I thought these comments from the chief counsel for the USCCB were interesting, and suggest that the bishops are, as Grant suggested below, not going to be satisfied with a Hawaii-type compromise, or even with a total exemption (without conditions) for Catholic institutions:

The White House is “all talk, no action” on moving toward compromise, said Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular,” Picarello said. “We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed.”

That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”

“If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate,” Picarello said.

Proposed congressional action on the issue is similar in its apparent  intention to extend the exemptions debate well beyond the domain of religious institutions.  According to this report, the Rubio/Manchin proposal in the Senate would allow any employer (and not just religious institutions) to avoid having to provide contraceptive coverage by citing religious objections.

This strikes me as the logical extension of the arguments that some have made on behalf of allowing Catholic institutions to obtain an extension.  If forcing them to pay into an insurance fund that covers contraception violates their religious conscience, I’m not sure why a private Catholic employer who accepts the Church’s position on contraception and on the impermissibility (but see Madison, Wis.) of paying into such a fund is differently situated in some fundamental way.  Now, the law frequently distinguishes between religious institutions and private citizens (e.g., religious institutions that own property are allowed by the Fair Housing Act to discriminate in the housing market on the basis of religion, whereas other private owners are not), so I’m not saying that one cannot, as a practical matter, make the distinction. But the argument from religious conscience has a tendency to take on a life of its own.

For some nine years, the most difficult decisions I had to make did not concern my personal life or job, but the Catholic high school that I served as a volunteer trustee. This week, the school announced it will close in June. I’m in mourning.

I’m not privy to the decison-making involved; I’ve been off the board for several years. But the reason Brooklyn’s Nazareth Regional High School will close is obvious: total enrollment for the four years has dropped to 311 – nearly the same size as my 1971 graduating class. As recently as 2006, the school had nearly double the current enrollment, 602. Since tuition makes up the bulk of revenue, it would be very hard to absorb such a loss (especially since there were already substantial debts).

It was a wonderful new school in my day, run by the Xaverian Brothers with a staff made up largely of  talented, innovative young  teachers, many of whom would go on to distinguished careers elsewhere  as they got older. The combination of youthful enthusiasm and post-Vatican II optimism made it quite a place. The tuition, subsidized by the Diocese of Brooklyn, was $200 a year.

By the late 1970s, the Diocese of Brooklyn – first to feel the pinch of hard times because it is the only entirely urban diocese in the country – cut the school loose. A lay board was formed to run it, anticipating a model being adapted now in many Catholic schools. Changing with the demographics, the student population shifted from nearly all-white to entirely minority, with a large number of Caribbean-American students. The all-boys school accepted girls.

The school was slow at first to connect with the Caribbean community, but eventually did so. When I became involved in 2001, I saw that the warmth between teachers and students that I experienced had continued. This, I believe, is what makes Catholic education special – the commitment to the whole person. This is why the school graduated and sent virtually every student to college. And the quality of the school – the continued dedication of the staff – is why I thought it worth some effort, and a lot of difficult decisions, to try to keep the school going. Read the rest of this entry »

A parallax is a change in the spatial orientation of an object when viewed from two different vantage points. By measuring the changes in the position of the observer and the spatial shift in the appearance of the object, one can calculate the distance to and between objects in space. These kinds of calculations are used in astronomy to calculate the distances to and between stars and planets, and it is also the way that we are able to perceive depth in our visual field. Because our eyes receive sensory inputs independently and yet are close enough together to be able to combine these separate images in the brain, we are able to more accurately perceive the arrangement of objects in space. If you want to experience a parallax shift, hold your finger up directly in front of your face lining it up with some object in the distance, look at it while opening and closing one eye and then the other. You will notice that your finger will look like it is on one side of the object when you have your left eye closed and on the other when you close the right, and you will also notice that the further the object is from your finger, the wider the oscillation will appear.

