Creative Advance

Supreme Court and Bishops Double-Team to Assault the Rights of "Religious Employees"

2012-01-12T10:42:00.002-06:00

Two developments were in the news yesterday dealing with the rights of "religious employees," clergy and others employed by churches, synagogues and other religious organizations. While thus far I have not found any commentary linking the two developments, I think they are linked in a way that could eventually deny some religious employees any employment protection whatsoever.

The first development was the announcement of the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling that ministers and unspecified other religious employees may not sue churches for employment discrimination--even in a case that involved no doctrinal dispute, but rather a church school's failure to provide reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

The minister in this case was described as an ordained teacher at a grade school run by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in Michigan. But as noted by The Washington Post, the problem with the unanimous ruling written by Chief Justice Roberts was that the Supreme Court provided no definition of what constitutes a religious employee and no precise guidelines stating which church employees are covered by the decision and which are not. In fact, different justices offered concurring opinions, some trying to define "religious employee" and at least one saying he would leave the definition up to the churches.

The second development is what makes this lack of precision so dangerous. The very same day, four prominent U.S. Catholic bishops joined 35 other conservative religious leaders in issuing a letter claiming that forcing them to respect the rights of church employees who contract state recognized same-sex civil unions violates the churches' freedom of religion under the First Amendment.

The civil unions issue is in fact the only example cited in the letter. The letter contends that if religious organizations are forced to respect their employees' rights to a civil union, Religious employers would "face lawsuits for taking any adverse employment action -- no matter how modest -- against an employee for the public act of obtaining a civil 'marriage' with a member of the same sex. This is not idle speculation, as these sorts of situations have already come to pass," the letter said.

The specter of churches retaliating against their employees for exercising a right guaranteed to them by the state is clearly what these religious leaders hope to achieve. By failing to define which religious employees are covered by its expansive definition of the churches' religious freedom, the Supreme Court appears to be signaling its willingness to aid and abet the religious leaders' assault on their employees' civil rights.

Shame on these religious leaders for their bogus assertion that their organizational freedom of religion is more valuable and of greater importance than the religious freedom of their employees, or their employees' right not to suffer discrimination on the basis of religion, sex, or disability. And shame on the Supreme Court justices for not comprehending the establishment of religion their ruling portends.

Obama Can Salvage the Economy -- and His Presidency -- By Pushing for Simpson-Bowles

2011-11-23T11:18:00.001-06:00

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman posted an excellent analysis yesterday, arguing that the only way Barack Obama can salvage the economy -- and his presidency -- is by making the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction recommendations his own and fighting to implement them between now and election day. Friedman isn't the first or the only commentator to suggest this, but his arguments may be the most compelling anyone has made so far. And, for good measure, he includes criticism of Obama from none other than Warren Buffett, who is trying to tell the president that he's running out of options fast. Excerpts of the column follow.

President Obama has a clear choice on how to approach the 2012 election: He can spend all his energy defining Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or whoever ends up as the Republican nominee in as ugly a way as possible, or he can spend all his energy defining the future in as credible a way as possible. If he spends his energy defining his Republican opponent, there is a chance the president will win with 50.00001 percent of the vote and no mandate to do what needs doing. If he spends his time defining the future in a credible way and offering a hard, tough, realistic pathway to get there, he will not only win, but he will have a mandate to take the country where we need to go.

I voted for Barack Obama, and I don’t want my money back. He’s never gotten the credit he deserves for bringing the economy he inherited back from the brink of a depression. He’s fought the war on terrorism in a smart and effective way. He’s making health care possible for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions, and he saved the auto industry. This is big stuff. But, as important as all of these achievements are, they pale in comparison to the defining challenge of Obama’s presidency: Can he put the country on a sustainable economic recovery path at a time when, if we fail, it could be the end of the American dream?

I believe the best way for Obama to do that is by declaring today that he made a mistake in spurning his own deficit reduction commission, chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and is now adopting Simpson-Bowles — which already has Republican and Democratic support — as his long-term fiscal plan to be phased in after a near-term stimulus. If he did that, he would win politically and create a national consensus that would trump his opponents, right and left.

“I think what happened with Simpson-Bowles was an absolute tragedy,” Warren Buffett said on CNBC last week. “They work like a devil for 10 months. ... They compromise. They bring in people as far apart as [Democratic Senator Dick] Durbin and [Republican Senator Tom] Coburn to get them to sign on and then they’re totally ignored. I think that’s a travesty.”

I think America’s broad center understands very clearly that the country is in trouble and that the Republican Party has gone nuts. But when they look at Obama on the deficit, they feel something is missing. People know leadership when they see it — when they see someone taking a political risk, not just talking about doing so, not just saying, “I’ll jump if the other guy jumps.” In times of crisis, leaders jump first, lay out what truly needs to be done to fix the problem, not just to win re-election, and by doing so earn the right to demand that others do the same.

What would it look like if the president was offering such leadership? First, he’d be proposing a deficit-cutting plan that matches the scale of our problem — one with substantial tax reform and revenue increases, a gasoline tax, deep defense cuts and cutbacks to both Social Security and Medicare. That is the Simpson-Bowles plan, and it should be Obama’s new starting point for negotiations. The deficit plan Obama put out last September is nowhere near as serious.

Second, he’d offer a plan in which the wealthy have to pay their fair share and more, because they’ve had a great two decades. But everyone, including the middle class, has to contribute something. This has to be a national effort. Third, he would offer a plan that is aspirational. It would not just be a roadmap to balancing the budget but to making America great again through reignited economic growth.

My gut says that if the president lays out such a plan — one that begins with him taking all the political risks on himself and then demanding the G.O.P. and his own party follow — he will be both defining himself and the future in a way that would earn him so much centrist support and respect that it would leave every possible Republican opponent in the dust, no matter how obstructionist they are or want to be.

Go big, Mr. President. You will win, and so will America.

On Second Thought: Devil Doesn't Make Gays Do It, Catholic Newspaper Decides

2011-11-04T11:43:00.000-05:00

The Pilot, which is the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, now says "our bad" regarding a column it published October 28th that made the devil responsible for same-sex attraction.

A low-level staffer for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops evidently authored the piece. He says it was "not authorized for publication"--although one might wonder who authorized him to write it at all.

However, the newspaper's editors and even a spokesperson for the archdiocese have all been quick to say that the devil-theory is a theological error that is not the position of the Catholic Church. A Jesuit priest chimed in to agree that The Pilot was right to retract the column and apologize for running it.

The following is The Huffington Post's coverage of the faux pas:

A controversial column suggesting same-sex attraction was the work of the devil has been retracted from the country's oldest Catholic newspaper.

The piece by Daniel Avila, an associate director for policy and research for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was published in The Pilot on Oct. 28 and was pulled from the publication's website Wednesday, Nov. 2 accompanied by an apology, The Associated Press reports.

The nearly 900-word column ponders the origin of homosexual attraction from a "born this way" standpoint. It stated:

Disruptive imbalances in nature that thwart encoded processes point to supernatural actors who, unlike God, do not have the good of persons at heart.

In other words, the scientific evidence of how same-sex attraction most likely may be created provides a credible basis for a spiritual explanation that indicts the devil...

...whenever natural causes disturb otherwise typical biological development, leading to the personally unchosen beginnings of same-sex attraction, the ultimate responsibility, on a theological level, is and should be imputed to the evil one, not God.

Avila later stated that the commentary was "not authorized for publication" and that he apologized for the "hurt and confusion" the piece caused. In an editor's note, the publication said it was sorry for "having failed to recognize the theological error in the column."

"As we absorbed what was in the paper, we said, 'Whoa, that's a problem' Terrence Donilon, a spokesperson for the archdiocese told the Boston Globe about the column. "That's not the position of the church or the archdiocese."

Avila also acknowledged that he does not support unjust treatment or violence toward anyone.

A printed apology will appear in this week's issue of the publication, the Boston Globe reports.

UPDATE: 12:42 p.m. --

Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest, supports The Pilot's decision to retract the column.

"Satan doesn't create homosexuality any more than Satan creates heterosexuality," Martin told The Huffington Post in an email. "God creates gays and lesbians, loves them into being, and love them into eternity.

"Opining that their sexuality comes from satanic forces seems to be in opposition to the Catechism," he added.

"Stick to Being Bulls. Stop Being Pigs." -- Thomas Friedman Advises the Top 1%

2011-11-03T10:35:00.004-05:00

In his column published in the Houston Chronicle on October 30th, New York Times writer Thomas Friedman, a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, pinpointed exactly why the Occupy Wall Street protests have found such resonance, both across the United States and around the globe: like the Arab Spring protesters in Tharir Square in Cairo, Occupy Wall Street is primarily a cry for fundamental economic justice.

Friedman says that despite causing the economic collapse and arousing the animosity of the public and progressives in Congress, the large U.S. banks and other Wall Street institutions still don't get it. He suggests that they pay attention and repent--before things get really ugly. And since repentance seems unlikely, he also proposes four essential reforms--none of which the financial services industry, or their cronies in Congress, will like.

The second half of Friedman's column follows (reformatted in places for added emphasis).

Our financial industry has grown so large and rich it has corrupted our real institutions through political donations. As Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, bluntly said in a 2009 radio interview, despite having caused this crisis, these same financial firms "are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they, frankly, own the place."

Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.

We can't afford this any longer. We need to focus on four reforms that don't require new bureaucracies to implement.

1) If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big and needs to be broken up. We can't risk another trillion-dollar bailout.

2) If your bank's deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can't do any proprietary trading with those deposits - period.

3) Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges where we can see if another AIG is building up enormous risk.

4) Finally, an idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like NASCAR drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they're taking money from.

Capitalism and free markets are the best engines for generating growth and relieving poverty - provided they are balanced with meaningful transparency, regulation and oversight. We lost that balance in the last decade. If we don't get it back - and there is now a tidal wave of money resisting that - we will have another crisis. And, if that happens, the cry for justice could turn ugly.

Free advice to the financial services industry: Stick to being bulls. Stop being pigs.

Canon Lawyer Disputes Expelling Priest for Supporting Women's Ordination

2011-10-06T09:55:00.009-05:00

It has been three years since the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith told Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois--for decades a widely respected Catholic peace activist--that he had 30 days to recant his public support for ordaining women or face automatic excommunication.

Although Bourgeois said that as a matter of conscience he could not accept the official Roman teaching that women may not be ordained, the Vatican never declared that he had been excommunicated. However, in March of 2011 his religious order said it was dismissing him for "publicly rejecting the teaching of the Holy Father." Maryknoll has yet to carry out the threat.

More recently, however, Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, better known for his advocacy on behalf of victims of clerical sexual abuse, has written a letter to Maryknoll's Superior General, questioning both the legality and the appropriateness of the order's announced action again Bourgeois--and the Vatican ultimatum that preceded it.

The following is coverage of Doyle's argument by Tom Roberts, editor at large for the National Catholic Reporter. The points Doyle makes are also important because they challenge the insistence of some that the recent papal teaching on women's ordination is infallible--when in fact is most certainly is not. Bourgeois is not the only church leader who has been disciplined over that claim.

Fr. Roy Bourgeois recently took another step in his fight to remain a member of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, when he asked his superiors to engage reputable theologians to reconsider issues stemming from his support for the ordination of women.

"In spite of the apparently clear orders of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the related norms of church law, the overall situation with Roy is anything but clear-cut and simple,” Dominican Fr. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer representing Bourgeois, wrote in an Aug. 16 letter to Fr. Edward Dougherty, Maryknoll’s superior general. Doyle is most widely known for his advocacy on behalf of victims of sexual abuse by clergy.

Doyle contends that the church’s prohibition of female ordination is not infallible teaching and asks in his letter “that the assistance and input of reputable theologians be sought in order to look much more deeply” into two central issues: the church’s claim that the teaching is infallible and the right of a Catholic “to act and think according to the dictates of his conscience” even if the conclusions put one in conflict with the church’s highest authorities.

Doyle also argues that the punishment of excommunication and expulsion from the society is disproportionate. As a comparison, he notes that priests and bishops who sexually abused children and/or covered up the abuse have not been excommunicated.

In response to a question, Maryknoll spokesman Mike Virgintino said that Doyle’s letter had been received and that the general council had not yet responded to it “but will review his letter and will respond to him at earliest opportunity.”

In October 2008, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith gave Bourgeois, who had participated in a woman’s ordination ceremony, 30 days to recant his “belief and public statements that support ordination of women” or face automatic excommunication. Bourgeois never recanted, saying he could not in good conscience do so.

Whether the priest was formally excommunicated is unclear, because the Vatican never issued a public statement to that effect. At the same time, while never responding directly to Bourgeois, doctrinal congregation officials have communicated with Maryknoll, a society founded 100 years ago to train priests to work in foreign missions.

In a July 27 letter to Bourgeois, Dougherty warned the priest a second time that if he continued his “campaign in favor of women priests and failed to recant publicly your position on the matter” he faced dismissal from the order. Bourgeois was given 15 days from reception of the letter to recant or the dismissal proceedings would begin. However, the letter also noted that Bourgeois had the right to defend himself against the warning and the proposed dismissal.

In an interview with NCR, Doyle said his intent in filing a response with Dougherty was to have the order “take a deep breath and step back from starting the process.” He said there were substantial issues that should be considered by the society’s leadership and members.

In one of several documents filed with Dougherty between Aug. 15 and Aug. 30, Doyle explains that Bourgeois’ defense is based on two rationales: first, Bourgeois’ right to not violate his conscience and, second, his conviction that ordination of women is not an infallible teaching.

Doyle said Bourgeois believes the teaching is not “so essential to the core beliefs of Catholic Christians that to question or reject it is tantamount to a rejection of the fundamental teachings of Jesus Christ which form the core of Catholicism as a people of God.”

Bourgeois’ view of women’s ordination “is shared by countless others, including scripture scholars, theologians and church historians from among the ranks of the laity, priesthood and episcopacy,” Doyle said.

Bourgeois formed his views, Doyle said, “in an unselfish and honest manner, well-aware of the consequences of taking a position that is contrary to the present and past pope as well as most (at least) of the Vatican curia.” At the same time, argues Doyle, there is “no evidence of either consensus or unanimity among theologians, scripture scholars and bishops” that the ban on women’s ordination is “solidly grounded” in either tradition or teaching of the church, as asserted by the late Pope John Paul II in his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.

"There is a massive body of scholarly work,” writes Doyle, “that credibly challenges the assertion that Jesus ordained anyone as priests and an equally credible and persuasive body of scholarly work that can find no consistent and continuous theological tradition that would support the preclusion of women from sacred orders, other than the tradition that official power in the church has been held by men.”

Doyle also challenged imposition of the punishment of automatic excommunication, saying it did not conform to the requirements of canon law in this case because Bourgeois’ actions do not involve a “malicious disregard” for church authority but rather his belief “that to act contrary to the dictates of his conscience … would be tantamount to a serious sin on his part.”

In a separate document, Doyle submitted a list of quotes from St. Thomas Aquinas, Vatican documents, and the Gospel of Matthew upholding the primacy of conscience in Catholic teaching.

In the same vein, said Doyle, Bourgeois’ actions have not “gravely harmed” anyone, nor has anyone lost belief in God or been “so physically or emotionally damaged that he or she has been deprived of the ability to lead a happy and productive life” because of Bourgeois’ convictions or actions.

In contrast, Doyle notes some 20 members of the hierarchy in the United States, 15 in Europe and three in Canada, including some cardinals, “have been confirmed by credible sources to have committed the canonical delict named in canon 1395.2, that is, the sexual molestation of minors, or the crime mentioned in Title V of the Papal Instruction Crimen Sollicitationis, in force until May 18, 2001, namely sex with men.”

Those infractions, said Doyle, carry a punishment up to and including dismissal from the clerical state.

Yet no member of the hierarchy to date has undergone even a papal investigation, said Doyle, “much less any form of penal sanction. … To this date no archbishop, cardinal or bishop who has violated both canon law and civil law by sheltering known sexual abusers among the clergy or by knowingly reassigning known molesters to other assignments where they could and often did continue to violate the vulnerable, has been asked to resign, much less face justified canonical investigation and prosecution.”

Even among the thousands of priests across the globe who have been credibly accused of molesting minors or convicted in criminal proceedings, not one has been excommunicated, said Doyle, though most have been removed from the clergy ranks.

“The contrast is striking: Thirty-eight bishops who have committed grave sexual crimes which have resulted in serious emotional and spiritual damage to innocent Catholics have faced no disciplinary action, while four bishops who have followed their consciences and publicly questioned Vatican practices or doctrine out of concern for the spiritual welfare of the faithful have not only been humiliated but removed from office."

Doyle concludes by asking on Bourgeois’ behalf that the process that has arrived at an ultimatum “be seriously and fearlessly re-evaluated” by outside theologians against the backdrop of concerns raised in his correspondence.

After listing several links to earlier coverage, NCR appended the following to Roberts' article:

Statements of the primacy of conscience

In a separate document to Maryknoll Fr. Edward Dougherty, Fr. Thomas Doyle submitted a list of quotes from St. Thomas Aquinas, Vatican documents, and the Gospel of Matthew upholding the primacy of conscience in Catholic teaching. Following are a few selections from Doyle’s letter.

“Conscience is more to be obeyed than authority imposed from the outside. By following a right conscience you not only do not incur sin but are also immune from sin, whatever superiors may say to the contrary. To act against one's conscience and to disobey a superior can both be sinful. Of the two, the first is the worse since the dictate of conscience is more binding than the decree of external authority.” [St. Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 17, a.5]

“Every judgment of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, in such a way that anyone who acts against his conscience always sins.” [St. Thomas Aquinas, Questiones quodlibetales, 3, q. 12, a.2]

“Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, tells him inwardly at the right moment: do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. His dignity lies in observing this law and by it he will be judged. His conscience is man's most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths. By conscience in a wonderful way, that law is made know which is fulfilled in the love of God and of one's neighbor.” (Gaudium et Spes, no. 16)

"Over the pope as expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there stands one's own conscience which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority. This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even the official church, also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism." (Josef Ratzinger, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, 1967)

Risking All on Cherishing the Gift of a Common Creation as Our Common Good

2011-09-22T10:20:00.005-05:00

Jeff Dietrich, a member of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community, had an excellent essay in the September 2nd print edition of the National Catholic Reporter, reminding us that the traditional Catholic emphasis on our duty to promote the common good traces back to creation as God's common gift to all creatures--and that grasping that and living it could do a lot to fix what's wrong with our world.

A longer version of the article originally appeared in the June edition of The Catholic Agitator, where Dietrich is editor. Most of the NCR version is below:

The recent vitriolic debate in Congress about raising the debt ceiling, the rancor at paying taxes for other people’s health care, the thought that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid might be cut, and public education dismantled, the destruction of unions, and the denigration of voices calling for mutual responsibility all reflect the degree to which the values of the marketplace have displaced our sense of the common good.

When I think of the common good, I think of the commons, the common land worked communally in pre-Renaissance Europe, and I think of Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, who still had a memory of the commons -- a memory of medieval times, forged by his early village years in a part of France that was slow to develop and still lived by the old values and rhythms.

Lewis Hyde tells us in his now classic book, The Gift, that this way of life was largely destroyed throughout most of Europe, and he reminds us that it was the Reformation that changed everything. In 1525 the Peasants’ War, precipitated by the liberative aspects of the Reformation, was at its height in Germany. Hyde writes, “Germany had seen over a hundred years of unrest as feudalism faded and [Lutheran] princes began to consolidate their power by territory. ... The basis of land tenure had shifted. ... Now men claimed to own the [common] land and offered to rent it for a fee.”

Thus the mass displacement of commoners from the common land, driven by capitalism, led to an unprecedented increase of impoverished people from rural areas migrating to the plague-infested slums of large European cities, there to be exploited as cheap labor for the industrial revolution and consumers of its mass-produced commodities.

Hyde describes the Europeans’ export to the New World of this same process of displacement of commoners and commodification of the commons: “The Peasants’ War was the same war that the American Indians had to fight with the Europeans, war against the marketing of formerly inalienable properties. Whereas before a man could fish in any stream and hunt in any forest, now he found that there were individuals who claimed to be the owners of these commons.”

Like the Native Americans, the ancestors of our Judeo-Christian tradition were also tribal people. The 12 tribes of ancient Israel, our forefathers, escaped slaves from the “overdeveloped” Egyptian empire, understood that “development” and exploitation of common creation was the primary sin of humanity. They incorporated the understanding of the gift of common creation to all from the Creator God into their very laws. “Don’t take more than you need. Make sure everyone has enough. Don’t work on the Sabbath” (Exodus 16:16-30).

The Sabbath day prohibitions call us to stop and rest in creation, as did the Native Americans, who were regarded by European settlers as lazy. It is all gift, and the more we work the more we delude ourselves into thinking that what we have is what we earned and that we deserve what is in reality a gift. That is the meaning of Sabbath.

The church’s doctrine of the common good filters down to us through the scriptures. However, its moral formulation was birthed during the feudal era, a time of peasants who, like Peter Maurin, lived off the common lands and were displaced by the lords and princes of this world. The Robin Hood story of Sherwood Forest is an old memory of that struggle. Our collective longings for primeval trees, large-eyed deer and doe, and the shining salmon surging up crystal streams recall a time when the gift of creation was common to us all.

Hyde tells us that we should understand gift as a “total social phenomenon -- one whose transactions are at once economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythical, and whose meaning cannot, therefore, be adequately described from the point of view of any single discipline.” The meaning of the gift, he says, is always enshrouded in mystery. However, the doctrine of the common good can be seen as not mysterious, but rational and reductionistic.

Yet, as Catholics, we are marked in our hearts and souls by mystery--the mystery of the Eucharist.

Hyde has helped me to understand the mystery of the Eucharist, the mystery of gratitude. And it makes no difference whether we believe in the traditional eucharistic doctrine of “transubstantiation,” or we believe in the “unbloody sacrifice of Calvary,” or we believe that we simply “share a meal, a common meal, so that all might be satisfied.” It is still mystery.

And mystery, Hyde says, “revives and refreshes” and marks us as people of the gift and the common good, causing us to remember the startling words of Isaiah: “Why work for that which is not food? Why give your life for what does not satisfy?” I also think of Dorothy Day, who at the end of her life could say, “All is grace, all is grace, all is gift and grace.” Hyde quotes Thomas Merton, who says, “Grace and gift flow to the empty places, grace flows to the poor beggar with the empty bowl,” and the mystery of the Eucharist is that gift and grace flow back from the empty places, softening the hardest hearts.

As Catholics, we know intuitively and irrationally that our redemption, our very salvation, is bound up with softening hearts and the mutual reciprocity of gift that flows to the empty places. We are all people marked by mystery and the gift of the common good that surpasses all understanding and flies under the radar of logic and rationality, striking the core of our being. We know that in some mysterious way we are all connected, that we are all in communion, that as Dorothy Day would say, “An injury to one is an injury to us all.”

In addition, we know that the rancor, rhetoric and rectitude of the current public discourse is not our language. We know that our mother tongue is the language of soft hearts, of gift and grace and Eucharist. We know that we cannot be whole until all empty bowls of the poor are filled and all empty spaces are filled -- until the hills are brought down and the valleys are filled.

We cannot be satisfied until all are satisfied.

Times are tough. The commons will continue to be rapaciously “developed” for the profit of the few; the poor will continue to be evicted from the commons and marginated from the common good. Wealthy capitalists will try to commodify and control every element that is common to our common humanity: food, water, earth and even the air; and then they will try to sell it back to us for a profit.

We live in a perilous time, a time that calls for perilous action, but we cannot save the world. As Christians we are enjoined to believe that the world has already been saved, as absurd as that notion may seem. In the words of St. Teresa of Avila, “The worst is already over.”

If we believe such pie-in-the-sky nonsense, we have only one choice: We are compelled to live our lives as a testament to that very nonsense. We have to fly like a bird under the radar of marketplace rationality and marketplace logos and risk the derision, diminishment and dismissal that come to fools who take it all seriously. We have to risk everything on the importance of the common good and put ourselves in the flow of the gift relationship, into the mystery of the Eucharist that is celebrated, however improbably, in such disparate places as Sunday suburban parishes, ghetto hovels, prison cells, papal palaces, and, yes, the basements of tawdry soup kitchens.

Don't Blame the EPA for Luminant Job Losses; Blame Perry's Failed Deregulation

2011-09-14T14:13:00.000-05:00

In the print edition of today's Houston Chronicle business columnist Loren Steffy has a characteristically prescient take the lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency by Luminant, Texas' largest power plant operator.

Luminant, in bed with presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry, contends that the agency's stricter air quality standards will cause it to close two coal-fired power generating facilities and lay off 500 employees. But Steffy suggests other culprits:

Given that NRG, the second-biggest generator in the state, says it will comply with the EPA regulations without any layoffs or plant closings, the Luminant job losses would not be caused by the EPA but by Luminant's financial problems. And, unfortunately, those can be traced directly to Texas' failed attempt at deregulation of electric companies, championed by none other than Gov. Perry himself.

I have looked in vain for an electronic link to Steffy's column. If one eventually becomes available, I will include it in a comment on this posting.

Rick Perry Has Put Texas in Debt $21 Billion to Build Roads--and Plans $10 Billion More!

