Obamacare has passed the Constitution sniff test and we now live in a socialist Worker’s Paradise.  What about all those dead-beats who chose not to have insurance because of their pre-existing conditions?  If it is bad for people to only buy insurance when they are sick, won’t Obamacare come tumbling down in 2014 when most of the uninsured sick people in America belly up to the trough at their local insurance exchanges to enroll?  Is this going to bankrupt all of us responsible Americans who chose not to have pre-existing conditions?  Are we as doomed as the Right claims we are?

Let’s take a little peek inside the black box of Obamacare, shall we?

Read the rest of this entry »

Chief Justice John Roberts was asked about his plans now that the high court’s high stakes term is done. He noted that he plans to teach a class for two weeks this summer in Malta:

“Malta, as you know, is an impregnable island fortress. It seemed like a good idea.”

Maybe he could even become U.S. ambassador there some day…

Noted sociologist Peter Berger in his latest blog asks: “Is freedom of religion endangered in the U.S.?  His own answer: “It seems to me that, empirically speaking, the answer is no,” especially by comparison with many other areas of the world. But while he has criticisms of the “level of alarm” demonstrated by the USCCB, he thinks that there are some serious issues involved in the two cases of the insurance mandate and same-sex marriage:

It will be clear from the above that I am not in tune with the vehemence of the bishops’ campaign. Although there continue to be disputes over the balance between the free-exercise and no-establishment clauses in the first amendment, there are more painstaking protections of religious freedom in the United States than in just about any other country in the world. Nevertheless,the bishops are right that both issues raise questions about religious freedom. The fact that things are enormously worse in Iran or Saudi Arabia is beside the point: American standards should be enormously better than those prevailing in those two countries. On the fight over the insurance mandate, the bishops are right in saying that contraception is not the issue here, but rather the government’s interfering in how Catholics understand and practice their faith (praying in church a religious act/nursing the sick a secular act). In the matter of same-sex marriage, the bishops are also right in separating the legal status of such a practice from the freedom of speech and symbolic action of those who oppose the practice. In both disputes, the core question is about government overreach—an important enough issue to justify what will probably be a long trek through the federal courts to the Supreme Court.

After citing examples in which religious freedom and freedom of speech have been threatened here and elsewhere, he concludes:

Beyond the legal matter of cases that require new clarifications of the first amendment, there is a broader issue here—that of an increasingly intolerant culture of secularism, trying to use the state to enforce its values—itself part of the even broader issue of government over-reach.  The Roman Catholic Church has been a major target of this secularist agenda,  because its sexual ethics has been repugnant to many people (the ever widening scandal of pedophile priests has clearly fed the repugnance). There is a very real issue of religious freedom here—a good reason to support the Catholic bishops, even if one completely disagrees with their views on issues south of the navel.

From Moyers.com:

We now have confirmation that on Sept. 14 three Catholic luminaries will share a stage at Fordham University. Cardinal Dolan and Stephen Colbert will present an evening focused on the relationship between faith and humor, and their dialogue will be moderated by James Martin, S.J. (award-winning author of Between Heaven and Mirth).

The event is coming together through collaboration between the Department of Theology, the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, the office of University Mission and Ministry, and the Office of the President.

It promises to be a banner night for American Catholics, and one which will be shared widely through online video.

More details to follow soon about “Rejoice, Always” on September 14!

Now on the Commonweal site, E.J. Dionne Jr.’s column on why it’s time for Antonin Scalia to step down.

He’s a fine public speaker and teacher. He’d be a heck of a columnist and blogger. But he really seems to aspire to being a politician — and that’s the problem.

So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did this week, when the court announced its decision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of the line. …

[H]e is perfectly free as a citizen to join the political fray and take on the president. But he cannot be a blatantly political actor and a justice at the same time.

Read the whole thing right here.

Dionne’s is one among a rising number of voices. The Washington Post says Scalia has discredited the court; Richard Posner, writing in Slate, thinks his comments on President Obama’s immigration decision will show up in campaign ads; and University of California law professor Gabriel J. Chin (quoted in the New York Times) says that the justice has “jumped the shark.”

