A judge has convicted Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph on one misdemeanor count of failing to report suspicion of child endangerment, making him the highest-ranking U.S. church official — and the first U.S. bishop — to be convicted in the sexual-abuse crisis. More from the Kansas City Star:

The charges stemmed from the church’s handling of the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, on whose laptop a diocesan vendor found hundreds of lewd photos of young girls in December 2010. Finn’s second-in-command at the diocese, Monsignor Robert Murphy, did not report the photographs to police for five months.

(…)

Finn and the diocese had been scheduled to start a jury trial in less than three weeks, but in a surprising move Wednesday, the matter was reset for trial in front of Torrence only.

Lawyers limited the case to a narrow range of facts, which were expressed in 69 paragraphs submitted to Torrence at the hearing. Torrence listened to about 25 minutes of summary from attorneys then took a half-hour break before finding Finn guilty based on those facts.

Those facts included an acknowledgement from Finn that he is a mandated child abuse reporter under Missouri law. The stipulation also contained a long recitation of the now-familiar facts of the case with a few new insights.

Read the rest here.

For American Catholics, the summer of 2012 was partially thematized by the midsummer “Fortnight for Freedom.” The U.S. bishops’ document, “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” offered a list of besieged liberties currently “under attack, both at home and abroad.” The document clearly emphasized two endangered species of liberty in the U.S.: the widely debated federal mandate that requires insurance plans to offer contraception coverage; and state immigration laws, such as Arizona’s and Alabama’s, that outlaw charity and pastoral care toward people without proper documentation. On the first, lots of Commonweal coverage here. On the second, as of yesterday, federal judge Susan Bolton, though upholding the “show your papers” part of the laws, seems to have struck a victory for religious liberty in striking down the part of these laws which makes “harboring” or “transporting” undocumented immigrants illegal. The bishops of many border towns can breathe a bit easier today, in the hopes that they do not need to choose between caring for their flocks or following the law.

The thematized summer brought into focus some other tragedies of religious liberty under attack. The shooting at the Sikh temple was obviously the horrific example of an attack on religion, but other events may have slipped under the radar.

Charlotte Knobloch / Foto: Steffi Loos

For example, consider the example of Jews in Germany. After a court ruling that banned circumcision in Germany in June, and then a public beating of a rabbi and subsequent solidarity march (“yarmulke flash mob”), the liberty of Jews in Germany is seriously threatened. In response to the summer’s events, Jewish leader Charlotte Knobloch wrote an incisive editorial in yesterday’s Suddeutsche Zeitung: “Wollt ihr uns Juden noch?” In an English summary in Der Spiegel, her sentiment is translated thus:

For six decades I have had to justify myself because I stayed in Germany — as a remnant of a destroyed world, as a sheep among wolves. … I always readily carried this burden because I was firmly convinced that this country and these people deserved it. For the first time my basic convictions are starting to shake. For the first time I feel resignation. I seriously ask if this country still wants us.

Meanwhile in Egypt, the perilous position of Coptic Christians showed little signs of improvement over the summer. To wit, David Pinault at America notes that support for and anticipation of martyrdom has returned to consciousness in Egypt. A newspaper in Old Cairo recently featured the following headline:

“The blood of the martyrs cries out from the darkness, and the tears of the Copts will not dry. But our Lord is present.” A photo-montage accompanied the text—a crowd of wailing women at Maspero, horror and shock in their eyes; and the face of Jesus, his head bowed beneath a crown of thorns. Suddenly the distant days of Saints Catherine and Barbara felt very close at hand.

Finally, back in the heartland of the United States, I was stunned to find out that the proposed mosque in Joplin, Missouri, which had been subject to arson earlier in the summer, was burned again last month. One of the local leaders stood firm for American principles, despite having been subject to such hatred:

“This is what we stand for,” said Dr. Ahmed Asadullah, a member of the Islamic Society of Joplin. “Freedom of religion. Freedom of speech.”