2011-08-04T10:10:00.002-05:00

Texas Governor Rick Perry has continued flitting around the country, proclaiming the superiority of the Texas economy over just about everyone elses and taking credit for balancing the Texas budget without raising any new revenues. He's also a constant conservative critic of federal spending and borrowing.

Nay-sayers have pointed out that Perry never acknowledges taking federal stimulus money to balance the state's previous budget--even though he could not have balanced it without the federal funds.

Now comes the revelation that Perry, in addition to gorging himself at the federal trough, has since 2001 also saddled Texans with $21 billion in indebtedness for new road construction -- and plans to raise the number to $31 billion during his current term!

Here's the story, from yesterday's Houston Chronicle, authored by Jim Dunnam, a former Texas state representative and senior fellow at The Texas First Foundation, which aims to put what is right for Texas ahead of partisan politics.

With all our attention focused on the federal debt-ceiling debacle in Washington, it is easy to ignore our own state debt crisis here in Texas. Texas' debt is increasing at a rate that rivals the federal government's, yet no one seems to know it.

We have heard how our new Texas budget cuts more than $4 billion from our schools and students, but not about our ballooning state debt.

Before Rick Perry became governor, Texas was a pay-as-you-go state for roads, meaning we used current gas tax receipts to pay for new road construction. Our forefathers set up a system where transportation needs were paid for then and now, not by passing the buck to future generations. Under Gov. Perry, all that changed.

Starting in 2001, Texas started borrowing money for new road construction, pushing that cost onto future taxpayers. In just a decade, this debt has grown from zero to $11.9 billion. With interest payments, future taxpayers and our children will need 20 years and $21.1 billion to pay off that debt. There is even more about to be borrowed. In all, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) has authority to borrow $17.3 billion, with a 30-year payoff of $31.1 billion, further shifting the burden to our children.

To make matters worse, new transportation debt is being secured by general state revenue, not just the gas tax. The exact same taxes we use to pay for public education, state universities and health care are now being diverted to make bond and interest payments on this debt. Imagine what future Texans could do without being saddled with $14 billion in interest payments over the next generation. They might not have to take money out of their public schools or health care. They might even have a real tax cut some day.

This debt is as potentially crushing on the future of Texas as the federal debt is for our United States. Texas' borrowing has gotten so bad that we are now spending more annually on debt service than we are paying for new roads. According to TxDOT's latest figures, we will spend $1.72 billion on debt payments over the next two years, compared to $1.28 billion for new roads. Just like Washington, Austin is borrowing and spending away our future.

Texas should have never gotten away from the pay-as-you-go system for roads. Our tax system is inefficient and broken. Instead of fixing our broken revenue structure, changing the 20-year-old gas tax methodology, or closing tax loopholes, nearly all of our future infrastructure needs are to be funded by borrowing from the future generation of Texans.

With infrastructure needs only expected to grow, TxDOT continuing to issue bonds is unsustainable. Soon, all funds will be needed just to service the debt and pay interest, leaving nothing for future needs. In fact, bond rating agencies are already looking negatively upon toll road debt in the states, so even that favored option of Perry's will be gone.

Texas' political leadership likes to flaunt our balanced budget and admonish the federal government for its lack thereof. But those leaders are living in a giant glass house and deceiving Texans. The balance in Texas' budget is achieved largely through accounting tricks and debt, both of which shift the burden to future taxpayers. Genuine equalization between revenue and spending levels is nowhere near the truth about Texas' budget.

Today's successful Texas politicians shout, "No new taxes," then cut public education and health care for children, use accounting tricks to delay bills and advance receipts, then pat themselves on the back for balancing the budget. In the meantime, they quietly saddle future generations with billions in new debt obligations. Their borrowing means our children will pay nearly double tomorrow for what they are unwilling to pay for our needs today. Our parents did not do that to us, and we should be ashamed for betraying that legacy.

Texas needs roads, and we also need education. We have to have an honest conversation about how we can balance these needs without extreme cuts and without simply putting it all off for others to deal with.

Most Who Get Government Benefits Fail to See Themselves as Government Beneficiaries

2011-07-28T10:24:00.003-05:00

Clarence Page had a great column on July 20th that took off from the incongruity of Michele Bachmann ranting against government programs while her own family has benefited from them significantly. But the main point of the column was that Bachmann is not untypical of thousands of other Americans who also fail to see how much they benefit from government programs.

The only caveat I would raise is that there are many different kinds of government benefits -- from those to which people should feel entitled because they have specifically paid into them, to those that help people who have served their country in the military, to those which aim to promote home ownership and education, to those designed to help the poor through expenditure of other peoples' tax revenue. Given this variety, it is possible for people to value some of the programs more than others. But otherwise, Page's point stands. Some of his paragraphs follow:

A substantial number of Americans who say they support cutting government programs don't realize just how much they benefit from them.

Many who receive government benefits either don't believe or don't understand that they are government beneficiaries, according to a study last year by Cornell University political scientist Suzanne Mettler.

Those who incorrectly identified themselves as not receiving government help included 60 percent of homeowners who qualify for a mortgage-interest deduction, 53 percent of those who hold government-backed student loans, 47 percent of those who qualified for the Earned Income Tax Credit, 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 40 percent of Medicare recipients and 27 percent of Americans receiving welfare or Medicaid benefits.

As a mortgage payer, I was not surprised to hear that homeowners and student loan borrowers were least likely to see themselves as receiving a government benefit. After all, we work hard to pay off our loans. That makes it harder for us to think of tax breaks and government loan guarantees as "benefits," a term that today's political conversations tend to equate with "handouts" — even in some liberal circles.

Cornell's Mettler refers to such popular programs and policies as "the submerged state," a social welfare system that is virtually hidden in a wide array of popular policies aimed at incentivizing and subsidizing incomes, education, home-owning and other productive activities.

The reasons for the camouflage are political and practical. For example, liberals and conservatives alike find the Earned Income Tax Credit to be more popular than welfare payments as a way to fight poverty, reward work and help the poor become economically independent. But it's still a government program, even if almost half of its recipients don't realize it.

Government Can Stimulate Demand--and Should--Rice's Baker Institute Says

2011-07-28T10:04:00.004-05:00

The Houston Chronicle on July 24, 2011, posted an op-ed column entitled "Government can stimulate demand." The print version on July 25th carried the sub-head, "Now is not the time for fiscal prudence."

The analysis argues that the economy is in deep trouble, and there is only one entity that can help it grow:

"Consumption is an unlikely source of growth. Given high levels of unemployment and consumer debt, the household sector is not in a position to power a robust recovery. Neither is the business sector. Businesses are not going to invest without some convincing signs that expenditures by other sectors are increasing. It doesn't make sense to invest in additional capacity when there is no demand for the new output. Finally, the rest of the world is not going to bail out the U.S. economy. U.S. exports have grown a little over the past year, but with contractionary policies being pursued in many countries, including Europe and even China, exports cannot be counted on to drive the economy. Besides, if the U.S. economy does start to recover, its imports will increase, partially offsetting the stimulus effect of exports.

"That leaves the government sector."

This, of course, makes perfect sense to me. And it is something that Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has argued for years.

What is remarkable about the Houston Chronicle column is that it is authored by two scholars from the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. For scholars at a conservative Republican think tank to come to this conclusion is truly eye-opening -- and just another marker of the national Republican Party's total disconnect from fiscal and political reality.

Duplicitus Rex: Prayer-a-Palooza Perry Reprises "Let's Do the Flip-Flop Again"

2011-07-20T11:06:00.010-05:00

Political columnist Lisa Falkenberg had an excellent commentary in yesterday's print edition of the Houston Chronicle on how often Texas voters have allowed Rick Perry to change his mind on important political issues over the last 20 years.

Unfortunately, since the Chronicle has thus far not seen fit to post the column on-line, we'll have to rely on my typing skills to give it the internet presence it deserves. The column is below, followed by a link to the Chronicle's take on Stephen Colbert's suggestion that the best running mate for Perry would be ... GOD!

The latest breathless dispatch from the Rick Perry presidential watch beat is that the governor told the Des Moines Register he's getting "more and more comfortable every day that this is what I've been called to do."

Now, if Perry really believes he's being called, I won't blame the Lord, whom Perry has falsely accused before. Recall that unfortunate Gulf oil spill that Perry famously blamed on "an act of God."

And there's always a chance the governor didn't hear quite right. It could have been a bad connection, like the time Perry prayed for rain and we got the worst drought since the 1950s.

That being said, it doesn't surprise me one bit that Perry would suddenly become"more comfortable" with the idea of leading a country he once flirted with seceding from.

If our governor is consistent about anything (other than good hair days) it's his penchant for changing his mind. Call it flip-flopping. Call it hypocrisy. But nobody does it better than our Perry.

It is, for me, the single most irritating thing about Texas' longest surviving governor. But it's also one of his best weapons. While other candidates may be bound by silly, old-fashioned things like truth, and principle and vertebrae, Perry -- the Democrat-turned Republican-turned Tea Party Darlin' -- is free to be whoever he needs to be in any given polling period.

He's an anti-government crusader who's a career politician who's collected a government paycheck for 20 years.

He's a fiscal conservative who called on lawmakers to make up a budget shortfall in the tens of billions by living within our means. Yet he's charging taxpayers $10,000 a month for a 6,386-square-foot rental mansion in the West Austin hills with seven baths and $1,000 Neiman Marcus window coverings.

He railed against federal stimulus funding, then took credit from a misinformed Fox news host who applauded him for not taking "any stimulus money," when, in fact, he signed a biennial budget in 2009 plugged with $12.1 billion in stimulus funding.

During the last gubernatorial campaign, Perry made a big do-to about so-called "sanctuary cities" like Houston when, by his own standards, he's the governor of a sanctuary state. Houston officers don't ask about immigration status in the field, but neither do troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Perry opposed the federal health care reform act, but considers it an "emergency" for government to force a woman considering an abortion to have a medically unnecessary sonogram.

While the governor is perfectly comfortable with government micromanaging women's wombs, he's appalled by such overreach in the form of, say, a bill that would have banned texting while driving. Our proudly "pro-life" governor saw nothing wrong with vetoing the anti-texting measure that would have surely saved lives.

The good Christian governor wears his faith like a campaign bumper sticker, and makes headlines with events like the upcoming prayer-a-palooza at Reliant. But when it comes to putting his money where his mouth is? The Chronicle's Gary Scharrer reported recently that, of the $2.68 million he's earned since he became governor, only half of a percent went to churches and religious organizations.

He's Fed Up with the federal government, and even wrote a book saying so. Texas can take care of itself, he says. He wants Washington out of his life, he says. Unless of course, he needs it. Like in the case of a wild fire, or when his political ambitions have grown too big even for Texas.

The subtitle of Perry's recent book is Our Fight to Save America from Washington. If Perry gets in, it'll be up to those of us who know him to save Washington from Perry.

http://blog.chron.com/believeitornot/2011/07/colbert-wants-to-see-a-perry-god-ticket/

Liturgist Writes Scathing Critique of New U.S. Missal Dictated by Rome

2011-07-12T10:31:00.004-05:00

Christians devoted to authentic liturgy and the authentic exercise of liturgical authority should be grateful to the National Catholic Reporter for publicizing an experienced liturgist's "searing critique of the New Roman Missal translation set to take effect in November." The critique by Rita Ferrone, author of several books on the liturgy, appears in the latest edition of Commonweal magazine.

Ferrone blames the sad shape of the new English translation on misuse of authority by the Vatican, a questionable set of liturgical translation principles decreed by the last two popes, and above all a reactionary drive to reverse the most significant liturgical reforms promulgated by the world's Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council. Ferrone offers examples of the translation's failings, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and shows how they result inexorably from Rome's failure to respect the experiences of local Catholics at public prayer.

I'll join NCR is highlighting the three concluding paragraphs of Ferrone's critique, which nicely summarize her point-by-point indictment of Rome's abusive meddling in liturgical decisions that, according to Vatican II, should rightly be made only by local bishops and their national conferences.

Where is this new translation taking us? It is important to realize that negative responses to the new translation reflect both dismay at the wording of the text and disagreement with the principles that guided its production. Yet the conflict goes deeper than an argument over theories of translation. That the new translation of the Roman Missal should come to us replete with embarrassing gaffes, nonsensical passages, and a near-total lack of accountability is as clearly a symptom of the misuse of authority as it is the fault of the questionable set of translation principles enunciated in Liturgiam authenticam. Yet even the misuse of authority is not the root cause of the immense disquiet and even outrage that this translation has aroused.

Beneath the words of the new translation, one senses a drive to minimize the practical effects of Vatican II. The reforms of Vatican II prized clarity and intelligibility in the liturgy; they gave priority to the work of ecumenism and evangelization; they respected the local work of bishops conferences; they invited aggiornamento and engagement with the world. This vital heritage is being eclipsed by another agenda. We are seeing a wooden loyalty to the Latin text at the price of clarity and intelligibility. We are seeing a retreat from advances already made in ecumenism. We are seeing the proper role of local bishops and bishops conferences increasingly taken over by the authorities in Rome. We are seeing the liturgy reimagined as an event taking place in some sacral space outside of our world, rather than the beating heart of a world made new.

Yes, we can get used to the new translation of the Roman Missal. But we shouldn’t. The church can do better, and deserves better, than this.

David Brooks: GOP "Not Fit to Govern" If Their Fanaticism Causes Debt Default

2011-07-07T09:57:00.004-05:00

New York Times columnist David Brooks, who has decades-long credentials as a conservative but rationale Republican, took advantage of the 4th of July to repudiate the tea-bagger wing of the GOP as "an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evidence and the ancient habits of our nation."

Brooks' verdict: "If the debt-ceiling talks fail... independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

"And they will be right."

The last three-quarters of Brooks' column follow. The paragraphs are the best multi-count indictment I have seen for detailing how completely the tea-bagger Republicans have separated themselves from reality and from the values that characterize America. And in a religious assessment I very much share, he finds their "sacred fixation" on never raising taxes nothing less than idol-worship.

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases.

A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without putting any real crimp in economic growth.

The party is not being asked to raise marginal tax rates in a way that might pervert incentives. On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.

The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.

But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures. Manufacturing employment is cratering even as output rises, but members of this movement somehow believe such problems can be addressed so long as they continue to worship their idol.

Over the past week, Democrats have stopped making concessions. They are coming to the conclusion that if the Republicans are fanatics then they better be fanatics, too.

The struggles of the next few weeks are about what sort of party the G.O.P. is — a normal conservative party or an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evidence and the ancient habits of our nation.

If the debt ceiling talks fail, independent voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

And they will be right.

Vatican's Nostalgia for Eucharistic Adoration an Attempt to Return to "Ocular Communion"

2011-06-17T14:59:00.003-05:00

The National Catholic Reporter yesterday posted Religion News Service coverage of Vatican attempts to inject new life into discredited practices of eucharistic adoration. It was heartening to read that several reputable theologians share my view that such devotions are inimical to a genuine understanding of the eucharist as a sacred meal. As a meal, it does not lend itself to being captured in a monstrance and worshipped as though it were a sacred thing or, even worse, the physical presence of Jesus himself.

Excerpts from the article follow. I eliminate paragraphs in which various right-wing Catholics try to defend eucharistic adoration. Those nostalgic for such theological claptrap can link to NCR's full coverage.

For seven centuries, Eucharistic adoration—praying before an exposed consecrated Communion host—was one of the most popular forms of devotion in the Roman Catholic Church, the focus of beloved prayers and hymns and a distinctive symbol of Catholic identity.

Following the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the practice fell from favor, especially in Europe and the U.S. But over the last decade, under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the church has strongly encouraged a revival of the practice.

Next week (June 20-24), the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome will host an academic conference on Eucharistic adoration, where the speakers will include six prominent cardinals, focusing on the rediscovery of the practice.

At the same time, however, some theologians object to adoration as outdated and unnecessary, and warn that it can lead to misunderstandings and undo decades of progress in educating lay Catholics on the meaning of the sacrament.

Eucharistic adoration by the laity originated in the 13th century as a substitute for receiving Communion at Mass, said Monsignor Kevin W. Irwin, dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America.

At the same time, he said, the church often encouraged a believer’s sense of “personal unworthiness” to receive the sacrament—which Catholics believe to be the body of Christ—so many resorted to so-called “ocular communion” instead.

Eucharistic adoration was also used as a teaching tool to reaffirm the doctrine of the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist, said the Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a noted theologian at the University of Notre Dame.

For instance, McBrien said, devotion grew during the 16th- and 17th-century Counter-Reformation, in response to the arguments of some Protestant Reformers that the Eucharist was merely a symbol, not the actual body of Christ.

In the days when priests celebrated Mass in Latin with minimal participation by the congregation, the hymns and prayers associated with adoration gave lay Catholics an opportunity for public worship, Irwin said.

Liturgical reforms after Vatican II greatly increased the laity’s participation at Mass, which Irwin said satisfied the “felt need for participation in public prayer.” Irwin called that an “underlying reason” for the practice’s decline.

McBrien acknowledged that some Catholics find adoration “spiritually enriching,” but said many liturgists see it is a “step back into the Middle Ages.”

“It distorts the meaning of the Eucharist,” McBrien said. “It erodes the communal aspect, and it erodes the fact that the Eucharist is a meal. Holy Communion is something to be eaten, not to be adored.”

For that reason, McBrien said, the practice should be “tolerated but not encouraged.”

Perry's 'Day of Prayer' Violates Church-State Separation, Houston Clergy Say

2011-06-17T14:48:00.004-05:00

Twenty-five Houston clergy said in a column in the Houston Chronicle today that Gov. Rick Perry's planned day of prayer at Reliant Stadium on August 6th--to which only Christians whom Perry approves of are invited--violates the separation of church and state. Their column follows. The signatories may be found at the posting on the Chronicle's website.

As Houston clergy, we write to express our deep concern over Gov. Rick Perry's proclamation of a day of prayer and fasting at Houston's Reliant Stadium on Aug. 6. In our role as faith leaders, we encourage and support prayer, meditation and spiritual practice. Yet our governor's religious event gives us pause for a number of reasons.

We believe in a healthy boundary between church and state. Out of respect for the state, we believe that it should represent all citizens equally and without preference for religious or philosophical tradition. Out of respect for religious communities, we believe that they should foster faithful ways of living without favoring one political party over another. Keeping the church and state separate allows each to thrive and upholds our proud national tradition of empowering citizens to worship freely and vote conscientiously. We are concerned that our governor has crossed the line by organizing a religious event rather than focusing on the people's business in Austin.

We also express concern that the day of prayer and fasting at Reliant Stadium is not an inclusive event. As clergy leaders in the nation's fourth-largest city, we take pride in Houston's vibrant and diverse religious landscape. Our religious communities include Bahais, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Unitarian Universalists and many other faith traditions. Our city is also home to committed agnostics and atheists, with whom we share common cause as fellow Houstonians. Houston has long been known as a live-and-let-live city where all are respected and welcomed. It troubles us that the governor's prayer event is not open to everyone. In the publicized materials, the governor has made it clear that only Christians of a particular kind are welcome to pray in a certain way. We feel that such an exclusive event does not reflect the rich tapestry of our city. Our deepest concern, however, lies in the fact that funding for this event appears to come from the American Family Association, an organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The American Family Association and its leadership have a long track record of anti-gay speech and have actively worked to discriminate against the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. The American Family Association and its leadership have also been stridently anti-Muslim, going so far as to question the rights of Muslim-Americans to freely organize and practice their faith. We believe it is inappropriate for our governor to organize a religious event funded by a group known for its discriminatory stances.

As religious leaders, we commit to join with all Houstonians in working to make our city a better place. We will lead our communities in prayer, meditation and spiritual practice. We ask that Gov. Perry leave the ministry to us and refocus his energy on the work of governing our state.

Earth Needs: People Possessing Less, Working Less--and Birthing Less

2011-06-17T14:12:00.002-05:00

Ten days ago New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had an excellent commentary spotlighting the views of Paul Gilding, an Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who has an insightful new book titled The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.

Gilding argues that we have reached a global population that is demanding the resources of 1.5 Earths--and that the longer we wait to tackle the problem, the more intractable will be the crises that we face. He sees the need for a growth model that will give people more time to enjoy living, but with fewer possessions. I wish I could share his optimism that "We may be slow, but we aren't stupid"--so that the size of the current problem and the obviousness of the antidote will cause global leaders to mobilize "as we do in war." We can certainly pray that Gilding is right.

Moreover, it seems even more obvious that 'possessing' fewer children is one of the critical things people will have to do to make his new model work. Friedman's column doesn't have Gilding saying much about that. But maybe his book does. Here are some excerpts from Friedman's column:

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornadoes plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”

Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.

This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once.

“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. “If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”

It is also current affairs. “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” China’s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. What China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that “the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.”

But Gilding is actually an eco-optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”

We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.

“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

Elizabeth Warren: Why the "Big, Bad Banks" Are Very, Very Afraid--and Should Be

2011-06-01T09:59:00.002-05:00

Houston Chronicle business columnist Loren Steffy posted an excellent analysis May 28th on why the "big, bad banks" have a bevy of reasons to be afraid of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard lawyer, University of Houston graduate and former University of Texas law professor who is charged with setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB) established by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown.

A decade before the financial crisis, Warren grasped--and warned in scholarly papers and books--that banks are willing to bankrupt their customers for short-term profit and that their short-sighted greed would lead to economic collapse.

Steffy notes: "In 2006, two years before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, she warned that banks' attitudes had shifted so dramatically in the past 80 years that the greatest threat to the economy wasn't customers making runs on banks, but banks making 'a run on the customers.'

"Ruining customers through excessive fees and gimmicks, driving them into foreclosure, default and bankruptcy, would lead to the same economic collapse that bank runs did during the Great Depression, she warned."

Steffy spent the rest of his column mocking the efforts of the banks' Republican lapdogs in the current Congress to badger and embarrass Warren into weakening the CPFB:

The big banks are tough.

They can handle Dodd-Frank. They can handle being labeled a "vampire squid" in the pages of Rolling Stone. They can even outlast the threat of criminal prosecutions for taking the global economy to the brink of collapse.

But what scares them the most is Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who has spent years learning their secrets.

Last week, the banks' representatives in Congress grilled Warren over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a panel created in response to the financial crisis that might just give consumers a fighting chance against banks' exorbitant fees, debt spiral schemes and outright fraudulent lending practices.

Warren is a veteran of contentious congressional hearings, most recently ones she conducted as head of the oversight panel for the federal bank bailout. During those sessions, she squared off with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner over the government's handling of bailout funds and its claims that banks' balance sheets are sound.

So last week, when Warren didn't crumble under his badgering, Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican from Bank of America's home state of North Carolina, decided to try to humiliate her. Knowing she had scheduling conflicts that had already been discussed with committee staffers, he tried to delay the hearing and when she protested, he basically called her a liar.

The lack of decorum speaks to the desperation that the big banks feel over Warren and the CFPB, an agency that she is helping to establish and that would have broad powers to act on consumers' behalf.

In other words, the banks fear Warren because she knows their games and she has the data to expose them, and the prospect of Warren running the CFPB has fostered a growing desperation in the industry.

Last week, bereft of other arguments, the congressman from Bank of America resorted to name calling.

Elizabeth Warren isn't a liar. She's one of the few people in Washington with the courage to tell the truth.

And Today's Infallible Pronouncement Is . . . Whatever I Decide Is Infallible

2011-05-26T09:59:00.004-05:00

Despite the efforts of two Vatican Councils to contain the ultramontanist view of papal infallibility, it continues to rear its ugly head in the official pronouncements of the current pontiff.

The ultramontanists--who held that the pope should be understood as "as if heaven were always open over his head and the light shone down upon him" and that opposition to him was the sin against the Holy Spirit--could conceive of nothing more beneficial than "an infallible statement at the breakfast table each morning with their copy of the London Times."

By insisting that infallibility could only be exercised ex cathedra, i.e. from the chair of Peter under the most stringent of conditions, the First Vatican Council tried to seriously restrict the ultramontanist view. The Second Vatican Council tried to dilute it still further, by recontextualizing papal infallibility alongside of the infallibility of the church's bishops when they taught together and the infallibility of the body of the faithful as a whole.

But since the papacy of John Paul II, guided intellectually by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who succeeded John Paul II as Benedict XVI, ultramontanism has been on the ascendant once again.

The latest manifestation was the claim, made by Benedict XVI in a recent letter dismissing an Australian bishop, that John Paul II “decided infallibly and irrevocably that the church has not the right to ordain women to the priesthood.”

On May 23, 2011, the National Catholic Reporter published two postings challenging the validity and accuracy of Benedict's claim--one an article quoting several theologians who said that Benedict was on very shaky ground, the other an editorial whose title speaks for itself: Ordination ban not infallibly taught.

The editorial states the case succinctly. John Paul II never said ex cathedra that the church had no right to ordain women. What he said was that such was the constant teaching of the church's bishops over several centuries. A few years later, Ratzinger (as the Vatican's chief enforcer of orthodoxy) issued a statement saying that because it was a constant teaching of the bishops, John Paul's edict had to be definitively held by all Catholics. Now, decades after that chain of events, Ratzinger as Pope Benedict translates his interpretation of John Paul's statement into an infallible pronouncement by John Paul! What is infallible is what I say is infallible. What could be more ultramontane?

