Vatican Says Muslims Outnumber Christians--Unless Catholics Include Non-Catholics

Catholic News Service reported March 31st that a Vatican official agrees that today's global population has more Muslims than Catholics. This has been the position of the World Almanac and other sources for several years.

Msgr. Vittorio Formenti, head of the Vatican's statistics office, said that based on Rome's count "tabulated methodically" and Muslim estimates transmitted to the U.N., at the end of 2006 Muslims were 19.2 percent of the world population, while Catholics were 17.4 percent.

It was unclear if the good monsignor took comfort from another factoid he reported: that if other Christian denominations are taken into consideration, the global Christian population is about 33 percent of the total.

The importance of the numbers is questionable. But if Catholicism is going to keep track of them, Rome might at least acknowledge that counting non-Catholic Christians almost doubles the Christian population of the world--or, to put it another way, that only half the Christians on the planet pledge allegiance to Catholicism.

Shouldn't that make the Vatican a lot more cautious about declaring that non-Catholic Christian congregations and denominations are not churches? Shouldn't the Vatican be a lot more respectful of non-Catholic Christians and their leaders, who remain unconvinced that the Roman Catholic model is the only church structure inspired by Jesus Christ? Shouldn't the Vatican be a lot more humble and a lot more collegial before it attempts to tell Muslims and Jews what Christianity believes?

The Theory of Limits Helps Explain Why Some ‘Get’ Jeremiah Wright, and Many Don’t

In earlier postings I have argued that Pope Benedict XVI (formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger, theologian, cardinal and Catholicism’s grand inquisitor) could benefit from understanding Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of limits.

The theory observes that because reality and language are always in flux, assertions can be true only within strict limits, and that when those limits are forgotten, an assertion begins to do the work of a falsehood. Occasions when Benedict has taken questionable positions, communicated poorly or offended people from various religions are generally ones where he forgot those limits.

But the theory of limits also applies to politics. Politicians, commentators and the American public have reacted in various ways to inflammatory comments by Jeremiah Wright, who retired earlier this year after 35 years as pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, which has been Barack Obama’s church for the last 20 years. The theory of limits can help explain why Wright phrased some statements the way he did—and why Obama should not have waited to find them inappropriate until people, mostly not in the black community, began to take offense.

If one takes time to examine Wright’s disputed claims and appreciate the context in which he made them, it is possible to identify even in the most outrageous ones a core of truth. Apart from that effort, many may react with hostility to snippets of his sermons, but they will not be hearing what Wright tried to say.

Two things are important about the context of Wright’s remarks: the mostly black congregations he was addressing expected him to reflect on their experience, past and present, and to do so in a prophetic style of preaching that black preachers have used for centuries.

As Clarence Page has observed, Wright was successful at both, transforming a congregation of 80 members in 1972 to a membership of 8,000 today. But another reason Wright succeeded, Page says, was that he could also pray before a racially mixed group, “Oh, God, we come from many different places and different races, but we are of one race, the human race.” So Wright could condemn the United States for its failings—not only because our failings have afflicted blacks, but because they have denied God’s love for the human race as a whole.

With this context in mind, it is possible to construe some of Wright’s more incendiary rhetoric as true, provided the limits of that truth are specified. Let’s look at a few examples.

Wright charged that the U.S. government invented the AIDS virus to kill black people. So far, no one has proved that is literally true. But it wasn’t that long ago that ACT UP and other gay-activist organizations were saying exactly the same thing about American gay men, the original U.S. victims of the disease. How the virus jumped from monkey populations to African humans has never been satisfactorily explained. For the gay activists, and for black activists before and since, that has left the door open for the suspicion that the jump was someone’s plot, or at least an experiment gone awry.

Given Americans’ historical oppression of gay people and blacks, sinister motives to kill off some of either population are not inconceivable. And as Kathleen Parker has noted, blacks in particular have special reason to fear they will not receive the best medical care: “After all, the 40-year Tuskegee syphilis study, in which about 400 black men with syphilis were left untreated and uninformed as part of an experiment, was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Public Health Service.”

Whether or not these fears are ever proved to be justified, there is a core of truth in Wright’s jeremiad: the Centers for Disease Control says HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death for blacks in the United States. On the face of it, U.S. governments have not stopped the disease from spreading exponentially in the black community. Gays made the same charge against Ronald Reagan about their AIDS deaths. George W. Bush, to his credit, has given some priority to fighting AIDS in Africa. But Wright is right that the United States has not done enough to keep AIDS from killing American blacks.

