Among the initial round-up of “react quotes” from academic theologians about the CDF’s notification for Margaret Farley’s Just Love, the response of Lisa Sowle Cahill (Boston College) was the most detailed and incisive. She has now expanded that into an op-ed at the Guardian. Concluding paragraphs here:

[T]he Vatican’s selection of moral issues to criticize does not reflect the priorities of Just Love. A huge concern of the book is gender-based violence and sexual oppression of women worldwide. These issues have actually received significant attention in recent papal teaching. They receive nary a mention in the notification, which seems to find masturbation more important.

A final point is the nature and role of theology – which is not the same as official doctrinal teaching. Medieval thinkers defined theology as fides quaerens intellectum – “faith seeking understanding”. Theology is rooted in faith and practical concerns. But the main purpose of theology, unlike pastoral teaching or the definition of doctrines, is the understanding of God and of humans in relation to God. Understanding involves intellectual justification and cogency.

Finally, theology is a process of seeking, inquiry and exploration in a dynamic and critical relation to other theological positions. Theologians do not see or present their work as “official Catholic teaching” and few of the faithful are confused about this fact. Readers of Just Love will feel free to question, disagree and improve the points of the author – as is, no doubt, her intention.

The editors of n+1 on Twitter:

When Beckett wrote, in 1930, that it was every bit as illogical to expect tomorrow’s self to be gratified by today’s experience as it was to expect your hunger to vanish at the sight of your uncle eating a sandwich, he could take it for granted that nobody expected one person’s sandwich to satisfy someone else. That was then. Lots of people on Twitter do think you’ll enjoy the spectacle of their snacks. They tell you what they’re eating, where they’re going, what they’re consuming, never mind why you should care. Or — an apparently opposite genre to the hyper-banal tweet (“Lunch again today!”), but identical in effect — they tweet something cryptic to the point of senselessness. This is the tweet that says, whatever its actual content, “I have nothing to say but I want to say something.”

Possibly it’s the automatism, the compulsiveness, that’s depressing. Because another variety of bad tweet is the one that would actually be pretty good if the tweeter hadn’t taken it upon himself to shtick-ify his personality. Thus a funny person, alive to the wisdom of building your brand, calcifies into a humorist, or a clever person into a witticist. It can be very amusing, Dickensian, when a fictional avatar has a narrow, caricatured personality: the girl who says, exclusively, shit girls say, or the tween hobo or out-of-touch masculine blowhard who is always true to type. It’s a lot less funny when a real person, supposedly the many-sided hero of his own life, decides to say only one sort of thing, and say it all the time.

Read the whole thing here.

So said David V. Mason in an edgy op-ed in the NYT last week. His point was theological: that Mormons are theologically as different from Christians as Christians are from Jews. Further, he looks to the day when Mormonism might be recognized as a fourth Abrahamic religion, an opinion he shares with Richard D. Land, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

He’s got a point. Mormonism is henotheistic, not Trinitarian-monotheistic, and any good Mormon boy can go on to become God of a new place if he so desires. (Girls can’t. Of course.) God, then, was once an ordinary dude, and still has a body, as it says in Doctrine and Covenants, “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” (130.22).To believe in Jesus’ divinity doesn’t really cut it as a means of defining Christians, either, unless you’d like to include any number of Hindus who affirm Jesus’ status as an avatar of Visnu, a physical manifestation of divinity. Is considering Jesus the “Son of one God among many” close enough? Read the rest of this entry »

Liberal New York Times columnist Bill Keller and conservative Catholic League crusader Bill Donohue have found it — in Wild Bill’s latest book, “Why Catholicism Matters.”

As Keller (a self-described “collapsed Catholic,” a nifty neological step beyond “lapsed” Catholic) puts it in his op-ed today about Bill D’s thesis:

His [Donohue's] point: “Quite frankly I believe, as Pope Benedict the XVIth said just before he became pope, that maybe a smaller church would be a better church.”

Much as I wish I could encourage the discontented, the Catholics of open minds and open hearts, to stay put and fight the good fight, this is a lost cause. Donohue is right. Summon your fortitude, and just go. If you are not getting the spiritual sustenance you need, if you are uneasy being part of an institution out of step with your conscience — then go. The restive nuns who are planning a field trip to Rome for a bit of dialogue? Be assured, unless you plan to grovel, no one will be listening. Sisters, just go. Bill Donohue will hold the door for you.

So Bill and Bill have something in common with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which has been running their ad telling Catholics “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church.” (Oh, and start sending your money to the FFRF instead…That ad space is expensive.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that opposite extremes will meet each other on the far side. This seems to be the case as well.

I’ll settle for that deeper, broader, more satisfying — if crowded and complex and maddening — Common Ground, thanks.

John McCain was half of the McCain-Feingold effort to stem big money in electoral politics. Their effort was undercut by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, and seems to have gone the way of the Dodo bird with millions awash in the 2012 electoral season.