Scalia’s default response to critiques of his reasoning, character, taste in opera, choice of duck-hunting partners — anything, really — is the scoff, and he’s probably issued several times his quota in the last 36 hours. But now that the court has finished its term by upholding the health care law (Scalia — wait for it — dissenting), maybe the justice has time to ponder the possible career moves Dionne suggests. Politician? Pundit? Trusted consultant to Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio? What would you propose for Scalia post-SCOTUS?

I hope you weren’t looking at Twitter just now. If so, you would have learned that the Supreme Court both struck down and upheld the Affordable Care Act. What actually happened is this: Chief Justice John Roberts read the majority decision, which, by a 5-4 vote, upholds the Affordable Care Act — including the individual mandate — with one exception: the federal government’s power to end state Medicaid funding is narrowly read. The Court said that while the law’s expansion of Medicaid is itself constitutional, it would not be constitutional for the federal government to withhold new existing Medicaid funding for states’ failure to comply with the expansion provisions. From the majority decision: “Nothing in our opinion precludes Congress from offering funds under the ACA to expand the availability of health care, and requiring that states accepting such funds comply with the conditions on their use. What Congress is not free to do is to penalize States that choose not to participate in that new program by taking away their existing Medicaid funding.”

Early reports indicate it was Roberts’s vote that saved the law. ”Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.” From footnote 11 (as pointed out by SCOTUSblog): “Those subject to the individual mandate may lawfully forgo health insurance and pay higher taxes, or buy health insurance and pay lower taxes. The only thing that they may not lawfully do is buy health insurance and not pay the resulting tax.” Justice Kennedy, reading the dissent — which was joined by Scalia, Alito, and Thomas — couldn’t disagree more: “In our view, the entire Act before us is invalid in its entirety.”

For more, be sure to visit the (hopefully not overwhelmed) SCOTUSblog. And you can read the Court’s opinions here (.pdf).

It is a peculiarity of the current moment in American politics that the Supreme Court has six Catholic and three Jewish justices when Catholics and Jews make up only 22% and 3% respectively of the US population.  (Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010, was the last remaining Protestant on the Court.)

In the comparative lull today before the Court releases its final decisions of this term tomorrow, and in the wake of a flurry of decision in recent days, I’ve found myself thinking of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Watching the the devastation that followed after the levees broke in New Orleans, and the ongoing collective failure by our government (my government!) to respond effectively, brought a mix of anger, shame, embarrassment and grief that, I think, was shared by many Americans.

Regardless of what the Court decides tomorrow about the Affordable Care Act, I expect that I—and some minority of American Catholics—will feel some of those same emotions (more muted because Court decisions are themselves more “muted” actions than the flooding of a city), just as I have with many of its recent decisions. Read the rest of this entry »

Taking our eye off of healthcare for a moment, Andrew Sullivan calls attention to the analogous case of school curricula, as reported by Rachel Tabachnik:

Some Louisiana students receiving publicly funded vouchers and attending private schools in 2012-2013 will be taught from educational media promoting young earth creationism, global warming denial, history that is not factual, and bigotry toward Catholicism, Mormonism, other Protestants, and non-Christian religions. This is predictable because some of the schools that are on the approved list to receive voucher students use curriculum from A Beka Books, Bob Jones University Press, and Accelerated Christian Education (ACE). Public funding of the teaching of creationism is already happening in Pennsylvania, Florida, and other states with “private school choice” programs.

She does the digging here, here, and here.

As more private institutions take on the burden of providing services that the State deems necessary for the flourishing of its citizenry, I predict that we will have more clashes between institutional autonomy and government mandates. The fact of the matter is that you cannot take government money and use it for evangelical purposes. That’s establishment.

So, as public schools are abandoned and public money is funneled into “private” institutions, they lose their right to teach whatever they want. Similarly, in the absence of a single-payer system a deprivatized healthcare system, if medicare and medicaid funding, not to mention federal student aid, is used to support the heath provisions offered by “private” hospitals and universities, these institutions can no longer claim exemption from government oversight.

If you want to be exempt from the mandates of the government, do not take government money. Just ask the Church of England, who fears that, because of their established status, they will be legally bound to bless same-sex marriages. Interestingly, then, in England people might be coming around to the virtues of disestablishment, just as the country that invented it seems to be having doubts.

