.”

This could give Catholic conservatives palpitations.

On the other hand, the CNS story notes that Pope Benedict’s powerful 2009 social justice encyclical, “Charity in Truth” (“Caritas in Veritate”), is an inspiration for the forthcoming document and is also a touchstone for the neo-distributists I wrote about this week.

Pontifex maximus?

Stanley Fish offers a thoughtful assessment of the Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC case recently argued before the Supreme Court.

A teacher in a school run by the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, (not the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which is the largest Lutheran body in the US,) was fired in what she contends is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The school responds that she had violated a “core Lutheran belief” by taking the matter to the courts at all. She was also deemed (the school contends) to be a “commissioned minister,” even though most of her duties consisted of teaching secular subjects.

The “ministerial exception” exempts churches from some state and federal employment statutes. Specifically, churches are exempt from the provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.(A standard example here is the Roman Catholic priesthood, which excludes women on theological grounds, not on grounds of competency.)

It’s a difficult situation. as Fish explains:

If the ministerial exemption is to have any bite, there must be a way of distinguishing employees central to a religious association’s core activities from employees who play only a supporting role (the example always given is janitors). But if the line marking the distinction is drawn by the state, the state is setting itself up as the arbiter of ecclesiastical organization and thus falling afoul of the establishment clause. And if the line is drawn by the religious association, the religious association is being granted the power to deprive as many of its employees as it likes of the constitutional protections supposedly afforded to every citizen. It is these equally unpalatable alternatives — this Scylla and Charybdis — that the justices find themselves between in oral argument. What a mess!

The LCMS finds itself in the (I hope!) unpalatable position of having to defend a firing in apparent violation of the ADA on grounds that, because it is a church, it gets to discriminate against the disabled. (The teacher in question has narcolepsy, apparently not to a degree which would make it impossible to fulfill her duties.) I find myself with two conflicting reactions:
1. Why on earth would the LCMS want to go all the way to the Supreme Court to argue THIS case? It makes them look like they’re using a religious veneer to cover up a rotten practice of discrimination, which, one would hope, violates LCMS’ sense of Christian justice surely as deeply as the teacher’s going to court did–if not more deeply.
2. Or is it like a situation in which free-speech advocates hold their noses and defend pornographers, on grounds that the most egregious cases can demonstrate the importance of the principle?

Thoughts?

M.J. Rosenberg shares his experience as a congressional staffer on the way in which aid to Israel was built up over the years by Congressmen/women who saw the country as a local constituent. He notes that while the U.S. military budget is being cut, U.S. military aid to Israel goes on (even though Israel is cutting its military budget). That’s what we’d have to call clout.

Rosenberg cites as have many others Walter Pincus’s column in the WashPost: His opening sentence: “As the country reviews its spending on defense and foreign assistance, it is time to examine the funding the United States provides to Israel.”

P.S. And to all those good citizens, who wrote me personally (and impersonally) about my last post, suggesting that I was a “useful idiot,” an “idiot,” and/or verging on anti-Semitism, or was actually an anti-Semite, let me say this to you: 1. spend more time reading about the complex issues involved in Israel’s survival, which I ardently support; 2. give thought to the dysfunctional relationship between the U.S. and Israel, which serves mostly to undermine Israel’s ability to live in peace in the Middle East; 3. understand that my purpose here is to inform my fellow Catholics about the dangers in the current situation and to encourage them to think outside the  (we-are-all-guilty-for-the-Holocaust, ergo, we must support Israel no matter what!) box.

Sweet Marie, there’s another GOP debate tonight. With Ceo-of-Self Herman Cain still leading the field, he’s sure to receive lots of attention from the moderators–and his competitors. They’re going to want to know why, for example, he doesn’t think foreign-policy experience–or knowledge, really–matters much in this race.

Which reminds me. Read the rest of this entry »

The president is even sending a contingent of troops to fight the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda! As Rush Limbaugh notes:

“Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. It means God.”

Indeed.