When I was in Catholic grade school (in the late 1980s-early '90s), I can remember being encouraged to pray for the intercession and eventual canonization of then-Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha. I don't know what inspired our teachers to bring her to our attention, besides her fairly recent beatification (in 1980). Maybe they were flush with success after the 1975 canonization of St. Elizabeth Seton -- the patron of Catholic schools, as we were so often reminded -- and were hoping to energize us with another American cause. Or perhaps they assumed, correctly in my case, that she was a figure who would appeal to our young imaginations: American like us and yet exotic, a figure who stood out from the crowd of saints with whom we were familiar; a laywoman, and young at that, when she made her courageous commitment to Christ. Probably, too, the story of Kateri fit in well with a curriculum, and as I recall a wider culture, that was heavy on the study of Native Americans -- a sudden burst of respectful attention to compensate for many decades of neglect and worse. As I look back, I remember learning a lot about American Indian nations and their ways of life in grade school: who lived where, in what sort of dwelling, wearing what, and so forth. As older kids we got more information about where all those noble tribes disappeared to, and why. I couldn't summon many details from my social-studies books now, but the general sense of respect and awe has stuck with me. (Of course, all that sensitivity training didn't stop me from dressing up as an Indian maiden for Halloween when I was eight or nine -- but I meant it as a tribute. I wanted to be like Kateri Tekakwitha. Plus, I had a hand-me-down costume with lots of tiny beads and leather fringe that was just so cool.)

Thus my ten-year-old self is very pleased that Kateri Tekakwitha has become a saint at last, though perhaps without much help from me. Kathleen Sprows Cummings's article in our June 1 issue (subscription required) is a fascinating look at the circumstances that led to her canonization last October, after a journey of more than a century. Cummings explains what made Kateri a promising candidate when the U.S. bishops opened her cause in 1884, and how her cause fell out of style in the generations that followed. Other home-grown saints surpassed her in popularity -- almost always women, hence the article's title, "Native Daughters" -- and Cummings proposes that their varying fortunes reveal something about the eras in which they were elevated. We like to think that there's a timeless standard of "holiness," and exemplars of that standard will be easily identifiable in any era. But as Cummings shows, different times call for different models of holiness, and the same person's story can be put to different uses depending on the needs of the day. It's another angle on the story of who gets to official sainthood, and when, and why.

As for Kateri Tekakwitha, she might never have been canonized had it not been for significant developments both in the Catholic Church and in American culture. One was the 1979 election of John Paul II, who streamlined the saint-making process, in part to give Catholics from nations without wealth or influence a better chance to secure saints of their own....

By then the Lily of the Mohawks symbolized something quite different from the Tekakwitha whose name had appeared on the Baltimore petition a century before. No longer an effective national symbol, she had reemerged as an ethnic one. Since the 1970s, Tekakwithas most enthusiastic devotees have been Native-American Catholics, both in Canada and in the United States. It is telling that while all U.S. church leaders had supported the 1884 petition that initiated her cause, only one issued a public statement when it finally succeeded: Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, the lone Native American in the hierarchy.

While celebrating the "tangible signs of inculturation" that greeted the canonization of Tekakwitha and Marianne Cope, Cummings also worries that "in 1884, canonization offered the American church divided then, as now, by ethnic and ideological conflict a way to rally behind a common goal. Today, canonization reveals just how tribal U.S. Catholicism has become." Read the article. What do you think?

Mike Konczal and Peter Frase take another look at the Universal Basic Income. Konczal:

Though establishing a basic income was once at the forefront of politics, it has since become more of a Utopian, abstract project. But sometimes it is helpful to step back from the day-to-day wonk work and think Utopian.

Samuel Goldman on "expressive consumerism," superficial inclusiveness, and economic inequality:

In our time,the stories of greater social equality and economic inequality are far from unrelated. Rather, social inclusion has been used to legitimize economic inequality by means of familiar arguments about meritocracy. According to this view, its fine that the road from Harvard Yard to Wall Street is paved with gold, so long a few representatives of every religion, color, and sexual permutation manage to complete the journey. Superficial diversity at the top thus provides an moral alibi for the gap between the one percent and the rest.