On Saturday the New York Times published Mark Oppenheimer’s writeup of the controversy surrounding Duquesne University’s refusal to allow teachers it pays no more than ten grand a year — without health coverage — to form a union. (Paul Moses covered it here.) Oppenheimer nicely summarizes the issue: “Catholic moral theologians say Catholics have a special duty to recognize unions — and Catholic administrators say their university has a special right not to.” Of course, as the piece makes clear, you could just as well substitute “popes” or “bishops” for “Catholic moral theologians.” When Benedict XVI wrote that labor unions “have always been encouraged and supported by the church,” he wasn’t kidding — or innovating.

Still, perhaps Benedict might chortle at one of his priest’s interpretation of church teaching on the right of labor to organize. As is required of all exercises in journalistic coverage of Catholic economic questions, Oppenheimer’s article features a predictable quote from free-market warrior Fr. Robert Sirico. Arguing for a curiously contingent view of Catholic social teaching, Sirico suggests that because Rerum novarum — Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on labor and capital — was written in 1891, it may not apply to the situation of Duquesne’s adjunct professors. “In the industrial revolution, the church was concerned about communism, and not just capitalism but savage capitalism,” Sirico told Oppenheimer. “People were being brutalized. That’s just not the case in Pittsburgh today.”

Of course, there’s nothing particularly humane about a Catholic university paying half its faculty a wage below the poverty line. Yet that’s not what’s most galling — or laughable — about Sirico’s comment. No, it’s the idea that Rerum novarum had an expiration date. Needless to say, that’s not exactly what Leo XIII had in mind when he wrote it: “We may lay it down as a general and lasting law,” Leo taught, “that working men’s associations should be so organized and governed as to furnish the best and most suitable means for attaining what is aimed at, that is to say, for helping each individual member to better his condition to the utmost in body, soul, and property.” Why “general and lasting”? Because, as Vince Miller ably explains, the church’s support for workers’ right to unionize is rooted in natural law — not merely a reading of the signs of the times. The U.S. bishops of the late 1980s understood this. “No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself,” they wrote in Economic Justice for All (1986). A clear, strong statement. But is it one the bishops of today would endorse? Read the rest of this entry »

Having spent about eight years as a reporter covering various court beats, I was surprised when Monsignor William Lynn was jailed immediately after his conviction on a charge of child endangerment. The practice I’ve witnessed countless times, except for gangsters, drug dealers and other violent criminals, is for the defendant to be free on bail pending sentencing. And even then, the judges I covered – some very tough judges in the federal court – often allowed defendants to remain free pending appeal.

At a hearing in Philadelphia today, prosecutor Patrick Blessington came up with a surprise piece of information to support his call for Lynn to remain in jail pending his Aug. 13 sentencing: a Chicago Tribune article reporting that since 1985, some 32 priests who were charged or under investigation in child-abuse cases fled the country. Only five returned to face trial.

I hadn’t caught that troubling story when it ran in March and, as the Philadelphia Inquirer makes clear, neither had Judge M. Teresa Sarmina, who “appeared to be taken aback.”

Blessington warned her that the Vatican doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S., implying that Lynn could find refuge there.

It sounds as if the judge had been ready to release Monsignor Lynn to house arrest pending sentencing, a not-unexpected ruling for a defendant who has deep roots in the community. Typical precautions could  include having the defendant wear an electronic monitoring bracelet and turn in his passport. Instead, the judge wants a further guarantee; she asked the lawyers to conduct research into whether a letter from Lynn waiving extradition would be binding.

This means the monsignor will continue to be held in the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (No. 1102886) – at least until a July 5 hearing is held.

Always knew it!!! Our clinical study of two persons supports the findings reported by Jane Brody (aka Calamity Jane in our household) in the Times’s Science Section: “When smoking and many other factors known to influence health and longevity were taken into account, coffee drinkers in the study were found to be living somewhat longer than abstainers. Further, the more coffee consumed each day — up to a point, at least — the greater the benefit to longevity.”

What say you, tea drinkers?

