The first period of Vatican II (1962) was its most crucial; by freeing the Council from the narrow channels of the official drafts, it permitted it to expand its vision and eventually to produce texts that represented and encouraged the three goals Pope John set out for the Council: spiritual renewal, pastoral updating (aggiornamento), and the pursuit of Christian unity.

Four major scenes defined the first act of the conciliar drama; for them I have supplied some useful material:

1) Pope John’s opening speech, with my summary

2) the election of members for conciliar commissions

3) the debate and vote on the liturgy

4) the debate and vote on the draft on the sources of revelation.

Next month, voters in Massachusetts will decide whether to approve Question #2, “allowing a physician licensed in Massachusetts to prescribe medication, at the request of a terminally-ill patient meeting certain conditions, to end that person’s life”.

With all the discussion here at dotCommonweal in recent weeks about whether, when and how our bishops should enter into the arena of electoral politics, the example of Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston and how he’s chosen to engage with the challenges presented by Question #2 seems a worthy addition to our ongoing “clarification of thought”.  In the first in a series of columns Cardinal O’Malley is writing in the weeks leading up to the election*,  three things struck me as important aspects of how he is exercising his role as bishop and teacher:

Humility:  O’Malley begins not by invoking his (or the pope’s, or the Church’s) authority, but by framing his forthcoming statements as “some reflections around the theme of end-of-life issues” that he wants “to share with the people (of) the archdiocese”.  He then tells the story of how as a young Franciscan, he “decided ‘to make the sacrifice’ in solidarity with a fellow religious” of showing up to a sparsely attended honorary degree ceremony for the then-little known Mother Teresa of Calcutta.  (There’s a gentle, self-mocking humor exhibited here; it’s a characteristic of the cardinal’s pastoral style often evident in his appearances around the archdiocese.)

Read the rest of this entry »

NPR (et al) reported yesterday that 17 year old Ryan Andersen has been denied the rank of Eagle Scout by the Boy Scouts of America. Here’s the organization’s statement:

“This scout proactively notified his unit leadership and Eagle Scout counselor that he does not agree to scouting’s principle of ‘Duty to God’ and does not meet scouting’s membership standard on sexual orientation,” Deron Smith, a spokesman for the organization said in a statement. “Agreeing to do one’s ‘Duty to God’ is a part of the scout Oath and Law and a requirement of achieving the Eagle Scout rank.”

First, I am not questioning the BSA’s legal right to exclude anyone from its ranks, on the basis of whatever criteria they wish. Private organizations can do that.

Second, I don’t know what the substance is of Andersen’s failure to do his “Duty to God,” but I suspect that the two objections of Duty to God and sexual orientation are connected. However, I could be wrong on this count. Further, I don’t know Andersen’s religious faith or denomination.

However, I think this would be a fine opportunity for Catholic leadership to speak out in support of kids like Ryan, and urge the BSA to welcome gay Scouts. Here are a couple reasons why:

1. Official Catholic teaching, unlike that of many right-wing evangelical churches, draws a distinction between sexual inclination/desire (the official teaching tends not to use the word “orientation,”) and sexual acts. Homosexual acts are condemned, while homosexual desire is not. I suspect the BSA does not encourage sexual activity for any of its members, but rather encourages them to remain sexually abstinent, at least until marriage or responsible adulthood. (A quick googling didn’t answer this question for me. My searches yielded reports about sex abuse and poor responses to sex abuse within this all-heterosexual group.) Why wouldn’t the Catholic Church want to encourage all interested kids to join groups calling for responsible chastity? Not to mention the fact that scouting might help them find the kind of solid friends that Church teaching says is helpful for gays in dealing with homosexual desire? Catholic magisterial teaching says that no unjust discrimination of any kind should be practiced against LGB people–wouldn’t involvement in a group that helps form responsible and thoughtful men be a good thing for gay kids? (Since I am talking about a response by Catholic leadership here, I am not calling into question the Church’s teaching on same-sex relationships here. There’s no need to change Catholic teaching in order for Church leaders to support scouting for gay kids.)

2. We’ve heard a lot about religious liberty from Catholic leadership this year. Many Christian denominations and other religious groups are supportive of LGBT people and (when appropriate) same-sex relationships. It may well be the case for Ryan–and it is undoubtedly the case for many scouts–that Duty to God as they understand God REQUIRES them to be open and affirming of LGBT people. In their own well-formed consciences, such scouts are put in a difficult position of having to decide whether their membership in a group that excludes gays is in conflict with their promise within that very group to be reverent and to serve God. Wouldn’t a call for an inclusive stance point to the bishops’ sense of the urgency of protecting religious freedom for all and the importance of obeying conscience?