Of course, what this illustrates above all is how slippery and untenable the notion of any infallibility really is. My dissertation shows on historical, linguistic and cosmological grounds why it is impossible for any church teaching to be irreformable. (Those who are interested in the documentation should click on the link to the right of these postings.) So the real problem is that when Vatican I, in partial deference to the ultramontanists, declared that the pope possesses "that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed His Church to be endowed," it gratuitously attributed infallibility to the will of Jesus Christ. What the bishops at Vatican I refused to consider is that Jesus Christ may not have willed his church or its leaders to be infallible at all--because such a wish contradicts the metaphysical structure of the universe and future actions by the living God.

So we can continue to fight about "creeping infallibility" and try to rein it in. But even if Benedict were to buy the argument that he has misrepresented what John Paul II said, all he would have to do to overcome the problem would be to mount the chair of Peter and declare ex cathedra what John Paul attributed (inaccurately) to the constant, universal teaching of the bishops.

What really needs to be addressed is how any kind of infallibility can be sustained--philosophically, linguistically or historically. The honest answer is that it cannot be sustained under any of those tests, and that continuing to adhere to a dishonest doctrine can only result in more dishonesty.

U.S. Clergy Sex-Abuse Report Ignores 'Arrogant Clericalism,' the Primary Cause

2011-05-24T14:56:00.006-05:00

Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer and a long-time advocate of justice and compassion for clergy sex-abuse victims, says the recently released John Jay report on the causes of sex abuse by U.S. clergy misses the mark by blaming most of the abuse on the permissive sexual culture of the 1960s and 1970s--when several other reports have concluded, accurately, that the main causes were within the Catholic Church and that the pre-eminent one was 'arrogant clericalism."

Doyle posted his commentary on the website of the National Catholic Reporter May 21, 2011. Most of the critique follows.

In the last few days I have carefully read the entire 143-page John Jay report on the causes of clergy sex abuse in the United States and have again reviewed the executive summaries and conclusions of 17 of the 27 reports on clergy sexual abuse that have been published between 1989 and 2011.

Most of these are from official sources such as the U.S. grand juries, the three Irish reports (Ferns, Ryan, Murphy) or the two Canadian reports that resulted from the Mt. Cashel debacle of the eighties. Others are from Church sources such as the National Review Board Report of 2004, The Bernardin Report of 1992 or Church sponsored reports such as the Defenbaugh Report (Chicago, 2006) or the first John Jay Report from 2004. Most of the reports contained a section on causality. None of the reports said anything about the effect of the culture of the sixties or seventies as a factor of causality but every one of them pointed to the various kinds and levels of failure by the bishops as the essential cause of the phenomenon of sexual abuse of children and minors by clerics.

Some of the reports went into more detail about socio-cultural factors that had a causal effect but none of these factors included somehow shifting the blame to the “increased deviance of society during that time” as Karen Terry said in her statement released with the report. There was unanimity about the effect of culture, but it was not the culture outside the church but the culture within. Arthur Jones hit the nail squarely on the head in his NCR column on May 18 when he named arrogant clericalism as the culture that in many ways created the offending clerics and allowed the abuse to flourish.

There is a third source of information that perhaps provides the most accurate data on clergy sexual abuse in our era and that is the data obtained by victims’ attorneys in the six thousand plus civil and criminal cases from the U.S. alone. Add to this the information from similar cases in Canada, Ireland, Australia, the U.K. and several other European countries and you have a picture that is much different than that proposed in this latest John Jay report. The report refers to the sixties and seventies as the peak period with cases dwindling off after that period. This apparently fits in with what some of the cynics have called the “Woodstock Defense.”

Those who see the main conclusions from the Executive Summary as support for the bishops’ blame-shifting tactics are probably right. Yet these conclusions are only a part of the whole story and in some ways they are of minor relevance. The finding that the majority of cases occurred in the 1960s and 1970s can be quickly challenged. It is more accurate to say that the majority of cases reported in the post 2002 period involved abuse that took place in the period from the sixties to the eighties. Its way off base to assume that the majority of incidents of abuse happened during this period. Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald founded the Paraclete community in 1947 to provide help to priests with problems. From the beginning he was treating priests with psycho-sexual issues and in a letter to a bishop he said that 3 out of every 10 priests admitted were there because they had sexually molested minors.

Fr. Gerald wrote that letter in 1964. Unfortunately it is difficult if not impossible to do a study of abuse victims between the 30’s and the 50’s but Fr. Gerald’s information leaves no doubt that sexual abuse by priests was a significant phenomenon long before the free-wheeling 60’s and 70’s. The one constant that was present throughout the entire period from before the 60’s to the turn of the millennium has been the cover-up by the bishops and the disgraceful treatment of victims. The John Jay researchers were commissioned by the bishops to look into the reasons why priests molested and violated minors. They were not asked to figure out why this molestation and violation was allowed to happen. That would have been deadly for the bishops and they knew it.

Nevertheless the researchers could not avoid the blatant role played by the hierarchy. In this regard the report should not be written off as largely either irrelevant or enabling of the bishops’ never-ending campaign to avoid facing their responsibility square on. That’s why it’s important to read the whole report and not depend on the Executive Summary or Karen Terry’s statement or the statements of any of the bishops or church sponsored media outlets. Well into the body there is recognition of the real issues that have caused the anger and are the basis for the thousands of lawsuits and official reports. The section entitled “Mid-1990’s Diocesan Response” on pages 86-91contains a sobering antidote to the soft-peddling about priests who lost their way in the Woodstock Era. To their credit the research team included information critical of the bishops’ responses on several levels. A few quotes:

The failure of some diocesan leaders to take responsibility for the harms of the abuse by priests was egregious in some cases. (p. 89)

Parishioners were not told, or were misled about the reason for the abuser’s transfer (p. 89)

Diocesan leaders rarely provided information to local civil authorities and sometimes made concerted efforts to prevent reports of sexual abuse by priests from reaching law enforcement even before the statute of limitations expired. (p. 89)

Diocesan officials tried to keep their files devoid of incriminating evidence . (p. 89)

Diocesan leaders attempted to deflect personal liability for retaining abusers by relying on therapists’ recommendations or employing legalistic arguments about the status of priests. (p. 89)

Dioceses, the interviewee reported, would intimidate priests who brought charges against other priests; he reported that the law firm hired by the diocese wiretapped his phone and went through his trash. (p. 90).

The interviewee was a priest-victim who had come forward in 1991.

These citations do not represent exceptions. This was the operating procedure that was standard throughout the institutional Church until the public revelations that began in 1984 and reached a boiling point in 2002 caused widespread media attention, legal scrutiny and public outrage which in turn forced the bishops to change their tactics. The John Jay report refers to the organizational steps taken by the bishops in response to the “crisis” and points out that no other institution has undertaken a public study of sexual abuse and as a result there are no comparable data from other institutions (Executive Summary, p. 5).

The report gave short shrift to mandatory celibacy and the all-male environment of the clerical world. This will feed right into the defenses of those who try to claim that the problems are all from outside influences. Yet the influence of mandatory celibacy and the sub-culture of which it is an integral part play a major role in the socialization and maturation processes of the men who will eventually violate minors. The clerical culture should have been the subject of the 1.8 million dollar venture because if looked at closely and honestly it would have yielded information that not only provided believable reasons for the abuse nightmare but valuable though radical steps to take to avoid similar travesties in the future. That would have been much too dangerous for the hierarchical establishment though, because without doubt, it would point to needed fundamental changes.

There will be a variety of levels of both praise and criticism of this document. Among the more valuable will be the critical responses of other academic professionals, especially sociologists, which will help place the document in a more realistic and relevant light.

The report was released along with statements by Karen Terry, the lead investigator, Diane Knight, chair of the National Review Board and Blase Cupich, chair of the Bishop’s Committee for the Protection of Children. The most disturbing sentence of all of the documents presented with the report is from Karen Terry’s statement: “The problem of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests in the United States is largely historical, and the bulk of cases occurred decades ago.” I am quite certain that Dr. Terry had no idea of how offensive this statement is to the thousands of victims who were abused decades ago and who still live with the intense pain that never goes away. These people aren’t “historical” they are now. What happened to them years or decades ago is still real and still destructive in their lives.

While the bishops and their defenders bask in the illusion that this report validates their standard defenses and their self-affirmation for the procedures and policies they have created to try to heal the wound, the reality of the “phenomenon of sexual abuse” is something this report will not be able to answer. What is important is not why the thousands of clerics went off the tracks and raped and violated tens of thousands of innocent children.

What is important is what the institutional Church has done, or to be more precise, not done, to help heal the thousands of victims who still live in isolation and pain. More than anything else these men and women have had their very souls violated and in the words of some, murdered. Rather than go to such great lengths to try to exonerate themselves the bishops could have done what they should have done…..try, at least, to begin to understand the profound depth of the spiritual wounds inflicted on these many men and women, once innocent and trusting boys and girls. Abandon the insincere promises, the endless efforts to hide the secrets and the debasing legal strategies to pound the victims into submission. Once the official Church figures out how to authentically respond to its victims, and actually does it, then and only then will this abominable disgrace start to slowly move towards being historical.

Pope Fires Australian Bishop for 2006 Pastoral Letter on Priest Shortage

2011-05-06T15:44:00.006-05:00

The National Catholic Reporter has posted an editorial angrily denouncing Pope Benedict XVI for firing the bishop of Toowoomba in Queensland, Australia, after local Catholic reactionaries questioned his loyalty to church teachings in an Advent 2006 pastoral letter. The letter said that his diocese might need to consider "other options" for dealing with its shrinking supply of priests than those so far endorsed officially by Rome.

NCR noted scathingly the pope's speed in firing a bishop for having thoughts, in contrast with his inability to fire any bishop who enabled and covered up priestly molestation of children. It shows, NCR said, where the pope's priorities lie. The editorial follows.

The Australian Catholic diocese of Toowoomba, encompassing more than 300,000 square miles, has just a relative handful of healthy priests to serve the church’s 35 parishes. So it came as no surprise to Toowoomba’s Catholics when the area’s bishop, William M. Morris, addressed the priest shortage in a candid but still cautious Advent 2006 pastoral letter.

“We do face an uncertain future with regard to the number of active priests in our diocese,” wrote Morris. “Other options,” he wrote, “may well” need be considered. These include:

1. “ordaining married, single or widowed men who are chosen and endorsed by their local parish community;
2. welcoming former priests, married or single, back to active ministry;
3. ordaining women, married or single;
4. recognizing Anglican, Lutheran and Uniting Church Orders.”

For these words, this week the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI has fired Morris. Eighteen years as bishop ended with the stroke of a papal pen. (Click here for original the news story about the Morris firing.)

Some obvious but necessary points need making:

First, it turns out it’s really not that difficult for the pope to give a bishop a pink slip. In the course of the quarter-century clergy sexual abuse cover-up, there’s been considerable hand wringing over just this question. Bishops don’t “work for” the pope, we have been told. Bishops are “fathers” to their flock – with all the unconditional love and commitment that entails – not employees subject to the whims, well-intentioned or otherwise, of the boss. Canonical procedures must be followed.

Apparently, that’s just so much hooey. If the pope and his advisers care deeply about an issue about which a bishop has publicly raised questions – such as women priests and optional celibacy – a way can be found to dismiss that bishop.

And – noteworthy because it goes to some underlying issues – a bishop who acts against church teaching and law related to sexually abusive priests apparently need fear no such reprisal.

Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali, for example, continues a life befitting a prince in splendorous surroundings, even as his flouting of church procedures (and perhaps civil law) resulted in nearly 30 diocesan priests facing administrative suspension and heat from local prosecutors.

And not to forget Cardinal Bernard Law, orchestrator of the Boston clergy abuse cover-up. His punishment? An extended Roman holiday and a healthy pension. Meanwhile, Morris gets the door.

The pope’s priorities are clear.

The pervasive intellectual chill in the church reaches beyond the towers of academia (note the recent chastisement of theologian St. Joseph Sr. Elizabeth Johnson) or to those who directly challenge the rules – Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois’ open support for women’s ordination a most recent case in point. (Bourgeois is facing excommunication for saying what he thinks on the subject.)

Now even those directly in the line of apostolic succession are forbidden to speak freely.

Note that Morris did not offer answers to the provocatively posed semi-questions on celibacy and ordination he raised that Advent. Instead, employing what one advocacy group terms the “progressive bishop’s style book,” he couched his concerns more obliquely. (No doubt to avoid Rome’s wrath. Lot of good that did him.)

Today, it seems, even such carefully couched queries are completely verboten; such so-called “open questions” (non-doctrinal in every sense of the word) such as the ordination of married men are grounds for dismissal. That the overwhelming majority of clergy (not to mention laypeople) think the failure to even consider options like married priests in the midst of a clergy shortage crisis goes beyond Dilbertesque mismanagement. It is, to employ the psychobabble of the era, completely dysfunctional.

As we prepare to celebrate the feast of the first pope next month, are we still permitted to remind church fathers that Peter was a married man? That this Holy Father was likely a human father? Or should Mrs. Peter and her progeny, like so many nettlesome Stalin-era apparatchiks, be airbrushed from history?

Because of Morris, we know that the dysfunction flows right from the top. Canon law may be more flexible than previously promoted, but a bishop’s dismissal cannot be shuffled to an underling, buried, as in Bourgeois’ case, in a bureaucratic chain of command. No, the canning of a bishop is a task only a pope can command.

And he has made his priorities quite clear.

While the reasons for Morris’ dismissal are relatively clear, the process remains an unholy mess, shrouded in secrecy.

Soon after Morris’ 2006 Advent pastoral was released, Benedict sent Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput to “investigate” the incident, which is a little like sending the fox to investigate the hens. Given his well-known views on the concerns raised by Morris (Chaput is more Catholic than the pope on these issues), we are skeptical that Toowoomba’s bishop got a fair hearing. There’s a relatively small number of right wing Catholics in the diocese (Morris and others call them the “Temple Police”) who have long been after the bishop. That Chaput gave them undue weight and deference seems more than plausible.

You know the type. In the U.S., they are the crowd that takes marching orders from The Wanderer, their time at Mass searching for a violation of a rubric rather than receiving whatever wisdom or grace might come their way. Then, having detected an “Alleluia” where an “Amen” was called for, they write letters to Vatican congregations, hoping for a sympathetic ear to their pathetic pleas.

Their Australian equivalents were, it appears, successful in transforming Morris’ molehill into a mountain.

But, we acknowledge, our skepticism is partly emotional, or perhaps ideological. We’re inclined to give Morris a break because we’re inclined to agree with him that the issues he raises require airing.

But, and here’s the point, we simply don’t know what Chaput found because no one’s talking. Not even Morris has received a copy of Chaput’s report (assuming something has been reduced to writing).

We presume, given the public nature of Morris’ offenses, that Chaput’s findings have something to do with the bishop brainstorming some remedies to the priest shortage in the face of the real crisis in his local church.

Did Chaput find something more dastardly, such as a bishop speaking like an adult to his church? Heaven forbid. We likely will never know. When NCR asked Chaput to respond to a series of questions regarding his apostolic visitation to Morris’ diocese, he declined to answer, explaining that “any apostolic visitation is governed by strict confidentiality. This is for the benefit of all parties involved.”

So are we to believe Morris has benefitted from being tossed out without ever having been allowed to defend himself against Chaput's findings, which were never shared with the Australian prelate? This is the kind of trial and judgement one more often associates with China or Iran. The Catholic church?

The real scandal to the faithful in this matter has nothing to do with the way Morris has conducted himself. It has everything to do with priorities and processes within our church today. It has much to do with the trampling of human rights and professed values of decency and charity by our church’s prelates, in this case including, sad to say, Benedict himself.

This is no way, shall we say, to set a Christian example – or manage the church.

In 2003, Fred Gluck, a former managing partner of McKinsey & Company who currently serves on the board of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, wrote a memo to church leaders. It’s crafted in managementese, but disregard the jargon for the moment and pay attention to the message.Wrote Gluck:

“Your organization [the church] has no effective central point of leadership that can energize the necessary program change.

“Your leadership is aging and also largely committed to the status quo or even the status ante.

“Your tradition of hierarchy dominates most of your thinking about management.”

“Coming to grips with this formidable set of challenges in an organization as historically successful as yours will be a daunting challenge, and can only be accomplished by a comprehensive program of change with strong leadership from the top,” he concluded.

No one in a position of authority paid any discernible attention to Gluck eight years ago. Sadly, we don’t expect that to change.

The pope has made his priorities all too clear.

Scripture Cannot Be a Guidebook for Sexual Morality, Boston Baptist Scholar Argues

2011-04-15T17:16:00.011-05:00

Kudos to the Houston Chronicle for carrying a slightly abbreviated version of the following article in its weekly Belief section (print edition) today. It's by Cecile S. Holmes of Religion News Service. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a link to the article on the Chronicle's website. So here's the link to the complete article as posted yesterday by The Christian Century.

I want to learn more about the specific content of Jennifer Wright Knust's scriptural analysis, especially where it might dove-tail with the analysis of various church teachings on sexual morality discussed in Part III of my doctoral dissertation (see link at right).

Is the Bible good for your sex life, but bad for a sex ed class?

A Boston biblical scholar challenges widely held beliefs about the Bible and sex in her new book, arguing Scripture cannot and should not be a guidebook for sexual morality.

The Bible is a complex compendium of human experience including stories of love, prostitution, extramarital sex and more, Boston University religion professor Jennifer Wright Knust argues in "Unprotected Texts: The Bible's Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire."

Her book goes against most biblical conservatives' view that the Bible specifically prohibits sex outside of marriage and condemns homosexuality. From Genesis to the Gospels, Knust's research turns many traditional interpretations upside down.

She's also unafraid to get a little racy: a full-page ad for her book in the venerable ChristianCentury magazine asks, "Is it OK to pray for better orgasms?"

Exploring the love poetry of the Song of Songs, for example, she notes the text does not shrink from describing "sexual intimacy and climax." Its vivid and lurid details worried some church thinkers, including the ancient Christian theologian Origen.

Turning the Bible into a sexual rulebook doesn't work, Knust says, because it can be use to support an almost endless set of "interpretive agendas." Too often, she says, the holy book has been used to silence rebels, repress women and minorities, condemn homosexuals and even justify slavery.

Her intent, Knust says, is to move conversations about sex and the Bible past "polemical and shortsighted" claims using passages to support this or that particular viewpoint.

A good example is "the unfortunate history around biblical interpretation around the slavery issue," she says. "Slavery was natural and even believed to be divinely inspired by some" who used the Bible to support their outlook.

"When the abolitionists began to argue that the Bible was against slavery, they really tied themselves up in knots trying to cite certain passages in a certain way that supported their arguments." The same can be said for arguments over sexuality, she says.

Equally alarming to Knust are present-day situations in which political opponents on either side of an issue use biblical texts to underscore their outlook.

"I hate to see the Bible being employed as kind of a weapon against women, against girls, against lesbian, gay, and transgendered people," she said. "I've seen so many people injured by this kind of biblical interpretation. For example, I was talking with a really wonderful woman recently who was saying she wanted to get a divorce from her husband because he was physically abusive. The message she was getting from her church was that the Bible was against divorce and therefore she had no choice but to stay in the marriage."

As a child, Knust read Bible stories before school most weekday mornings. Seated on her family's big gold couch, she and her mother read from a two-volume illustrated book. Never once did her mother tell her it was "silly or bad" to ask questions about the stories.

Knust grew up to see the Bible as neither a collection of policy statements nor a treatise to enforce a particular point of view. Instead, the Bible offered "an invitation to think abut who God might be and what it means to be human."

Knust is an ordained minister in the American Baptist Churches USA, which generally has a more open approach to interpreting Scripture than the more conservative (and larger) Southern Baptist Convention. As a scholar, Knust is at ease talking about the Bible in both church and academic circles. And as an author, she writes with authority yet keeps the general reader in mind.

Her book demonstrates "the extraordinary range of scriptural attitudes toward the body," says fellow scholar Peter S. Hawkins, Yale University professor of religion and literature. It also shows "the impossibility of using any particular saying as warrant for a monolithic biblical teaching," he says.

Au Contraire, Mr. Ryan: You Can't End the Deficit Unless You Tax the Super Rich

2011-04-07T10:26:00.004-05:00

I am grateful to National Catholic Reporter columnist Joe Feuerherd for his blog posting yesterday saying that the conservative blueprint for eliminating the federal deficit unveiled by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) "lacks seriousness," especially in comparison to the real budget balancing and actual budget surplus achieved by the Democratic Congress and the Clinton administration in the post-Reagan 1980s and 90s.

Feuerherd ticks off several reasons why Ryan's plan won't accomplish what it claims:

"Repeal of last year's health care reform bill...is simply not going to happen." Maybe. But the chances that Republicans will succeed in rendering it unfunded seem pretty high.

Seniors and the AARP will not buy Ryan's proposal, a reiteration of the one he and Alice Rivlin submitted to the bipartisan deficit commission, to change the single-payer Medicare system--"socialism that America's seniors have learned to love"--into a voucher system to help them buy private health insurance. I think Feuerherd is right about this.

Governors "already facing the most daunting budget challenges since the Great Depression, will fight the plan to convert Medicaid to a block grant." Unfortunately, several Republican governors were already cheering for block grants, even though their states would be getting less money than they do under the current matching-funds approach. What they want is relief from having to provide state funds as a condition of receiving the federal match.

But what I am especially grateful for is that Feuerherd pointed his readers to an excellent April 4 posting by Robert Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, who again supports what I have argued repeatedly here:

"The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich."

Reich lays out in painstaking, unassailable detail all the ugly reasons why this is the case. Those who are not super rich cannot afford more taxes. But those who are super rich have managed to pay higher taxes in the past and still remained ultra wealthy. It is a time for a country that desperately needs their financial support to stop coddling them and block their relentless drive to impoverish the rest of us.

The question is whether serious people, including President Obama, will pay attention--or whether they will continue to cringe in fear before the tea bagger know-nothings who dominate what currently passes for political dialog.

"A Truly Living Tradition...Must Always Be Recontextualized in the Present Moment"

2011-03-18T13:38:00.002-05:00

The headline of this post could easily be lifted from my doctoral dissertation, The Creativity of Church Teaching: A Whiteheadian Alternative to the Notion of Development of Doctrine (1983). One of the central points argued there is that church teaching is a process and that the process moves forward by the continuous, endless interplay of scripture, tradition and contemporary experience.

In fact, however, the headline is a direct quotation from Dr. Richard Gaillardetz, a highly regarded Roman Catholic theologian, in his final Murray/Bacik lecture at the University of Toledo on January 27th, "The State of the Church, 2011." The link is to the website of the National Catholic Reporter, which published the complete lecture online, and the second half of it in its print edition of March 4, 2011. The lecture was his last in Toledo because starting this fall he begins his appointment to the Joseph Chair of Catholic Systematic Theology at Boston College.

For my money, the import of the Gaillardetz quotation is that it is part of his vision of how the exercise of authority in the church could be productively reformed. It comports very comfortably with the recontextualization model that my dissertation tried to articulate: the interplay of scripture and tradition with contemporary experience results in newer church teachings, which simultaneously take their place among the old and make the old teachings available in a novel context, thereby redefining the limits of the older teachings and redistributing the intensities among them.

The context of Gaillardetz vision is provided by the first half of his lecture, in which he traces the history of American Catholicism from the 19th century to the present, but with particular emphasis on the period since Vatican II. Agreeing with other commentators, he sees the tensions within the church as a struggle between those who remain inspired by the achievements of Vatican II, versus those who bought the very conservative, overly clerical interpretation of Vatican II which Pope John Paul II drummed into Catholics during his historically lengthy reign.

In this Gaillardetz explicitly distinguished his analysis from that of Catholic conservative George Weigel, in whose narrative "the church of the 70s and 80s was characterized by a flimsy and irresponsible application of conciliar teaching accompanied by an episcopal practice of cultural accommodation that needed to be corrected by John Paul II's insistence on fidelity to 'settled teaching' and his robust confrontation with the toxic cultural elements of our age." Instead, Gaillardetz argues that in the 70s and 80s "the bishops' conference was not concerned with cultural accommodation but with balanced critical engagement with a sensitivity to the need to moderate the authority claims of their policy judgments."

Gaillardetz suggests that reforming the exercise of authority in the church requires that pastoral leaders "recover the ancient conviction of St. Cyprian of Carthage that you cannot be a good leader and teacher unless your are a humble learner and listener." This would open the door to re-imagining ecclesial authority in three ways.

First, pastoral leaders would recognize that the legal or de jure authority of their offices is only a part of, and in fact quite secondary to, their larger leadership roll. They are called first of all to excel in the charism of leadership. And they are unlikely to achieve success with their de jure authority if they lack the charism of leadership. Thus the screening for candidates for priest and bishop should call forth those who actually possess that charism, rather than finding the most competent dogmatists and legalists.

Second, pastoral leaders need to see themselves not as museum curators controlling how dogmatic antiquities are exhibited, but more as gardeners, tending the living tradition of the church but also trying "to create the best possible conditions for healthy growth but [who] ultimately have to allow the growth process to act according to its own independent processes."