Michel Kinsley on "LGBT PC":

All you need to know is that Ben Carson opposes same-sex marriage. Case closed. Carson was supposed to be the graduation speaker at Johns Hopkins Medical School. There was a fuss, and Carson decided to withdrawas speaker. The obviously relieved dean nevertheless criticized Carson for being hurtful. His analysis of the situation was that the fundamental principle of freedom of expression has been placed in conflict with our core values of diversity, inclusion and respect. My analysis is that, at a crucial moment, the dean failed to defend a real core value of the university: tolerance.The universitys response was wrong for a variety of reasons. First, Carson isnt just another gasbag. He is director of pediatric neurosurgery at Hopkins. Pediatric neurosurgery! He fixes childrens brains. How terrible can a person be who does that for a living? Yes, I know the flaw in this thinking: There is no necessary connection. As a character says in Mel Brookss movie The Producers: der Fhrer vas a terrific dancer. But Carson didnt murder millions of people. All he did was say on television that he opposes same-sex marriagean idea that even its biggest current supporters had never even heard of a couple of decades ago. Does that automatically make you a homophobe and cast you into the outer darkness? It shouldnt. But in some American subculturesHollywood, academia, Democratic politicsit apparently does. You may favor raising taxes on the rich, increasing support for the poor, nurturing the planet, and repealing Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, but if you dont support gay marriage, youre out of the club.

The closer you get, the worse it looks.That seems to be the takeaway from a collection of surveys over the past year intended to gauge the response of Catholics to the new English translation of the Roman Missal. The controversial new English translation of the Roman Missal had its debut at the end of 2011, amid doubts of its ability to gain wide appeal. Give it a chance its advocates advised, youll get used to it.

A year later, when a CARA survey reported that 70% of lay Catholics in America agreed with the statement that The new translation is a good thing, it seemed these predictions were justified. To say that the translation is a good thing might seem to be a rather lukewarm endorsement, but these results were positive enough to be encouraging. Online polls conducted around the same time however revealed a more troubling picture, showing considerably more negative opinion, especially among priests, who arguably have the greatest investment in the new translation because of their role in the daily celebration of the liturgy. They use the Missal every day, and know its pluses and minuses better than anyone.

• The Tablet found that clergy gave the new translation very negative marks. Of the 1189 clergy who participated, 70% were unhappy with the translation and wished to see it revised. In a strange twist, considerable numbers of respondents who preferred the Extraordinary Form (which is in Latin) took the survey. 94% of them approved of the new translation. But 57% of those who preferred the Ordinary Form disliked it.
• US Catholic polled more than 1200 priests in a reader survey, and found that 58% agreed with the statement: I dislike the new translations and still cant believe Ill have to use them for the foreseeable future. 49% of Catholics in the pews also registered unhappiness with the translation whereas only 17% said they enjoy them as much as or more than the old translation.

Observers have taken the more critical Tablet and US Catholic results with a grain of salt. Yes, they indicate dissatisfaction, and especially strong dissatisfaction among clergy, but how reliable are these polls?

The results of a new study, released today, sets our knowledge of the opinions of priests on a firmer footing.

Now live on the website, the new issue of Commonweal.Among the highlights:Kathleen Sprows Cummings on the torturous path to sainthood of Native American Kateri Tekakwitha, a process that took more than a century and that offers an illuminating glimpse into American Catholic history:

U.S. Catholics attributed their lack of a patron to a dearth not of holiness but of influence. They argued that the modern process of canonization, implemented in the seventeenth century, disadvantaged those Catholics living on the churchs periphery, far from its center of wealth and power. Without monarchs or wealthy communities to undertake the long and often expensive investigations demanded at Rome, one American Catholic grumbled, it was little wonder that no one north of the Rio Grande had ever even been proposed for canonization. One American priest, Rev. Edward McSweeny, suggested that the Vatican appoint a special group of cardinals to glorify the hidden saints of countries whose people were too poor to sponsor a cause.There was no such simple remedy for the second obstacle U.S. Catholics saw thwarting them in their search for a native saint: anti-Catholicism in their own country. In seeking to elevate one of their own to the altars, North American Catholics would have to contend not only with a daunting and costly process but also with a Protestant supremacy that held them in contempt. Many outspoken anti-Catholics reserved special scorn for sainthood and viewed the prospect of an American saint as a travesty. In 1841, the politician and Presbyterian minister Robert Breckinridge had beseech[ed] God that no American papist may ever be corrupt, debased, and infamous enough during his life, to be esteemed by Rome worthy of being a saint in her calendar after his death.And indeed, the 1884 petition on behalf of Tekakwitha set off warning bells in some Protestant circles. Recognizing that the United States was now a step closer to a canonized saint, the editors of the Methodist Review warned that if Catholic immigration continued apace, American Protestants would soon have to tolerate not only the canonization of an inconspicuous Indian maiden but also an abundance of U.S. saints drawn from among the present superstitious masses of our country[Catholics] of Irish or Italian extraction.

Read it all here (subscription required).Also, Matthew Ashley reviews Jacques Dupuis Faces the Inquisition, which documents the travails and the courage of the late Jacques Dupuis, the Jesuit priest and theologian whose work on what he called a Christian theology of religious pluralism drew scrutiny from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith during the last decade of his life. From the review:

Dupuis approach to a theology of religious pluralism, while deemed insufficiently radical by many seminarians and theologians in India, was viewed in Rome as going too far. This negative reaction, first signaled by a 1992 book review of Jesus Christ at the Encounter of World Religions in Civilt Cattolica, culminated in an investigation of Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism by the CDF that began in June 1998; three months later, Dupuis received a notification that his book contained grave errors and doctrinal ambiguities on doctrines of divine and Catholic faith. In response to the notification Dupuis composed and submitted almost two-hundred pages of text; seven months later, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger responded that Dupuis answers were considered inadequate for preserving the doctrine of Catholic faith free from errors. More questions were posed, which Dupuis answered with another sixty pages. There followed many months of silence; then, in September 2000, Dupuis was summoned to the offices of the CDF, where he was asked to sign a draft of a notification that asserted propositions to be affirmed and errors to be rejectederrors imputed to his book without quotations or page references. The signed notification would have been published simultaneously with the CDFs own statement on the relationship between Christianity and other religions, Dominus Iesus. The apparent goal was a potent one-two punch intended to warn off theologians, such as Michael Amaladoss, Peter Phan, and Paul Knitter, who went further than Dupuis was willing to go.Dupuis found himself unable to sign. While he could agree to the positive statements he was required to affirm (noting, however, that they required further interpretationwith the implication that in so doing one could arrive at his theology) he noted that the alleged errors either misrepresented what I wrote or interpreted it in a way that went against my intention and meaning. The meeting ended in an impasse. A second draft, sent in December, stated its charges somewhat more temperately, downgrading grave errors and ambiguities to grave ambiguities and ambiguous formulations or insufficient explanations that could lead the reader into erroneous opinions. Reluctantly Dupuis agreed to sign, but included an explanation that his signature indicated he would later have to take into account the text of the declaration Dominus Iesus and of the notification. The CDF would have none of that, and when the signed notification was published in LOsservatore Romano it included an additional paragraph that Dupuis never saw, specifying that in signing the author committed himself to assent to the stated theses, and in his future theological activity and publications, to hold the doctrinal contents indicated in the notification. Observing the difference between take into account and assent and hold, Dupuis reflected, in typically understated fashion, that this procedure was of course, questionable.

You can read the whole thing here(subscription required).Also posted today, E. J. Dionne Jr. on how dissatisfaction and the erosion of engagement suggest there may be something especially flawed with our democracy:

Citizen dissatisfaction is hardly surprising in the wake of a deeply damaging economic downturn. That doesn't make the challenge any less daunting. We should consider whether democracy itself is in danger of being discredited. Politicians might usefully disentangle themselves from their day-to-day power struggles long enough to take seriously their responsibility to a noble idea and the systems that undergird it.

Read the whole thing here.