Nonetheless, McCain seems committed to the effort to stem the tide. In an interview on PBS’s Newshour, he pointed out the potential for foreign money (illegal in the U.S.) to be channeled through Big Donors to the Super-Pacs.  Sheldon Adelson (the last supporter of New Gingrich) is cited as such a potential channel. McCain notes Adelson’s connection to the gambling interests in Macau (Chinese?). In Sunday’s New York Times, Nicholas Confessore goes further and underlines Adelson’s deep Israeli commitments. Adelson has contributed $10 million to Karl Rove’s Super-Pac and more is on promise. Confessore also notes that Adelson attended the annual Koch Brothers fund-fest this year.  Confessore’s story.  More details on the contributions at Politico.

There are many ways to look at this: As long as the U.S. is up for intervening around the world, why shouldn’t the rest of the world have a say in our elections? If billionaires aren’t going to be taxed by the representatives they buy, how else can they contribute to civic life? Will the feckless FEC look into McCain’s suspicions?

No doubt, you will have your own take on this.

Today the Catholic Health Association released its comment (.pdf) on the Department of Health and Human Services proposal to accommodate religious employers’ objections to the contraception mandate. From the beginning, CHA has objected to the structure of the mandate’s exemption, which defines a religious employer as one that “primarily” serves and hires co-religionists, and whose purpose is the inculcation of its values. Still, when the Obama administration announced its intent to shift the responsibility of providing contraception coverage from religious employers to insurance companies, CHA praised the plan. Now, after studying the “advance notice of proposed rulemaking” (ANPRM), CHA says its initial concerns are “not relieved”:

Read the rest of this entry »

The good news is, the discussion of religious freedom at the bishops’ conference has not focused solely on Catholics or Christians. The bad news is that this is how Muslims came up:

Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz: I haven’t had a chance to read the Obamacare Protection Act, but somebody told me that there’s a total exemption for Muslims in the back of that act, that all Muslims are exempt because insurance, for Muslims, is a type of gambling, which is contrary to the Koran, and therefore Muslims are not obliged in any way to observe the insurance mandate which derives from the act. I’m not sure if that’s true or not; I just want to know if any of you know anything about it.

He was addressing his question to Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore and to John H. Garvey, the president of Catholic University, both of whom had just finished their presentations to the assembly. (I’ll link to the video at the end of this post.)

The bishop from Nebraska is misinformed: there is no exemption for Muslims buried “in the back” of the Affordable Care Act. The claim has been circulated in some chain emails, and yes, Snopes.com has debunked it (FactCheck.org, too). It plays to a number of popular themes in anti-Obama right-wing discourse, which you will recognize if you have been on the receiving end of such emails (or, as Michael Sean Winters says, if you watch a lot of Fox News): there is, first of all, the strange conviction that Muslims are getting off easy in America because everyone is bending over backward to avoid offending them. Related to that is the suspicion that President Obama is himself a Muslim, or perhaps just a bit more sympathetic to Muslims than befits an American leader. Then there is the objection (this one fairly mainstream) that the bill is so long and complicated that “no one” knows what it says. And these accusations are often accompanied by dark warnings about “creeping sharia” and the Muslim plot to take over our nation.

In other words, there’s a lot of ugly baggage that goes along with what was, I trust, an innocent query on Bruskewitz’s part. Read the rest of this entry »

E.J. Dionne proposes an alliance of “public-spirited citizens” to offset big super PAC spenders and destroy incentives for the very rich to buy the election. But could there ever be an alliance spirited enough to discourage a buyer like Sheldon Adelson?

Adelson on Wednesday gave $10 million to the pro-Romney Super PAC Restoring Our Future. But Forbes reports the casino billionaire is now so intent on seeing Barack Obama defeated that further donations might be “limitless.” That’s presumably more than the $100 million he was willing to part with to put Newt Gingrich in the White House, and it’s all to keep the country from turning any more “socialist” than it already has in the past three-plus years.

Socialism, or what some decry as redistribution of wealth, has clearly been good for Adelson. Forbes’ own figures show that since Obama took office, Adelson “has made more money than just about any American.”

Not far from the pedestrian entrance to Fordham University’s campus in the Bronx is one of the boldest signs in all of New York. In a city not known for subtlety, even this one stands out as uncannily direct: Butt Boosting Jeans. In the accompanying photo I have spared you the window-shopping, where you could see the means by which your pompis might be exalted, but I’ve made sure to capture the Spanish (and actual) name of the store for those of you interested in, ahem, learning more.