This is where Gaillardetz gets closest to my own thinking. And he can be about as scathing as I think he needs to be: "Too often a crass and antihistorical 'traditionalism' masquerades as a love of tradition. As Jaroslav Pelikan famously put it: 'Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.' If a religious tradition is a truly living tradition and not merely a preoccupation of those prone to nostalgia and love of antiquities, it must always be recontextualized in the present moment. With every new social context the tradition will have to, in some sense, assume a new form."

Third, Gaillardetz recommends his own version of Alfred North Whitehead's dictum, it is more important for a claim to be interesting that for it to be true. Church teaching advances, not by trying to resurrect "the juridical paradigm of command and obey" and not by insisting "on an uncritical and unswerving obedience to all church teachings," but by encouraging Catholics and Christians and other believers and even non-believers to wrestle with the tradition and at least take it seriously in their decision-making. This might not end in internal assent, but it at least allows the tradition to be entertained conscientiously by individuals and by a wide variety of groups. By contrast, a self-proclaimed dictatorship of religious absolutes will be dismissed out of hand.

My dissertation maintains that the only guarantors of the accuracy of church teachings are God and the future. God keeps luring forth new teachings and the future progressively sets them within new limits, provided by the context of newer teachings still. Gaillardetz ends with some sentences which resonate quite harmoniously with that view:

"The Venerable Bede once wrote: 'Every day the church gives birth to the church." Out of this present moment, a new church will doubtless be born. All Catholics should pray that we will be its humble and faithful midwives."

Time to Fire Philadelphia Cardinal Who Failed to Stop Priestly Sex Abuse

2011-03-17T10:20:00.005-05:00

National Catholic Reporter blogger Michael Sean Winters makes a persuasive case that failure to remove 21 sexually abusive priests from active ministry in Philadelphia is way beyond embarrassing for the Catholic bishops of the United States. Illustrating that the bishops' 2002 norms on handling sexually abusive priests have failed, it constitutes dire episcopal malfeasance by Cardinal Justin Rigali--so serious that the Vatican should remove Rigali from office. Winters' posting follows:

It has been almost ten years since the clergy sex abuse scandal blew up in Boston in 2002. NCR readers, of course, had earlier been made aware of the issue but no one in the national media or in the country’s chanceries paid much attention before 2002.

That was when the revelations in Boston were so gruesome, with clear evidence that priests who had raped dozens of children were passed from parish to parish, always with the intent of keeping their horrific activities under wraps, that there was no possibility of containing the scandal.

The press and the people of God both demanded an accounting.

Cardinal Law was forced to resign, giving those clamoring for change a pound of hierarchic flesh, but the truth be told, Law did not do anything that other bishops and cardinals had not also done.

The centerpiece of the bishops’ response to the scandal was the adoption of the Dallas norms for the protection of children. The bishops of the United States essentially said to the Catholics of America: We recognize that we have a real problem.

Horrific attacks on children were called to our attention and we did not react with horror, we reacted with a defensive, self-protecting, overly legalistic response. Instead of caring for the child-victims, we cared more about the priest-predators, and more than either, we cared most about the Church’s and our own reputation. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

But the Dallas norms also did something else. They promised a change. Like the prodigal son, the bishops turned around from their former ways at Dallas. They adopted standards of reporting, guidelines for investigating, and independent review boards to look at the ways every diocese in America handled allegations of clergy sex abuse.

It was not only that they had repented, but they promised that the new measures would make any further cover-ups impossible. They got it, and even if they didn’t get it, the norms were in place to force them to confront this horrific sin and stain upon the life of the Church.

After Dallas, we had the most solemn pledge from our bishops that no priest against whom charges had been made would be in active ministry unless an investigation proved those charges to be groundless.

The announcement yesterday that 21 priests in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia were being placed on administrative leave demonstrates conclusively that the Dallas norms have failed. (Another five were either already retired or had left the archdiocese.)

Last Sunday, those 21 priests presided at Mass in their parishes. Last Sunday, those 21 priests were in active ministry. The charges against them had been examined before and...what? They were either wrongly exonerated or diocesan officials decided to look the other way.

And this is no ordinary diocese. It is led by a cardinal, indeed, by one of the most powerful cardinals in America given his active responsibilities as a member of the Congregation for Bishops. Over the past few years, the fastest way to become a bishop was to be a successful monsignor in Philadelphia.

But we now know the man at the helm was not only derelict in his duties, he completely misunderstood the nature and import of the promises made to the faithful at Dallas.

To be clear, the entire reputation of the entire American hierarchy, and that of the officials in the Vatican, is being weighed in the balance. There is nothing that has been done or said by SNAP, or by victims’ attorney Jeff Anderson, or by any of the Church’s critics that comes even close to the damage to the Church’s reputation inflicted by Cardinal Justin Rigali.

All of the warnings from SNAP about the lack of independence by the independent review boards have been confirmed. The Vatican must remove Cardinal Rigali and remove him now.

On a New Orleans radio show the other day, Archbishop Gregory Aymond said, “What has happened in Philadelphia, quite frankly, is embarrassing to us.”

That is putting it mildly, although Aymond gets credit for breaking the unwritten rule that no bishop criticizes a situation in another diocese. What has happened in Philadelphia eats at the very heart of the credibility of the American bishops as a whole.

If they can’t get the clergy sex abuse mess right, after all their protestations that they had taken steps to deal with the problem, and all their claims that the Catholic Church was now ahead of the curve on the issue, that our policies were such that the Catholic Church was the safest place for a child to be, nothing else matters.

The New Evangelization? Forget about it. Pro-life activities? Not a chance. Advocacy for the poor? It rings hollow. If the leaders of the Church cannot be trusted to keep their most solemn pledge to protect children, they cannot be trusted at all. If they fail to see this, their moral sensibility is not merely skewed, it is dead. It is not only that they cannot be trusted, it is that they should not be trusted.

I do not believe that Cardinal Rigali’s mishandling of this situation is the norm. I believe many bishops, even most bishops, have been faithful to the Dallas norms. But if those norms shifted the responsibility for the safety of children from the clergy to the bishops, and those norms have now been spectacularly breached, either the man who breached them must go or the norms will be seen to have no force.

The bishops and the Holy See can no longer place this scandal on the backs of the clergy. The issue is no longer pedophilia among the priests. The issue is episcopal governance.

St. Augustine taught us many centuries ago that evil is an absence. In Philadelphia, there has been a great evil, the absence of effective, Christian leadership. The culture of bowing and scraping, of “Yes, your Eminence” and “As you wish, your Eminence” has brought into question the credibility of the entire American hierarchy.

Cardinal Rigali has proved himself eminent in his arrogance, in his willingness to flout the standards of conduct to which he had pledged himself. For the good of the Church, no, for the survival of the Church, he must go and he must go in disgrace. No continued membership of the Congregation for Bishops. No sinecure. Let him go someplace quiet and repent of his sins.

Rigali’s brother bishops are said to be livid, as well they might be. But livid is an emotion, not an action, and the situation demands action.

Only the Holy See can remove a bishop from his diocese. The ball is now in the Vatican’s court. If they fail to move swiftly in Philadelphia, the people of God in Ireland and Germany and around the world will take note and the church will be seen to be unserious in its promises.

The day of reckoning in civil court will come, and the payouts to the victims of these priests in Philadelphia will be enormous. But, now, immediately, the Holy See must act to restore whatever credibility can still be salvaged.

The situation in Philadelphia is not, as one person put it, “Boston Reborn.” This is worse than Boston. After Dallas, there is no excuse.

Texas Legislature Threatens Poor Seniors with Triple Whammy, AARP Says

2011-02-10T10:07:00.002-06:00

The Houston Chronicle ran a cogent analysis by Ollie Besteiro, president of AARP Texas, showing how the Texas Legislature's proposed state budget for the next biennium would "devastate older Texans" in three different ways, compounding their misery and exacerbating health care costs for everyone who is not poor. Yet another example of conservative Republicans' willingness to sacrifice the genuine needs of real human beings to their ridiculous fiscal ideology that increasing government revenue is never a good thing:

What does it say about the value that Texas places on its older citizens when we pay fast-food restaurant workers more than those who provide care for our elders?

Who will take care of our aging parents and grandparents if we keep putting up roadblocks to quality long-term care, both community-based and in nursing homes? Will the services be there for us some day if we need them?

All these are fair questions in light of recent budget proposals being bandied about at the Texas Capitol.

Under consideration is a 10 percent cut in payments to Medicaid providers — including community-based services and nursing homes - on top of a recent 2 percent rate cut that's already gone into effect for nursing homes.

AARP believes that pulling the rug out from under seniors on both ends of the long-term care service spectrum is penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Why? For starters, it's a little-known fact that Medicaid helps pay for two out of three nursing home stays in Texas. Medicaid is easily the largest payer of long-term care in our state, with more than 60 percent of its dollars devoted to the care of the elderly and disabled. That's more than the program spends on low-income women and children. Plus, Medicaid brings important federal matching dollars to the state, to the tune of $1.47 for every one dollar the state puts up.

Texas currently pays the second lowest Medicaid reimbursement rates for nursing homes in the country. Further cuts would have a direct impact on the quality of care received by residents, leaving nursing homes with no option but to reduce staffing. There are volumes of research documenting the relationship between staffing levels and the quality of care. Reduced payments to nursing homes will place our most vulnerable seniors in a highly dangerous situation.

At the same time, the Legislature is proposing to reduce oversight of nursing homes by reducing the number of staff responsible for their monitoring. This would only add insult to injury when it comes to ensuring our seniors are safe.

Cutting Medicaid funding for community-based care would push more people into nursing homes, which are more expensive for the state. We also know that the vast majority of older Texans want to stay in their homes for as long as they are able. On average, nursing home care costs the state more than $3,000 per person per month. Care at home costs the state between $700 and $1,500 per person per month. Community care funds are wisely spent state dollars because they provide coverage while people are still in reasonably good health, preventing the need for more costly treatment later.

Reducing payments for community care programs will make it increasingly difficult for Texans getting help from them to find workers who are willing to care for them. These programs already pay about minimum wage, $7.25 per hour.

In a nutshell, the Legislature's approach is seriously misguided. Lowering payment rates would put the lives of nursing home residents at risk by reducing the number of facility staff. Reducing oversight of these facilities by state personnel will degrade the quality of care received by patients, potentially putting their health at risk. At the same time, reducing rates for community-based care would have the effect of pushing more people into nursing homes, which are more expensive for the state.

Wages for workers who care for clients either in the community or in a nursing home have not kept pace with the cost of living. It's essential that direct-care workers be paid a living wage in order to ensure quality care.

Rather than saving money, the proposed state budget is dangerous for our seniors as well as costly for taxpayers. Both in terms of money and human lives, it is a plan we just can't afford.

Hysteria Over Muslim Growth: A Myth Shared by Jihadists and Islamophobes Alike

2011-01-28T10:24:00.005-06:00

The New York Times has an excellent article by religion writer Laurie Goodstein, covering a report by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life on the pace of Muslim growth globally over the next twenty years. The upshot for that time period is that even though the number of Muslims will increase at twice the rate of non-Muslims, the growth rate will level off and will occur at a rate too slow to create any drastic shift in balance among world religions.

(I learned of Ms. Goodstein's report from a reprint in the Belief section of today's Houston Chronicle. I have not been able to find an electronic link to the Chronicle's version, but it appears they published the New York Times article in full.)

The Pew Research Center has a strong track record of gathering actual facts about peoples' religious beliefs and behaviors, and of using expert analysis to dispel myths and misunderstanding. The myth in this case is a pretty much global hysteria about the pace of Muslim growth--shared, ironically, both by Jihadists who want non-Muslims to fear a Muslim tide of global dominance and by Islamophobes who feel compelled to do all in their power to stem that tide.

The Pew findings show that the tide is imaginary. As Muslim economic, education and political levels improve, birthrates in majority-Muslim countries (and among Muslims in majority-non-Muslim countries) will become more like the birthrates among non-Muslims.

The following are excerpts from Laurie Goodstein's report:

A new report forecasts that the number of Muslims around the world will grow over the next 20 years at twice the rate of non-Muslims, but that the rapid growth will level off. With more Muslim women getting educations and jobs, people migrating to cities, and living standards improving, the report says, the birthrate in majority-Muslim countries will come to more closely resemble the pattern in other nations.

Predictions that Europe will become a majority-Muslim “Eurabia” are unfounded, according to the report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, a nonpartisan research group.

Muslims in Europe made up only 6 percent of the population in 2010, and will grow to 8 percent by 2030, the report says. In France and Belgium, Muslims will be about 10 percent of the population in 20 years, and in Britain, 8 percent.

Globally, Muslims now make up 23.4 percent of the population, and if current trends continue, will be 26.4 percent by 2030. Such growth is not enough to create a drastic shift in the world’s religious balance, experts said. The world’s Christian population has been estimated in other reports to be 30 percent to 33 percent.

Amaney A. Jamal, associate professor of politics at Princeton and a consultant for Pew on global Islam, said that the report could challenge assertions by some scholars and far-right political parties about future demographic domination by Muslims.

“There’s this overwhelming assumption that Muslims are populating the earth, and not only are they growing at this exponential rate in the Muslim world, they’re going to be dominating Europe and, soon after, the United States,” she said. “But the figures don’t even come close. I’m looking at all this and wondering, where is all the hysteria coming from?”

In the United States, the report found about 2.6 million Muslims in 2010, a number projected to rise to 6.2 million in 20 years. (The 2.6 million figure is far lower than the numbers claimed by some American Muslim groups, but not out of line with some previous studies.) At that rate of growth, Muslims would still be a religious minority in 2030, 1.7 percent of the American population — about the equivalent of Jews in the United States today.

The report suggests that economic and educational factors affect population growth rates among Muslims far more than the religious factor. In Iran, which encourages family planning and birth control, the fertility rate of only 1.7 children per woman resembles that of many European countries. It has the lowest fertility rate of any Muslim-majority nation, while Niger, a poor African nation, has the highest, at 6.9 children per woman. Iranian girls receive 15 years of schooling on average; in Niger, it is four years.

All Our Taxes Won't Save Texas; Leave That to the Least of Our Brothers and Sisters

2011-01-27T09:48:00.015-06:00

Houston Chronicle political reporter Lisa Falkenberg has an excellent commentary in today's newspaper on the suicidal folly of the state budget Texas Republicans plan to enact.

Being last among the fifty states in per capita spending and health insurance coverage? That just wasn't good enough for Texas. And so, says Falkenberg, Governor Rick Perry shows us what he really means when he urges Republicans "seize the moment" and "show the rest of the country how conservative governing and budgeting can help lead the way out of this national economic crisis."

They will accomplish this feat by unemploying up to 100,000 educators, denying financial aid to 60,000 students, and cutting programs like Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program and food stamps by $2 billion. Really something to be proud of! Go Rick!

Falkenberg's commentary follows in full:

Hey you! Teacher who's going to lose your job, stop worrying. There's no state budget shortfall.

Hey you, community college student who's going to lose your financial aid, and maybe even your campus, stop whining. There's no budget shortfall.

Hey you, kid from the poor side of town who could lose your health insurance and probably your access to pre-school, stop crying. There's no budget shortfall.

There can't be. This is Texas. And according to Gov. Rick Perry, we don't have shortfalls in Texas. And certainly not deficits.

We may have "budget challenges," as Perry termed them in his inauguration speech. They may be challenges that require more than $30 billion in cuts. Those cuts may lead to, among many other things, the elimination of nearly 10,000 state jobs and as many as 100,000 public education jobs, loss of financial aid for 60,000 students; and $2 billion in cuts to programs like Medicaid, CHIP and food stamps that keep our most vulnerable citizens alive.

But, hey, no biggie.

Lost jobs and health insurance aren't exactly urgent matters. And investing in our state's future through the education of our young people is no emergency.

No, in the great state of Texas we reserve that term "emergency" for much weightier matters.

Like cracking down on voter fraud that doesn't exist, outlawing sanctuary cities that never were, and supporting a federal balanced budget amendment that has no hope of passing.

And, of course, allowing the government to barge into a medical exam room and order a woman considering an abortion to submit to a procedure that will compound her emotional distress. You know, important stuff like that.

The governor recently bestowed upon the above issues emergency status while he was in Las Vegas peddling his book at a hunting and shooting trade show. I think this is what the governor would call "multitasking."

Like nearly every other state, Texas is required to balance its budget each session. This means we'll never rack up trillions in credit card debt like the federal government.

In lean times — doomsday times, if you read those paranoid liberal loons in the mainstream media - when there's not enough money coming in to pay the bills, when we're estimated to have only slightly more revenue than we spent in 2006-2007, despite inflation and population growth and increased demand on social services, we don't raise taxes. (Maybe a few fees that nobody will notice, but not taxes.)

We simply cut the fat. Even if there isn't any. Even if we find ourselves hacking away at bone matter.

Now, to the faint of heart, this may sound draconian, especially considering that Texas already ranks dead last in per capita state spending and first in the number of people without health insurance.

But there simply aren't any other options - except, well, it is true that Perry boasted proudly in his campaign ads last year that "today, we have billions in surplus." Indeed we do. It's called the Rainy Day Fund. But the governor has vowed to defend from frantic pillaging that $9 billion pile of your money and mine for the logical reason that if it were spent, the governor and his Republican colleagues could no longer proudly boast that today we have billions in surplus.

It really all comes down to a simple exercise in prioritization. Some things count: the governor's Enterprise "deal closing" Fund for businesses. And some things don't: Early childhood education.

It's the Texan way, the Texas Exception. And lest you take exception, take a moment to recall the prophetic words in Perry's recent inauguration speech. He called on Texans to show the rest of the country how conservative governing and budgeting can help lead the way out of this national economic crisis.

This, declared the governor, will some day come to be known by historians as the "Texas Century."

"This is our time, this is our place in history," according to the governor's speech. "We must seize the moment."

And so we must!

After all, the way we're headed, it could be our last.

"Smoking Gun:" 1997 Letter Shows SOME Vatican Officials Tried to Obstruct Justice

2011-01-19T09:16:00.004-06:00

Several different news outlets are carrying versions of an Associated Press article with headlines like Vatican Told Irish Bishops Not to Report Abuse.

The article says that in a 1997 letter that has not been made public before, Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's diplomat to Ireland, expressed Vatican misgivings about "a 1996 Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests following Ireland's first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits."

The article continues: "Storero wrote that canon law — which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church — 'must be meticulously followed.' He warned that any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the 'highly embarrassing" position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome."

Anti-child-abuse activists in Ireland and the United States saw the letter as "the smoking gun we've been looking for" to document that the Vatican not only sanctioned bishops' hiding pedophiles from criminal investigators but in fact ordered bishops to do so.

Not so fast, says the National Catholic Reporter's John Allen Jr. in a posting today. Allen allows that the letter documents "that in the late 1990s the Vatican was ambivalent about requirements that bishops be required to report abuse to police and civil prosecutors." Allen argues, though, that "There are three bits of context...which complicate efforts to tout the letter as a smoking gun."

The first was that one of the points of the letter was to avoid having bishops' determinations to remove sexual abusers overturned at the Vatican level on procedural grounds if the bishops did not follow the Code of Canon Law meticulously.

Second, the highest concern reflected in the letter was that reporting sexual abuse to the police could not be allowed to violate the seal of the confessional between the priest and his confessor: as long as the bishop protected the sanctity of the confessional, there was nothing to stop him from cooperating with local authorities.

Third, the letter reflected "a debate among senior Vatican officials about how aggressive the church ought to be in streamlining procedures for sex abuse cases." The letter, says Allen, reflects the position of Colombian Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, head of the Congregation for the Clergy at the time. Allen notes that Castrillón lost the argument to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, whose tougher stance eventually prevailed.

Allen's bits of context may nuance how the letter constitutes "a smoking gun." But they cannot fully exonerate the Vatican--or Pope John Paul II, whose cause for sainthood is very much tarnished by the Vatican's mismanagement of the entire sexual abuse crisis.

It was good for the abused and for the church that Ratzinger's position eventually trumped the Castrillón stance which John Paul II allowed to dominate for too many years. But at the very least the Vatican is criminally liable for obstruction of justice during the time before Ratzinger prevailed.

The letter undoubtedly is one of the smoking guns for that period. Everyone believes there are more. Now Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger knows that first-hand. He ought to admit it publicly--and in every court case in which the issue is raised. That is the only substantive way for the Roman Catholic institution to make amends for its criminal behavior.

Westboro Backs Off Protesting All Tucson Victims' Funerals, Kansas TV Station Says

2011-01-14T15:37:00.007-06:00

KCTV Channel 5 of Kansas City, MO, reports that Fred Phelps' Kansas hate group, which masquerades as Westboro Baptist Church, has backed off plans to picket the funerals of any of the Tucson shooting victims, in exchange for air time on a local Christian radio station and a Canadian radio talk show:

A Kansas church that pickets the funerals of soldiers and blames their deaths on the country's tolerance of homosexuality now says it won't protest the funerals of any victims of Arizona's mass shooting.

Shirley Phelps-Roper, of Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church, says her church has agreed to avoid Thursday's funeral of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green in exchange for live radio interviews in Canada and Arizona.

The church also promised to not protest the funeral of U.S. District Judge John Roll or other victims of the shooting after a nationally syndicated radio show agreed to host church members Monday.

Christina and Roll were among six killed in the shooting Saturday targeting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Westboro church members picket high-profile funerals to promote their beliefs.

Judging from Google searches, other outlets confirm that the Phelps Klan agreed not to picket yesterday's funeral of nine-year old Christina Green; but KCTV seems to be virtually alone is quoting their change of heart about the funeral of Judge Roll or the other victims. It will interesting to see if KCTV turns out to be accurate.

Meanwhile, kudos to all the Tucson residents and visitors who participated in Angel Actions like the one above at the two funerals that have been held so far, as well as all those who lined streets for miles to protect the mourners and their loved ones from the Phelps's attempt to violate their religious freedom to conduct funerals without harassment from those who believe only in intolerant theocratic nonsense.

In the Crosshairs: Incite Paranoia, And the Crazies Will Do the Killing for You

2011-01-14T10:34:00.003-06:00

Predictable. Yet still amazing. That Sarah Palin and her worshippers would disclaim any responsibility for the gun assault on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the killing of Arizona Chief Federal Judge John Roll, along with five others who happened into the line of fire, including a budding nine-year old girl.

Those gun-scope sites Palin put on her map of 20 Congressional representatives she wanted eliminated were just map symbols, the Palinistas claim. Even though Rep. Giffords herself, right after Palin published her targets, warned that such right-wing paramilitary symbolism could have very dire consequences. I'd say "hogwash" or "bullshit." But neither term is strong enough to capture the utter hypocrisy of Palin's weaseling. Perhaps the Jack Ohman cartoon above says it best.

At least Palin's lack of remorse has forced brighter minds to reflect on why most of us feel in our gut--despite assurances from all over that such feelings are unjustified--that Palin is not without blame, that at the very least she contributed to the political atmosphere in which the Tuscon shooter became increasingly deranged. The most helpful I have read was Dangerous Outcomes from a Culture of Paranoia, written by Harold Meyerson, op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.

Meyerson helps situate between more accurate limits exactly how Palin and Beck and Limbaugh and the tea partiers incite such violence. They are very careful to maintain a position of plausible deniability and not say outright that anyone should kill anybody else. But instead they paint such a paranoid picture of what their opponents are "doing to the country," and rant about it so often and so dramatically, that some troubled person somewhere is bound to think it's their patriotic duty to do something about it.

Such tactics, of course, have precedent. Consider the Nazis leading up to World War II. Consider the extremists of the pro-life movement. The pattern is the same: arouse paranoia about those you oppose, and the crazies will take them out for you. Here's Meyerson's analysis in full:

Last October, Glenn Beck was musing on his radio show about the prospect of the government seizing his children if he didn't give them flu vaccines. "You want to take my kids because of that?" he said. "Meet Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson."

Last April, Erick Erickson, the managing editor of the right-wing RedState blog and a CNN commentator, was questioning the legality of the Census Bureau's American Community Survey on a radio show. "We have become, or are becoming, enslaved by the government. . . . I dare 'em to try to come to throw me in jail. I dare 'em to. [I'll] pull out my wife's shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door."

Do right-wing talk show commentators incite violence against the government? Feel free to draw your own conclusions - but to dwell on the rise of violent rhetoric on the right is to miss an even bigger, though connected, problem. Let's focus, rather, on the first part of Beck's and Erickson's observations: The government wants to take away Glenn Beck's (and by extension, your) kids. The government wants to take a census and will throw Erick Erickson (and by extension, you) in jail if he, and you, don't comply.

Can we see the hands of all the kids taken from their parents because they didn't get flu shots? How about all those people rotting in jail because they didn't cooperate in compiling the census?

The primary problem with the political discourse of the right in today's America isn't that it incites violence per se. It's that it implants and reinforces paranoid fears about the government and conservatism's domestic adversaries.

Much of the culture and thinking of the American right - the mainstream as well as the fringe - has descended into paranoid suppositions about the government, the Democrats and the president. This is not to say that the left wing doesn't have a paranoid fringe, too. But by every available measure, it's the right where conspiracy theories have exploded.

A fabricated specter of impending governmental totalitarianism haunts the right's dreams. One month after Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, Beck hosted a show that gamed out how militias in Southern and Western states might rise up against an oppressive government. The number of self-proclaimed right-wing militias tripled - from 42 to 127, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center - in 2009 (and that doesn't count those that are entirely underground).