Wright has also said that the United States bears some responsibility for the attacks of 9/11. Of course, conservative preachers said the same thing, before the ashes of the World Trade Center towers had even settled. The difference was that they were blaming homosexuals and others who do not buy right-wing morals, while Wright attacked the foreign policy of the United States. What’s sauce for the goose, as they say…

As CNN forecast, Barack Obama said in an interview today that if his pastor had not retired first earlier this year, and acknowledged that some of his comments deeply offended people, he would have left Trinity UCC. But the same article quotes another Wright sermon in which he deplored Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians, especially by forcibly taking their land for right-wing Jewish settlements. There is also a core of truth in that observation. Sure, Wright could have been more nuanced, by also recognizing that the Jews have a right to defend themselves from Palestinian terrorists. But wasn’t Wright’s point that tactics like the settlement program are not a legitimate means of defense?

And then there was perhaps Wright's most played You Tube moment, when he yells “God damn America for treating its citizens as less than human!” Some find the phrasing indelicate, but it would be really hard to prove that the United States has not so treated some of its citizens some of the time. The phrasing is loose enough that it allows any number of mistreated groups the hear Wright as speaking up for them. To substitute a blessing for the curse, the course is obvious: stop trampling on Americans’ human rights.

Of course, the theory of limits also applies to Wright, and to Obama. Wright could have clarified long ago that his claims work only within limits, and that if those limits are forgotten, some of his words truly are abominable. And, as Parker says, Obama could have contributed more to healing our racial divide if he had said much earlier, before others began objecting, that Wright’s language reflects some legitimate African-American grievances—but that fanning the flames of those grievances is not the most direct route to racial harmony. In other words, Obama should have seen it coming and given his latest Big Speech proactively, rather than defensively.

Clarence Page finds it ironic that Obama may find himself “trapped in the racial divide that many still hope he is uniquely qualified to heal.” Part of the irony is that Obama got involved with Wright in the first place to learn more about the American black experience. Says Page:

“The irony for Obama, who grew up a biracial kid in Hawaii, Indonesia and rural Kansas, is that he met Wright while working as a community organizer and trying to get a better handle on black American culture in the 1980s. Now pundits ask whether Obama, who has won more white than black votes numerically, is ‘too black’ to win many more white votes.”

Time will tell if Obama can eventually capitalize on this experience. But if he is to do so, it can only be by putting Wright’s claims within valid limits and explaining why they are false if those limits are ignored.

From Chutzpah to Claptrap: Unable to Rouse a Majority, Conservatives Still Crave Power!

As a movement only infrequently able to get a majority to salute it, U.S. conservatism has always had to rely on more than a little chutzpah to gain ground. Lacking any lasting clout of their own, they nonetheless have shown a talent for pitting other minorities against one another, so that every so often the radical right can fancy itself as the minority in charge.

And the Bozell family in particular—L. Brent, Jr. and the III—has shown that even very traditionalist Catholics can be adept at chutzpah. It has taken them far in their efforts to rule American politics and the U.S. Catholic church.

But in his latest broadside against the American public, L. Brent Bozell III descends from chutzpah to pure claptrap.

Born in 1955, Bozell III says he has “been in the trenches fighting for an alphabet soup of conservative causes for 30 years” and has “raised hundreds of millions of dollars for it.” He leads numerous right-wing groups: founder and president of the Media Research Center, the Conservative Communications Center and the Cybercast News Service; founder of the Culture and Media Institute; founder and now an advisor of the Parents Television Council; board member of the American Conservative Union and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

So certainly Bozell III has earned the right to take credit for any accomplishments the movement would like to claim.

Yet rather than acknowledge that their multi-decade effort to capture the Republican Party has in fact achieved several conservative priorities, Bozell castigates Republicans for not doing enough for the conservative cause: “For 20 years, the moderate establishment of the Republican Party has told conservatives to sit down, shut up and do as we’re told… This is a movement fed up with betrayals…”

Surely this will come as news to George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush, who spent the bulk of their adult political lives trying to make their conservative base happy. Evidently, nothing will satisfy them—save perhaps establishing a theocracy with Bozell at the helm.

For six years of W’s presidency Karl Rove pandered to them. They got their way on invading Iraq; filling Supreme Court vacancies with conservative judicial activists; stifling the Bill of Rights; cracking the wall of separation between church and state; enacting tax cuts for the wealthy that made the national deficit explode exponentially; not enforcing laws passed to regulate the loan industry, thereby weakening the dollar and creating what may be our longest recession in decades; preventing federal agencies from having sufficient staffing and resources to cope with natural disasters, police imports from China, safeguard the nation’s food supply or prevent highway bridges from decaying and falling down; blocking life-saving stem-cell research; paying only for sex education and birth control programs that relied naively on abstinence alone; preventing gay people from being treated equally under the law; obstructing comprehensive immigration reform.