While parallaxes add depth to our experience of the world, they are also responsible for blind spots. The fact that we sense objects at the edges of our visual field without being able to really perceive them is due to the fact that our view on the world is always the composite of two images that cannot be completely reconciled with one another. So, that which allows us to experience the depth of the world also contributes to narrowing our total view of reality. In his essay on the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by the Dreams of Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant spoke of such parallaxes arising in philosophical argument:

I formerly used to regard the human understanding in general merely from the point of view of my own understanding. Now I put myself in the position of someone else’s reason, which is independent of myself and external to me, and regard my judgements, along with their most secret causes, from the point of view of other people. The comparison of the two observations yields, it is true, pronounced parallaxes, but it is also the only method for preventing optical deception, and the only means of placing the concepts in the true positions which they occupy relatively to the cognitive faculty of human nature.

The concept of “religion” in America seems to suffer and benefit from a similar kind of parallax.

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t miss her excellent piece at the Atlantic:

The list of Catholics who have lobbied the administration to consider a broader definition of “religious employer” than now exists — one that would cover institutions like Catholic universities and hospitals — includes politically progressive Catholics who have been close allies of the White House, like Father John Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame who stood up to conservatives who wanted Obama disinvited from giving the school’s commencement address in 2009. It includes pro-life Catholic Democrats like Senator Bob Casey, who now faces an even tougher reelection campaign in Pennsylvania because of his vote in favor of Obama’s health reform plan. And it includes precisely those Catholic hospital officials and progressive nuns whose support of health reform provided reassurance and cover for the holdout Catholic Democrats who voted to make it law. In doing so, they made possible the largest expansion of contraception access in U.S. history.

Without the work of women like Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, and Sister Simone Campbell of the Catholic social justice group NETWORK, there would be no health reform and therefore no contraception coverage mandate to argue over — not just for the employees of Catholic hospitals and universities, but for the estimated 24 million other women who will benefit from this aspect of the law.

So, yes, a little gratitude from women’s health advocates and other liberals would be appropriate. Instead, when these Catholic sisters and others asked for some flexibility with regard to the mandate, the advocates pooh-poohed as irrelevant their concerns about religious liberty and insisted that “the bishops” were the only ones who had a problem with contraception coverage.

The White House also bears its own large share of the blame for how it has mishandled the issue.

Read the rest right here.

Also: Lawrence O’Donnell on how we got into this mess in the first place:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rick Santorum has own rich guy, also a Koch Brothers alum. His name is Foster Friess and, unlike other rich guys, he actually talks to reporters. NYTimes on February 9.

“Few people played a more pivotal role in Tuesday’s turn of events than Mr. Friess. An investor who made millions in mutual funds and now lives in Wyoming, he is the chief backer of a “super PAC” that has helped keep Mr. Santorum’s candidacy alive by running television advertisements on his behalf.

“His role as outside funder — one that Mr. Friess indicated he would continue to play in the contests ahead — escalates the battle among a few dozen wealthy Republicans to influence their party’s choice of a presidential nominee.”

A bit like a horse race, isn’t it?

I’m feeling proud of my home state today.  Amidst the news coverage of its vote to allow same-sex couples to marry, I found this quote from marriage equality supporter, and Republican and Catholic State Rep. Maureen Walsh very moving:

Republican representative Maureen Walsh, whose daughter told her she was gay a few years ago, voted in favor of the bill on the basis of equality. “Nothing’s different,” Walsh said. “She’s still a fabulous human being. And some day, by God, I want to throw a wedding for that kid.”

Last week the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a new analysis of trend in political party identification by various religious communities.  The overall finding is that, between 2008 and 2010, Republicans made significant gains among all religious groups, with the largest gains coming among White Catholics (+8 percent points), Jews (+9 points), and Mormons (+12 points).  Among all Catholics, Republican affiliation increased by 6 percentage points.

It is interesting to note, however, that Catholics overall are still more likely to say they lean toward the Democrats (48%) than toward Republicans (43%), despite the 49%/42% advantage that the Republicans enjoy among White Catholics.  Although the data on the Pew web site do not break out other ethnic groups among Catholics, my surmise is that the views of Hispanic Catholics (who tend to lean Democratic) are the reason for this difference.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the prior ruling by US District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker that Proposition 8, which took away the right of same-sex couples to marry in CA, was unconstitutional. (Read the decision here.)