As much of the right sees it, the government is planning to incarcerate its enemies (see Beck and Erickson, above), socialize the economy and take away everyones guns. At the fringe, we have figures like Larry Pratt, executive director of the Gun Owners of America, who told a rally in Washington last April that, "We're in a war. The other side knows they are at war, because they started it. They are coming for our freedom, for our money, for our kids, for our property. They are coming for everything because they are a bunch of socialists."

But the imputation of lurking totalitarianism, alien ideologies, and subversion of liberties to liberals and moderates has become the default rhetoric of the right. Never mind that Obama is a Marxist, a Kenyan and an advocate of sharia law. Consider the plight of poor Fred Upton, the Republican congressman just installed as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, over considerable right-wing opposition. According to Beck, Upton is "all socialist," while Rush Limbaugh calls him the personification of "nannyism" and "statism." Upton's crime is that he supports more energy-efficient light bulbs. How that puts him in a league with Marx, Engels and Nanny McPhee, I will leave to subtler minds.

American politics and culture have a rich history of paranoia, as historian Richard Hofstadter and many others have documented. Many of the incidents of anti-government violence over the past couple of years - flying a plane into an IRS building in Texas, shooting police officers in Pittsburgh and carrying out last weekend's savagery in Tucson - came from people who, however individually loony they may have been, also harbored paranoid visions of the government that resembled, though by no means entirely, those put forth by the Becks and the Ericksons.

That doesn't make Beck, Erickson, Rupert Murdoch and their ilk responsible for Tucson. It does make them responsible for promoting a paranoid culture that makes America a more divided and dangerous land.

Westboro Fascist Church Hits New Low: Now "God Hates Catholics" Not Just Fags

2011-01-11T16:08:00.008-06:00

CNN has been reporting for several hours on steps by the Arizona Legislature and local citizens to mitigate plans by the infamous Fred Phelps and his neo-Nazi Westboro 'Baptist' Church to picket the funerals of those killed by a deranged gunman in Tucson Saturday.

Evidently the first target of Phelps' storm troopers will be the family of Christina Green, the nine-year old girl who was the youngest of the innocents slaughtered.

Earlier postings of the CNN article said a flier on the Westboro website declared they would picket her funeral because she attended a Catholic church with her family, and “God Hates Catholics...God calls your religion 'vain,' as it's empty of His truth; you worship idols!”

At this hour the Westboro website appears to be down--so that linking to the hateful flier, or verifying it was taken down, is not possible. However, CNN has now replaced its earlier reporting with the following more generic account:

"Westboro Baptist Church spokeswoman Shirley Phelps-Roper, daughter of Fred Phelps, provided CNN with a statement detailing their decision to picket the funerals. It is filled with the usual anti-gay, anti-abortion and anti-divorce church members used to justify their pickets -- that God hates America because it has turned its back on what they see as God's way."

Whether the "God hates Catholics" flier is still posted or not, the fact that Phelps and company could use this terrible incident to descend from "God hates fags" to "God hates Catholics" only illustrates more vividly their complete intolerance for any religious belief but their own.

Shame on Phelps and his followers for calling themselves Baptist and sullying the Baptist Church with a message that is neither Baptist nor Christian.

And thank God there are decent people in Tucson and Arizona who are doing what they can to protect the victims' families from theocrats who are as deluded and dangerous as the man who pulled the trigger.

Curran on Abortion Laws: Full Text of Lecture Makes His Argument Sharper and Stronger

2010-12-16T10:00:00.013-06:00

On November 2nd I posted an analysis of Charles Curran's October 28th lecture at Southern Methodist University on the U.S. Bishops' "flawed" approach to outlawing abortion. At the time the complete text of the lecture had not been published; so I relied on coverage by National Catholic Reporter Editor-at-Large Tom Roberts, who attended Curran's scholarly tour de force.

Finally on November 29th NCR was able to post the full text of the lecture, describing it as "an abridged version of a chapter in Fr. Charles Curran's newest book The Social Mission of the U.S. Catholic Church: A Theological Perspective, which will be published in early January by Georgetown University Press."

While the full text shows that Roberts' reporting generally was accurate, I think it also adds nuances and context which sharpen Curran's position and actually make his argument stronger. The complete lecture also recontextualizes some of the concerns that I raised in my posting.

Let me highlight three significant distinctions between the lecture and Roberts' reporting.

The first important distinction comes in the "preliminary remarks" of lecture's opening paragraph, which Roberts did not quote or reference. The first remark out of Curran's mouth is: "The paper will not address church involvement in the public and political areas from the perspective of the First Amendment."

In my November 2nd posting I spelled out why I did not believe it was possible or constructive to avoid that topic in connection with abortion legislation. And implicitly I faulted Curran for not addressing it more explicitly.

I still maintain that such a nexus is impossible to ignore; but, now I understand that Curran bracketed it out as a methodological strategy and not as a topic he would necessarily exclude under other circumstances. He did not want to muddy his critique of the bishops' public policy teaching "from within the Catholic tradition itself" with a topic which, while related enough to abortion law for Curran to mention it, has its own history and its own controversies. So while I can disagree about the wisdom of excluding it from the November 2nd lecture, reading Curran on his own terms makes it clear that he forewarned at the outset he would do so. For all I know he may well address the First Amendment in another chapter in his new book.

A second major contrast between the lecture and Roberts' reporting is the cumulative impact of the entire first half of Curran's lecture, which Roberts summarized in a few short paragraphs. Roberts says that part of the lecture "traced the narrowing of the bishops' approach to abortion since the mid-1970s" and the bishops most recent position is that their teaching on other public policy issues involves "prudential judgments" but their teaching on abortion laws does not.

This is, in fact, part of Curran's analysis. However, Roberts' summary does not articulate a more significant point Curran makes: the bishops' claim that their teaching on abortion laws does not involve "prudential judgments" is not only a narrowing of their previous approach but also a significant departure from guidance the bishops accepted from the Vatican in the 1980s.

At that time a meeting was convened by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to discuss divergent public policy teachings by various bishops' conferences. The meeting resulted in a memorandum which, in Curran's words, "called for the bishops in their letters to distinguish clearly between moral principles and their application to concrete realities that involve the assessment of factual circumstances. The authority of the bishops on prudential judgments or the application of principles does not bind all Catholics. There is room for legitimate diversity in the church in the area of prudential judgments."

Clearly this is Curran's largest point, but Roberts' summary obscures it: the bishops, unable to marshall any reliable theological grounding whatsoever, have arbitrarily exempted their teaching on abortion law from the Vatican's official guidance on public policy teachings. The rest of the lecture highlights several different ways in which prudential judgments remain endemic to the bishops' teaching on abortion laws, with Curran documenting point by point that the bishops have no leg to stand on.

A third important distinction between the lecture and Roberts' reporting is Curran's analysis of a natural-law approach to civil law versus a religious freedom approach. Here the problem was as much my overly hasty reading of Roberts' as his less-than-precise summary of Curran.

My confusion began, I think, when Roberts wrote: "Curran said that in the abortion issue, he prefers the religious freedom approach..." Curran's wording in the lecture was a lot more than expressing a preference: "The pope and the bishops have used the Thomistic approach in dealing with the legality of abortion. In my judgment the religious freedom approach is the correct approach and since the Second Vatican Council should be used by all today in the Catholic tradition."

A la Roberts, I thought Curran was mainly interested in contrasting the two approaches, but also in arguing that a religious freedom approach could accommodate either. So I launched into a counter-analysis that Vatican II's religious freedom approach had actually altered the context in which the natural law approach was now available, thereby placing the natural law approach within much more strictly defined limits. That counter-analysis remains accurate, but now it's clear that I missed another point Curran was making.

Besides contrasting the natural law and religious freedom approaches, Curran was also demonstrating how the religious freedom approach, without necessarily referencing the natural law, could be used legitimately to justify a whole range of specific approaches to abortion law. He noted, for example, that a religious freedom approach could focus primarily on an individual woman's conscience and rely on her to make conscientious decisions about abortion. But, he added, another aspect of the religious freedom approach could focus on just treatment of the fetus as a developing individual with rights appropriate to its status.

This puts Curran much closer to my counter-analysis. But it also brings us back to the discussion of the First Amendment that I started with above. As I see it, because Vatican II's religious freedom approach can lead to multiple outcomes and even incompatible outcomes, it is ultimately the First Amendment that decides for Americans which approaches are allowable and which are not. It seems to me that one approach that is clearly disallowed is for the leaders of one religious group to impose its moral teaching about abortion on those who believe otherwise. Those of us who pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States cannot support that approach.

Pope Says Condoms Are a Lesser Evil Than Spreading HIV to New Victims

2010-11-24T09:17:00.004-06:00

On 11/21/10 various news organizations carried the stunning news that Pope Benedict XVI, as part of a book-length interview with a German reporter, had done a major about-face in his position on the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS.

Only last year Benedict had raised a storm of controversy, and drawn nearly unanimous criticism from global health organizations and Western European governments, for saying that condoms did nothing to contain the spread of AIDs and that they in fact worsened it.

The 11/21 reports brought the news that the pope now has said, as MSNBC put it, "that condom use by people such as male prostitutes was a lesser evil since it indicated they were taking a step toward a more moral and responsible sexuality by aiming to protect their partner from a deadly infection."

That was followed two days later by a Vatican clarification that the pope also meant his remarks to apply to women who have HIV--even if their use of condoms also prevented a pregnancy.

In this instance, it must be said that the secular media have done a much better job of grasping and communicating how much of a "game-changer" Benedict's new position is. The Catholic press for the most part has been all too eager to assure lay Catholics that the pope is not back-tracking on Pope Paul VI's ban on "artificial contraception." What I have not seen from Catholic analysts yet is the recognition that by allowing for situations where use of condoms is less of an evil than not using them, Benedict opens the door to more exceptions than controlling HIV transmission.

For once the primary consideration shifts from use of condoms to prevent pregnancy to use of condoms to responsibly protect the health of ones sex partner, aren't there other situations where using a condom might be more responsible than not doing so? I'm thinking, for example, of situations where a woman has been advised by her physician that having more children would endanger her physical health. If the church cannot see its way clear to allow that woman to use the pill to prevent another pregnancy, couldn't it at least use Benedict's logic to say that it would be more responsible for her partner to use a condom, even to prevent pregnancy, than to endanger her life because he did not use one?

I think over time it will be discovered that Benedict has opened up several questions along these lines, especially for situations where HIV is not the threat a partner is trying to avoid, but where some other life-threatening condition is.

That is the kind of nuanced thinking on these matters that Catholic moral theologians have been urging for decades. I think it may be the most helpful development in forty years that a pope has finally grasped what they've been saying and has had the courage to agree with it. I hope Catholic analysts will get around to saying so, and soon.

Party of Treason: Republicans Sacrifice National Security on Dump-Obama Altar

2010-11-19T10:06:00.023-06:00

I said in March that the Republican party was "very much in danger of transitioning from the party of no to the party of treason."

At the time the context was that the Republicans, then being called a failed political party for doing absolutely nothing to repair the economy they trashed, were undermining U.S. democracy by trying to overturn the recently passed health care law and encouraging those who threatened to exterminate anyone who had voted for it.

But now the Republicans have tricked voters--except for the millions on the east and west coasts who actually pay attention to facts--into believing that "No" to anything President Obama proposes can masquerade as a policy initiative. And now they think they can continue their "No" as a strategy to deny the president re-election in 2012.

So let the conservative over-reaching begin! And let it begin, in all places, with blocking ratification of the New START (the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty)--favored by every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, several prominent Republicans who were once Secretary of State, and even the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In an excellent editorial The San Jose Mercury News calls the Republican tactic "a new low" and says Republicans should be ashamed of themselves for letting political posturing morph into an imminent threat to American lives. The Houston Chronicle thought so much of the editorial that it re-published it in today's print edition. The Chronicle's posting of the editorial follows:

If you doubted that Republicans could be so craven as to put their own political interests above national security, the proof was delivered Tuesday: Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl announced he will block New START, which calls for the resumption of nuclear controls that until now have had bipartisan support.

Holding our nuclear security hostage solely to embarrass President Barack Obama is a new low. Public-spirited Republicans should demand that the treaty move forward as planned.

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) is a consensus document. Obama went to great lengths to win the support of the military, the State Department and a broad range of Republicans and Democrats.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice supports the treaty. So do other prominent Republicans including George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Baker and Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff strongly backs it. The chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, has said, "I believe — and the rest of the military leadership in this country believes - that this treaty is essential to our future security."

The treaty would require that Russia and the United States cut back on nuclear arsenals and would allow the United States to resume inspecting Russia's nuclear facilities, a right that lapsed last December for the first time since the Cold War. Does anyone really want Russia shuffling its nuclear weapons around without inspections? Even a year's gap has put us in greater danger of materials falling into the wrong hands.

The intrusion of partisan politics into national security is a break with tradition. The opposition party in Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, has long set politics aside so that the country could present a united front to other nations. Lacking trust, we will have fewer allies and partners. Does anyone really think we can go it alone in today's world?

Obama went to extraordinary lengths to iron out areas of disagreement with Kyl, knowing two-thirds of senators must approve the treaty. The president had no fewer than 29 meetings, phone calls or exchanges with the Arizona senator and his staff, White House documents show. The sticking point seemed to be Kyl's sense that the United States needs to go to greater lengths to modernize its nuclear arsenal (at the expense of the deficit). So the president offered to add $80 billion to the budget for that purpose, including $4.1 billion just last Friday in an effort to close the deal.

So how did Kyl respond? He disrespectfully blindsided the president, timing his announcement to embarrass Obama just before he departs to Portugal for a NATO summit.

Kyl is taking his marching orders from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who openly proclaims that Republicans' top priority for the next two years is to defeat Obama.

Unchecked nuclear weaponry in unstable Russia ultimately threatens American lives.

If that's the cost of this political game, it won't be Obama's fault. It will be McConnell's.

Good Journalism Unmasks Another Phony Story from the Purveyors of Faux News

2010-11-18T16:02:00.006-06:00

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman applauds how CNN's Anderson Cooper unmasked the baseless rumor that President Obama's trip to India and Asia was costing U.S. taxpayers $200 million a day--a story "reported" with hysterical grandiosity by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage. When will the public learn that nothing that comes out of their mouths can be trusted?

Most of Friedman's column follows:

On Nov. 4, Anderson Cooper did the country a favor. He expertly deconstructed on his CNN show the bogus rumor that President Obama’s trip to Asia would cost $200 million a day. This was an important “story.” It underscored just how far ahead of his time Mark Twain was when he said a century before the Internet, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” But it also showed that there is an antidote to malicious journalism — and that’s good journalism.

Cooper said he felt impelled to check it out because the evening before he had had Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a Republican and Tea Party favorite, on his show and had asked her where exactly Republicans will cut the budget.

Instead of giving specifics, Bachmann used her airtime to inject a phony story into the mainstream. She answered: “I think we know that just within a day or so the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India, and these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.”

The next night, Cooper explained that he felt compelled to trace that story back to its source, since someone had used his show to circulate it. His research, he said, found that it had originated from a quote by “an alleged Indian provincial official,” from the Indian state of Maharashtra, “reported by India’s Press Trust, their equivalent of our A.P. or Reuters. I say ‘alleged,’ provincial official,” Cooper added, “because we have no idea who this person is, no name was given.”

It is hard to get any more flimsy than a senior unnamed Indian official from Maharashtra talking about the cost of an Asian trip by the American president.

“It was an anonymous quote,” said Cooper. “Some reporter in India wrote this article with this figure in it. No proof was given; no follow-up reporting was done. Now you’d think if a member of Congress was going to use this figure as a fact, she would want to be pretty darn sure it was accurate, right? But there hasn’t been any follow-up reporting on this Indian story. The Indian article was picked up by The Drudge Report and other sites online, and it quickly made its way into conservative talk radio.”

Cooper then showed the following snippets: Rush Limbaugh talking about Obama’s trip: “In two days from now, he’ll be in India at $200 million a day.” Then Glenn Beck, on his radio show, saying: “Have you ever seen the president, ever seen the president go over for a vacation where you needed 34 warships, $2 billion — $2 billion, 34 warships. We are sending — he’s traveling with 3,000 people.” In Beck’s rendition, the president’s official state visit to India became “a vacation” accompanied by one-tenth of the U.S. Navy. Ditto the conservative radio talk-show host Michael Savage. He said, “$200 million? $200 million each day on security and other aspects of this incredible royalist visit; 3,000 people, including Secret Service agents.”

Cooper then added: “Again, no one really seemed to care to check the facts. For security reasons, the White House doesn’t comment on logistics of presidential trips, but they have made an exception this time." He then quoted Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, as saying, “I am not going to go into how much it costs to protect the president, [but this trip] is comparable to when President Clinton and when President Bush traveled abroad. This trip doesn’t cost $200 million a day.” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said: “I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd, this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy and some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier in support of the president’s trip to Asia. That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.”

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it.

Eight Deadly Meals: Does Anyone Need a Day's Worth of Calories in One Sitting?

2010-11-08T09:18:00.016-06:00

Talk about food for thought! There's enough food here to fuel thinking for several days. Put another way, there's enough food here to make you sick--or at least to make everyone of us fatter and fatter. And maybe that should provoke a particular thought: boycott these fat factories until they remove these items from their menus.

In yesterday's online postings and today's print edition the Houston Chronicle calls attention to eight restaurant meals that -- in one sitting -- provide close to "the 2,000 calories recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for an entire day's sustenance."

The Chronicle article, Chain-restaurant fare weighing down Americans, actually re-publishes a September 21st article by Washington Post Staff Writer Rachel Saslow entitled With high-calorie dishes, restaurant chains put obesity on the menu.

The article was a follow-up to the 2010 Xtreme Eating Awards, given in May by the Center for Science in the Public Interest to nine "caloric heavyweight meals"--many of them offered by the same restaurant chains Saslow spotlights, but some actually less weighty than the eight below. What follows is the last two-thirds of Saslow's article.

"Restaurants are not in the business of making people healthy," Washington dietitian Rebecca Scritchfield says . "They're trying to make money, and salt and fat are cheap ways to make food taste better."

We asked Scritchfield to give us her take on these caloric heavyweights.

All of the nutritional information below comes from the restaurants' websites, except for the Cheesecake Factory's, which is courtesy of CSPI's Xtreme Eating awards. (The chain does not publish its nutritional information online.)

Quiznos large tuna melt sub sandwich

The numbers: 1,520 calories, 101 grams of fat, 21 grams of saturated fat, 2,020 milligrams sodium. Equivalent of eating: More than a stick of butter's worth of fat. Expert evaluation: Grabbing a tuna sandwich for lunch sure sounds like a healthful decision, but not with this jumbo-size sub. "If someone hears 'tuna' and they think they should be eating more fish, they might think that's a good choice, but the portion is way too big," Scritchfield says. On top of that, "it's made with foods that have high calories, such as mayonnaise and cheese."

Chipotle's chicken burrito

Filled with rice, pinto beans, corn salsa, cheese, sour cream and guacamole, accompanied by a side of chips. The numbers: 1,750 calories, 79.5 grams of fat, 23 grams of saturated fat, 2,750 milligrams of sodium. Equivalent of eating: The calories in more than nine chicken soft tacos at Taco Bell. Expert evaluation: "There are lots of ways you can make that healthier," Scritchfield says. "My top recommendation is not to get cheese and sour cream but instead get guacamole because that has the heart-healthy fat and gives you the creaminess you're going for." You could also forgo the chips and save 570 calories.

Applebee's New England fish and chips

The numbers: 1,910 calories, 137 grams fat, 24 grams saturated fat, 3,150 milligrams of sodium. Equivalent of eating: The fat in almost a pound of cheddar cheese. Expert evaluation: "If you really wanted this, I'd say split it and add some veggies," Scritchfield says. "And do not touch the salt shaker; it already has more than a day's worth of sodium in it."

Chili's Big Mouth Bites

Four mini burgers topped with jalapeño ranch dressing. The numbers: 1,930 calories, 31 grams of saturated fat, 4,400 milligrams sodium. Equivalent of eating: The calories of about 25 eggs. Expert evaluation: "These are interesting because they're sold as 'mini' burgers, but it's still a high-calorie, high-fat and high-salt meal because of what's on them," Scritchfield says.

Outback Steakhouse's full rack baby back ribs

Served with Aussie fries. The numbers: 1,936 calories, 133 grams of fat, 56 grams of saturated fat, 2,741 milligrams of sodium. Equivalent of eating: The fat grams in 20 tablespoons of salad dressing. Expert evaluation: "There is no color on that plate: no broccoli, no garden salad. Vegetables should be half of your dinner plate, and they're absent," Scritchfield says. Outback diners can substitute steamed green beans or seasonal veggies for the fries and slash about 200 calories and 15 grams of fat.

The following mega-meals could be shared, but Scritchfield says it wouldn't be surprising if they sometimes are consumed by just one person: "People envision what they're served as their portion."

Domino's bread bowl pasta

The numbers: One bread bowl, which Domino's nutritional information counts as two servings, contains 1,340 to 1,470 calories, 48 to 56 grams of fat, 21 to 27 grams of saturated fat, 65 to 115 grams of fiber, 1,830 to 2,860 milligrams of sodium. Equivalent of eating: The fiber in about 16 to 29 servings of oatmeal. Expert evaluation: "If you get enough fiber, and 25 to 35 grams a day is the right amount, it helps keep digestion at a normal pace. But if you eat too much fiber, it actually gives you constipation," Scritchfield says.

P.F. Chang's double pan-fried noodles

With a combination of meats. Although this is one entree, the company counts it as four servings since it totals 36 ounces. The numbers: 1,820 calories, 84 grams of fat, 8 grams saturated fat, 7,692 milligrams of sodium. Equivalent of eating: The sodium in 70 tablespoons of blue cheese dressing. Expert evaluation: "If four people shared this (as their entire meal), not only would the waiter be like, 'What are you doing?' but we'd leave dissatisfied," Scritchfield says. "They're breaking it down so their numbers look good."

Cheesecake Factory's pasta carbonara

The numbers: 2,500 calories, 85 grams of saturated fat. Equivalent of eating: The saturated fat in about 5 cups of half-and-half cream. Expert evaluation: "Four adult men would have to share this entree in order to each stay within a day's worth of saturated fat," Scritchfield says.

Free of "the Democratic Politics of Capitol Hill," Maybe Obama Can Govern His Way

2010-11-04T16:36:00.010-05:00

Like House Speaker-in-Waiting John Boehner, Washington Post columnist George F. Will wants us to see Tuesday's Republican sweep of the House of Representatives, several Senate seats and a passel of governorships as A recoil against liberalism. In today's column Will argues:

This was the serious concern that percolated beneath the normal froth and nonsense of the elections: Is political power - are government commands and controls - superseding and suffocating the creativity of a market society's spontaneous order? On Tuesday, a rational and alarmed American majority said "yes."

Well, that may be what some of the majority said. However, David S. Broder, who has been a political reporter for the Washington Post since 1966 and is perhaps the most centrist political columnist at the newspaper, had a rather different take:

Some people may have voted against President Obama's party because they think he has not devoted enough energy toward fixing our economy, but the larger disappointment that fueled anti-Obama animus was that he allowed himself to be sucked into the Democratic Party's endless machinations to get better deals for their base and their contributors, which bloated the economic stimulus, the health care law and the failed energy bill into "a swollen, expensive and ineffective legislative monstrosity." The result for Obama?

Thus, a double setback to the hopes that had been aroused by his election. Instead of cooperation, the worst kind of partisanship returned. And instead of changing the way Washington operated, he seemed to ratify business as usual.

Broder, in other words, sees not so much a rejection of Obama's agenda (wherever on the spectrum it may be located) as an angry disappointment at his failure to achieve the kind of post-partisan leadership to which he aspired and which his campaign inspired us to believe was possible. Broder suggests that Obama's way forward is to try again to do things his way, not the Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid way:

There will be a temptation to interpret the Democrats' loss of their House majority and of at least six Senate seats as a rejection of Obama's first-term agenda, the one on which he was elected in 2008.

What lessons should Obama draw? The worst mistake would be for him to abandon or reject his own agenda for government. If health care is to be repealed, let it be after the 2012 election when he will have a chance to defend his handiwork - not now.

Instead, he should return to his original design for governing, which emphasized outreach to Republicans and subordination of party-oriented strategies. The voters have in effect liberated him from his confining alliances with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and put him in a position where he can and must negotiate with a much wider range of legislators, including Republicans.

The president's worst mistake may have been avoiding even a single one-on-one meeting with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell until he had been in office for a year and a half. To make up, the outreach to McConnell and likely House Speaker John Boehner should begin at once and continue as a high priority.

Obama tried governing on the model preferred by congressional Democrats and the result was the loss of Democratic seats and his own reputation. Now he should try governing his own way. It cannot work worse, and it might yield much better results.

Charles Curran: Abortion Law Push Lacks Certitude, Consistency and Constitutionality

2010-11-02T10:06:00.010-05:00

Catholic Priest Charles E. Curran has been Elizabeth Scurlock University Professor of Human Values at Southern Methodist University since 1991.

At age 76, he is certainly no newcomer to Catholic moral theology, with Doctor of Sacred Theology degrees in 1961 from two Catholic institutions in Rome: the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Academia Alfonsiana.