So these are two reasons for Catholic leaders to call on the BSA to change their exclusive policy. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that they boot out Boy Scouts from church buildings unless they do so–such strictures are reserved for punishing Girl Scouts because of their association with insidious groups like the Sierra Club. But it is in keeping, istm, both with current magisterial teaching regarding LGB people, and would be a resounding reiteration of our leaders’ own call for greater respect for religious freedom in American society.

Again, this is not a legal matter, but a moral matter. Shouldn’t Catholic leaders support the inclusion of gay kids in scouting?

Stephen Colbert was on Fresh Air this past Thursday (as himself) to talk about his character’s new book. The whole interview is worth a listen, but I found his comments on tomorrow’s “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” to be the most interesting. Colbert had Pastor Jim Garlow on his show this week to talk about the initiative. It is aimed primarily at Evangelical pastors and encourages them to videotape themselves endorsing candidates, political platforms, and initiatives from the pulpit in violation of their own tax exempt status, which bars tax-exempt religious institutions from direct political speech to avoid being unwillingly subsidized by non-adhering tax-payers. This movement, which is also being framed as an act of civil disobedience, reminded me of the USCCB’s “Fortnight for Freedom” as well as the LCWR’s bus tour this summer. I thought Colbert’s comments on the dangers of churches getting involved in the distracting and fractious world of politics, regardless of their perceived right to do so, were right on:

I think they should be able to endorse from the pulpit. Now whether or not they should get tax-exempt status is another thing, because that is the rest of us subsidizing their political speech. … I think they should be able to do it, but I also think that it’s a very dangerous thing to do — not just for our politics, but it’s also dangerous for the faith of people who are exercising that right. Because they seem to think that it’s a one-way membrane — that they’ll get religion into our politics. But they’re ignoring the fact that politics will come right back through that gate onto our religion. And if you actually have a political party that is this religion, or a political party that is that religion, I think that’s a short road to the kind of religious civil war — whether or not it’s actually an armed war — but religious civil war that we fled in Europe. America has avoided that. And I think our politics are so horrible these days. … Why anyone would want that horrible tar on something as fragile as faith is beyond me.

Alternatively, I think the pivot away from politics and toward the New Evangelization, which Peter posts on below, is the right move. It would be nice to see our religious leaders talking about the joy of the Gospel rather than wasting all of their energy playing power politics—because, there really is no other kind.

Paolo Gabriele, former butler for Pope Benedict XVI, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing confidential Vatican documents that he leaked to the news media. As I had suspected, it appears the motive behind this caper is high-minded: What the butler saw as one of the few lay people in the papal household made him fear for the church. As a loyal Catholic, he decided to do something about it by leaking documents to an Italian journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi.  AFP reports on the proceedings against Gabriele:

 ”What really shocked me was when I sat down for lunch with the Holy Father and sometimes the pope asked about things that he should have been informed on,” he told the court when he was given a chance to defend himself.

“It was then that I became firmly convinced of how easy it was to manipulate a person with such enormous powers,” he said.

I’ve seen nothing to contradict what Gabriele told the court at the closing of his trial:  “The thing I feel most strongly is the conviction of having acted out of visceral love for the Church of Christ and of its leader on earth.”  He deserves the papal pardon that, according to news accounts, is likely. One bit of intrigue lingers from a statement Gabriele made earlier that 20 people were involved in the scheme. He later denied this.

The Vatican’s response to the leaks was an overheated call for any journalists involved in publishing the leaked documents to be prosecuted. Have any lessons been learned? That  a man like Gabriele – practically the only layman to enter this inner circle of the Vatican – felt morally compelled to take such drastic steps sounds yet another alarm about the way the church is being run at its highest levels.

The Synod for the New Evangelization begins tomorrow inRome.  John Allen has a helpful FAQ on the Synod here.  I’ve been reading through the instrumentum laboris, the working document for the Synod and found a passage I particularly liked.  It reminded me of Karl Rahner’s suggestion many years ago that we needed new “short formulas” of Christian Faith:

The Christian faith is not simply teachings, wise sayings, a code of morality or a tradition. The Christian faith is a true encounter and relationship with Jesus Christ. Transmitting the faith means to create in every place and time the conditions which lead to this encounter between the person and Jesus Christ. The goal of all evangelization is to create the possibility for this encounter, which is, at one and the same time, intimate, personal, public and communal. Pope Benedict XVI stated: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. [...] Since God has first loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10), love is now no longer a mere ‘command’; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us.” In the Christian faith, the encounter with Christ and the relationship with him takes place “in accordance to the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3, 4). The Church is formed precisely through the grace of this relationship.