Amid all the metaphorical attacks on religious liberty in the United States, I don’t want to forget the real ones: banning the sign of the covenant for Jewish men in Germany; violence and murder of Coptic Christians in Egypt; a repeated arson of a mosque under construction in Missouri.

Unless religious liberty means liberty for others, it means nothing. That’s the American vision, and since Vatican II, it’s the Catholic vision too. That’s why Mike Bloomberg’s 2010 speech (transcript) on Governors Island was so meaningful to me, as an American. An Irish-Catholic speechwriter penned an eloquent oration so that a Jewish mayor could defend the rights of Muslims to follow the First Amendment. It is that sweet land of liberty of which I, for one, sing.

Running an errand in the car with my eight-year-old daughter last night, I subjected her to NPR coverage of the Democratic National Convention, just in time to hear host Brian Lehrer taking calls from listeners on what event or experience had turned them into Democrats (he did the same for Republican callers during last week’s RNC). There were the expected, generally unsurprising anecdotes (though moving and heartfelt nonetheless)—stories from working- and middle-class citizens who’d been able to secure educational aid or had suddenly and unexpectedly faced the temporary need for food stamps, as well one from a woman who’d been physically assaulted “by an older man” outside a medical clinic she’d visited to discuss with a doctor the possibility of terminating a pregnancy.

Then came the caller who said that, growing up Catholic, he’d learned the importance of doing unto others. “Like the hymn we used to have to sing,” he explained. “ ‘Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me.’ And I never hear that from the other side.” By which he meant, as Lehrer teased out of him, the Republican party.

My daughter likes hearing stories of my own childhood, so I told her the hymn the caller mentioned was one my brothers and I used to sing in the car on the way home from mass (I didn’t completely admit that it was only to mimic the baritone of our parish’s theatrically earnest cantor, and not for any extra sustenance). She responded by asking if we could put the Who back on, and I forgot about the whole thing until later, when watching Michelle Obama address the convention.

Almost everyone has weighed in with raves for her speech, so no additional are needed. But among the many moments worth singling out is this: “[W]hen you’ve worked hard, and done well, and walked through that doorway of opportunity… you do not slam it shut behind you… you reach back, and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed.”

You can write it off as rhetoric, and like many other lines it functioned as a stiletto slipped between the ribs of the opposing ticket (as has been widely noted, there was not one overt mention of Mitt Romney). But its inclusion in the featured event of the night gets precisely to what that caller was talking about. Last week, from Tampa, we learned that knowing how to handle a .357 Magnum should count among your credentials for running a state. We also learned that making do with tuna and pasta in the first “lean” years of a marriage will steel you for success; were informed that we “are paralyzed by a desire to be loved” and need to hear the word “no” a lot more often; and were hectored into admitting just who built it, and why that matters far more than how, with what kind of help, or for what greater purpose.

Words serve a tactical need but they also, to borrow another phrase from last night, reveal character, of a group or a party or an individual. With one side, we can hear “do unto others” running through the language employed. But with the other, it’s the slamming door. When moral arguments are being marshaled for preferred methods of governance, it’s fair to note this difference.

The radio caller got this, and I think it’s something a lot of other voters might also. I may have laughed at the rendering of the hymn (a youthful indiscretion), but the words still made their point. Otherwise, I might have been receptive to a whole other set of appeals.

Our new issue is now live.

Highlights:

• Richard W. Garnett on how both political parties have ignored the Constitution
• Benjamin Wittes and Ritika Singh on the troubling new consensus in Washington on the legal and political issues surrounding terrorism
• Robin Darling Young on Henri de Lubac’s role in the Second Vatican Council, and why regarding him as a reformer eager to engage the modern world is to misunderstand him

There’s more. See the whole lineup here.