In fact, prior to joining SMU he was a peritus (theological expert) at the Second Vatican Council, and shortly after the council he was appointed associate professor of theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he was granted tenure and served almost continuously until 1986. (I was privileged to be a student in a couple of his classes in the 1971-1972 academic year.)

"Almost continuously" is said very much tongue in cheek. Curran was briefly fired in 1967 for his views on birth control--but quickly reinstated after a five-day faculty-led strike. He also became persona non grata with the Vatican after he joined some 600 theologians in questioning the methodology and conclusions of Humanae vitae, Pope Paul VI's encyclical forbidding 'artificial' birth control.

But despite his dissent and his relentless assertion that theologians and lay Catholics had every right to dissent from particular papal teachings, Curran held on to his job until after the election of Pope John Paul II--who had Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF, formerly known as the Inquisition), declare that Curran was no longer eligible to teach in Catholic schools. Curran argued in a civil suit that the Catholic University had violated its own due process procedures in terminating his employment, but the court disagreed.

SMU had the academic foresight and ecumenical largess to hire him five years later, which has allowed him to continue functioning as a moral theologian regarded by his peers as the best American in his field.

I think both as a courtesy to SMU and as a means to avoid exacerbating his Roman Catholic situation Curran has laid relatively low on specifically Catholic issues in recent years. He has not been silent and he has not stopped asserting his deeply held convictions. But he has generally avoided broadsides that would raise the ire of Catholic authorities.

So I was curious when Curran told a gathering of moral theologians meeting in Trent, Italy, last July that "we cannot put our heads in the sand" in the face of current crises in the church. He was referring to people leaving Catholicism in unprecedented numbers as a result of the clergy sex abuse crisis and the bishops' attempts to cover it up, conflicting approaches to moral theology taken by theologians and the hierarchy, and the return to authoritarianism and overcentralization that has characterized the Vatican in the decades since Vatican II. I was curious above all if Curran had some more specific personal response in mind. Last week, it became clear that he did.

In a public lecture at SMU on October 28th, Curran made a newer theological issue his own: the U.S. bishops efforts to impose Catholic-based abortion laws on the citizens of the United States. As summarized by National Catholic Reporter Editor at Large Tom Roberts, Curran called the bishops' approach to such laws "flawed," for at least four reasons:

“The speculative doubt about when human life begins;
“the fact that possibility and feasibility are necessary aspects involved in discussions about abortion law;
“the understanding and role of civil law;
“and the weakness of the intrinsic evil argument.”

So far no one who has found a complete transcript of Curran's lecture online. As reported by Roberts, however, Curran is arguing under these multiple headings that the bishops' position lacks the certitude, consistency and constitutional standing to justify enacting it into law.

On the question of certitude, Curran points out that Catholic tradition, from Thomas Aquinas to the present day "recognizes speculative doubt about when the soul is infused or when the human person comes into existence." Curran acknowledges that the CDF's 1974 Declaration on Procured Abortion and John Paul II's 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae both call Catholics to err on the side of caution: since "the presence of the soul is probable" at any given point in a pregnancy, "one cannot take the risk of killing a human person."

However, sufficient uncertainty remains that the church cannot legitimately force this belief on non-Catholics. Thus, says Curran, "The most accurate way to state the Catholic moral teaching is that direct abortion even of a fertilized ovum is always wrong, but you cannot say it is murder. There is doubt about the reality of the early embryo."

In a pluralistic and politically divided society like the United States, there is also uncertainty about the possibility and feasibility of enacting an across-the-board prohibition of abortion. Absent certitude on those issues, it is a matter of prudential judgment whether Catholics should work for such a law or support other measures that they believe would be more effective. (Curran doesn't seem to say so, but how such a law could be enforced equitably and effectively is also fraught with uncertainty.) Obviously this has a direct impact on the right of bishops to excommunicate or even discipline Catholic lay people and politicians who decline to tow the bishops' official line.

Curran also sees uncertainty on whether the role of civil law should be viewed through a natural law perspective, which would seek to protect basic human rights including the right to life, versus a religious-freedom approach, under which "one could give the benefit of the doubt to the freedom of the woman." However, because I see this more as a church-state separation issue, I think it is probably the weakest of Curran's arguments. I will say why under the discussion of constitutionality, below.

Curran sees lack of consistency in the bishops' assertion that all abortions must be outlawed because abortion is an intrinsic moral evil. Curran argues that using the term as a rationale for giving abortion preeminence over all other political issues is a faulty argument. Citing prostitution and adultery, Curran notes the Catholic tradition has not insisted that either be outlawed, even though Catholic theology calls both intrinsically evil. If abortion is to be treated inconsistently, the bishops need to explain why. So far they have failed to do so.

This also echos Curran's insistence earlier in the lecture that official church teaching on the morality of abortion is "not as certain" as the teachings on murder, torture or adultery" and that what the bishops want legislated about abortion "entails prudential judgment so that they cannot logically distinguish it from most of the other issues such as the death penalty, health care, nuclear deterrence, [and] housing."

By raising the question of religious freedom, Curran's reflections on "the understanding and role of civil law" touch on the constitutionality of outlawing abortion. However, his direct concern is the conflict in Catholic theology between a natural law approach to civil law and an approach which makes freedom of religion the dominant principle.

One possibility is to say, as Curran does, that the conflict means there is lack of certitude in Catholic theology on this issue, so that either approach can be pursued with equal validity, albeit also with requisite humility and respect for opponents' experience, motivation and rationale.

Another approach, which I favor, is to say that Vatican II's teaching on religious freedom has become the new context in which the natural law tradition is available. From a process philosophy perspective, the teaching on religious freedom has relativized the conclusions of the natural law analysis and redefined the limits under which natural law conclusions are valid and applicable. To assert natural law beyond those limits is to proclaim a falsehood.

What Vatican II's teaching on religious freedom did was to move the church's official position much closer to the separation of church and state enshrined (per Thomas Jefferson and an unbroken string of court rulings) in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Which is why I have argued since 1968, and several times here, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" means that the bishops may not insist that the Catholic moral teaching on abortion be imposed on everyone else as a public law--because "everyone else" includes non-Catholics, non-Christians, nonbelievers, and even Catholics who conscientiously disagree with it. On the issue of abortion in the United States, at least, the Constitution requires that freedom of religion predominate over a natural law approach to civil law.

With that one amendment, I find Curran's arguments accurate and compelling. It may indicate that I am not alone that so many Catholic conservatives have already responded to Curran's critique not with reasoned argument but with ad hominem attacks, most focusing on the claim that he was "fired" by Catholic University in 1967--which, as Curran says about the bishops' position on the personhood of the fetus, "is accurate but not totally forthcoming." Officially he was fired for a few days, but he was quickly reinstated and held his post continuously for another 20 years. And even when the Vatican revoked his authority to teach in Catholic schools, it did not instruct him to stop functioning as a Catholic theologian.

But the conservative response may also portend that some church official somewhere is probably ready to pounce on what they will perceive as Curran's departure from orthodoxy. And that could cause the Vatican to escalate from "Thou shall not teach in Catholic schools" to "Thou shall not publicly proclaim Catholic theology anywhere," or even "Thou art no longer in communion with the Catholic Church."

I imagine that Curran preferred to avoid those risks for several years, but became convinced that given his age and the dire condition of the church, they are risks he could avoid no longer. As he said in July, "We cannot put our heads in the sand." And if moral theologians have to put their heads on the chopping block of censure or excommunication to bring the official church to its senses, who more credible to lead them than Charlie Curran?

Let me end this with the prayer from Ephesians that concludes the final chapter of my doctoral dissertation: "Glory be to him whose power, working within us, can do infintely more that we can ask or imagine; glory be to him from generation to generation in the church and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen."

Who Has Put Pubic Hair on Our "Citizens United" Decision? Could It Be Ginni Thomas?

2010-10-27T15:33:00.010-05:00

There was one predominant reaction to Ginni Thomas' insistence that Anita Hill needs to apologize for her sexual-harassment testimony against Clarence Thomas 19 years ago: what was Mrs. Thomas thinking? What could the Thomases possibly gain by resurrecting a controversy so old that many of Ms. Hill's law students didn't realize who she was?

On the eve of Halloween week, why treat a new generation of Americans to the macabre details of Ms. Hill's allegations against Mr. Thomas--including sharing his interest in pornography and his horniness with unwilling female co-workers and, above all, his elocution to some of them: "Who has put public hair on my Coke?"

And did Mrs. Thomas give no thought that her new harassment of Ms. Hill might bring comment from others who had been romantically involved with Mr. Thomas in the past--like former girlfriend Lillian McEwan, previously an SEC lawyer, who last week confirmed that Mr. Thomas was really into porn and really aggressive in pushing himself sexually on female co-workers? Don't McEwan's revelations set up Mr. Thomas for impeachment by Congress, on the grounds that he lied under oath in his confirmation hearings?

Whether Mrs. Thomas' role as a prominent tea bagger and high-profile fund raiser for the movement was a motivating factor is unknown. But Providence Journal columnist Fromma Harrop finds it ironic that by putting her husband's controversy back in the news, Mrs. Thomas has helped us focus on the serious threat posed by the Supreme Court's ruling in the "Citizens United" case.

Harrop doesn't say so, but I will: the pubic hair on the Coke has become the pubic hair on Citizens United: Mrs. Thomas' gambit personifies why allowing 501(c)(4) groups with phantom donors to contribute anonymously and without limit to partisan political advertising is such a danger to American democracy.

Portions of Harrop's column follow:

Ginni Thomas has bigger fish to fry than to rehash her grievances with Anita Hill. She's raised hundreds of thousands for her lucrative political brainchild, Liberty Central. The group's mission is to co-opt tea party types and deliver them to the Republican establishment. What better way for Ginni to profit from right-wing anger than to portray herself as the victim of a left-wing smear campaign?

By all means, let's keep the spotlight on her and follow it to Liberty Central. You think that big money has already taken over Washington? You have no idea how much worse it could get. The Thomases' activities provide a number of scary potential scenarios.

Clarence Thomas' more serious brush with indecency involved his role last January in the obscene Citizens United ruling. Joining the conservative majority, he helped open the stable doors for 501(c)(4) groups, like Ginni's Liberty Central, to collect millions from unidentified donors, then use the money to run political ads.

Now, Ginni is a private citizen who has every right to be politically active. Liberals can play the same game. But here's the problem — and it goes way beyond possibly compromising the electoral process.
Clarence rules on cases that affect powerful economic interests. We have no idea whether those interests are simultaneously enriching Ginni's political group and, by extension, the Thomas household. But Ginni knows.

What's to stop her from saying over breakfast: "Honey, Megamogul Hedge Fund Partners has just given Liberty Central $500,000. They need your help at court today." Or to better protect her husband from possible conflict-of-interest charges, she could take an indirect approach: "Honey, I don't care for the plaintiff's argument in today's case," followed by a wink.

Perhaps the Thomases are sterling servants of the public good. Still, how can we assess whether a justice has a conflict of interest without knowing where the family's money comes from?

The classic conservative cure for keeping elections honest while allowing unlimited campaign spending was to disclose the names of the spenders. Now we can't even tell who may be paying people off.

Thank you, Ginni Thomas, for keeping us focused on these dangers to the democracy. You may have done our civic culture a great service even if you had no intention of doing it.

Church Teaching Comes from Three Groups; Church Officials Are But One of Them

2010-10-15T13:40:00.011-05:00

Hats off to the National Catholic Reporter today for posting two excellent commentaries reaffirming that there are multiple teaching authorities in the Catholic Church, and that church officials are only one of them. This was, of course, one of the pivotal themes of my doctoral dissertation, and a reality that Vatican conservatives have been eager to deny in the 40+ years since Vatican II.

In the wake of a September 15th broadside by the Committee on Doctrine of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops--which charged that the 2008 book The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology by Creighton University theologians Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler was “in serious error, and cannot be considered authentic Catholic teaching”--the commentaries remind the bishops that Catholic theologians and baptized Catholics as a whole are parallel channels of teaching authority: sources which the bishops may neither disrespect nor ignore.

One commentary by theologian Regina Schulte, is entitled On sexuality, the hierarchy has usurped the entire teaching office. She compares the bishops' reactionary stance to the one they voiced against the 1977 landmark book Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought, by a committee of theologians commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America--and concludes that not much has changed. Schulte knows whereof she speaks: her late husband James Schulte was one of the study's authors. Ms. Schulte asks:

"Should final decisions regarding sexual morality for all persons be filtered only through such a single mindset and then imposed dictatorially on all members -- men and women, married and single, homosexuals at all androgynal points on the spectrum?

"It borders on the ridiculous to disallow contributions that the very people possessing the requisite wisdom born of experience can bring to the discussions.

"It is apparent that the hierarchy has usurped the entire teaching office -- the “magisterium” -- for themselves; yet they are only one of three components endowed with this charism. Theologians and the wisdom born of experience in the “sense of the faithful” comprise the other two. It would seem, then, that appropriate exercise of their distinctive roles requires that bishops collaborate rather than compete.

"Finally, theologians must constantly emphasize that their role is not catechesis. Theology’s mission is not that of mere communicator between hierarchy and laity. When denunciations such as that pronounced on this latest scholarly work by Salzman and Lawson cease to be standard operating procedure, then, and probably only then, will Catholic moral theology move forward, offering light and guidance to contemporary Catholics -- and to society at large with whom it will undoubtedly resonate."

The second commentary is an NCR editorial entitled The wisdom of the church’s three magisteria. The editorial echoes Shulte's insistence that teaching authority in the Catholic church is shared by three different bodies of believers--officials, theologians and all the baptized. But the editorial expands on the theme by tracing it back to the "newly Blessed" Cardinal John Henry Newman, and by noting that Newman valued even more channels by which the Spirit of the Risen Lord could inspire church teaching:

"It was the newly Blessed John Henry Newman himself who pointed out that there are really three magisteria in the church: the mouth of the episcopacy, the doctors (meaning the theologians) and the people in the pews. Newman valued all three equally and the wise balance and guidance they provided.

"'I think I am right in saying that the tradition of the apostles, committed to the whole church in its various constituents and functions ... manifests itself variously at various times: sometimes by the mouth of the episcopacy, sometimes by the doctors, sometimes by the people, sometimes by liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and customs, by events, disputes, movements, and all those other phenomena which are comprised under the name of history. It follows that none of those channels of tradition may be treated with disrespect.'

"Newman was fascinated with the interactions among these three magisteria in history when doctrine and theology were being formulated, notably in the early centuries when the laity saved the church from the Arian heresy and then in the 19th century when the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was forged by Pope Pius IX, who preferred expressions taken from the church’s lived experience, from the faith and worship of the Christian people, to scholastic definitions."

The editorial ends by quoting the forward to The Sexual Person written by Fr. Charles Curran, moral theologian at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, whom I still cherish as one of my mentors at the Catholic University of America in the 1970s:

“Anyone familiar with the Catholic tradition and its history knows that arguments and even sharp differences between and among Catholic theologians are nothing new. In fact, in earlier times the differences were more severe than they are today. ... In that historical context, The Sexual Person makes a significant contribution. Not all theologians will agree with what Salzman and Lawler propose but all must recognize they have achieved their purpose of entering into a genuine and respectful dialogue in the search of the truth and meaning of human sexuality in the Catholic tradition today.”

Supremes Should Tell Fred Phelps He Can't Impose His Religion on Other Faiths' Funerals

2010-10-14T10:32:00.005-05:00

The gist of most of the coverage of the Supreme Court's questioning of the Fred Phelps clan October 6th was that most of the justices, conservative and liberal, seemed sympathetic to the family of the deceased soldier harassed by the anti-gay hate group at their son's funeral and wanted to find a way to rule against Phelps--but the justices seemed to be grasping for a way to do so that would not stifle legitimate free speech.

In a letter to the Houston Chronicle October 12th, a reader gave the justices an excellent rationale. Stephen W. O'Driscoll of The Woodlands, TX, said the issue should be freedom of religion, not freedom of speech: funerals, which are almost always conducted by a religious official of one kind or another, should be considered protected events under the First Amendment's freedom of religion clauses--so that no one has the right to disrupt them, and especially when they're trying to assert contrary religious claims against the mourners. The text of the letter follows:

No right to disrupt

Regarding "Justices not blind as they hear appeal," (Page A3, Thursday), the Supreme Court case involving the disruption of the burial of a fallen Marine is actually simple to decide.

Any burial can be considered a private and religious rite since a religious figure, such as a priest, rabbi, minister or other, is normally involved.

To say that anyone has the right to disrupt the service would lead to wholesale disruptions in churches, mosques, synagogues and any other places of worship.

I will leave it to the Supreme Court to decide if such disruptions should be considered as hate crimes.

— STEPHEN W. O'DRISCOLL,
The Woodlands

States Rights? Texas Oil Majors Try to Gut California Law That Cuts Greenhouse Gases

2010-10-07T09:30:00.004-05:00

"States rights." It's perhaps the perennial slogan of the U.S. political right. But when it suits their purposes, proponents have no compunction whatsoever about asserting, nakedly and arbitrarily, that other states have fewer rights than their own.

Take, for instance, the State of Hawaii. It has laws governing birth records--laws which mandate that original birth certificates be kept in a state filing cabinet, and nowhere else. Confronted with this mandate, those who insist on questioning the true birthplace of the President of the United States declare that Hawaii has no right to enact this legislation. How would they like it if Hawaii told them what they do not have the right to enact?

And now, thanks to a recent Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times, we get another flagrant example. We learn that two large Texas oil companies--Valero and Tesoro--are working to have California voters gut a law to rollback greenhouse gases, passed by the California Legislature with strong bipartisan support in 2006. And we also learn that California Republican Governor Arnold Schawrzenegger is mad as hell about the effort--as is Californian George Shultz, Republican secretary of state in the Reagan administration.

What we do not hear is any outcry from Texas Governor Rick Perry, long-put-upon champion of states rights for Texas. Perry, of course, has publicized his championship by dubious stances like challenging the EPA's right to enforce federal environmental laws in Texas, rejecting stimulus money publicly but taking it through the back door, squandering federal dollars intended to keep school districts from laying off teachers in a benighted attempt to plug a gigantic deficit looming in the state budget, and the like. So it would surprise no one if Perry were to claim that Texas has rights which California doesn't. Bless his heart!

As Daniel Webster asked during an historic debate in 1830, "wence is this supposed right of the states derived?" Of course Webster was debunking another presumptuous state right: the right to withdraw from the "perpetual union" into which the Constitution forged the states--another right Perry arrogates to himself. Perhaps Texas voters will be bright enough to disabuse him of that claim. Not likely, but one can hope.

Meanwhile, let's revel in most of Friedman's account of Texas' arrogance and California's rightful outrage:

The Terminator, a k a the Governator, is not happy. And you shouldn’t be either.

What has Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California incensed is the fact that two Texas oil companies with two refineries each in California are financing a campaign to roll back California’s landmark laws to slow global warming and promote clean energy innovation, because it would require the refiners to install new emission-control tools. At a time when President Obama and Congress have failed to pass a clean energy bill, California’s laws are the best thing we have going to stimulate clean-tech in America. We don’t want them gutted. C’mon in. This is a fight worth having.

Here are the basics: Next month Californians will vote on “Prop 23,” a proposal to effectively kill implementation of California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, known as A.B. 32. It was supported by Republicans, Democrats, businesses and environmentalists. Prop 23 proposes to suspend implementation of A.B. 32 until California achieves four consecutive quarters of unemployment below 5.5 percent. It is currently above 12 percent.

A.B. 32 was designed to put California on a path to reducing greenhouse gases in its air to 1990 levels by 2020. This would make the state a healthier place, and a more innovative one. Since A.B. 32 was passed, investors have poured billions of dollars into making new technologies to meet these standards.

“It is very clear that the oil companies from outside the state that are trying to take out A.B. 32, and trying to take out our environmental laws, have no interest in suspending it, but just to get rid of it,” Governor Schwarzenegger said at an energy forum we both participated in last week in Sacramento, sponsored by its energetic mayor, Kevin Johnson. “They want to kill A.B. 32. Otherwise they wouldn’t put this provision in there about the 5.5 percent unemployment rate. It’s very rare that California in the last 40 years had an unemployment rate of below 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters. They’re not interested in our environment; they are only interested in greed and filling their pockets with more money.

“And they are very deceptive when they say they want to go and create more jobs in California,” the governor added. “Since when has [an] oil company ever been interested in jobs? Let’s be honest. If they really are interested in jobs, they would want to protect A.B. 32, because actually it’s green technology that is creating the most jobs right now in California, 10 times more than any other sector.”

No, this is not about jobs. As ThinkProgress.org, a progressive research center, reported: Two Texas oil companies, Valero and Tesoro, “have led the charge against the landmark climate law, along with Koch Industries, the giant oil conglomerate owned by right-wing megafunders Charles and David Koch. Koch recently donated $1 million to the effort and has been supporting front groups involved in the campaign.”

Fortunately, Californians from across the political spectrum are trying to raise money to defeat Prop 23, but the vote could be close. George Shultz, a former secretary of state during the Reagan administration, has taken a leading role in the campaign against Prop 23. (See: www.stopdirtyenergyprop.com.)

“Prop 23 is designed to kill by indefinite postponement California’s effort to clean up the environment,” said Mr. Shultz. “This effort is financed heavily by money from out of state. You have to conclude that the financiers are less concerned about California than they are about the fact that if we get something that is working here to clean up the air and launch a clean-tech industry, it will go national and maybe international. So the stakes are high. I hope we can win here and send a message to the whole country that it’s time to put aside partisan politics and get an energy bill out of Washington.”

Dan Becker, a veteran environmental lobbyist, echoes that view: “Now that industry and their friends in Congress have blocked progress there, the hope for action moves to the states” and the Environmental Protection Agency. “Unfortunately,” he added, “polluter lobbyists are tight on our heels. They’ve offered Senate amendments to block the E.P.A. from using the Clean Air Act to cut power plant pollution. Since that failed, they are trying to block California from moving forward. ... If the people of California see through the misrepresentations of the oil industry, it throws climate denialism off the tracks and opens the door for a return to a science-based approach to the climate. It would be a triumph for the National Academy of Sciences over the National Academy of Fraud.”

The real joke is thinking that if California suspends its climate laws that Mother Nature will also take a timeout. “We can wait to solve this problem as long as we want,” says Nate Lewis, an energy chemist at the California Institute of Technology: “But Nature is balancing its books every day. It was a record 113 degrees in Los Angeles the other day. There are laws of politics and laws of physics. Only the latter can’t be repealed.”

Interior Dept. Approves 11 Square Miles of Solar Projects on Public Lands in So-Cal

2010-10-05T16:26:00.010-05:00

A posting from "msnbc staff and news service reports" (covered by others in the hours since) touts a significant step forward in the effort to harness solar energy to power homes. If things go well, several similar projects also plan to start up in the coming months. Excerpts follow:

After five years of negotiations and battles, some of them environmental, two large solar power projects on Tuesday got the first-ever green lights to set up shop on federal lands.

"These projects are milestones in our focused effort to rapidly and responsibly capture renewable energy resources on public lands," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement announcing the approvals in desert areas of Southern California.

One includes a square mile of solar panels near Victorville in inland Southern California, and the other covers about 10 square miles in the remote Imperial Valley, east of San Diego.

The announcement comes about five years after solar developers began asking the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for rights to develop hundreds of solar plants on federally owned desert land across the Southwest.

Expected to cost around $2 billion, the largest of the two projects will use 28,360 solar collectors known as SunCatchers to produce enough electricity to power more than 200,000 homes.

The approvals give the project sponsors access to almost 6,800 acres of public lands for 30 years.

Construction is expected to start on both by the end of the year, and Interior said the projects should generate almost 1,000 jobs.

The two approvals are:

The Imperial Valley Solar Project, by Tessera Solar of Arizona and based in Imperial County, Calif., is expected to produce up to 709 megawatts from 28,360 solar dishes, enough to power at least 200,000 homes.

The Chevron Lucerne Valley Solar Project will use photovoltaic solar technology in San Bernardino County, Calif., and will produce up to 45 megawatts from 40,500 solar panels, enough to power at least 13,000 homes.

Interior said both are part of a "fast track" process that provides significant funding via the federal stimulus program if construction begins by the end of 2010.

"The Recovery Act’s payment for specified energy property in lieu of tax credit program makes Tessera and Chevron eligible for approximately $273 million and $31 million, respectively," Interior stated.

Tuesday's approvals came shortly after California regulators passed rules requiring utilities to derive a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020, the most aggressive standards in the U.S.

The newly approved permit for sites in California were the first in a series Salazar expected to issue before the end of the year. Final approval by 2011 qualifies projects for federal stimulus funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Currently, solar developers have proposed facilities that would produce more than 6,000 megawatts, enough to power 4 million homes for a day at peak usage. The projects are proposed for about 23 million acres of federally owned desert in the Southwest.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the state is on track to approve nine large solar plants by year's end.

"Our great partnership is helping to improve public health, grow our green economy, promote energy independence and strengthen our national security," the governor said in a statement.

"Tea Kettle Movement" Vents Steam, But Offers Nothing to Cure What Ails Us

2010-09-29T09:58:00.003-05:00

New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman says "The tea party that has gotten all the attention, the self-generated protest against growth in government and the deficit" should really be called "the 'Tea Kettle movement'--because all it's doing is letting off steam."