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait on conservative opposition to health-care reform:

Opponents of the law have endlessly invoked “socialism.” Nothing in the Affordable Care Act or any part of President Obama’s challenges the basic dynamics of market capitalism. All sides accept that some of us should continue to enjoy vastly greater comforts and pleasures than others. If you don’t work as hard as Mitt Romney has, or were born less smart, or to worse parents, or enjoyed worse schools, or invested your skills in an industry that collapsed, or suffered any other misfortune, then you will be punished for this. Your television may be low-definition, or you might not be able to heat or cool your home as comfortably as you would like; you may clothe your children in discarded garments from the Salvation Army.

This is not in dispute. What is being disputed is whether the punishments to the losers in the market system should include, in addition to these other things, a denial of access to non-emergency medical treatment. The Republican position is that it should. They may not want a woman to have to suffer an untreated broken ankle for lack of affordable treatment. Likewise, I don’t want people to be denied nice televisions or other luxuries. I just don’t think high-definition television or nice clothing are goods that society owes to one and all. That is how Republicans think about health care.

Read the whole thing here.

The Supreme Court’s decision in the SB 1070 case is a big win for opponents of the law.  Although it leaves the odious “show me your papers” provision in place, the posture of that case as a facial challenge always made that a tough claim to win in this case, and the Court left the door open for a subsequent as-applied challenge.  Since it seems impossible to implement that provision without the use of racial profiling, I think the odds of success for such a challenge are very good.

Somewhat relatedly, this Gallup poll helps to put SB 1070 and the attitudes of Latino voters towards immigration into context.

I’m especially interested in the right-hand column (Latino voters) and how it differs from the left-hand column (Latinos in general).  I find it totally unsurprising and not at all contradictory for two things to be simultaneously true:  (1) immigration is not the most important political issue for most Latino voters and (2) Latinos are likely to vote overwhelmingly for Obama in his reelection bid because of Republican immigration efforts like SB 1070. Read the rest of this entry »

As a professed member of the Third Order Secular of the Franciscans, I know that we tend to have a reputation of being “liberal”.  Our current Rule, which was approved by Pope Paul VI in 1978, is definitely a post-Vatican II document.  But we see our Rule in particular and Vatican II in general as conforming to the 800 year old ideals of our Franciscan order.  In this context Vatican II seems to us to have been a deeply conservative event.

Could John XXIII and Paul VI have carried off Vatican II if they hadn’t been conservative?  Their stated intention seems to have been to take the Church back to its authentic origins in the face of a crisis that society had already been going through for several hundred years and which seemed to have reached a head in the middle of the 20th Century.  To the Council’s opponents on the Right (who were and are not convervative, but reactionary) Vatican II did look radical at the time and looks even more radical when seen through semi-opaque rose colored glasses of the 1950′s.  As the secularization of society has continued; as the traditional family and community has broken down even further from where it was when the Council began there are some who even seem to claim that Vatican II itself was the problem and that it destroyed a world of self-contained believers who were in the world, but not of it.

From a Franciscan point of view that we ourselves are under the mandate that Christ gave Francis to “Repair My House”, the current rise of reaction in the Church and its dance with the political Right seems nothing less than a radical innovation and a betrayal of the basic conservative nature of the Church.  This radical innovation, which seems to some of my fraternal brothers and sisters as amounting to a split in the Church, is very troubling to them.  I am troubled too, but optimistic.  These reactions have happened before.  And they have always failed.  The political Right is no less secularizing than the political Left.  Circling the wagons to create and defend a Cult of Purity denies a basic truth that the Church is, in fact, both in the world and of it.  The grapes of reaction have always withered on the vine.

SFPD Chief Greg Suhr and other SFPD officers in the 2011 San Francisco Pride Parade. Photo credit: Bill Wilson

The NYTimes last week published this op-ed by David Blankenhorn, a notable opponent of same-sex marriage, Here’s more about Blankenhorn’s switch. It’s a thoughtful op-ed, listing the reasons for his change of heart. One sobering note:

In the mind of today’s public, gay marriage is almost entirely about accepting lesbians and gay men as equal citizens. And to my deep regret, much of the opposition to gay marriage seems to stem, at least in part, from an underlying anti-gay animus. To me, a Southerner by birth whose formative moral experience was the civil rights movement, this fact is profoundly disturbing.