The list could go on and on. But it’s long enough to say that most of what is wrong with the United States today is the direct result of adopting conservative policies.

Rather than pretend they got nothing that they wanted, conservatives need to face the fact that much of their program has been adopted—and for the most part, it has utterly failed.

And they also need to realize that the public agrees. The conservatives were unable to field a candidate who could sustain majorities in enough primaries to beat John McCain. McCain won because even though he favors some conservative positions (e.g., the surge in Iraq, making the Bush tax cuts permanent), he is not perceived as wedded to every doctrinaire conservative policy that has gotten us where we are today.

So the Republicans may not be able to count on votes from Bozell and company. But so what? Do they plan to vote for a Democrat? Unlikely. Do they plan to promote as a third-party candidate some conservative who has already failed to convince voters in the primaries? They might do that, but all it would do is assure the election of a Democratic president. Does that do their cause any good?

What they might do instead is recognize that the United States remains a democracy and that not enough voters believe them anymore. The conservatives’ policies were a disaster. We have had enough. Either propose alternatives that acknowledge that and make sense, or get out of the way.

On Eve of U.S. Visit, Pope’s Mind Is Made Up: And No One Will Confuse Him with Facts

Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to visit Washington D.C. and New York City in mid-April. An article in the March 21st edition of the National Catholic Reporter says it would be helpful if Benedict could take a crash course on how to speak to Americans before he arrives. But writer David Gibson, author of The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World, thinks the chances are slim.

He notes a famous effort 20 years ago, when John Paul II was visiting the U.S. and a popular Catholic priest tried politely to get him to listen to U.S. Catholics. John Paul sat patiently while the talk was interrupted 13 times by sustained applause, but he seemed to actually hear very little. There are no plans for Benedict to receive such input. Gibson’s article explains why. Here’s the second half of it.

Benedict is a paradox in that he relishes the clash of ideas -- he has been at the center of every significant church controversy in the last generation -- yet dislikes personal confrontation. Part of that can be traced to Benedict’s dual vocations as a churchman and an academic theologian who prefers the pulpit and lectern to noisy debate. He is an intellectual whose talks are informed by intensive study and conversations with other bishops; indeed, he is most at ease among fellow clerics, and as pope he often meets with Italian priests for conversations that are expansive and enlightening.

But these exchanges are not terribly challenging, nor does his network go far beyond the clerical ranks or conservative circles. And they are hardly in tune with an American culture that was born in rebellion, fed by competition, traumatized by civil war and energized by civil rights. Today’s culture, left and right, is a product of the 1960s just as today’s Catholic church -- left and right -- is a product of the Second Vatican Council. In America, as in the church, honest conversation and the free expression of ideas and, yes, emotions, messy as they are, remain central to our pilgrimage. And for a church racked by scandal and frustrated by institutional stonewalling, open communication is more important than ever. In fact, it could be argued that the lack of discourse has left the church polarized and enervated by a diminished civility. Catholic culture has assumed the worst aspects of American culture because the church could not accommodate the best of America’s traditions. No matter the venue, a straitened view of public discourse that lectures from on high can only be answered by shouts from below.

It should, and could, work the other way around, with the church as a model. In one of the most memorable yet rarely cited episodes in American church history, John Paul engaged in a “structured” dialogue with a representative of the nation’s priests during a 1987 visit to the United States. It was a particularly difficult era between Rome and America, and Fr. Frank McNulty, a widely respected priest from New Jersey, was delegated to address the pope. His talk was a model of sincere, measured, yet frank talk about the problems facing the priesthood and the church in the United States, and the need for reforms that would include a discussion of neuralgic topics such as mandatory celibacy.

“If priests could open up their hearts and tell you of their priesthood,” McNulty told John Paul, “they could not do so without some controversial questions surfacing. In our country there is an attitude toward questions; it comes from our heritage, those historical events which help make us the way we are. We treasure freedom -- freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of expression. Questions brought our nation into being. In such settings people do not run from questions about what they believe and how they live out those beliefs. Priests know well that there are no easy answers but want to face the questions with honesty.”