Money quote:

All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation of ‘marriage,’ which symbolizes state legitimization and societal recognition of their committed relationships. Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for “laws of this sort.” [Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 633 (1996)

Context: In California, state law extends the (state) benefits of marriage to same-sex and opposite-sex couples alike. Hence the grounds for this decision. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Kimmelman, the fine architecture critic of The New York Times, has posted a utopian proposal to “Restore a Gateway to Dignity.” It entails moving Madison Square Garden to a new location, and bringing back some measure of dignity and humanity to the tragedy and travesty which is Penn Station.

His lament prompted the title of this post: Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Obama administration signaled that it’s willing to try to address the concerns of religious institutions that object to the HHS ruling requiring them to cover contraception in their employee health plans. When Press Secretary Jay Carney first began fielding questions about the mandate, he repeated the mantra that the administration had found “an appropriate balance” between the health-care needs of women and the First Amendment rights of religious groups. Then, after polling data showed that the mandate wasn’t exactly a hit with Catholic voters — especially white Catholics — Carney’s tune changed. Now he identifies a “need to find an appropriate balance” in a way that ensures “that the policy is implemented and that all women have access to these services that also deals with the concerns that have been expressed.”

As Melissa Rogers first suggested back in October, Hawaii state law may provide a model for striking such a balance. Hawaii mandates that all employers include contraception in their employee insurance plans. A religious employer can invoke a refusal clause that allows it to exclude such services from employee health plans. Once a religious group invokes that clause, it must provide written notice informing employees that contraception is not included in their health plans; they must also tell employees where such services can be obtained. Employees can then purchase contraception coverage from their insurer at a cost no higher than the enrollee’s pro-rata share of the price the employer would have paid had it not exercised the religious exemption. In other words, religious employers don’t have to subsidize plans that cover contraception, and employees can, for a nominal fee, purchase a contraception rider with their own money.

Given that the main objection of the U.S. Catholic bishops has been that the HHS ruling forces them to “pay for” contraception coverage, an arrangement like Hawaii’s ought to satisfy them. So why is the associate director of the USCCB Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities throwing a wet blanket on the idea? Read the rest of this entry »

Our new editorial on the HHS mandate argues that the federal government is wrong to force Catholic institutions to choose between offering their employees health insurance that covers contraception and not offering their employees any insurance at all. The editorial also argues that, once forced with this bad choice, Catholic institutions should continue to offer insurance even as they campaign for a reversal of the HHS decision. “In this instance, the greater good of providing health insurance for all employees outweighs the ‘evil’ involved in the possible use of contraception by some. A different calculus would be employed if the funding in question were for elective abortion, which is a much graver evil.” The argument here is based on the distinction between remote material cooperation with evil and other kinds of cooperation — an important distinction in traditional Catholic moral theology and one that has featured prominently in the dotCommonweal threads devoted to the current controversy.

Whether the good of providing health care to employees really does outweigh the material cooperation with evil involved in funding coverage for contraception is of course disputable (as is the claim that all artificial contraception is evil). But I doubt that all who condemn such cooperation out of hand really understand the implications of this judgment. It is very difficult, not to say impossible, to avoid remote material cooperation with evil in a complex modern economy. I wonder how many Catholics who are outraged at the thought of a Catholic institution reluctantly offering insurance that includes contraception coverage are sure that their own health insurance does not include such coverage. If it does, that is remote material cooperation with evil. If one does business with a company that offers its employees insurance that covers contraception, that, too, is remote material cooperation with evil (though the cooperation is more remote). In fact, unless you live in a monastery that doesn’t have investments, it’s unlikely you are innocent of remote material cooperation with something the church condemns. Nor does the church condemn you for this; it asks only that you be as conscious of these entanglements as you can be, that you minimize them whenever possible, and that you be sure they really are offset by a greater good. Meanwhile, Catholics should avoid condemning other members of the church for failing to meet a rigorous standard of purity that the church does not in fact demand, especially if they haven’t bothered to consider whether they meet it themselves. I am not asking here for a show of hands. But zealous champions of the faith must at least avoid bad-faith arguments.