And then a call to collaboration:

Instead of fighting gay marriage, I’d like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same. For example, once we accept gay marriage, might we also agree that marrying before having children is a vital cultural value that all of us should do more to embrace? Can we agree that, for all lovers who want their love to last, marriage is preferable to cohabitation? Can we discuss whether both gays and straight people should think twice before denying children born through artificial reproductive technology the right to know and be known by their biological parents?

You may agree or disagree with his agenda, but it marks a major shift for Blankenhorn and those who will join him. This agenda also reveals what Andrew Sullivan has been saying for decades–the push for legal recognition of same-sex marriage is a profoundly conservative move, not a radical or liberal one. Or at least it fits well within the conservative (and not only conservative!) paradigm that values marriage as a fundamentally important social institution.

Pride weekend, of course, is timed to commemorate the June 27, 1969 (actually early a.m., June 28,) riot at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in NYC. It began as a routine raid, when something extraordinary happened–the crowd said “no” to this kind of harrassment. Here’s Michael Fader’s reflection on the riots:

We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of s***. It wasn’t anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration….All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course. …And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We weren’t going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it’s like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way, and that’s what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue, and we’re going to fight for it. It took different forms, but the bottom line was, we weren’t going to go away. And we didn’t.

What a change in 43 years! In 1969, the gay community was largely marginalized, a sub-culture that the majority felt free to mock, subject to legal sanction, and, too often, violently abuse. This was a time when castration, hypnosis, electroshock therapy and lobotomies were used by psychiatrists to attempt to “cure” homosexuals. Now gay “reparative” therapy has been revealed as the scam it is. Once police were perceived as the enemy of the gay community–now they march in the Pride parades. Gay men and lesbians serve openly in the military now, too. A majority of Americans, and a majority of Catholics, approve of some recognition of same-sex unions. The mainstreaming of gay culture is accelerating every day, thanks to the courage of those who said “no more!” at Stonewall, and, no less, to those countless gay men and lesbians who had the courage to come out to family, friends and co-workers.

It’s not over. Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project is a response to the ongoing abuse of queer kids and kids perceived to be queer by their peers, abuse which is too often tolerated by adults. “Fag” is still a derisive term in many circles. The magisterium, among whom homosexuals far outnumber the proportion of gay men in society generally, (unless leaders skew far more straight than priests generally, which seems unlikely,) still refers to same-sex love as “intrinsically evil,” and to same-sex attraction as “objectively disordered.”

But times are changing. In the end, it will be love, and the dignity of every person’s striving to love as well as we can, that wins the day.

Happy Pride, everybody.

Today’s (June 24) editorial on Sheldon Adelson in the New York Times at last gets down to some home truths about Adelson’s gazillion dollar contributions first to Newt Gingrich and now to Mitt Romney. Yes, he’s a Republican; yes, he’s rich, really rich; yes, he’s to the right of….. Yes, he expects a Romney campaign to call off federal investigations of his gambling interests.

What the Times has finally alluded to is that Mr. Adelson’s primary interest is not his own country, but Israel which, he has made clear, is his real country.

Gist: “[W]hy is Mr. Adelson writing these huge checks? The first answer is clearly his disgust for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, supported by President Obama and most Israelis. He considers a Palestinian state ‘a steppingstone for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people,’ and has called the Palestinian prime minister a terrorist. He is even further to the right than the main pro-Israeli lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which he broke with in 2007 when it supported economic aid to the Palestinians.”

At the same time the U.S. Catholic bishops are giving daily lessons on how important it is for government to respect individual conscience, the Philadelphia jury that convicted Monsignor William Lynn on Friday of child endangerment has offered a lesson on the role of conscience in the church.

In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, jury foreman Isa Logan spoke of how he told the other jurors about his military experience; he served two years in an artillery unit in Korea. “All I told them was, I’m a soldier, and if my commander tells me to do something that’s inhumane or against any kind of Army rules,” he would not, Logan said. “I’m a human being before I’m a soldier.”