It fails to comprehend what is really wrong with the United States, and its primary goal of reducing the federal deficit is diametrically incompatible with its goal of reducing taxes. By contrast, says Friedman, a "really important" tea party movement would face what ails us head on and not mince words about the obvious solutions.

The tea baggers have done such a disservice to rational political dialogue, I think it is a mistake to characterize any movement that wants to be taken seriously as a tea party. But I think Friedman is accurate about the movement the country needs--and accurate in his assessment that Barack Obama has not proven to be the leader the movement awaits. Excerpts from Friedman's column follow:

The Tea Kettle movement can't have a positive impact on the country because it has both misdiagnosed America's main problem and hasn't even offered a credible solution for the problem it has identified. How can you take a movement seriously that says it wants to cut government spending by billions of dollars but won't identify specific defense programs, Social Security, Medicare or other services it's ready to cut?

And how can you take seriously a movement that sat largely silent while the Bush administration launched two wars and a new entitlement, Medicare prescription drugs--while cutting taxes--but is now, suddenly, mad as hell about the deficit and won't take it anymore from President Barack Obama? Say what? Where were you folks for eight years?

The issues that upset the Tea Kettle movement--debt and bloated government--are actually the symptoms of our real problem, not causes. They are symptoms of a country in a state of incremental decline because our politics has become just another form of sports entertainment, our Congress is a forum for legalized bribery and our main lawmaking institutions divided by toxic partisanship.

The important tea party movement, which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats, understands this at a gut level and is looking for a leader...

Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg told me that when he does focus groups today this is what he hears: "People think the country is in trouble and that countries like China have a strategy for success and we don't. They will follow someone who convinces them that they have a plan to make America great again. That is what they want to hear. It cuts across Republicans and Democrats."

...What is America's core competency and strategic advantage, and how do we nurture it? Answer: It is our ability to attract, develop and unleash creative talent. That means men and women who invent, build and sell more goods and services that make people's lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, secure and entertained than any other country.

Leadership today is about how the U.S. government attracts and educates more of that talent and then enacts the laws, regulations and budgets that empower that talent to take its products and services to scale, sell them around the world--and create good jobs here in the process. Without that, we can't afford the health care or the defense we need.

This is the plan the real tea party wants from its president. To implement it would require us to actually raise some taxes--on, say, gasoline--and cut others--like payroll and corporate taxes. It would require us to overhaul our immigration laws so we can better control our borders, let in more knowledge workers and retain those skilled foreigners going to college here. And it would require us to reduce some services--like Social Security--while expanding other, like education and research for a 21st-century economy...

Any tea party that says the simple answer is just shrinking government and slashing taxes might be able to tip the midterm elections in its direction. But it can't tip America in the right direction. There is a tea party for that, but it's still waiting for a leader."

Freedom of Religion = Freedom from Legislating the Catholic Position on Abortion

2010-09-17T10:16:00.002-05:00

Tim Townsend, religion reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch since 2004, has gained quite a lot of attention for his analysis of various religions' divergent views on when human life begins, first posted on the Post-Dispatch website on August 22nd under the headline, New Mo. abortion law counters some philosophy, theology.

Several other media outlets that ran the piece thought they could improve on the title:

The Huffington Post (and evidently Religion News Service) named it Life Begins at Conception, New Mo. Law Says.

The National Catholic Reporter ran with Mo. lawmakers answer when life begins.

The weekly Houston Belief section of the Houston Chronicle got fancier: When does life begin? Laws attempt to apply Christian theology to answer question.

None of these, alas, captured Townsend's point as cogently as the original headline. For his real point is that several respectable religions have widely divergent views on when human life begins--and that the First Amendment's freedom of religion clauses prevent federal, state and local governments from favoring any one of them in legislation to control abortions. That, of course, has been a persistent view of mine since the 1960s.

But that, of course, has not prevented the Roman Catholic Church from trying to impose its specific abortion teaching on the rest of us throughout those decades. Rome has always tried to argue that its position is grounded, not on religious belief but on the so-called natural law--which, church officials argue, is accessible to all people of good will through reason alone, apart from any revelation by anyones God. Trouble is, Catholic church officials are the only religious leaders who accept their version of natural law. Thus the Catholic description of natural law is at bottom a religious belief--and, as such, one among others. No wonder after so many decades of trying, Rome has gotten only two of our states to agree legislatively that human life begins at conception.

Townsend's best contribution to the discussion is pointing out that until the late 19th century Rome's reading of the natural law was different than it has been since, and in fact much closer to the views of today's Protestants, Jews and Muslims than those of today's Catholic conservatives. This being the case, why make it the litmus test for Catholic orthodoxy and why, above all, insist that it can be imposed on other believers or those who exercise their right not to believe at all?

The following paragraphs are Townsend's succinct summary of the positions of various religions on when life begins. They explain why freedom of religion must mean freedom from legislating the Catholic position on abortion.

Aquinas, and Augustine before him, wrestled with concepts introduced by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. Aristotle believed that a soul could inhabit a fetus only when that fetus began to look human, a timetable he set at 40 days for men and 90 days for women.

The 40-day notion prevailed in the Roman Catholic Church until the 19th century, when Pope Pius IX removed the distinction between souled and unensouled fetuses from church doctrine.

Since then, the Catholic Church has conceded that man can never know empirically when an embryo gains its soul.

Protestant denominations have a variety of positions on life's beginnings, although more conservative evangelical churches largely embrace the Vatican's absolutist views.

But other faith traditions disagree, and have for centuries.

"The Talmud says that from the moment of fertilization until 40 days, the embryo has a status of being nearly liquid," said Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, Judaic scholar at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. "The question for Jewish law is not when does life begin, but when is the embryo entitled to the justice and compassion of society?"

Islamic law closely follows Jewish law, though different streams within Islam have various views, said Abdulaziz Sachedina, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Virginia and author of Islamic Biomedical Ethics.

Most Sunni Muslims "believe that life begins at the turn of the first trimester," Sachedina said.

Hindus believe in reincarnation, so life beginning "at conception" creates theological problems. "Life cannot begin at conception when our lives have not ended in the first place," said Cromwell Crawford, a retired professor at the University of Hawaii and author of Hindu Bioethics for the Twenty-First Century.

In its Declaration on Religious Freedom, Vatican II officially moved the Catholic church beyond its earlier claim that it had the right to tell others, believers and non-believers, how to believe. On the issue of abortion legislation, Rome has yet to follow the council's decree. How long, oh Lord, how long?

Blessed John Henry Newman: The Faithful Often Save the Church from Its Bishops

2010-09-16T16:10:00.012-05:00

Robert McClory, author of Faithful Dissenters: Men and Women Who Loved and Changed the Church, says Cardinal John Henry Newman, who converted to Roman Catholicism from the Church of England, would be aghast that Pope Benedict XVI is about to beatify him for being an opponent of dissent.
On the contrary, says McClory, "Newman was as singular a voice for responsible dissent and the rights of the laity as the Roman Catholic church has ever seen."

And as McClory points out, apart from Newman the Catholic Church would have no clue about development of doctrine and the essential role of the consensus of the faithful.

Although my Ph.D. dissertation argues that Newman's specific description of doctrinal development was an instance of misplaced concreteness (in Alfred North Whitehead's sense of the term), the church owes Newman a tremendous debt for staking his faith on notion that the development of Christian doctrine is real and observable--even though Pope Pius IX and other church officials of Newman's day were certain he was wrong and perhaps even heretical.

The following is McClory's take on Newman, posted today on the website of the National Catholic Reporter.

There is stark irony in the words Pope Benedict XVI chose when he announced last February his plan to visit England this year and there pronounce John Henry Newman as among the “blessed,” just one step from canonization as a saint. He cited Newman as an example for all the world of opposition to dissent. “In a social milieu that encourages the expression of a variety of opinions on every question that arises,” said the pope, “it is important to recognize dissent for what it is and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate.”

If Newman’s remains had not decomposed -- as Vatican investigators discovered when they attempted to dig up his coffin in 2008 seeking evidence of his sanctity -- he would have been spinning in his grave. For Newman was as singular a voice for responsible dissent and the rights of the laity as the Roman Catholic church has ever seen. He paid dearly for his convictions and was very nearly silenced or worse when he became embroiled in 1859 in a controversy over the development of doctrine.

The idea of development was not popular at the time, especially among the hierarchy. So Newman, using history to make his point, wrote about the Arian heresy of the 4th century. Twenty-five years before, he had produced a massive, scholarly history of the Arians and how they failed, despite a 50-year, emperor-supported campaign to impose as church doctrine the belief that Christ was not divine; rather, he was a most elevated, godlike being, but creature nevertheless. Now in a lengthy, pointed article, titled “On Consulting the Faithful on Matters of Doctrine,” Newman argued that the Arian position, shared by the overwhelming majority of the bishops and endorsed by at least one pope, did not become Catholic doctrine because a great mass of the laity along with a handful of priests and bishops resisted. Despite beatings, seizures of property and in some cases martyrdom, they refused, they dissented. They clung to the doctrine of the Council of Nicea, which, they were assured, had been discredited. Only at the First Council of Constantinople was the Arian position repudiated.

Belief in Christ’s divinity was maintained during the greater part of the 4th century, wrote Newman, “not by the unswerving firmness of the Holy See, Councils or Bishops, but … by the consensus fidelium [consent of the faithful]. On the one hand, I say, there was a temporary suspense of the functions of the Ecclesia docens [the teaching church]. The body of the Bishops failed in their confession of the faith. … There were untrustworthy Councils, unfaithful Bishops; there was weakness, fear of consequences, misguidance, delusion, hallucination, endless, hopeless, extending itself into nearly every corner of the Catholic church.”

To explain how such a thing happened (and could happen again), Newman relied on his own, well developed ideas about the “sense” and the “consent” of the faithful. Church teaching, he argued cannot be a top-down enterprise, a one-way street. It must be the result of a conspiratio, literally a breathing together of the faithful and the bishops. It is the first responsibility of the episcopacy and papacy, he said, to listen carefully before teaching doctrine.

And to what must they listen? Said Newman, “I think I am right in saying that the tradition of the Apostles, committed to the whole Church … manifests itself variously at various times: sometimes by the mouth of the episcopacy, sometimes by the doctors, sometimes by the people, sometimes by liturgies … customs, disputes, movements, and all those other phenomena which are comprised under the name of history. It follows that none of these channels of tradition may be treated with disrespect.” This is not to undercut the teaching authority of the bishops, insisted Newman; they must wade through all these sources. And, he added, of all the sources, “I am accustomed to lay stress on the consensus fidelium.”

Newman strove for most of his life as a Roman Catholic to open the minds of English Catholics, lay and clerical. In this he had scant success, living for most of his remaining years under a cloud of suspicion. At one point, he was labeled “the most dangerous man in England.” Then in Newman’s final days Pope Pius IX died and his successor, Leo XIII, removed the cloud by naming Newman a cardinal. It was at the Second Vatican Council that Newman found a larger measure of vindication.

Theologians by then had embraced and expanded on his ideas of doctrinal development and the importance of consulting the faithful. The fingerprints of Newman can be found on many council documents, most notably the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church. Pope Paul VI went so far as to say Vatican II was “Newman’s council.”

The beatification of John Henry Newman now seems more a scandal than cause for celebration as those who are determined to rewrite Vatican II seek to enlist Newman in their misrepresentation. He will not join the movement.

Protest the Pope: Why Dignify Benedict's Long Train of Abuses with a State Visit?

2010-09-16T09:50:00.027-05:00

CNN has posted a speech given in London last month to members of the Protest the Pope movement by Australian activist Peter Tatchell, who campaigns for human rights, democracy, lesbian and gay freedom and global justice. The campaign said Pope Benedict XVI had committed atrocities against several groups of human beings and that the UK government should not be dignifying him with a state visit. Tatchell's speech is a handy summary of Joseph Ratzinger's failings, both as Roman Catholicism's chief doctrinal enforcer under Pope John Paul II and as John Paul's successor. CNN's posting follows.

As a democrat, I defend the right of Pope Benedict XVI to visit Britain and to express his opinions. But people who disagree with him also have a right to protest against his often harsh, intolerant views.

The Protest the Pope campaign is calling on the British government to disassociate itself from the pope's opposition to women's rights, gay equality and the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV. On these and many other issues, Benedict is out of step with the majority of British people, including most Catholics.

We do not believe that the pope should be honored with a state visit, given his role in the cover up of child sex abuse by Catholic clergy. Even today, he is refusing to hand the Vatican's secret sex abuse files to the police in countries worldwide. He is protecting the abusers. This makes him complicit with sex crimes against children. Such a person does not deserve the honor of a state visit.

We also object to part of his visit being funded by the taxpayer. The British public never funds visits by the Grand Mufti of Mecca or the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. Why should the pope's visit get privileged financial support?

On many important social issues, the pope rejects equality and human rights.

Pope Benedict opposes women's ordination. Women are deemed unfit to be priests. This is an insult to the whole female sex. The implication of the pope's teaching is that women have no moral capacity for spiritual leadership as clergy. This is pure patriarchy and misogyny.

The pope says artificial contraception is a sin. He condemns poor parents in developing countries to have large families that they can't care for adequately. In some countries, priests promote scare stories that contraception makes women sick and will kill them.

Benedict XVI opposes IVF fertility treatment. He wants to deny childless couples the chance of parenthood. This is odd. The Catholic Church says having children is God's will yet it rejects giving the option of parenthood to infertile couples.

The pope rejects potentially life-saving embryonic stem cell research, which could help find cures for fatal illnesses like motor neurone disease -- saving lives and improving people's quality of life. Surely this research is fulfilling Christian values and ideals?

Benedict XVI has denounced the use of condoms, even to stop the spread of HIV. A husband with HIV must not use a condom to protect his wife from infection, according to Papal doctrine. He has also claimed that condoms "increase" the rate of HIV infection. His dishonest teachings discourage a proven way to reduce HIV transmission; thereby putting millions of lives at risk.

The pope has colluded with the Vatican's promotion of the lie that condoms spread HIV because latex is porous to the virus. This is an outrageous falsehood and has been condemned as untrue and irresponsible by scientists and medical professionals. Yet Benedict has never withdrawn or repudiated the Vatican nonsense that condoms have tiny holes through which HIV can pass.

In 1986 and 1992, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he authored a Vatican document that condemned the homosexuality as an "objective disorder" and the mere fact of being gay as a "strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil" -- even if a gay person never has sex. Rejecting the concept of gay human rights, the document asserted that there is no "right" to laws protecting homosexual people against discrimination, suggesting that the civil liberties of lesbians and gay men can be "legitimately limited for objectively disordered external conduct."

The pope has attacked same-sex marriages as "evil" and vilified supporters of gay equality as "gravely immoral." He has also denounced homosexual equality as a "deviant trend" and condemned same-sex love as being "without any social value." He even threatened to excommunicate Catholic legislators who voted for gay rights laws.

While condemning loving, consenting adult same-sex relations, the pontiff played a role in shielding Catholic clergy guilty of child sex abuse from prosecution.

In 2001, Pope Benedict wrote a letter to all Catholic Bishops, which ordered "Papal secrecy" concerning allegations of child sex abuse. He instructed the Bishops to report all such cases to him in Rome, so the idea that he did not know about sex abuse by priests is nonsense. His letter did not tell Bishops to report the abusers to the police.

The esteemed Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, said the pope bears co-responsibility for the cover-up and that Benedict has failed to apologize for his own personal shortcomings during the child sex abuse scandal.

For more than two decades, as a Cardinal and as a Pope, Joseph Ratzinger has attempted to reverse the liberalizing trends of the Second Vatican Council -- pushing the whole church back to a more orthodox, conservative agenda. He's strengthening the hierarchy and autocracy of the Vatican and the Papacy.

This has prompted a grassroots Catholic revolt -- the "We are Church" movement -- which seeks a more democratic, transparent, accountable Church. It asserts that the people are the Church, not the pope.

The Pope has condemned liberation theology, as espoused by Catholic theologians such as Gustavo Gutierriz and Leonardo Boff, and he has opposed the worker priest movement. He preaches social justice but attacks those clergy who advocate political action to reform society and make it more just.

Last year, Pope Benedict rescinded the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson who, in 2008, denied key elements of the Holocaust; claiming that a maximum of 300,000 Jews died in concentration camps and that none were gassed by the Nazis. Williamson remains a part of the Catholic church, with the Pope's blessing, despite the furore over his holocaust denial.

Benedict has also paved the way for eventual sainthood of Pope, Pius XII, despite the war-time pontiff's failure to speak out publicly, either during or after the Holocaust, against the Nazi mass murder of six million Jews and millions of others, including Russian, Polish, disabled, gay and Roma people -- and many more.

Pius XII was no saint. The fact that Pope Benedict wants to makes him a saint shows how far he has strayed from the moral and ethical values of most Catholics and most of humanity.

JFK Was Better on Church-State Separation Than Current Crop of "Cafeteria Bishops"

2010-08-23T13:15:00.013-05:00

"I do not speak for the church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me."

This was one of the ways John F. Kennedy described the U.S. Constitution's separation of church and state in his historic appearance before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 16, 1960, during the campaign that led to his election as the nation's first Catholic president.

In recent years it has become fashionable among ultra-conservative U.S. bishops--and especially in the public utterances of the upwardly aspiring Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver--to argue that bishops do have the authority to tell Catholic politicians what to say and how to vote and that Kennedy had it all wrong. And, after all, Chaput felt compelled to add, what would you expect from "Kennedy, who wore his faith loosely anyway."

Patrick T. Reardon made a valuable contribution to this discussion in an analysis entitled JFK and the cafeteria bishops in the August 6, 2010 print edition of the National Catholic Reporter. The link in the previous sentence is to the August 10th version on the NCR website, indentical except for giving Reardon the wrong middle initial on the by-line. His name is correct in the biographical blurb at the end of the article, which describes Reardon as "a freelance writer living in Chicago."

Actually, Reardon is a bit more than that. In the early 1970s I was in a religious order seminary with him in Southern California. He left the program not long after and went on to become a widely respected urban affairs and features writer for the Chicago Tribune. It appears that he retired around 2009 but, in addition to free-lancing, still writes the Burnham blog for the Burnham Plan Centennial. Burnham was one of the visionaries who crafted a 1909 plan that guided the development of the greater Chicago region for the next century.

Given this background and the accuracy of his analysis of church-state separation from the perspective of U.S. Catholic history, Reardon's article has not received the attention it deserves--either by most of those who have left comments on the online version or even by the editors of NCR, who in an editorial Private beliefs and public acts gave Chaput too much credit and Kennedy much too little.

Despite a lot of comments to NCR that had little relevance to Reardon's main points, a commentator identified only as "stefano" made a very important observation: Kennedy had major help writing his Texas speech from Bishop John Joseph Wright of Worcester, MA. Wright was orthodox enough to later be named Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, where he served in Rome from 1969 to his death in 1979. The NCR commentator notes that at the time highly regarded Msgr. John Tracy Ellis regarded Wright as one of the few intellectuals in the U.S. hierarchy, and that Wright's thinking was much closer to the thought of U.S. Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, which is very much enshrined in Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom.

What Reardon's piece documents so well is that Murray, Wright, Kennedy and the bishops at Vatican II grasped something very central --something which Chaput and his fellow Neanderthals today repeatedly decline to address: that the First Amendment does not permit the adherents of any particular religion to impose their distinctive moral beliefs on people who do not share the same moral assumptions and conclusions--whether those other people are adherents of other religions or even adherents of ethical systems that eschew religion.

The U.S. bishops, especially on the issue of abortion, have been refusing to address this stubborn reality of the First Amendment since the 1960s. Reardon rightly points out that this refusal seems restricted mainly to a couple conservative issues, like abortion and gay marriage, even though the bishops clearly seem to get the point when it comes to not forcing Catholic politicians to pursue Catholic positions on capital punishment or international military aggression. In so doing, the bishops become the kind of "cafeteria Catholics" they accuse others of being--except that they pick only from the conservative political side of the menu while ignoring official teachings they regard as too liberal.

I think Reardon is right. One day church historians will conclude that what John F. Kennedy said to Protestant ministers in Houston in September 1960 will come to be seen as exactly the position which both the First Amendment and the Declaration on Religious Freedom require:

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote... I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant or Jewish... where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source."

Phoenix Bishop Failed to Grasp "Toxemias of Pregnancy," Denver Physician Tells NCR

2010-07-22T10:18:00.007-05:00

A posting here in May covered the unfortunate case of Mercy Sister Margaret Mary McBride, declared excommunicated by Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmstead, who said she had endorsed an abortion to save a mother's life. Olmstead based his position, in part at least, on advice given him by Rev. Brian Johnstone, the diocese's ethics advisor.

The July 9th print edition of the National Catholic Reporter had a letter to the editor from Denis L. Keleher, a medical doctor from Denver, which challenges Olmstead and Johnstone's understanding of the medical condition which the mother and her developing child both faced.

Keleher's input is important in two ways: first, it shows that Sr. McBride was misjudged; second, it highlights the inadequacy of the official church policy on abortion in such circumstances. Keleher sheds major new light on the issues in the case. His letter deserves a lot more attention than it has received.

I re-publish his letter below. (I'd provide an electronic link, but I can't find one on the NCR website.)

When I was a seminarian in the 1960s before I studied medicine, I was taught that theology proceeded by close analysis of valid distinctions. Both Bishop Thomas Olmstead (broadly) and Fr. Brian Johnstone (subtly) have not made the essential distinction (NCR, June 11). The bishop has said, "A child is not a disease," and Fr. Johnstone said that the danger to the mother's life is the presence of the embryo in her womb. Wrong. It is the pathological process of pregnancy iself that threatens both mother and child in this case.

It has been known for ages that some healthy women will sicken and die in pregnancy and it is not caused by an identifiable disorder of the child. I'm a physician, and I own an obstetrics textbook from the faculty of Johns Hopkins more than a century old that devotes several hundred pages to the "toxemias" of pregnancy from which the mother will die unless the pregnancy is interrupted. These still occur. The child that this woman was carrying was also a victim of this disease state, distinct from itself. The ethicists and bishops of this world should meet their obligation to know the science and medicine about which they judge. Canon law is not enough.

GTU's Episcopal School Gets $400,000 Grant to Craft Same-Sex Blessing Ceremonies

2010-07-22T09:42:00.003-05:00

The National Catholic Reporter has posted a July 20th report by Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service that a gay rights foundation has donated over $400,000 to the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) to craft ceremonies that can be officially adopted by the Episcopal Church USA for blessing same-sex relationships, unions and marriages.

CDSP is one of the member schools of Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, from which I earned my Ph.D. through the Franciscan School of Theology.

The grant will supplement the relatively meager $25,000 that had been allocated to the project by the church's Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music. The NCR posting says "A major part of the grant will go to funding a conference next March where two representatives from each of the church's 110 dioceses will be able to offer suggestions and share work that's already been done."

Other excerpts from the article follow:

A Michigan-based gay rights foundation has given more than $400,000 to a California seminary to help craft formal liturgies for the Episcopal Church to bless gay and lesbian relationships.

The Episcopal Church still officially considers marriage between a man and a woman, reflected in the marriage rite of its Book of Common Prayer. Many dioceses, however, unofficially allow priests to bless same-sex relationships and even marriages.

Because the church puts a high value on scripted liturgies, many same-sex couples want their own marriage/blessing rite since many bishops are reluctant to use the traditional husband-wife marriage liturgy for same-sex unions.

The church's 2009 General Convention gave the green light to collecting “theological and liturgical resources” that would form the basis of an official same-sex rite that could be added to the list of approved ceremonies.

Many observers expect the church, when it gathers again in 2012, to approve rites for same-sex unions, or at least give official approval to start the process, which can take several years.

The $404,000 grant from the Arcus Foundation to the Church Divinity School of the Pacific will help facilitate the process; the church's official Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music has only $25,000 designated for the project.

“Developing liturgical resources for blessing same-sex unions is a once-in-a-lifetime generation change, and we want to do it well,” said the Rev. Ruth Myers, a professor of liturgy at the seminary in Berkeley, Calif.

Though ultimate decisions and recommendations will be left to the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, the seminary hopes the grant will help keep the process going, with the necessary funds to match.

Authority Gushes from Official Catholicism as Cultural of Clericalism Implodes

2010-07-08T14:00:00.010-05:00

I highly recommend and heartily endorse the following editorial, posted today on the website of the National Catholic Reporter:

The first half of 2010 has been a particularly bumpy patch for the papacy of Benedict XVI. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This pope had as goals to sharpen the teaching of the world’s largest Christian denomination, to do battle with secularism and relativism, and to convince the world, Catholic and otherwise, that Christianity authentically lived is more about possibilities and new freedom than about “thou shalt nots” and other restrictions.

His program has been seriously sidelined by the lingering effects of the sex abuse scandal in the United States; the explosion of the scandal in Ireland, Germany, Italy and now Belgium; and the diminishment of the episcopal office, particularly in those countries most affected by the scandal.