As one wag said, there seems to have been a football game at the recent Madonna concert in Indianapolis. No one ever said Madonna didn’t know how to put on a show.  I was blown away by her entrance (to Vogue) and the last dance number (to Like a Prayer).

Madonna, who was raised Catholic, has long been involved in Kabbalah–Jewish Mysticism. But there were rumors last year that she was returning to Catholicism–and to Opus Dei, specifically. She has not been shy to explore religious themes-even in very controversial ways. But my guess is that Opus Dei isn’t a good fit for Madonna. Among other things, she is going to have trouble getting her, um, mode of transportation (see above) through the same door with her at the Opus Dei Center in New York–I’ve heard there are separate entrances for men and women–separate entrances–that’s not exactly Madonna’s modus operandi.

What struck me watching this, and her other videos, is the attention to detail. No one has ever said Madonna wasn’t a hard worker, a perfectionist, even. Think about the Superbowl performance: hours and hours of work for a nine minute spectacle, and then it’s gone. More generally, performers have something to tell us, it seems, about the relationship between chronos (the extension of time) and kairos (a transformative moment).

Here, by the way, are the original videos of Vogue and Like a Prayer. Clearly influenced by the religion of her upbringing, I think Madonna has forged a secular liturgical sensibility.

From our new editorial on the HHS’s contraception-coverage mandate:

The administration’s decision raises deep concerns about its understanding of the fundamental corporate and institutional nature of the Catholic Church and similar religious communities. The HHS decision comes perilously close to insisting that the government should determine what is or isn’t a religious organization or ministry. The reasoning behind restricting the exemption to institutions that primarily employ and serve coreligionists appears to be based on an essentially sectarian, and historically Protestant, understanding of “religion.” The Catholic Church, which understands its public presence to be vital to its identity and mission, should not be forced to abide by such restrictions.

Read the whole thing here.

When the UN Security Council last week failed to pass a resolution calling for Syrian president Bashar al Assad to turn power over to his vice-president, Russia and China were named as the chief culprits. Many reasons were cited for their no vote. Stephen Walt points to what may be the most obvious but least cited reason–the regime change that took place in Libya. Many commentators at the time argued that France, England, and the U.S. exceeded the UN resolution allowing military action to protect Libyan civilians. Walt observes that fear of another such over-reaching in Syria may be a major reasons for the Russian and Chinese vetoes.  Walt’s short analysis at Foreign Policy.

MORE: A more fine-grained look at the international issues in the Syria-Iran connection by a former head of Mossad. Interesting. NYTimes op ed.

The USCCB may be unified on the contraception mandate, but Catholics aren’t. Here’s a Public Religion Research Institute poll on the mandate. Overall, 58% of Catholics think insurance should cover contraception. Catholic voters believe so at 52%.

The data shows that this is question that cuts differently for different groups: 62% of women and a majority of non-whites support the mandate more strongly than white males. 65% of Millennials approve the mandate, while only 40% of seniors do. As to including schools and hospitals under the mandate, still a majority of Catholics agree with the HHS decision. Among Catholic voters, 45% approve, 52% disapprove, but again, more whites than people of color agree–only 40% of white Catholics approve the mandate, so a large (but unspecified % here) of non-white Catholic voters must approve.

Most do not want the mandate applied to parishes, which, of course, is already an exemption under the law as written.

A few thoughts: Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a sharp response to Thursday’s White House blog post purporting to clear up any confusion about how the contraception-coverage mandate will affect religious institutions. The USCCB’s press release goes through the White House blog post point by point, clarifying a couple of important issues, but obfuscating several others by employing a touch of the worst-case-scenarioism that fueled the bishops’ opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Let’s have a look:

Claim: “Churches are exempt from the new rules: Churches and other houses of worship will be exempt from the requirement to offer insurance that covers contraception.”

Response: This is not entirely true. To be eligible, even churches and houses of worship must show the government that they hire and serve primarily people of their own faith and have the inculcation of religious values as their purpose. Some churches may have service to the broader community as a major focus, for example, by providing direct service to the poor regardless of faith. Such churches would be denied an exemption precisely because their service to the common good is so great. More importantly,the vast array of other religious organizations – schools, hospitals, universities, charitable institutions – will clearly not be exempt.