“Your Holiness,” he concluded, “our prayer is that today’s words will be the deepening of an honest, ongoing, heart-to-heart dialogue.” McNulty was interrupted 13 times by thunderous applause. John Paul responded by reasserting traditional teachings, and he added an enigmatic remark: “It’s a long way to Tipperary.” Whatever that meant, the plea for dialogue was a non-starter, and the problems McNulty spoke of have only worsened.

When I called McNulty recently to reminisce about that talk, he told me that the New Jersey parish where he helps out on Sundays arranged to show a video of his exchange with the pope on the 20th anniversary of the event. The church hall was packed, and when the video ended, the gathering gave McNulty a standing ovation. People were shocked to see such an exchange, and some asked for the tape so they could show their children, who would be even more surprised. “It was a fascinating experience,” McNulty said. “It just shows that such a thing is still very much needed.”

Don’t expect a repeat during Benedict’s visit. The job of a pope, like any bishop, is to teach, to sanctify and to govern. Benedict enjoys the first two, but (like John Paul) he has never billed himself as an administrator. He prefers to leave the grunt work to his bishops, but they could certainly use the visit as a steppingstone to broader conversations. The venues and models already exist, in forums that grew out of the sexual abuse crisis, like the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management or university-based initiatives like Boston College’s “Church in the 21st Century” program. There is also the more venerable -- and viable -- Common Ground Initiative, an effort to address what Fr. Donald Cozzens aptly calls the “sacred silence” of denial in the church.

Then there was the 2002 meeting in Dallas, when in the white heat of scandal, the bishops invited lay leaders, abuse victims and outside experts to speak to the hierarchy. That was historic, but it was dialogue at the point of a gun (and without the voice of a single priest) and never repeated. Sadly, it seems to take an acute crisis to create a small opening, and that is quickly filled with anger that has been pent up for too long. To do something similar under less trying circumstances, and on a regular basis, would be true to Benedict’s personal, pastoral core, and to the rule of the pope’s namesake, St. Benedict of Nursia, who said the entire community should be called together to discuss anything of importance, because the youngest often display the greater wisdom.

Legalizing and Regulating Brothels Works Much Better Than Criminalizing Prostitution

In the wake of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, a plea to legalize prositution struck me as so tired and predictable that I almost didn't read it. But Patty Kelly, an anthropology professor at George Washington University, recently took a year to spend days and nights in a legal Mexican brothel, observing and interviewing the prostitutes, their clients and the government bureaucrats who ran the place. She makes a persuasive argument that legalizing prostitution and regulating it works much better than criminalizing it and prosecuting the participants.

As for Spitzer, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) is still in the business of fighting for the rights of sex workers. Maybe they could use an experience legal counsel! Kelly's op-ed piece follows.

Eliot Spitzer paid a woman for sex. And got caught. Depending on whose statistics you choose to believe, more than one in every 10 American adult males have paid for sex at some point. What's more, in 2005, about 84,000 people were arrested on prostitution-related offenses.

In other words, it's not terribly uncommon. It's a part of our culture, and it's not going away any time soon. Perhaps Spitzer's resignation will help convince Americans that it is finally time to decriminalize prostitution across the country.

Recently, I spent a year working at a legal, state-regulated brothel in Mexico, a nation in which commercial sex is common, visible and, in one-third of the states, legal. I was not working as a prostitute but as an anthropologist, to study and analyze the place of commercial sex in the modern world. I spent my days and nights in close contact with the women who sold sexual services, with their clients and with government bureaucrats who ran the brothel.

Here's what I learned: Most of the workers made some rational choice to be there, sometimes after a divorce, a breakup or an economic crisis, acute or chronic. Of the 140 women who worked at the Galactic Zone, as the brothel was called, only five had a pimp (and in each of those cases, they insisted the man was their boyfriend).

The women made their own hours, set their own rates and decided for themselves what sex acts they would perform. Some were happy with the job. (As Gabriela once told me: "You should have seen me before I started working here. I was so depressed.") Others would have preferred to be doing other work, although the employment available to these women in Mexico (servants, factory workers) pays far less for longer hours.

At the Galactic Zone, good-looking clients were appreciated and sometimes resulted in boyfriends; the cheap, miserly and miserable ones were avoided, if possible.

To be sure, the brothel had its dangers: Sexually transmitted diseases and violence were occasionally a part of the picture. But overall, it was safer than the streets, in part because of police protection and condom distribution by government authorities.

Legalizing and regulating prostitution has its own problems — it stigmatizes sex workers (mostly by requiring them to register with the authorities), subjects them to mandatory medical testing that is not always effective and gives clients and workers a false sense of security (with respect to sexual health and otherwise).