Jonathan Chait has paid a lot of attention to Rep. Paul Ryan. So he finds it amusing that the rest of the world should only now, in the wake of Ryan’s convention speech, be figuring out that Ryan’s image as a congenitally sincere, unusually honest legislator is out of step with the reality of Paul Ryan the successful career politician. Chait writes today about the sudden shift in the man’s reputation:

Here’s what has not happened: Paul Ryan did not begin telling an unprecedented series of lies that suddenly exposed a predilection for shading the truth….

Ryan’s Tampa speech, while pretty dishonest, was not especially so by Ryan’s standards. Here you can see why Ryan must view the sudden attack of the truth squad so bewilderingly. Ryan has been saying things like this, and worse, all along. The bit where he sadly shakes his head and blames President Obama for the failure of the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission that Ryan killed himself has been a staple of the Ryan shtick for two years. Reporters usually bat their eyes and coo sympathetically. Now it has become evidence of his duplicity.

That second link leads to a Feb. 2011 post from Chait’s old blog at the New Republic, which concluded: “Why do the media not only fail to question his sincerity at all, but give him an uncritical platform to question the sincerity of others? It’s bizarre.” Chait believes the media has finally, belatedly turned critical because the Romney campaign all but forced it to. “Well beyond the usual exaggerations of a national campaign, Romney has built its entire message around two accusations — ‘you didn’t build that’ and ‘just send them a check’ — that are obviously false.” And the campaign has continued to push those accusations despite widespread acknowledgment of their falseness, even professing disdain for the work of “fact-checkers.” That the political media must finally respond was predictable, Chait says, though perhaps not to Ryan himself: Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of Labor Day, here is Josef Pieper on the foundational value of leisure:

Leisure is not justified in making the functionary [i.e., the worker or laborer] as ‘trouble-free’ in operation as possible, with minimum ‘downtime,’ but rather in keeping the functionary human … and this means that the human being does not disappear into function, but instead remains capable of taking in the world as a whole, and thereby to realize himself as a being who is oriented toward the whole of existence.

For Pieper, leisure is not mere idleness; it is “a form of stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear.” He goes on:

Leisure is not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go … In such silent openness of the soul, it may be granted for only an instant to know ‘what the world / holds in its innermost.’”

Pieper ends Leisure: the Basis of Culture (1948) with this hope for a mankind “‘born to labor’”: “to be taken from the toil of the work-day, to an endless day of celebration; to be rapt from the confines of the working environment into the very center of the world.” What a beautiful–and, given our own culture’s fetishization of work, timely–thought.

Patrick Pexton, the ombudsman of the Washington Post, reports on being asked:

“Readers periodically ask me some variation on this question: “Why does the press follow every jot and tittle of Iran’s nuclear program, but we never see any stories about Israel’s nuclear weapons capability?”

“It’s a fair question. Going back 10 years into Post archives, I could not find any in-depth reporting on Israeli nuclear capabilities, although national security writer Walter Pincus has touched on it many times in his articles and columns.”

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon AWOL: The Ancient World on Line, a project largely managed by Charles E. Jones, who explains its purpose:

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

It doesn’t take long for one to be impressed, not to say overwhelmed, by the variety of investigations under way all over the world as well as by the number of scholarly publications that record their progress. Many languages, ancient and modern, are part of the project. The list of journals available on-line includes many for biblical and patristic studies.

As I know from sad (not really!) experience, each new item added to the open access list can easily tempt one away from what one is supposed to be doing. E.g,, a week or two ago, when the site took notice of the Vergil Project; or the other day, when the annuals of an association for Roman archaeology in Britain was added;  ; or today when I learned of Lexicity, a site that gathers from all over the Internet useful and trustworthy materials for the study of ancient languages.

Today’s NY Times has a profile by Jo Becker of Valerie Jarrett, senior White House adviser to President Obama. It appears that among other things she is largely responsible for the clumsy way in which the contraception-mandate in health insurance programs was handled when it came to religious bodies and institutions. But the article also makes it clear that her influence, indeed power, is considerable and wide-ranging. She is depicted as regularly urging the president in liberal directions. I don’t think the reporter did Mr. Obama any favors when she wrote this sentence: “If Karl Rove was known as George W. Bush’s political brain, Ms. Jarrett is Mr. Obama’s spine.” Without her, he’s spineless?