Does the USCCB really expect readers to believe that parishes won’t be exempt? That, say, providing meals to the hungry — even as a “major focus” — would distract HHS from the fact that the primary function of a Catholic parish is to serve as a community of worship? That HHS would fail to notice that parishes are not for profit, that they primarily employ and primarily serve co-religionists, and that they exist to inculcate Catholic beliefs and values — in other words, that they meet all four (far too restrictive) conditions to qualify for an exemption from the contraception-coverage mandate?  Read the rest of this entry »

It’s shaping up to be a big year for the guild of Jewish New Testament scholars. The main event has been the publication of the Jewish Annotated New Testament, in which Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler brought together about 50 Jewish scholars to offer commentary and analysis on the New Testament and its historical milieux. Some of these are scholars of early Judaism who comment on the New Testament from that perspective, but a solid core of the group consists of New Testament scholars trained at the best institutions. Many of them say that studying the New Testament was a positive for their own religious lives: in the words of Levine and Brettler, “study of the New Testament has made us better, more informed Jews.”

I will be working through the rich (and reasonably priced!) book in the next couple months, and full reviews will be given in time by at least two Commonweal writers. But I wanted to draw your attention to it now so that readers can also be aware of A.-J.’s public speaking events about the project (one is here in NYC this week). The historical uniqueness of what she and her co-editor accomplished in this volume cannot be overstated, and it’s well worth hearing her talk about it in her own words.

Like Eduardo, I have become increasingly baffled by the nearly unanimous support among Catholic commentators of both “conservative” and “liberal” political persuasions for the Bishops’ specious appeals to “religious freedom” protections in their rejection of the HSS contraception mandate. I have been completely unable to see how the mandate has anything at all to do with “religion,” since the adjudication of the relative merits of religiously informed morality when applied to non-adherents is completely outside the purview of government expertise. As I listened impatiently as Bishop Kevin Rhoades’ version of the USCCB “protest” letter was read out in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame this morning, I was confirmed in my suspicion that all of this really has more to do with politics than religion, and more specifically, that the narrowing of the religious exemption threatens a particular form of politically motivated “Catholic” identity, which the Bishops and many in the Catholic press have a vested interest in protecting.

[Warning: This is long!]

Read the rest of this entry »

Those following the Republican primary campaigns will know that Gingrich’s shaky finances were repaired by Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino operator, who threw in $5 million after Iowa and his wife another $5 million before South Carolina. According to the NYTimes, Adelson sees the Gingrich trajectory downward and, though promising to keep him afloat until he pulls out, has made it clear he will give even even more money to Romney.

The Times story very genteelly mentions Adelson’s “shared passion for protecting Israel” with Gingrich. Adelson was part of the Koch Brothers gazzilionaire’s gathering focused on what they all have in common, defeating Barack Obama.

Okay, it’s a free country and money is free speech, but I hope we’re all clear that Mr. Adelson’s passion, Israel, is also his primary interest. So when Israel decides to go for Iran think about the attack ads this crew will devise to force Obama to join in, though none of them will vote for him, no matter what.

Story here. And here’s a short piece about Adelson from Haaretz.

I’ve been refraining from commenting on the contraception rule, because, to be honest, I’m puzzled both by the decision to mandate contraception coverage (which strikes me as politically very tone deaf) and by the reaction to it among liberal Catholics.  I’ll leave the political wisdom of the decision to others, but let me explain why I’m a little surprised by the vigor of the reaction to it on the Catholic left.  (And my puzzlement is not merely rooted in my concern about the wisdom of lending credibility to the mostly fatuous “religious freedom” line of attack that religious  conservatives have strategically adopted as their new all-purpose refrain in the culture wars.)