Contrast that with Monsignor Lynn’s testimony, reported here by journalist Ralph Cipriano:

Lynn’s direct testimony ended in a flourish, when [defense lawyer Thomas] Bergstrom asked the monsignor why he didn’t just quit his job as secretary for clergy, as some critics have suggested.

It’s “not in my nature to do that,” Lynn said. He explained he had a “simple faith” that “the will of God works through the bishop as far as your assignments are concerned.” He said he preaches that belief to fellow priests. It was a belief that provoked classmates in the seminary to call him a fool, Lynn said with a smile. But the monsignor said he sincerely believed it, so how could he quit his job as secretary for the clergy under Cardinal Bevilacqua?

“It’s just not who I am,” Lynn said.

“That’s all I have,” Bergstrom said. Read the rest of this entry »

“I do believe / I do believe / I do believe…” This is the refrain that kicks off the Drive-By Truckers‘ most recent album, Go-Go Boots. Sung in Patterson Hood’s characteristically plaintive tenor, which aspires to notes rather than hits them, the lines echo in silence before the band comes in with a tuned-down 60’s style, sludgy, surf   groove, setting the scene for a remembered trip to the beach with Grandma in the summer of 1967—“Percy Sledge on the radio / Or maybe Spanish songs.” There’s no nostalgic represencing in this song, however, as the band’s distortion ensures that the description stays decidedly past tense, and Hood obliges as the song ends with the same searching credo: “I do believe I do believe I know that you would never leave me / And when you slipped the earthly binds you still live in my mind.”

Ambivalence about the past is a common theme on Truckers’ records. Claiming both Athens, GA and Muscle Shoals, AL as home, principle songwriters Mike Cooley and Hood walk a fine line  between celebrating and condemning the history and mythology of  “The South.” Branded as a “Southern Rock” act when they landed on the music scene with 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, which follows a recent Class of ’79 high school graduate as he rides the rock n’ roll roller coaster from the death of his friend and bandmate just before commencement to the plane crash that killed Lynyrd Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant, the Truckers have always defied the Confederate expectations that a youth spent in the land of Skynyrd, Bear Bryant, and George Wallace, and a three-guitar sonic attack bring. Singing, as Hood did on Rock Opera, about the “duality of the southern thing,” the Trucker’s are well aware of the ironic posture of exclusion and embrace that the past demands, and they treat the fellow southerners that populate their songs with a healthy dose of judgment and mercy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Many will be elated that Monsignor William Lynn has been found guilty of one count of child endangerment. I’m not. It’s a sad day for Lynn, and for the church. And yet, it’s a necessary one.

The Philadelphia jury, which acquitted Lynn on two other counts, worked extremely hard. I hope we’ll see interviews with some of the jurors that explain  their decision.

Absent that, it’s a little difficult to interpret the verdict with the information available. Sometimes, juries just compromise – no favor to Lynn, since it only takes a conviction on one count to expose a defendant to prison time and change the course of his life. For a defendant, there is really no such thing as a “mixed verdict,” as this is being called.

The jurors’ questions during the long deliberation indicated that they were  very troubled by the conspiracy charge, and the panel passed up the chance to convict Lynn of entering into an illicit agreement with his superiors. So – this is preliminary – it looks like a verdict that focuses on Lynn’s personal responsibility. To reach it, the jury had to reject the so-called “only-following-orders” defense – a weak defense in any case.

Had more bishops resigned in response to the clergy sexual abuse scandal – had there been true accountability from the bishops – I suspect Monsignor Lynn would never have found himself in jail. (He was held pending his Aug. 13 sentencing, a strong indication that he’ll be sentenced to prison time) .

Prosecutors have great discretion over which cases to pursue, and they are sensitive to the public mood. The church has done much to deal with the problem of clergy sexual abuse, but never held its leaders accountable. As a result, the legal system, first in civil cases and now in criminal, has become the mechanism for accomplishing that.

That’s far from over.

A bumper crop of fire flies. Also of ferns. Any connection? Spring flowers profuse in April. Just last week the mountain laurel were all over the place and are now fading while the elderberry are flowering.