Are we witnessing the ecclesial equivalent of one of those slow-motion depictions of implosion, the kind where a seemingly invulnerable structure falls in upon itself, laid waste by some well-placed explosives? Perhaps.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that what is imploding is the church. The church is, in many ways, just fine. What is imploding, rather, is a culture of clericalism, especially the hierarchical layer of that culture, which has become so disconnected in many of its expressions from the core mandates of Christian scripture that it seems to barely function at all.

The authority that has been slowly leaking from the structure for decades is now gushing out as bishops contort themselves in attempts to convince the world of their good intentions and transparency while simultaneously railing against those within the church and without who are working to reveal the truth.

The shocking raid of a bishops’ meeting in Belgium is but the latest indication of the degree to which the old protections and privileges enjoyed by the clerical culture are disintegrating. It stands as a clear symbol that an age is ending.

The disintegration could be seen occurring during the past quarter century in the United States under the grinding weight of revelations that the Catholic hierarchy had repeatedly protected those who had sexually molested children and had hidden the crimes from the church and the wider community.

It continued in Catholic Ireland, where the deep betrayal of the community caused a serious exodus from the church amid lingering anger. In one of the greater absurdities of this period of crisis, church leaders in Rome have decided to send bishops from the United States to determine what happened in the Irish church.

The erosion goes on, at a quicker pace, ugly in details that keep heaping up for the world to see. The pope’s brother admits to slapping choir students who didn’t perform properly -- a human imperfection made all the more perceptible in an arena long wrapped in a façade of seeming perfection.

Meanwhile, the world outside this favored culture is beginning to realize that one of the most powerful men within it during Pope John Paul II’s papacy, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, once secretary of state and now dean of the College of Cardinals, took money from the likes of the late Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ. Maciel was a favorite of the former pope, and a man who abused his young seminarians and is accused of fathering children, including a son, whom he also allegedly repeatedly abuse.

Sodano was one of Maciel’s most ardent backers.

That Sodano should be nowhere near any level of control at the Vatican is apparent to most everyone who has given this scandal the slightest thought. But there he is, still posturing, offering paeans to a beleaguered pope during liturgies, and dismissing the growing chorus of charges against fellow bishops as petty gossip.

And when one of those fellow bishops, Cardinal Cristoph Schönborn of Austria, dares to call him out, as someone should, in one of the more rational comments that anyone inside the culture has yet made, Sodano is able to manipulate a meeting with Schönborn and the pope. The world is subsequently informed that such criticism is not to occur cardinal to cardinal. Such power is reserved for the pope alone. The pope remains silent and Sodano remains influential.

The protection from scrutiny previously enjoyed by the culture, a reflection more than anything of royal prerogatives and palace behavior, has disintegrated to the point where the U.S. Supreme Court gave approval for a suit that seeks to hold the Vatican responsible for the transfer of pedophile priests from place to place, transfers that occurred without warning to law enforcement bodies or to the communities involved.

The sex abuse crisis, as we’ve said in this space before, is a crisis of the clerical culture, a crisis of authority and ecclesiology. The sex abuse crisis is the awful symptom of much deeper problems.

Projection is occurring on a global scale as the bishops grasp for ways to explain how so much has gone so wrong so quickly. Relativism! Secularism! Cultural influences! All those bad things out there, they reason, are influencing the people to revolt, to backslide, to not believe as they should, to disregard the hierarchy’s rulings and pronouncements. It is the bishops who fail to recognize that they, themselves, are the best living examples of the relativism and secularism they decry.

The great irony in all of this, of course, is that the hierarchy need not thrash about wondering how to adjust their culture and lives to the demands of an educated church in the 21st century.

The great questions of this age -- and its demands for accountability and transparency -- were anticipated by the church, which began to deal with them during the Second Vatican Council, the reform gathering of the mid-1960s.

There was reason -- perhaps the Spirit responds when so many openly seek its guidance -- why the texts of that council’s documents were different from any before, why those texts are filled with notions of dialogue, of acceptance, of restraint in judgment and punishment, of the new description of church as the people of God.

Perhaps those at the council anticipated that the hierarchy of the future would have to structure itself differently, lead differently, and see the world differently.

What seems clear at this moment is that the hierarchy as it has evolved in the past half millennium is deeply damaged from within. And there is little evidence of the imagination, the creativity, the spirit, necessary to repair or rethink the structure.

The second half of 2010, it seems, may be just as disheartening to the Holy Father, just as bumpy, as the first.

Supreme Court Declines to Hear Vatican Claim of Sovereign Immunity in Sex Abuse

2010-07-07T16:26:00.005-05:00

I was traveling last week and did not realize until I returned that the Vatican has suffered a significant legal setback in it's claim to sovereign immunity from U.S. prosecution for the actions of pedophile priests and of bishops who repeatedly reassigned them and hid their crimes from local prosecutors.

I first became aware of the development as one of several listed by National Catholic Reporter Senior Correspondent John Allen Jr. in a July 2nd analysis entitled Seven Days That Shook the Vatican. Allen noted "A decision by the Supreme Court in the United States to allow a sex abuse lawsuit against the Vatican in Oregon to proceed, and the filing of a new lawsuit against the Vatican (as well as the Salesian order) in Los Angeles just two days later."

A Google search led me to more specific coverage, including articles in Reuters and The Huffington Post. The articles said that a lower court in Oregon had held that the case met one of the exceptions to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976. An appeals court had agreed, ruling that the plaintiff in the case had sufficiently alleged that the priest charged in the civil suit was "an employee of the Vatican acting within the scope of his employment under Oregon law." The Supreme Court declined to hear the Vatican's appeal of the rulings by the two lower courts.

Jeffrey Lena, the Vatican's attorney for all sex abuse claims naming it in the United States, tried to spin the development as positively as possible, telling Catholic News Agency that the decision was not on the merits of the case and that the Supreme Court rejection merely meant that the case was being returned to the Oregon court to hear other defenses.

This, however, minimizes the significance of the development drastically. Sovereign immunity has been one of the pillars of the Vatican defense for several years, and this case marks the first time the courts have called the Vatican claim bogus. Having lost all the way to the Supreme Court in the Oregon case, the Vatican ought to assume that it will face similar losses in others.

As observed here before, the claim that priests and bishops do not function as employees of the Vatican does not comport with reality in parishes and chancery offices around the globe. It is disingenuous for the Vatican's attorney to push such a claim, and all it does is fuel the public perception that the Vatican has something to hide. The Vatican needs to abandon the claim and own up to its civil and criminal liability for child abuse.

Belgian Police in Sex Abuse Probe Detain Bishops, Search HQ, Homes and Tombs

2010-06-29T11:51:00.006-05:00

The National Catholic Reporter has some excellent coverage of a Belgian police action against sexual abuse stonewalling June 24th: bishops gathered for a scheduled meeting were detained in their assembly room, their cell phones and some documents seized, and their headquarters searched, along with some of their personal residences and even the tombs of two deceased cardinals.

The coverage describes the Vatican as officially shocked and outraged at the conduct of the Belgian authorities. But the article about that makes it clear that the actions came after several years of investigators being stonewalled by the bishops.

A separate analysis by John Allen Jr., NCR's Senior Correspondent, provides additional background on the decades of sexual abuse and church obstruction that led up to the police action.

Perhaps Belgium will be the first nation to shatter the fiction that the church and its officials are immune from prosecution as functionaries of the Vatican State--and the first to subject a few bishops to criminal prosecution for an international conspiracy to obstruct justice in several countries.

Presiding Bishop Tells Canterbury That Episcopal Church Will Keep on Valuing Gays

2010-06-11T16:39:00.002-05:00

The National Catholic Reporter has posted a June 8th article by Daniel Burke of Religion News Service, reporting that Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA, has declared that the U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion will continue to value gay people, gay priests and gay bishops, and will continue to resist the anti-gay moralizing of the Communion's more conservative national churches.

Bishop Jefferts Schori was especially critical of efforts by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to enforce global uniformity in the Communion's stance toward gay people. She insisted that each national church has the right and the obligation to develop its own moral, pastoral and liturgical guidelines toward gay individuals and same-sex couples--and that the Episcopal position reflects 50 years of discernment and debate from which the church will not retreat.

Schori's position reflects historic characteristics of Anglicanism that I have applauded previously here. Is it time for Catholics who agree more with the Episcopal position than Rome's to consider swearing allegiance to the Episcopal Church, and to bishops who are more open to what the Spirit is doing and saying in the lives of Christian people?

Excerpts from Burke's article follow:

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has forcefully defended her church's embrace of gays and lesbians, and firmly rejected efforts to centralize power or police uniformity in the Anglican Communion.

Anglicans should be led by local communities rather than powerful clerics, Jefferts Schori argued in a June 2 letter to her church's 2 million members. And, after 50 years of debate, the Episcopal Church is convinced that gays and lesbians are “God's good creation” and “good and healthy exemplars of gifted leadership within the church, as baptized leaders and ordained ones.”

In May, the Episcopal Church consecrated its second openly gay bishop despite warnings the move would increase tensions in the worldwide Anglican Communion, many parts of which view homosexuality as a sin.

Last month, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said Episcopalians, who form the U.S. branch of the 77 million-member communion, are out of step with fellow Anglicans and should not fully participate in ecumenical dialogue and doctrinal discussions.

Jefferts Schori firmly rejected the push to centralize power and discipline, saying that Anglicanism, and the Episcopal Church, were founded by Christians who wished to escape the strong hand of an established hierarchy.

“Unitary control does not characterize Anglicanism; rather, diversity in fellowship and communion does,” she said.

Imposing uniformity on the 77 million Anglicans scattered across the globe runs the risk of repeating the “spiritual violence” and “cultural excesses” of colonial missionaries who built the communion on the back of the British Empire, the presiding bishop added.

“We live in great concern that colonial attitudes continue,” said Jefferts Schori, “particularly in attempts to impose a single understanding across widely varying contexts and cultures.”

The presiding bishop also said that criticism of the Episcopal Church often comes from parts of the communion that bar women from becoming priests or bishops; and charged that other Anglican churches allow gay bishops under an unofficial don't ask/don't tell agreement.

“In our context, bowing to anxiety by ignoring that sort of double-mindedness is usually termed a `failure of nerve,'” Jefferts Schori said.

Liberal Episcopalians applauded Jefferts Schori's letter, which was remarkable for its full-throated defense of Episcopal Church policies.

“It is an understated declaration of independence,” said Jim Naughton, editor of the blog Episcopal Cafe. “The presiding bishop is not going to allow the Archbishop of Canterbury to establish the terms of the debate anymore.”

Jefferts Schori's rehashing of Anglican history may seem innocuous to outside observers, said church historian Diana Butler Bass, but her strong defense of democratic Anglicanism is a “call to arms.”

“Those are fighting words,” Butler Bass said. “She's saying, `this is our tradition and you're violating it.' She is accusing Williams of being an imperialist.”

Hierarchy Uses Sex Prohibitions as Last-Gasp Efforts to Control Priests and Laity

2010-06-10T11:12:00.002-05:00

Author James Carroll has posted a commentary in the Boston Globe and the National Catholic Reporter saying that mandatory celibacy "cuts to the heart of what is wrong in the church today." Carroll says: "I write from inside the question, having lived as a celibate seminarian and priest for more than a decade when I was young."

On celibacy as a stand-alone issue, Carroll echoes many of the critiques of mandatory celibacy documented in earlier postings here. What is novel about his analysis, however, is how he ties together the hierarchy's attempts to control priests through celibacy with its efforts to control lay people with sexual prohibitions directed toward them, especially the teachings on birth control and abortion (although I would include other prohibitions, such as masturbation and homosexual relationships, as well).

Carroll sees these as parallel tactics in the hierarchy's last-gasp effort to cling to power by asserting an absolute right to control Catholics' sex lives. And he ties these tactics to the very interesting historical fact that birth control and celibacy were the only issues during Vatican II on which Pope Paul VI intervened and prevented the world's Catholic bishops from discussing.

Here are some excerpts from the NCR version of Carroll's commentary:

Celibacy began in the early church as an ascetic discipline, rooted partly in a neo-Platonic contempt for the physical world that had nothing to do with the Gospel. The renunciation of sexual expression by men fit nicely with a patriarchal denigration of women. Nonvirginal women, typified by Eve as the temptress of Adam, were seen as a source of sin.

But it was not until the Middle Ages, at the Second Lateran Council in 1139, that celibacy was made mandatory for all Roman Catholic clergy -- a reform bracing clerical laxity and eliminating inheritance issues from church property. But because the requirement of celibacy is so extreme, it had to be mystified as sacrificial -- “a more perfect way” to God. Monastic orders of both males and females had indeed discovered in such sexual sublimation a mode of holiness, but that presumed its being both freely chosen and lived out in a nurturing community... But when the monastic discipline of “chastity” was imposed on all priests as “celibacy,” something went awry. The system broke down during the Renaissance and the Reformation, with the Counter-Reformation hierarchy more attached to it than ever.

Not sex, but power was the issue. The imposition of sexual abstinence was a mode of control over the interior lives of clergy, since submission in radical abstinence required an extraordinary abandonment of the will. In theory, the abandonment was to God; in practice, it was to the “superior.” The stakes were infinite, since sexual desire marked the threshold of hell. The normally human was, for priests, the occasion of bad faith.

Obsessive sexual moralism, along with that bad faith, spilled out of pulpits. The confessional booth became a cockpit for screening “mortal sins,” with birth control emerging as the key control mechanism over the laity. If they were willing to abide by this intrusion and its burdens, it was only because the celibate priest could be seen to have made an even greater sacrifice. They were subject to an even greater control.

As is suggested by the contemporary hierarchy’s apparent equanimity about the exodus of tens of thousands of priests, and the crisis of ministry it has caused, church authorities will pay any price to maintain a vestige of that control. That is why bishops have exchanged their once ample influence on matters of social justice for a strident single-issue obsession with abortion, a last-ditch effort to control the intimate sexual decisions of laypeople. When it comes to their clergy, the single-issue obsession remains celibacy.

This nearly changed at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), when the bishops prepared to reconsider both birth control and celibacy. Until then, an insufficiently historically minded church had regarded such contingent questions as God-given absolutes. What was the point of even discussing them, since change was out of the question? But change was suddenly in the air. What? St. Peter was married? Even before the council acted, the myth that these disciplines were eternally willed by God was broken.

The conservative wing of the hierarchy panicked. Pope Paul VI astonished the council fathers, and the Catholic world, by making two extraordinary interventions that violated the letter and the spirit of the council. In late 1964, just as the fathers were about to debate the question of “responsible parenthood,” the pope ordered them not to take up the question of “artificial contraception.” Snap! Birth control was “removed from the competence of the council.”

But there was every sign that the council fathers, when they inevitably took up the subject of the priesthood, were still going to discuss celibacy, as if change were possible there. Yet it was politically unthinkable that the church could maintain the prohibition of birth control, the burden belonging to the laity, while letting clergy off the sexual hook by lifting the celibacy rule.

Therefore, in late 1965, Paul VI made his second extraordinary intervention to forbid any discussion of priestly celibacy. A council had initiated the discipline, but a council was now not qualified even to discuss it. The power play was so blatant as to lay bare power itself as the issue. And just like that, Catholics had reason to suspect that celibacy was being maintained as a requirement of the priesthood because of internal church politics, not because of any spiritual motive. God was not the issue; the pope was.

The abrupt elimination of the mystical dimension of vowed sexual abstinence left it an intolerable and inhuman way to live, which sent men streaming out of the priesthood, and stirred in many who remained a profound, and still unresolved, crisis of identity. Paul VI sought to settle the celibacy question with his 1967 encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, which proved to be a classic instance of the disease calling itself the cure.

The celibacy encyclical, maintaining the weight of “sacrifice” on clergy, prepared the way for the laity-crushing Humanae Vitae in 1968, with its re-condemnation of birth control.

In response to the pope’s initial removal of birth control from the “competence” of the council, one of its leading figures, Cardinal Leon-Joseph Suenens of Belgium, rose immediately with a warning; “I beg you, my brother bishops, let us avoid a new ‘Galileo affair.’ One is enough for the church.” Galileo was famously forced to renounce what he had seen through his telescope, an imposition of dishonesty. (“And yet it moves,” he was reported to have muttered under his breath.)

Paul VI’s twin re-impositions of the contraception and celibacy rules plunged the whole church into a culture of dishonesty. Catholic laypeople ignore the birth control mandate. Catholic priests find ways around the celibacy rule, some in meaningful relationships with secret lovers, some in exploitive relationships with the vulnerable, and some in criminal acts with minors. If a majority of priests are able to observe the letter of their vow, how many do so at savage personal cost? Well-adjusted priests may live happily as celibates, but how many regard the broad discipline as healthy? Insisting that celibacy is the church’s “brilliant jewel,” in Paul VI’s phrase, defines the deceit that has corrupted the Catholic soul.

But the most damaging consequence of mandatory celibacy lies in its character as the pulse of clericalism. The repressively psychotic nature of this inbred culture of power has shown itself in the still festering abuse scandal. Lies, denial, arrogance, selfishness and cowardice -- such are the notes of the structure within which Catholic priests now live, however individually virtuous many of them nevertheless remain. Celibacy is that structure’s central pillar and must be removed. The Catholic people see this clearly. It is time for us to say so.

BP's Gulf Gusher Proves: "Our Addiction to Oil Is Making Our Lives Dysfunctional"

2010-06-03T10:26:00.004-05:00

National Catholic Reporter staff writer and columnist Rich Heffern specializes on Christianity's duty to steward God's creation in a way that upholds the inherent value of all creatures and to resist the self-destructive evil of every assault on the global environment. Yesterday he posted an important perspective on BP's oil attack on the Gulf of Mexico by Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine.

Wallis says that as long as we rely on fossil fuels for most of our transportation, each one of us is complicit in BP's crime. And we cannot re-wire our energy grid until we first re-wire "ourselves, our assumptions, demands, expectations, our requirements." Heffern's interview with Wallis follows:

Jim Wallis is an evangelical Christian writer and political activist, best known as the founder and editor of Sojourners magazine and of the Washington, D.C.-based community of the same name. He is author of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (Harper) and The Soul of Politics (HarperCollins). I interviewed him June 2.

What are your feelings about the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico as the technological solutions continue to fail?

I think the announcement last weekend that the top kill had failed marked a critical shift in the issue. The conversation up until then has been dominated by technological issues, how to make oil drilling safe. The fact that they can’t fix it now until late summer shifted the whole picture.

To me, it’s a picture of addiction. What happens with addiction is that after a while it makes your life not work. There’s a lot of denial until you lose your job or family or home or self respect, then finally there is a moment of epiphany and conversion. “Hello, my name is John S. and I’m an alcoholic.” That’s a moment of redemption and redirection.

What we see in the heartbreaking pictures of out-of-work shrimpers, wheezing clean-up workers, or oil-soaked wildlife are the effects of this addiction. I was doing the Chris Matthews show last weekend; his focus was on politics, BP and Obama. But now these pictures from Louisiana show that our life as we have organized it isn’t working. Our addiction to oil is making our lives dysfunctional.

Whether it’s the Gulf coast wetlands, tourism, or livelihoods -- when this touches Florida then it will become a national issue. Mississippi, Alabama or Louisiana are just southern states but Florida is America, the destination state for East coasters.

What does our Christian moral and spiritual vision bring to the discussion?

It’s heartbreaking as we see how this is spilling out of control. The only redemptive thing here will be if it really does change us, if we take a long look in the mirror. It reminds me of Chesterton when asked what he thought was most wrong with the world. He responded, “I am.”

We did a powerful piece on our blog by a young woman, Tracy Bianchi, who drove her family from Illinois to Wisconsin on the Memorial Day weekend. She reflected on being in bumper to bumper traffic as Illinois people conveyed themselves to Wisconsin “ …so we could be next to a lake watching all this unfold and criticizing BP. But rarely do I hear anyone getting angry with themselves. Really though, I am part of the reason for that oil spill. As I sat on the highway with thousands of motorists, all fresh off a weekend that chugged down gallons of gas to fuel boats and other recreational toys, I was reminded once again of the total dichotomy that is my life. On the one hand I want to sit back all smug and hope for the demise of BP and all things petroleum. But I cannot be so quick to hate the oil companies since I really like their product. It gets me from point A to B on a daily basis and it launches me into the state of Wisconsin whenever I need a vacation.”

It’s not just that BP is lying. BP is a lie. Everything BP stands for is a lie. It’s not just them, though, it’s our participation as well.

I’m not often touched by advertising but some of the ads I’ve seen of soldiers who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that to change our lifestyle would be hard but no harder than what we all asked those soldiers to do in Iraq and Afghanistan, have gotten to me.

“I was fighting because I thought my country was under attack, not for oil companies,” they say.

We’ve had many teachable moments over the last 10 years, like 9/11 or Katrina, which we chose to move beyond without learning much. Whether this can be another moment we can miss or one that finally gets our attention is the question.

The faith community can and should now get involved. When it was a who’s in charge, who’s going to pay issue, there wasn’t much role for us but now there is. Chris Matthews told me: “Well, Jim, you’re going further and deeper than we usually get on this show.” He was right: Further and deeper is what is called for.

The nation needs a moral teacher. Matthews is convinced it can only be politicians but I think we of the Christian faith community need to step in. To move from fossil fuels to clean energy sources will take a re-wiring of our energy grid but it also will take a re-wiring of ourselves, our assumptions, demands, expectations, our requirements. I think this could be the beginning of a serious national reflection about our whole way of life. I’m not saying it will be so, because the forces against that are enormous, to keep us from really looking at how we live.

We have a moment of opportunity, especially as the quick fixes fail. It’s clearly a moral issue. It’s time for moral reflection about our whole way of life, and the Christian community has a key role to play. It’s bipartisan as well. Both parties are equally guilty. Once you move beyond politics it’s about a conversion process, about changing our habits of the heart, our way of living.

Nun "Excommunicated" Over 'Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care'

2010-05-20T10:39:00.005-05:00

Well, immigration policy isn't the only thing Arizona is infamous for.

Conservatives there have run amok on yet another issue, the National Catholic Reporter says.

This time it's religious conservatives: Phoenix Bishop Thomas J. Olmstead has declared that Margaret McBride, the highest ranking Sister of Mercy at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center, excommunicated herself when she interpreted a gray area in the U.S. Bishops 2001 'Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services' (ERD) as allowing a therapeutic abortion of an 11-week old non-viable fetus to save the life of a mother of four.

NCR reports that the hospital disagrees that it did not follow the bishops' guidelines:

"In a statement, Suzanne Pfister, a hospital vice president, said that the facility adheres to the Ethical and Directives for Catholic Health Care Services. But, she argued, the directives leave some gray areas.

"'In those instances where the Directives do not explicitly address a clinical situation -- such as when a pregnancy threatens a woman's life -- an Ethics Committee is convened to help our caregivers and their patients make the most life-affirming decision,' she said. 'In this tragic case, the treatment necessary to save the mother's life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy.'

"Pfister issued the statement on behalf of the hospital, its parent company Catholic Healthcare West, and the Sisters of Mercy, McBride's religious order.

"A letter sent May 10 from Catholic Healthcare West, signed by Sr. Judith Carle, board chairwoman, and President and CEO Lloyd Dean, asks Olmsted to provide further clarification about the directives. Agreeing that in a healthy mother, pregnancy is 'not a pathology,' it says this case was different. The pregnancy, the letter says, carried a nearly certain risk of death for the mother.

"'If there had been a way to save the pregnancy and still prevent the death of the mother, we would have done it,' the letter says. 'We are convinced there was not.'"

The article quotes a Catholic News Service report "that in a letter to the editor of The Arizona Republic May 18, Dr. John Garvie, chief of gastroenterology at St. Joseph's, called McBride 'the moral conscience of the hospital' and said 'there is no finer defender of life at our hospital.'"

So far the NCR article has generated five pages of reader comments. Most of the them are strongly critical of the bishop's interpretation of the health care guidelines and his cavalier assertion that Sister McBride procured a direct abortion and therefore incurred automatic excommunication under canon law.

A number of commentators point out that there is in fact a gray area between two different provisions in the ERD.

Directive 45 reads: "Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted. Every procedure whose sole immediate effect is the termination of pregnancy before viability is an abortion, which, in its moral context, includes the interval between conception and implantation of the embryo. Catholic health care institutions are not to provide abortion services, even based upon the principle of material cooperation. In this context, Catholic health care institutions need to be concerned about the danger of scandal in any association with abortion providers."

However, Directive 47 adds: "Operations, treatments, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child."

The ethics committee and the hospital argue that in this case the mother's pulmonary hypertension was a pathological condition requiring treatment and that allowing the pregnancy to continue would have killed both the mother and the fetus. They saw this specific situation as not being clearly addressed in the directives and believed that saving the only life which could be saved was their clear priority.

Obviously there is room for an alternate interpretation by the bishop and his ethics advisers. However, because there is room for more than one interpretation, the hospital and its ethics committee members should not be penalized for conscientiously doing their best with the guidelines they had.

For the bishop to construe the situation as Sister McBride directly procuring an abortion in violation of Directive 45 is arbitrary, unwarrantedly excessive and unjustifiably punitive. And for him to show no commitment toward saving the life of the mother of four existing children seriously undercuts his credibility as a moral theologian. If the church is pro-life, surely it favors life continuing for the living.

The bishop should retract his intemperate, ill-considered remarks and join the rest of us in affirming Sister Margaret McBride as a Catholic in good standing with the church.