An uplifting message

Fordham Road is a boisterous place, especially in summer. There are many days where it wouldn’t be exaggerating to call it a cacophonous, sweaty mass of humanity. On this clamorous commercial strip it’s often difficult to take note of anything except what’s directly at hand. Nonetheless I’ve noticed the sign many times, and today, strangely, it got me thinking about theology. Specifically, how is it that one does theology in this environment? How does the urban-ness of one’s surroundings affect one’s emphases, methods, and conclusions? Read the rest of this entry »

Slavo Žižek on the Greek crisis in the London Review of Books:

There are two main stories about the Greek crisis in the media: the German-European story (the Greeks are irresponsible, lazy, free-spending, tax-dodging etc, and have to be brought under control and taught financial discipline) and the Greek story (our national sovereignty is threatened by the neoliberal technocracy imposed by Brussels). When it became impossible to ignore the plight of the Greek people, a third story emerged: the Greeks are now presented as humanitarian victims in need of help, as if a war or natural catastrophe had hit the country. While all three stories are false, the third is arguably the most disgusting. The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in their struggle, because it is our struggle too.

Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy. By saving Greece from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself.

Voters in North Dakota have rejected, by a margin approaching to 2 to 1,  a state constitutional amendment aimed at protecting religious freedom.

In a backgrounder published earlier this week, The Christian Science Monitor offered a good overview of the ballot initiative:

Called the Religious Liberty Restoration amendment, the measure would add a clause to the state constitution stipulating that the government must have a “compelling interest” in order to “burden” a person whose actions or decisions are informed by religious belief and that the government should use the “least restrictive means to further that interest.”

Backers, which include the Roman Catholic diocese and a coalition of conservative groups in North Dakota, say the measure predates the current fight that erupted earlier this year when the Obama administration instituted new rules requiring most employers – including religious charities, hospitals, and universities – to provide employees cost-free access to reproductive health services …

Tom Freier, president of the North Dakota Family Alliance, says his group first began crafting its language more than two years ago, partly in response to 1990 US Supreme Court ruling that some groups viewed as an infringement on some religious practices. Read the rest of this entry »

Tantalizing:

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican newspaper reported Tuesday that 29 previously unpublished homilies said to be the work of one of the most important and prolific early church fathers have been discovered in a German library.

The 3rd Century theologian Origen of Alexandria is considered to have played a critical role in the development of Christian thought. Pope Benedict XVI, himself a theologian, dedicated two of his 2007 weekly church teaching sessions to the importance of Origen’s life and work.

Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said that despite Origen’s importance, few of his original texts remain in part because he was condemned by the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 553.

Not much else. I did find some more via the blog of Roger Pearse. What will homilies say? Orthodoxy? Heresy? Just lovely musings on the Psalms? I’m thanking God that at least they didn’t turn up another Gnostic gospel, or another Secret Gospel of Mark…

UPDATE: Via the Rev. Michael Heintz, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Master of Divinity Program, a specialist in the history of Christianity whose own translation of Origen’s homilies is forthcoming from Catholic University of America Press:

“Much of the original Greek of Origen’s works has been lost through the centuries, and we have been dependent upon the Latin translations of Rufinus and Jerome. Finding Origen’s work in the original Greek is a rare and wonderful find. Additionally, these may provide one of the earliest (if not the earliest) examples of early Christian preaching on the psalms. This will help us not only better understand Origen’s theology and preaching, but will also help scholars who study the Greek translations of the Old Testament.”

(Having trouble seeing the video? Go here to watch it on the Colbert Report‘s site.)

Now up on our homepage is a short web-only article about Padre Alejandro Solalinde, a priest who runs a shelter for Central American migrants in Ixtepec, Oaxacam, in southern Mexico. Padre Alejandro recently had to leave Mexico because of death threats from people who could lose a lot of money if the Mexican authorities started taking better care of migrants. Joseph Sorrentino writes:

Kidnapping is a huge business for drug gangs and local thugs: ransoms start at $1,500. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission estimates that in the period between April and September 2010 there were more than 210 mass kidnappings of migrants, with more than 11,000 victims.

Padre Alejandro is a threat to the kidnappers’ lucrative business, and they’ve noticed. When we spoke in February, he acknowledged the dangers of the work he does. “We are always receiving threats,” he said. “Not just me. There are more than fifty shelters for migrants…. We are like a collective and are damaging the interests of drug dealers, corrupt politicians, and corrupt corporations.” It took some convincing, but Padre Alejandro finally accepted bodyguards; he also agreed to travel with a driver (a man named Reubén who is a former policeman). Four state police guarded the shelter while I was there, but Padre Alejandro knew he would never be completely safe as long as he continued his work. “I don’t believe that the police can protect my life,” he told me.

Read the whole thing here.

This Wall Street Journal article [or here] finds glimmers of hope for Catholic schools, reporting:

For the first time in decades, Catholic education is showing signs of life. Driven by expanding voucher programs, outreach to Hispanic Catholics and donations by business leaders, Catholic schools in several major cities are swinging back from closures and declining enrollment.