 This encounter with Jesus, through his Spirit, is the Father’s great gift to humanity. We are prepared for this encounter through the action of grace in us. In such an encounter, we feel an attraction which leads to our transformation, causing us to see new dimensions to who we are and making us partakers of divine life (cf. 2 Pt 1:4). After this encounter, everything is different as a result of metanoia, that is, the state of conversion strongly urged by Jesus himself (cf. Mk 1:15). In a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, faith takes the form of a relationship with him and in remembrance of him, especially in the Eucharist and the Word of God, and creates in us the mind of Christ, through the Spirit, a mentality which makes us recognize our brothers and sisters, gathered by the Spirit in his Church, and, in turn, see ourselves as witnesses and heralds of this Gospel. This encounter equips us to do new things and witness to the transformation of our lives in the works of conversion as announced by the prophets (cf. Jer 3:6 ff; Ez 36:24-36).

 Some other good resources for reflection on the purposes of the Synod include Pope Paul VI’s 1975 Apostolic Exhortation Evangeli Nuntiandi, Cardinal Wuerl’s pastoral letter Disciples of the Lord: Sharing the Vision, and the USCCB’s resource page on the New Evangelization.

File this with the other studies that confirm what most people would have predicted.

Free birth control led to greatly lower rates of abortions and births to teenagers, a large study concludes, offering strong evidence for how a bitterly contested Obama administration policy could benefit women’s health. The two-year project tracked more than 9,000 women in St. Louis, many of them poor or uninsured, who were given their choice of a range of free contraceptives.

If there’s anything surprising about the finding, it is perhaps the magnitude.  The study group’s abortion rate was less than half that of the control group [women in the St. Louis Metro area] and a third of the national rate.

UPDATE:  Here’s a link to the actual study.  I also updated the language in the post because the original wording inaccurately referred to a “control group.”  The study did not use one.

For those who missed last night’s debate, here are the top stories:

Borowitz Report: “Millions of Americans Lose Consciousness”

Gail Collins: “So how are you enjoying Debate Season, people?”

The New York Times Editorial called the debate unhelpful but managed to note something its reporters seemed to miss: “The Mitt Romney who appeared on the state at the University of Denver seemed to be fleeing from the one who won the Republican nomination on a hard-right platform of tax cuts, budget slashing and indifference to the suffering of those at the bottom of the economic ladder.”

And your favorites???

Have at it. You will have to reload the page to see new comments:

Video of the proceedings of the roundtable/conference on the contraception mandate, hosted on Sept. 21 by Georgetown Law Center and Georgetown’s Berkley Center, is now available online.  Here’s the link.

Grant Gallicho mentioned in a previous post the remarks of Georgetown president John DeGioia, who at our recent Commonweal Conversations event received the third Catholic in the Public Square award. He spoke movingly of “the common good,” and his remarks are definitely worth viewing (or reviewing, if you were among us last Thursday) in full. Video below.

Commonweal Conversations 2012 Video: Remarks by John DeGioia, from Commonweal Magazine on Vimeo. 

The wisdom of recent elections has taught us that celebrity endorsements of political candidates don’t matter. A poll released yesterday confirmed this fact. Who cares what the lead singer of Creed or Eva Longoria — or Clint Eastwood, for that matter — thinks about the presidential election?

But on the same day that new poll was released, Mitt Romney scored a major endorsement, which I am convinced does matter. For those of you not from the Rocky Mountain region, let me explain.

“Mitt, we’ve got ‘em right where we want ‘em!”

Imagine that you are an undecided voter in a toss-up state. (I know, hard to imagine, but try.) It’s October of an election year, and a very smart and reasonable person that you trust makes a strong case for a candidate. You’ve known him for almost 30 years, ever since he graduated from Stanford. You’ve been through tough times together, ups and downs, and through it all he has been steady, opinionated but not partisan, classy, the kind of person who takes home a big paycheck but looks out for the common good. This person encourages you to vote for Romney.

For almost everyone in Colorado — and we might as well throw in New Mexico, which follows the Broncos — that person is former Denver Broncos quarterback, John Elway.  Read the rest of this entry »

David Brooks, perhaps anticipating a disaster for Romney in Wednesday night’s debate, has thoughtfully provided an opening statement for the candidate. It begins: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to use the opening minutes of this debate a little differently. I’d like to say that I wish everybody could have known my father, George Romney. He was a great public servant and I’ve always tried to live up to his example. The problem is that you get caught up in the competitiveness of a campaign and all the consultants want to make you something you’re not.”

And continues: “I’ve allowed that to happen to me. I’m a nonideological guy running in an ideological age, and I’ve been pretending to be more of an ideologue than I really am. I’m a sophisticated guy running in a populist moment. I’ve ended up dumbing myself down. It hasn’t even worked. I’m behind. So I’ve decided to run the last month of this campaign as myself.”

Brooks goes on to outline some interesting policy analysis and suggestions for the Republican candidate.