Part of my uncertainty about the merits of this particular controversy is due to my own ambivalence on the question of religious exemptions generally.  In this case, my confusion revolves around the difficulty I have in understanding the boundaries of appropriate demands for religious exemptions when it comes to moral claims like the Catholic hierarchy’s opposition to contraception (or, more accurately, to being compelled, if they choose to employ or provide services to non-Catholics and to provide them with health insurance, to pay for health insurance that covers contraception, which the employee may or may not choose to use).  A couple of clarifications.  First, for the purposes of this post, I’m distinguishing “moral” claims about how one ought to act in day-to-day life from claims related to ritual obligations.  Not all groups would recognize that distinction, but I don’t tend to think of Catholics as being such a group.  Second, I’m talking about the entitlement to an exemption here primarily in normative, and not in positive legal, terms.

My main question is what it is that properly qualifies a moral claim as “religious” such that the person who holds it is arguably entitled (on grounds of religious freedom) to some kind of exemption from a legal mandate to act otherwise.  For reasons I’ll explain, I think this is a particularly challenging line for Catholics to draw because of our tendency to approach moral issues in terms of natural reason.  But the uniformity of Catholic condemnation of the Obama administration’s decision makes me feel like I’m missing something.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a lot of it this week. A couple of selections:

First, Bryan Cones tries to suss out which Catholic institutions will have to include contraception coverage in their employee health plans. You’ll recall that not-for-profit religious institutions that employ and serve primarily co-religionists, whose mission is to inculcate its values, and are not-for-profits, are exempt. So, Bryan argues, when it comes to the Catholic Church, its parishes, parish schools, diocesan offices directly under the bishop’s authority (like the newspaper), religious congregations and agencies they directly supervise (like the Jesuits and America magazine), and Catholic high schools should receive exemptions from the mandate. What about Catholic Charities? Bryan writes:

Most (maybe all?) Catholic Charities agencies are separately incorporated in dioceses. So it’s “Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago.” But — and this is an important but — most Catholic Charities agencies are not part of the diocesan legal structure. In other words, Catholic Charities is a separately incorporated social service agency connected to the local church “aspirationally” but not directly funded by it necessarily. In fact most of Catholic Charities budget comes from public sources (state and federal).

Since Catholic Charities doesn’t necessarily primarily employ Catholics or primarily serve them, I suspect they would not qualify for a religious exemption to the HHS rule, but because of their particular connection to the local church, they may have an argument for the exemption. For example, the archbishop of Chicago appoints all the board members of Catholic Charities in this diocese.

That’s an interesting wrinkle, although in the end legal precedents may make it moot. In 2000, Catholic Charities of Sacramento sued the state over a law requiring insurance companies to include contraception coverage in plans with a prescription-drug benefit (obviously that wouldn’t cover sterilization procedures) because it didn’t qualify as a religious employer under the law. The challenge was rebuffed by two lower courts before the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case, as it declined to hear a later suit brought against New York State for a similar law. The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear those cases, along with other decisions upholding narrow religious exemptions for generally applicable laws — including one written by Justice Scalia — have led some to believe the HHS mandate will pass judicial scrutiny. Which doesn’t mean the Obama administration made the right call here, although it may lend some credence to the wild theory that the president is not out to get Catholics.

Read the rest of this entry »

For those who missed last evening’s PBS “Newshour,” Mark Shields was typically forthright in commenting upon the HHS decision:

what President Obama has done with this policy, and Secretary Sebelius, quite bluntly, is they have taken those Catholics who took a risk to support them, Father John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame, and Sister Carol Keehan, who is the president of the Catholic Health Association, and Father Larry Snyder, who is president of Catholic Charities, who have taken on orthodox, more conservative groups within their own Catholic Church to support the president, especially his efforts on the poor, and he has left them out to dry.

And he concluded:

I’m just saying that this appears to be distancing, if not dissing Catholics.

The full exchange is here (towards the end of the transcript).

David Ignatius has a column in the WashPost (Feb. 2) that lays out various scenarios for attacks-no attacks on Iran. He quotes Defense Secretary Panetta predicting an Israeli attack on Iran in the late Spring. There’s a strong note that they’d have to do it on their own, but….

A lot of leaking is going on including by Ignatius. So what is going on? Campaign season? Republican fodder for attacking Obama? Mere saber rattling? Preparing the U.S. for war?