Chicago Catholic elementary schools saw enrollment increase 3% this year and 1% last year—the first two-year growth spurt since 1965. Greater Boston elementary schools had a 2% bump—the first in 20 years. And Los Angeles, Indianapolis and Bridgeport, Conn., also added desks for the first time in years.

I can’t recall the last time I read anything so upbeat about the prospects for Catholic education. Although I do think publicly funded vouchers can be part of the solution, the  headline – “Vouchers Breathe New Life into Shrinking Catholic Schools – overstates their role.  Outreach to Latino Catholics and donations by business leaders, as the article notes, are also key.

The article glosses over another reason the enrollment picture seems to be improving. “Years of overhauls in public schools have yielded only modest progress,” it says.

That is, it has become clear that years of so-called reforms involving high-stakes testing and charter schools, changes in school governance and teacher contracts, etc., have produced only mixed results in public education, leading more parents to look once again at Catholic schools as an alternative.

Beyond the factors mentioned in the article, I’d add one more that is still needed: Catholics need to be enthusiastic about Catholic schools if they’re going to succeed.  Without that, I don’t think major donations from the business world or government money would do it.

At the Catholic Theological Society of America business meeting today, the membership considered a resolution urging “federal and state government to exempt employers from funding or providing contraception and sterilization when such funding or provision directly violates the moral tenets of the employer’s religious tradition.” Even though the original version of the resolution was tweaked after initial discussion (e.g., the final version excised the original’s naming of the Obama administration), its chances of passing were never high. Privately, some CTSA members expressed a concern that a no vote would only serve to highlight the distance between the organization and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. But, thanks to an exceptionally clever intervention by one member, the CTSA dodged that bullet. Here’s the full text of the resolution:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an interesting chart I came across in the course of reading about income inequality.  This comes from a paper by Brian Nolan and Ive Marx in the Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality (Wiemer Salvedra et al. eds. 2009).  I found it interesting because it is so, well, plausible.  It suggests that, at least among developed countries, poverty rates (measured as people earning less than one half the median national income) decline as governments spend more on cash transfers.  [Suggests, but does not prove.  It shows a mere correlation.  So it could be, for example, (as Nolan and Marx observe) that countries with high transfers also pursue other policies that limit poverty and that it is these policies we should emulate if we want to help the poor.]  I think this at least cuts against the more counterintuitive claim made by people like Paul Ryan that slashing government spending on social programs is in the long-term interest of the poor. Ryan wants to argue that he is not a Randian libertarian who is utterly unconcerned with the well-being of the poor.  But if he wants to claim that cutting taxes on the rich and gutting Medicare is good for the poor, the burden is on him to show that this is in fact the case and explain how it works.  One way to do that would be to show that countries with less generous social spending actually outperform other countries in terms of eliminating poverty.  This chart suggests otherwise.  (Some will surely argue that, even if government can effectively reduce poverty, the poor in more dynamic, small-government countries will be better off in absolute material terms because they will, over the long run, produce more wealth, which will in turn trickle down to the poorest, etc..  If you compare the countries in the top left of this chart with those in the bottom right, though, I think you will be hard pressed to argue that the countries in the bottom right are underachievers in terms of wealth-production.)

The doctrine of subsidiarity says that we leave functions with more local communities unless broader communities can do a better job of accomplishing our goals.  A few weeks back, Ryan argued that this doctrine leads him to favor private initiative as a means of combatting poverty:

“To me, the [Catholic] principle of subsidiarity, which is really federalism, meaning government closest to the people governs best, having a civil society of the principle of solidarity where we, through our civic organizations, through our churches, through our charities, through all of our different groups where we interact with people as a community, that’s how we advance the common good.

“By not having big government crowd out civic society, but by having enough space in our communities so that we can interact with each other, and take care of people who are down and out in our communities. Those principles are very very important, and the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenets of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life. Help people get out of poverty out into a life of independence.”

This is very confused for reasons others have already noted.  The concept of subsidiarity does not map cleanly onto the public/private distinction, since many private communities are not local in any meaningful sense (think WalMart) and some governments are very local.  But I think this chart suggests that, even if we took subsidiarity to constitute a preference for private over government solutions, government spending arguably does a very effective job of reducing poverty.

UPDATE: Moments ago (Friday evening), at the business meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America, the assembly voted by an overwhelming majority to adopt the statement of the CTSA board on the case of Sr. Margaret Farley as its own. (A few members opposed the motion, and a few more abstained.) This is significant because CTSA board statements are solely the responsibility of its members. Full statement of the CTSA below. [End update.]

This morning the Catholic Theological Society of America board released the following statement responding to the Vatican’s “notification” on Sr. Margaret Farley’s book Just Love:

On June 4, 2012, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a “Notification” entitled “Regarding the Book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Sister Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M.” The “Notification” judged that, in a number of respects, Professor Farley’s book presents positions on matters of sexual ethics that are contrary to the teaching of the Magisterium.