In what is described as his last interview, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini said that the Catholic Church is 200 years behind the times and called for it to recognize its mistakes and embark on a radical journey of change.

Cardinal Martini, who died Friday at the age of 85, had been interviewed Aug. 8. Corriere della Sera published the interview on Sept. 1 [here in PDF: L'ultima intervista].

Cardinal Martini called the church in Europe and America “tired” and, as Reuters reported, continued: “Our culture has aged, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our rituals and our cassocks are pompous.” He later added, as CNN reported, “The Church has remained 200 years behind the times. Why has it not been shaken up? Are we scared? Fear instead of courage?”

[Update: Here is a full translation by Father Joseph Komonchak, revised: Martini interview [PDF]. (You can read the full text after the jump.) It differs in some ways from the passages in the news coverage. And there is also the translation John Page linked to below. Grazie mille!]

To overcome its fatigue, the Church must admit its mistakes and make radical changes, the cardinal said, adding that the sex abuse scandals require a journey of conversion and transformation. Sacraments should be a healing tool, and “not a tool for discipline.” In the end, he said, only love can overcome the distrust of the church that he has seen in Europe. And only love will conquer the fatigue that besets the church. He is missed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Looking for something, I had occasion today to re-read paragraph 43 of Gaudium et spes, Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in Today’s World. It struck me that several of the common themes that come up for discussion on this blog are expressed and addressed in this paragraph, and I thought it might be useful to start a thread on it. The statements are sometimes too general and hortatory, but it’s not always a bad thing to be reminded of that to which we are exhorted! The paragraph is part of Chapter IV of GS, “On the Church’s Task in Today’s World,” and the whole of it is worth reading. [The numbers are to footnotes, which I have not supplied.]

43. This council exhorts Christians, as citizens of two cities, to strive to discharge their earthly duties conscientiously and in response to the Gospel spirit. People are mistaken who, knowing that we have here no abiding city but seek one which is to come,(13) think that they may therefore shirk their earthly responsibilities; they are forgetting that by the faith itself they are more obliged than ever to measure up to these duties, each according to his own vocation.(14) No less mistaken, however, are people who think that religion consists in acts of worship alone and in the discharge of certain moral obligations, and who imagine they can plunge themselves into earthly affairs in such a way as to imply that these are altogether divorced from the religious life. This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives ought to be counted among the most serious errors of our age. Read the rest of this entry »

Another straight-shooting report from Teheran by Thomas Erdbrink in the Times. The non-aligned group voted to support Iran’s development of nuclear power but refused to go along with Iran’s policy supporting Syria’s Assad. Does anyone think the U.S. needs to recalibrate? This is a large part of the world expect for Europe, Israel, and us.

“TEHRAN — The 120-nation Nonaligned Movement handed its host Iran a diplomatic victory on Friday, unanimously decreeing support for the disputed Iranian nuclear energy program and criticizing the American-led attempt to isolate and punish Iran with unilateral economic sanctions.

“But the group’s communiqué, issued by Iranian state news media at the end of its annual meeting, omitted any mention of support for Syria, Iran’s vital Middle East ally, which appeared to reflect a view among many members that the Syrian government’s attempt to crush the uprising there was indefensible.”

PM Morsi of Egypt was also given the back of the hand by Iranian officials for proposing the Assad government step down in Syria reflecting, the story says, widespread Arab support for an end to the carnage.

UPDATE: The head of the Joints Chief, Martin Dempsey isn’t enthused about an attack on Iran: “Distancing himself from any Israeli plan to bomb Iran, Dempsey said such an attack would “clearly delay but probably not destroy Iran’s nuclear programme”.

He added: “I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it.” In the Guardian. Hope the Commander-in-Cheif agrees with him!