Looking back, I see that I was reporting fire flies in May last year. Wasn’t here in May this year, so no comparisons but this year!!! Very glitzy.

It’s been a great and momentous week for the Southern Baptist Convention.  First Richard Land, the powerful chairman of the denomination’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission joined an Evangelical Immigration Table press conference calling for comprehensive immigration reform that, among other things, “respects the God-given dignity of every person, protects the unity of the immediate family (and)…establishes a path toward legal status and/or citizenship for those who qualify and who wish to become permanent residents”.

In an interview with The Atlantic’s Molly Ball, Land said of President Obama’s decision to stop deporting young illegal immigrants, “I applaud it. I would have preferred Congress to have done it. I hope that Congress would applaud it and pass something very similar.” Land also called on Republican nominee Mitt Romney to endorse Obama’s action, and to go even further if elected president. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, only if the block is virtual not physical.  As for being new, I’ve been hanging around in the comments section for at least a couple of years.  And nobody’s called me a kid in years…decades actually.

Regardless, thanks to the Commonweal editors for inviting me to post occasionally “above the fold”, as it were.  Thanks also to the dotCommonweal contributors who have, over the years, made this one of the most consistently interesting and informative blogs I’ve come across.  And many thanks to all the commenters—both frequent and infrequent—who make dotCommonweal such a lively and stimulating forum for debate, discussion and illumination.

Going forward, I welcome any suggestions, advice, criticism and encouragement you have to offer.  I’ll be back shortly with a more substantive post.

And on the fourth day…Nuns on the Bus came to South Bend, Indiana. In the chapel of Good Shepherd Montessori School–which doubles on Sundays as the sanctuary for the First Unitarian Church–the women religious involved in this nine-state pilgrimage met with about 300 adoring, sign-waving supporters, and two dissenters.

“We are consubstantial with you!” read one hand-lettered sign of greeting.

“Thank You for keeping the Vatican II Church going for us!” read another.

“Our Sisters Prophets Among Us,” said a third.

And indeed, the event–termed a “friend raiser”–had the feel of a genuinely prophetic experience. Led by Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, the Catholic social justice lobby, four of the nuns described encounters they have had with Americans of various occupations and income levels since they started their tour last Monday in Des Moines. Already they have traveled through Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana. Over the next 11 days they will pass through Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, ending up on July 2 in Washington, D.C.

The thrust of their effort is to call attention to the hurtful and destructive aspects of the Republican budget plan put forward by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and to call instead for a budget that makes paramount the needs of the poor and the vulnerable.

Without once mentioning the names “Obama” or “Romney,” the sisters reminded their audience that political decisions made in Washington and in the various state capitals will have enormous consequences, and that the Gospels and Catholic social teaching have important things to say about the choices America’s citizens and their leaders must make.

What the nuns seek, Sister Simone said, is “reasonable revenue for responsible programs.” And the Ryan budget, which would cut food stamps, cut Medicaid, reduce taxes for the wealthy and raise them for the rest, and raise defense spending beyond even what the military has requested, is neither reasonable nor responsible, she and her colleagues said.

While the audience members were overwhelmingly supportive of the nuns and their program, they were not unanimously so. Louann Kensinger, who described herself as a teacher at South Bend’s Riley High School, and her husband showed up, carrying placards calling for a stop to the Obama administration’s “HHS mandate” requiring contraception as part of employee health coverage. The nation’s Catholic bishops have said this requirement–and a subsequent compromise plan offered by President Obama displacing the requirement to insurance carriers–infringe the religious liberty of Catholic schools, colleges, hospitals and other institutions. The bishops have mounted a nationwide campaign of opposition.

Significantly, during her presentation, Sister Simone said that one of the happy aspects of the Nuns on the Bus effort was that it put the nuns on the same side as the bishops, who have raised objections on moral grounds to several aspects of the Ryan budget.

Kensinger’s objections to the nuns’ program was not unfamiliar. She said, in posing a question to the nuns, that “we have spent $5 trillion” on antipoverty efforts since the 1960s, and poverty has become, if anything, even worse. What America suffers from, Kensinger said in a subsequent interview, is “a poverty of values, not cash.”

She did not explain how taking food stamps, medical care and other necessary assistance away from needy Americans would improve their values.