We, the undersigned members of the Board of Directors of the Catholic Theological Society of America, wish to note that Professor Farley is a highly respected member of the theological community. A former President of the CTSA and a recipient of the Society’s John Courtney Murray Award, she has devoted her life to teaching and writing on ethical issues and has done so in ways that have been reflective, measured, and wise. Her work has prompted a generation of theologians to think more deeply about the Christian meaning of personal relationships and the divine life of love that truly animates them. The judgment of the “Notification” that a number of Professor Farley’s stated positions are contrary to the teaching of the Magisterium is simply factual. In our judgment, however, Professor Farley’s purpose in her book is to raise and explore questions of keen concern to the faithful of the Church. Doing so is one very legitimate way of engaging in theological inquiry that has been practiced throughout the Catholic tradition.

The Board is especially concerned with the understanding of the task of Catholic theology presented in the “Notification.” The “Notification” risks giving the impression that there can be no constructive role in the life of the Church for works of theology that 1) give voice to the experience and concerns of ordinary believers, 2) raise questions about the persuasiveness of certain official Catholic positions, and 3) offer alternative theological frameworks as potentially helpful contributions to the authentic development of doctrine. Such an understanding of the nature of theology inappropriately conflates the distinctive tasks of catechesis and theology. With regard to the subject matter of Professor Farley’s book, it is simply a matter of fact that faithful Catholics in every corner of the Church are raising ethical questions like those Professor Farley has addressed. In raising and exploring such questions with her customary sensitivity and judiciousness, Professor Farley has invited us to engage the Catholic tradition seriously and thoughtfully.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at the New York Review of Books‘ blog, the novelist Francine Prose has a post about the “nominations” process–the Orwellian name for the regular meetings at which President Obama decides which suspected terrorists to target for assassination. These meetings were the subject of a recent article by Jo Beck and Scott Shane in the New York Times, and Prose puts on her literary critic hat in order to offer a close reading of Beck and Shane’s devastating reporting: “As drama,” Prose writes, the President’s “Terror on Tuesday” meetings are “reminiscent of great moments in cable TV: Tony Soprano and his colleagues deciding whom to whack, The Wire’s Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell conferring on which of their child employees must be eliminated.” Here’s the conclusion to the post:

For [a moral critique of the policy], we need to examine the article’s final line, which continues to resonate after we have set aside our papers. Presumably, pages of transcripts must have been sifted through in order to find (and end with) the following quote from Michael Leiter, former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

“You can pass a lot of laws,” Mr. Leiter said, “These laws are not going to get Bin Laden dead.”

Get Bin Laden dead? With its execrable grammar, its calculated thuggishness, and, for all that we have been reading about the assumption of personal responsibility, its euphemistic avoidance of what is really at issue (to get dead is not the same as to kill, and it’s never laws but people who get other people dead), the quote suggests a new dispensation in which our government, at the highest level, has given Tony Soprano license to ignore the rule of law and murder actual human beings, some of them harmless civilians. Shouldn’t we feel more frightened than reassured by the knowledge that the leader of our country holds himself accountable for every one of these deaths?

Women. They’re so easily led astray. Culture of Life Foundation ethicist E. Christian Brugger is full of paternal concern for the weaker sex in his response to the CDF’s notification regarding Margaret Farley’s book Just Love: “Three Cheers for the CDF: A Long Overdue Admonition.”

Brugger starts by relating a story “we all know,” the one about how dissenting theologians started tearing down the Church’s moral teachings following Vatican II. “The undisputed matriarch of dissenting US Catholic ethicists,” he says, “is the influential emerita professor of ethics at Yale Divinity School and Religious Sister of Mercy, Margaret A. Farley” — who, he adds, is “an old woman now.”

The CDF’s notification declares that Farley’s book “is not in conformity with the teaching of the Church. Consequently it cannot be used as a valid expression of Catholic teaching, either in counseling and formation, or in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.” Sr. Farley responds — “straightforwardly,” as Brugger acknowledges — “I do not dispute the judgment that some of the positions contained within it are not in accord with current official Catholic teaching. In the end, I can only clarify that the book was not intended to be an expression of current official Catholic teaching, nor was it aimed specifically against this teaching.”

But there’s still cause for alarm, Brugger explains, because Farley “has trained and placed in academic positions a generation of gifted female Catholic ethicists sympathetic to her methods and ready to lay down their lives for her conclusions.” Not bad for an old woman! You do have to wonder how the many men who have studied with Farley over the years have avoided being thus bewitched. But then, as we will see, Brugger is possibly under the impression that Farley teaches only female students. Perhaps he imagines some ladies’ annex of the Yale Divinity School, where women talk about their own sexual pleasure without recourse to the Magisterium, and people still remember Geraldine Ferraro (“who?” indeed).