UPDATE: Leslie Gelb, former Times reporter and former president of the Council on Foreign Relations ends a  piece on upping the diplomacy with this: “And here we Americans are in a presidential election year. At these times, the straps of restraint on tough talk and tough action are almost always loosened. That’s especially true when Democrats hold the White House—Democrats who are quadrennially scared stupid by the prospect of Republicans accusing them of being lily-livered liberals and selling out the nation’s security. I’d like to see President Obama show the courage of offering a solid peace proposal instead of just drawing chest-thumping red lines. Meantime, he doesn’t have to withdraw any sanctions or any “red lines.” Just cut the usual diplomatic and political baloney, and try. With so much pressure now being applied on Iran, it might work. In the midst of a barrage of economic and military pressures, it is not a sign of weakness or lack of resolve to offer peace. It is classic negotiating from strength.”  Daily Beast

The second phase of the unfolding of Vatican II was the Preparatory Period which ran from November 1960 through to the very eve of the Council’s opening on October 11,1962. During it ten commissions prepared texts for discussion and approval when the fathers assembled in St. Peter’s for the Council proper. It was also the period when the rules for the conciliar deliberations and decisions were drawn up.

I have discussed the preparation of the Council in a long chapter in the first volume of the five-volume History of Vatican II, under the title, “The Struggle for the Council during the Preparation of Vatican II (1960-1962).” My title indicates that in the course of the preparation distinct and even contrasting views of what the Council should do and should say became clear and, after revealing themselves here and there in the work of the commissions, openly confronted one another during meetings of the Central Preparatory Commission which had the task of supervising the preparatory work, of reviewing the documents prepared by the various commissions, of recommending emendations, and of judging whether the texts should be submitted to Pope John XXIII for his approval as an agenda for the Council.

Although the preparatory commissions had been encouraged to form joint subcommissions to deal with matters that fell under the competence of more than one commission, not much collaborative work was undertaken. The Preparatory Theological Commission (PTC) in particular resisted the idea that it had to collaborate with other commissions, particularly not with the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity (SPCU) which the PTC dismissed as a mere “information-bureau” for non-Catholic bodies. The PTC reserved all doctrinal matters to its exclusive competence and pledged, in turn, not to involve itself in practical matters. Only the preparatory Liturgical Commission and the SPCU refused this separation and did not hesitate to engage the doctrinal issues that underlay their work.

You can find here several texts that illustrate contrasting views of what the Council should do and say that became clear as the preparatory commissions went about their work.

The plan for the Council drawn up by the Holy Office;

The questions proposed to the preparatory commissions;

Four brief outlines of documents to be written by the PTC;

Fr. Yves Congar’s counter-proposal for a conciliar agenda;

An unpublished paper of mine on the initial work of the PTC;

An essay of mine originally published as “The Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and the Preparation of Vatican II,” Centro pro Unione Semi-annual Bulletin, 50 (Fall 1996) 11-17.

The great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska died yesterday in Krakow. Here’s a poem from her 1976 collection, A Large Number:

IN PRAISE OF FEELING BAD ABOUT YOURSELF

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they’re light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.

This commentary from CNN.com is the latest I’ve seen to ask  whether Barack Obama is in the process of losing the Catholic vote. I think there is something to it.

His administration’s decision requiring Catholic institutions to pay for contraceptives through employee health insurance plans is reverberating in Catholic circles. It’s disturbing to many Catholics, regardless of whether they accept or disagree with church teachings on birth control.

The bishops have responded by encouraging a nationwide campaign of grassroots opposition to the health insurance mandate, framing it as a First Amendment issue. To the extent it comes from the grassroots rather than top-down, I think it’s effective.

From pulpits, in parish bulletins and letters to Congress,  the Obama administration’s decision is being assailed by Catholics, probably in your neighborhood. You don’t have to be versed in the writings of Saul Alinksy to realize that this could be politically damaging to Obama, especially in the swing states that have large Catholic populations.

There is a risk for the bishops: Many a Catholic has walked away from the church after being turned off by the political partisanship of not a few bishops. But as head of the U.S. bishops’ conference, Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan may be seeing to it that some of the blunders of the past are avoided.