Every last bit of it:
Commonweal June 15, 2012 Issue: The Bishops and Religious Liberty

It begins:

Read the statement by some parishioners of Blessed Sacrament Parish (mentioned in the NPR story) right here.

If you ever go to a white working class bar in a red state, the juke box will be playing and the music coming out will be country and western.  Different cultures in our big melting pot tend to promote their own music, and rural culture is no exception.  And of course, music can tell us a great deal about the people who sing it.

 I got to thinking about this a couple of weeks ago when I went on a short vacation to a resort hotel that happened to be in red country.  I was sitting in an outdoor lounge set up next to a playground so the parents could sit and have a drink while the children entertained themselves under their watchful eyes.

 The lounge had a pretty good country and western band and I was enjoying it, having been brought up by my eclectic mother on Patsy Kline and Hank Williams.  Suddenly, the single folks sitting at the bar erupted into loud cheers that drowned out the music for a minute.  When the cheering stopped, I realized with a start that the band had launched into the classic “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw” by Jimmy Buffett.  A good enough song, although perhaps not altogether appropriate for my kids swinging on the jungle gym.  But the kids didn’t seem to notice, so I held my powder and went back to my drink.  The song took me back, however, and I found myself ruminating on Southern religious culture and the life of an old acquaintance of mine whom I shall call Dub the Baptist, born and raised in West Virginia.

 The Dub is for W.D., the imaginary first two initials of his entirely fictitious name (for he may still be alive for all I know).  Dub was the first Southerner I ever got to know really well.  I would by no means cal him a typical Southerner (as you shall see) but his strange tale did help me develop a sort of understanding of how “conservative” moral culture works.  And I found out that it is more human than many people on the Left think.

Read the rest of this entry »

More at BillMoyers.com.

The National Labor Relations Board has turned back Duquesne University’s attempt to prevent adjunct faculty members from voting on whether to unionize.

The decision follows the latest attempt by a Catholic college to use First Amendment religious freedom to block what Catholic teaching clearly says is workers’ right to organize.  Inside Higher Ed summarized Duquesne’s argument as “Too Catholic to unionize?”

If it were as thoroughly Catholic as it says it is, Duquesne would follow church teaching and permit its employees to decide if they want to join a union.

Instead, it called in the lawyers. Using its full name, Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit argued that it is a church-operated school within the meaning of the 1979 Supreme Court ruling in NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago. If it is, it would be exempt from NLRB jurisdiction on First Amendment grounds.

It’s ironic that the religious freedom granted through the Constitution could be used  by a church organization to avoid following one of its faith’s own teachings.

Duquesne’s media office hasn’t returned my call. There’s no word if the university will appeal.

Update: Duquesne has appealed the NLRB decision, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Now on our homepage: “Bad History,” in which Julia G. Young challenges comparisons of Barack Obama to Plutarco Elías Calles, the infamous anti-Catholic president of Mexico who in the 1920s waged a brutal campaign against the clergy while outlawing public worship.

The comparison between Plutarco Elías Calles and President Obama is erroneous and misleading. It is also ahistorical. Several Catholic leaders have framed the contraception mandate as an infringement on religious liberty–a “slippery slope” that could lead to wider religious restrictions, just like those in Mexico in the 1920s.

But equating the anticlerical laws of 1920s Mexico with the contraception mandate today is nonsense. … The “Calles laws,” as they were known, were so comprehensively oppressive that they would be completely unthinkable in contemporary America.

As Young notes, the inapt analogizing is fueled in part by actors and consultants associated with the film For Greater Glory, which stars Andy Garcia and Eva Longoria and depicts the uprising of militant Catholics (“Cristeros”) against the Calles government. Eduardo Verástegui, who plays Anacleto Gonzalez Flores, a Cristero beatified in 2005 by Benedict XVI, warns that we ignore the similarities between Obama and Calles–not to mention a  certain sixteenth-century monarch–at our own peril.

“I don’t see any difference between Plutarco Elías Calles and President Obama or Henry VIII,” Verástegui says in an interview. “I almost see the same pattern repeat itself.”

Read all of “Bad History” right here.