Yes, the situation is dire. But never fear: Rome knows about this army of loyal, “gifted” but deluded Catholic lady ethicists. “The cardinal prefect of the CDF is well aware that Sister Farley is widely considered a courageous and far-sighted and utterly integral member of the Catholic theological community. And that’s how she’ll be presented to credulous college freshman in classrooms throughout the English-speaking world.” Will no one think of the children?

Like Brugger, I am fond of the final sentence of the notification from the CDF: “The Congregation wishes to encourage theologians to pursue the task of studying and teaching moral theology in full concord with the principles of Catholic doctrine.” They’re just being encouraging! But Brugger has a strong last line of his own: “I fear that this paternal and salutary admonition is likely to fall on deaf ears on the girls at Yale.”

At least he didn’t say “coeds.”

I was once among the girls at Yale — though I never had the pleasure of studying with Sr. Farley — And I suspect he’s right. Then, as now, I had trouble accepting salutary admonitions delivered with a condescending pat on the head. It’s almost as though overt paternalism is destined to appeal only to boys — and only to a certain type of boy, at that. But that’s just my opinion, and you know how impressionable girls are.

Jurors often deliver verdicts on Friday afternoons, and that’s what I was expecting for the trial of Monsignor William Lynn in Philadelphia. But, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, don’t expect a verdict soon:

Jurors at the landmark clergy-sex abuse trial of two Archdiocese of Philadelphia priests signaled Thursday they may be far from a verdict: The panel asked to take Friday off and to arrive late next Monday and Wednesday if they are still deliberating.

The jurors cited personal and family commitments. Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina granted the request, according to her staff.

No one can say that this jury, which began deliberating last Friday, is rushing to judgment in the trial of the first U.S. church official charged with a crime for his supervision of priests who sexually abused minors.

The panel has asked a lot of good questions, especially about the law regarding conspiracy. I wouldn’t read too much into jurors’ questions, but it is certainly clear that the members of this panel are taking great care.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan assailed The New York Times this week for its reporting on payments provided to priests who were known sex abusers so that they could be laicized as quickly as possible. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee refers to these payments, made while Dolan was archbishop there, as “funds for transition.” Advocates for victims call them a “payoff.”

Whatever term one uses, it is clear that, despite what the cardinal says, the church has paid  money with the aim of getting known offenders to leave the priesthood. But at the same time, The Times hasn’t provided the context needed to understand what Dolan said about one specific payment in 2006, which gives the impression that he lied at the time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Father Andrew Kemberling of the aptly-named Church of St. Thomas More in Centennial, Colorado, was asked to give the invocation at the Colorado Republican State Assembly and Convention in Denver in April, and his parish recently posted the video of that talk. It is pinging around the Interwebs.

I’m not sure why. Father Andrew swears he is not being partisan, and after all, he’s just talking about religious freedom. Oh, and gay marriage. And its connection to the socialist threat. And about how “conscience and private property are not human ideas — they come from God.” And they are being threatened.

Money quote: “Socialism is a foreign threat to our democracy! I am tired of this experiment and I hope you are, too!”

Check it out. Maybe the CDF should as well?

A major talking point in the Church’s opposition to the contraception mandate has been that the mandate goes beyond requiring employers to cover contraception and requires them to pay for products that, in the Church’s view, amount to abortion.  For example, the Notre Dame complaint (.pdf) repeatedly claims that the mandate requires Notre Dame “to provide, or facilitate the provision of, abortion-inducing drugs.” (see, e.g., para. 87, 90, 107, 109, 125, 140, 146, 147, 149, 156…and many more)  The complaint asserts that, as a matter of fact, Plan B “operates by preventing a fertilized embryo from implanting in the womb.”  Count IX of the Notre Dame complaint claims that the mandate is illegal precisely because it violates the APA’s commitment not to require employers to cover abortion services.  When the complaint lists the services to which it objects, it routinely uses the following formulation:  ”abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations, and contraceptives.”

Why this emphasis on abortion in a complaint to block the contraception mandate?  The question is made a little more urgent by today’s article in the New York Times reporting that the weight of scientific evidence is decidedly against the claim pressed by the Notre Dame complaint (and many Catholic opponents of the mandate) that Plan B “operates by preventing a fertilized embryo from implanting in the womb.”   Read the rest of this entry »

J.J. Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward takes note of moves in the Jewish community to censor liberal voices, in this case Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schulz. A Democrat, she was disinvited from speaking at a Miami synagogue on Memorial Day after a complaint from a member of the synagogue and chair of the local Republican committee. The issues may differ, but like Victoria Kennedy’s disinvite from Anna Maria College in Massachusetts, the notion flourishes that disappearing people from the podium will make their ideas disappear.

Or, is it just women who must disappear.