One more point: Mitt Romney showed a strong ability to win over Catholics in the Florida primary. He picked up 56 percent of Catholic votes, significantly better than the 46 percent he received overall, according to exit polls analyzed by Pew Research Center. Two candidates who have made much of being Catholic – Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum – fared poorly in attracting Catholic votes.

Romney still lacked strength among evangelical Christian voters. If that continues to be the case, he’ll need the Catholic votes all the more.

Mitt Romney’s latest fit of cluelessness:

A few points.

First, what makes this sound so bad is not just the sentence I quote in the title of this post. It’s the combination of this sentence and the one before it. “By the way, I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned with the very poor.” The suggestion, surely unintended, is that the poor are not really Americans — or are, at any rate, less American. They are exotic creatures, for whom real Americans must make some minimal provision — hence the next sentences: “We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.”

Second, Romney seems to think that the problem of unemployment and the problem of poverty are separate ones: “My campaign is focused on middle-income Americans. You can choose where to focus. You can focus on the rich — that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor — that’s not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans: retirees living on social security, people who can’t find work, folks that have kids that are getting ready to go to college.” The suggestion, surely unintended, is that the very poor are not people who can’t find work, but are people who are unwilling or unfit to work. Romney is also implying that when middle-income Americans lose their jobs, they remain middle-income instead of becoming poor. Of course he knows this isn’t necessarily the way it works, but he can speak this way because he himself is not “middle-income”: he comes from a class in which people can lose their income and remain quite comfortable because of their wealth. Most middle-income people don’t have a lot of wealth; they run out of money not long after their paychecks stop arriving. And then they’re poor, even very poor. (Romney could have saved himself some trouble by using the word “middle-class” instead of “middle-income,” but conservatives aren’t supposed to believe in class.)

Third, the conservative response to Romney’s gaffe is telling. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t fault him for saying he’s not concerned with the very poor. (Who hasn’t lapsed into imprudent candor from time to time?) No, Limbaugh’s upset because Romney said he’d fix the safety net if it needed fixing, when he should have said he’d tear it up and get the government out of the way so the poor could find jobs. But Romney’s conservative critics shouldn’t worry too much. After all, Romney had nice things to say about Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which would shrink the safety net considerably. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it” is a wonderful Romneyism. The unabridged version of this statement is: “If it needs repair — and I’m not saying it does — I’ll fix it.”

Finally and most obviously, very poor Americans don’t vote as much as middle-income Americans.

This bit of news has been bouncing around the Interwebs for a few days, and justifiably so, if you have a sense of history: two grandsons of President John Tyler, 10th president of the United States, born in 1790, are still alive.

It is not quite Abraham and Sarah territory, and it makes sense once you break it down: President Tyler had a son in 1853 when he was 63, and that son (and his wife, ahem) had sons when he was 71, in 1924, and four years later at 75. Both of those men are still living, and doing fine, according to New York magazine’s interview with Harrison Ruffin Tyler.

But this story still gives me that enjoyable frisson of historical proximity, that sense of the intervening years collapsing the mind’s eye. I am easy in this regard: I get that charge from walking a 2,000-year-old Roman road, or viewing the relic of a saint.

I wonder if this sensibility didn’t come from sitting at my grandmother’s knee and listening to her recall stories that her own father would tell of fighting in the Civil War (for the North — phew). She’d pull out his letters, and souvenirs, like old mini balls, some of which wounded him. (He lost his leg three days before Appomattox.) It seemed so immediate, so close, and was, though I’m not sure everyone shares that view. (Not with today’s media-induced amnesia.)

My great-grandfather was born in 1841 — the year Tyler became president — and he had two sons with his first wife, who died, then a daughter in 1888, my grandmother, with his second wife, who survived him. (He worked in the customs house here in Brooklyn, and spent a year in Havana after the Spanish-American War.)

My grandmother then had four children, and along came my mother at 45, a “change-of-life” baby, as they apparently said then. Hence my relatively few degrees of separation from the nineteenth century. But we got nothing on the Tyler dynasty.

Michael Klare has a brief and terrifying analysis (one of his sub-heads, “Every option on every table”) of the Straits of Hormuz, the world’s favorite choke point. On the alarmist side of the discussion, but well worth thinking about. Here: Tomgram