I found it a refreshing, if unlikely, stance for Romney to take. Your views: Yes, especially you Republicans!

Here: NYTimes, October 2.

And now a word from the pope — no, not the current one. But if the rhetoric was loftier eighty-one years ago and the pronouns unfashionably regal, the message remains alarmingly relevant:

There is every reason to fear that the plague of Unemployment, which We have already mentioned, will worsen, to such an extent that poverty may push—though God forbid it!—many a misery-stricken household to exasperation…. As an effect of rivalry between peoples there is an insensate competition in armaments which, in its turn, becomes the cause of enormous expenditure, diverting large sums of money from the public welfare; and this makes the present crisis more acute…. We exhort you all, Venerable Brethren, to busy yourselves with the work of enlightening public opinion in this matter, by all the means at your disposal, including both pulpit and press, so that the hearts of men may be turned towards the dictates of right reason, and, still more, to the laws of Christ.

This call to preach about the need to reduce defense spending in favor of public-welfare funding was issued on this day in 1931 by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Nova impendet. (HT @pourmecoffee.)

The pope begins with a flourish: “A new scourge threatens…. It strikes most heavily at those who are the most tender and are Our most dearly beloved; upon the children, the proletariat, the artisans and the ‘have-nots.’ We are speaking of the grave financial crisis which weighs down the peoples and is accelerating in every land the frightful increase of Unemployment.” Plus ça change. The solution, Pius says, is a “Crusade of charity,” with the bishops at its center. And, of course, prayer:

And especially let us pray for those of our brethren who are in distress, and let us repeat with more earnestness than ever before the prayer which Jesus Himself has taught us: “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Let all of us remember, as a spur and as a consolation, that the Divine Redeemer will cherish what we do for His poor as if we have done it for Himself (Matt. xxv. 40), and that, according to another of His comforting words, to receive a little child for the love of Jesus is the same as receiving Jesus Himself (Matt. xviii, 5).

Incidentally, the encyclical ends with a reference to the upcoming feast of Christ the King (“It seems to Us that it will be timely to prepare for the Feast by solemn tridua in the parish churches, whereby to implore from the God of Mercies celestial counsels and the gifts of peace”). It has that in common with USCCB’s recent document “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty”:

In addition to this summer’s observance, we also urge that the Solemnity of Christ the King—a feast born out of resistance to totalitarian incursions against religious liberty—be a day specifically employed by bishops and priests to preach about religious liberty, both here and abroad.

The poor we will always have with us, I guess.

In one of those coincidences that heighten—or at least change—one’s experience of a book, I had just started reading Eric Hobsbawm’s How To Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, when I learned that he died earlier today at the age of ninety-five.

Hobsbawm kept working right up until the end of his life: How To Change the World appeared last year; next spring his British publisher will release a new collection of his essays on culture and politics. Hobsbawm’s reputation as a historian was so great that it could coexist securely, if not always happily, with his reputation as an unrepentant Communist. He was a historian’s historian. Conservatives like Niall Ferguson and anti-Communist liberals like Tony Judt revered his three-volume survey of “the long nineteenth century”: The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, and The Age of Empire: 1874-1914. Read the rest of this entry »

The new issue is up.

Highlights: The editors on Vatican II, half a century later, and John Wilkins on collegiality after the council. Also, Gerald W. Schlabach identifies four lessons about religious freedom and Andrew J. Bacevich notes the lack of a credible peace candidate in American politics. Plus, reviews of Trouble With the Curve, starring Clint Eastwood, and Hope Springs, with Meryl Streep.

Also posted: the latest from E.J. Dionne, who identifies the challenges for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in this week’s presidential debate.

That sacred body known as the Crown Nominations Commission, a 16-member committee that meets in secret to choose the next Archbishop of Canterbury to head the Anglican Communion, is deadlocked. Via media Reuters:

After three days of talks behind closed doors in an undisclosed location, officials narrowed the field to three candidates, but will need to meet again to finish the job, the Sunday Times said, citing an unnamed senior cleric.

The choice of a replacement for Rowan Williams, who steps down in December, is critical for a church in danger of splitting over divisive issues such as gay marriage and senior women clergy, and facing a rising threat from secularism.

The Crown Nominations Commission (CNC), a church panel with 16 members whose chairman is appointed by the prime minister, had been expected to pick a preferred candidate and a second choice on Friday, a church source said last week.

The names were then due to be passed to Prime Minister David Cameron and Queen Elizabeth, supreme governor of the Church of England, before an official announcement within days, possibly on Wednesday.

In a brief statement, the church said a decision would be reached during the autumn. Officials had previously signaled that it could come as early as next week.

I have read that there are some calls for a synod to elect the next ABC. That sounds like a step in the right direction.