Last week is ages ago in blog time, I know, but I just came across a passage in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter that speaks to a ridiculous pseudo-controversy that engulfed the Internets early last week. Chris Hayes, an editor at The Nation and host of a program on MSNBC (full disclosure: I don’t have cable, and have never watched it), made what should have been some uncontroversial remarks about his discomfort with using the word “heroes” to describe Americans who have died in war, since in our dominant political discourse such language “is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war”. (I once wrote something similar.) My onetime editor Conor Friedersdorf has penned a nice critical analysis of the idiocy that ensued, but instead of more meta-idiocy let me give you Berry’s narrator, speaking of life after her husband Virgil went missing in World War II:

Grieved as I was, half destroyed as I sometimes felt myself to be, I didn’t get mad about Virgil’s death. Who was there to get mad at? It would be like getting mad at the world, or at God. What made me mad, and still does, were the people who took it on themselves to speak for him after he was dead. I dislike for the dead to be made to agree with whatever some powerful living person wants to say. Was Virgil a hero? In his dying was he willing to die, or glad to sacrifice his life? Is the life and freedom of the living a satisfactory payment to the dead in war for their living? Would Virgil think so? I have imagined that he would. But I don’t know. Who can speak for the dead? Who can speak for the dead whose bodies are never found, who are forever “missing”? Who can speak for a young man gone clean out of the world, whose body was maybe blown all to nothing, in the midst of terrible fear or pain, in the midst of his last prayer?

What I did know is this. Virgil loved his life. He loved me. He loved his family. He did not want to die. He wanted to come home and live with me and raise a family, and farm with his dad. He knew we were going to have a baby. He never knew he had a daughter. He never knew her name.

I don’t mean to be quarrelsome, but the dead are helpless. I was the mother of a helpless baby, and the wife of a dead man who was just as helpless. The living must protect the dead. Their lives made the meaning of their deaths, and that is the meaning their deaths ought to have. I hated for Virgil’s death to be made official. I hated for it to be a government property or a public thing. I felt my grief for him made his death his own. My grief was the last meaning of his life in this world. And so I kept my grief. For a long time I couldn’t give it up.

Who can speak for the dead? Surely not those whose main political priorities seem to center on making more of them.

Last month Jamie Dimon announced that JPMorgan’s chief investment office in London had lost at least $2 billion on the kind of complex derivatives that nearly sank the U.S. economy four years ago. Dimon has been a vocal — and often truculent — opponent of Washington’s efforts to strengthen financial regulation. He’s argued it’s unfair to punish banks like JPMorgan Chase, which emerged from the 2008 financial crisis in good shape, for the mistakes of its rivals. And many Washington lawmakers seem to agree. JPMorgan’s lobbyists have led efforts to delay, scuttle, or water down new regulations that would have prevented JPMorgan from losing so much, so fast on what was supposed to have been a “hedging strategy,” but the lobbyists’ efforts would come to nothing without the sympathy and willful amnesia of those who authorize and write the regulations. Read the rest of this entry »

NEWS

Today at Roman Noon the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a Notification about the book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2006), by Sr. Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M. (Read Luke Timothy Johnson’s review of the book here.)

For those who don’t already know about her, here are some highlights from the Yale Divinity School website: “A Sister of Mercy, Farley was the first woman appointed to serve full-time on the YDS faculty and shared with Henri Nouwen the distinction of being the first Roman Catholic faculty member at the Divinity School. She is widely published and the recipient of the John Courtney Murray Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America. She has served as president of both the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Society of Christian Ethics. Respected not only as a scholar but as a teacher as well, she appeared on the cover of the Yale Alumni Magazine in 1986 in connection with a feature article on great teachers. She began teaching at Yale Divinity School in 1971 and earned her Ph.D. from the University in 1973.” She retired as professor emerita in 2007.

The process toward the Notification began on March 29, 2010, with a preliminary evaluation “indicating the doctrinal problems present in the text.” According to the CDF, Sr. Farley’s response of October 28, 2010 did not clarify these problems in a satisfactory manner.” Then, following an evaluation by a “Commission of experts,” the CDF confirmed on June 8, 2011, that the book contains “erroneous propositions, the dissemination of which risks grave harm to the faithful.” On July 5, 2011, a letter was sent inviting Sr. Farley “to correct the unacceptable theses in her book.”

On October 3, 2011, the response of Sr. Farley was forwarded to the CDF, and this response, having been examined by the Commission of experts, was submitted to the Ordinary Session of the CDF for judgment on December 14, 2011. The resulting Notification results from that meeting.

The Notification casts judgment on Sr. Farley’s book in five specific areas: masturbation; homosexual acts; homosexual unions; indissolubility of marriage; and divorce and remarriage. It also accuses the book of these “general problems”: “Sr. Farley either ignores the constant teaching of the Magisterium or, where it is occasionally mentioned, treats it as one opinion among others. … Sr. Farley also manifests a defective understanding of the objective nature of the natural moral law, choosing instead to argue on the basis of conclusions selected from certain philosophical currents or from her own understanding of ‘contemporary experience.’”

In the end, the Notification concludes that the book “is not in conformity with the teaching of the Church. Consequently it cannot be used as a valid expression of Catholic teaching, either in counseling and formation, or in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.”

In her response to today’s Notification about the book, Sr. Farley does “not dispute the judgment that some of the positions contained within it are not in accord with current official Catholic teaching.” She explains that “the book was not intended to be an expression of current official Catholic teaching, nor was it aimed specifically against this teaching. It is of a different genre altogether.”

“Growing out of my work as a Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale University Divinity School,” she writes, “this book was designed to help people, especially Christians but also others, to think through their questions about human sexuality. It suggests the importance of moving from what frequently functions as a taboo morality to a morality and sexual ethics based on the discernment of what counts as wise, truthful, and recognizably just loves. Although my responses to some particular sexual ethical questions do depart from some traditional Christian responses, I have tried to show that they nonetheless reflect a deep coherence with the central aims and insights of these theological and moral traditions. Whether through interpretation of biblical texts, or through an attempt to understand ‘concrete reality’ (an approach at the heart of ‘natural law’), the fact that Christians (and others) have achieved new knowledge and deeper understanding of human embodiment and sexuality seems to require that we at least examine the possibility of development in sexual ethics. This is what my book, Just Love, is about.”

ANALYSIS

At this initial moment, here are a few comments from my perspective as a scholar of the Bible and a historian of Christianity.

- “Philosophical Currents.” The Notification denigrates the book’s method for arguing “on the basis of conclusions from certain philosophical currents.” Certainly the Magisterium understands that all of our Christian worldviews have been to some degree governed by philosophical currents, whether by Platonism and Stoicism in antiquity, Aristotelianism in the middle ages, or the epistemologies of Descartes and the Scientific Revolution later. Which philosophical currents are under suspicion, and why? The relationship between theology and philosophy is not a “general problem.” It must be some specific philosophical current that is the problem, but the Notification doesn’t explain this.

- “Experience” and Theology. The Notification rejects the book’s recourse to “contemporary experience.” As a historian and biblical scholar, I find this puzzling. Christian theologians and ethicists have been drawing from contemporary experience from the time of Jesus onward. For example: In the first century, Jewish-Christians reflected on their experience of getting to know Gentiles — in order to ultimately decide how to include them in God’s love and plan. Or consider how, in the 20^th-century, Gentile-Christians reflected on their experience of relating with Jews — and decided not to persecute them and even to elevate them in esteem (an insight later enshrined in the magisterial document, Nostra Aetate). These are examples of how Catholic thought — including official teachings of the early Church and later of the hierarchical Magisterium — has changed over time based on relationships of personal experience. If personal experience no longer constitutes part of an adequate basis for theology and ethics, why not? What is the argument? When did this change?

- Who gets to say what? Sr. Farley’s book is quite clear to point out when her own opinion differs from magisterial teaching, and so it is hard to see why her book should be singled out. She makes careful use of the phrases “my own view” or “my own position” on matters of disagreement with official Catholic teaching. She’s not the only prominent theologian to do so. Pope Benedict XVI — writing under his scholarly name, Joseph Ratzinger — has published two books on Jesus of Nazareth. In the introductory pages and throughout the text, he makes clear that he speaks in these pages as an individual scholar, searching for the truth as a man of fides quaerens intellectum. By his favorable quotations of the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas or his questioning of the historical veracity of Matthew’s Passion Narrative, will faithful Christians be led astray?

If even the Pope — whose every word and move is watched globally — is permitted to step out of his office and write as a spiritual seeker and theologian, what about a woman religious with a Ph.D. and forty years’ experience in the classroom? The Pope draws from contemporary philosophical currents (historical criticism derived from an Enlightenment consciousness) and contemporary experience (of anti-Semitism and its horrific effects) in the course of his presentation of Jesus. Just as with the Pope’s books on Jesus, attentive readers of Sr. Farley’s book on ethics know that she clearly states when she is speaking her own opinion about the principles of just relationships. It’s hard to imagine how Catholic readers would be in danger of mistaking her assessments for those of the Catechism. And after over forty years as a professor at a prominent seminary, Sr. Farley knows that she is not giving the faithful questions that they don’t already have.  The faithful know what the Catechism says, and if we don’t, it’s easy to find out.  But the faithful also have close, personal experiences with faithful Christians who, for example: divorced a spouse because the relationship was unjust and causing grave harm; or lived in a relationship of vastly unequal power and wanted to end it but couldn’t; or were raised from childhood to be men or women of stalwart faith and morality by their faithful parents, who happened to be of the same sex. Sr. Farley’s book results from years of study and witness to the questions raised by men and women who tried to live their Christian lives with faithfulness and righteousness.

UPDATE: A roundup of responses from other academics can be found here. Farley’s statement is here. And here’s the statement from the president of her community, Sr. Pat McDermott.