But criminalization is worse. Sweden's 1998 criminalization of commercial sex — a measure titled "The Protection of Women" — appears not to protect them at all. A 2004 report by the Swedish Ministry of Justice and the police found that after it went into effect, prostitution, of course, continued. Meanwhile, prices for sexual services dropped, clients were fewer but more often violent, more wanted to pay for sex and not use a condom — and sex workers had less time to assess the mental state of their clients because of the fear of getting caught.

New Zealand's 2003 Prostitution Reform Act is perhaps the most progressive response to the complex issue of prostitution. The act not only decriminalizes the practice but seeks to "safeguard the human rights of sex workers and protects them from exploitation, promotes the welfare and occupational health and safety of sex workers, is conducive to public health, (and) prohibits the use in prostitution of persons under 18 years of age."

Furthermore, clients, sex workers and brothel owners bear equal responsibility for minimizing the risks of STD transmission. In 2005, a client was convicted of violating the act by slipping his condom off during sex.

And this brings me to the clients. I have met hundreds of men who have paid for sex. Some seek any kind of sex; others want certain kinds of sex; a few look for comfort and conversation.

Saying that all sex workers are victims and all clients are demons is the easy way out. Perhaps it's time to face this like adults (or at least like Mexico) — with a little less moralizing and a good deal more honesty.

As for Spitzer, if he had walked into the Galactic Zone, my questions would have been these: Was he respectful? Was he safe? Did he pay well? If the answer to all three was yes, then, well, I voted for him once, and I would vote for him again.

Small Change: Why Not Abolish Coins That Cost More to Make Than They're Worth?

There's nothing like two weeks in Austria and England to make an American accutely aware of how much U.S. currency has diminished in relation to the euro and the pound. The euro currently costs over $1.50 and the pound over $2.00. It is especially remarkable that the U.K., deeply involved with us in Afghanistan as well as the debacle in Iraq, has managed to do so much better economically than the United States. Evidently foreign policy is not the only area in which the Bush administration lacks skill.

So it caught my eye when The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that, due to the increasing price of metals, pennies and nickles now cost the U.S. Treasury double their face value to make. The price of copper quadrupled over the last five years, while the price of nickle and zinc tripled. The U.S. Mint lost $99 million on penny and nickle production in fiscal 2007.

And the U.S. Mint's response? "Save taxpayers $100 million a year" by replacing the copper, nickle and zinc in the coins with cheapter metals. Is this the best idea the Treasury can muster?

If the government really wants to save taxpayers money--not to mention, improve the convenience of cash transactions--it really should consider abolishing these coins altogether. And for good measure, why not get rid of the dime and the half-dollar as well? If we must split dollars for old times sake, we could still retain the quarter and round all cash totals to the nearest one. But hasn't the time long since passed when pennies, nickles, dimes and half-dollars add any value to our economic lives?

While we're on the subject, it wouldn't hurt for the European Community to do the same. The annoyance and uselessness of such small change is the same there. In fact, the European countries compound the problem. The euro, in addition to 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 euro-cent coins, is also available in 1 and 2 euro coins. The pound, in addition to 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50-pence coins, is also available in 1, 2 and 5 pound coins. So much coinage is cumbersome, costly and a really unproductive use of the earth's metals.

The Tribune reported that a House subcommittee had a hearing March 11th about the Mint's proposal. Time challenges and the mechanics of dealing with vending machines were discussed. Only one member was brave enough to suggest abolishing the penny entirely. Another predicted "some good amendments coming for this." One can hope.

If "We Are the Change We Have Been Waiting For," Why Did We Wait?

Overall, it isn't the most original analysis of the presidential campaign. But New York Times columnist David Brooks manages to get in some great one-liners, and a bit of insight, about the two Democratic contenders.

He observes that as time goes by, Obama's most dedicated supporters have needed "more and purer hope-injections just to preserve the rush. They wound up craving more hope that even the Hope Pope could provide, and they began experiencing brooding moments of suboptimal hopefulness."

As the faithful began to come down from their initial mania, some began wondering if Obama's "stuff" actually makes sense. Giving his pronouncements calmer scrutiny, Brooks suggests, they might wonder, for instance: "if we are the change we have been waiting for then why have we been waiting since we've been here all along?"

And this even causes some Obama devotees to "experience slivers of sympathy for Hillary Clinton. They see her campaign morosely traipsing from one depressed industrial area to another--The Sitting Shiva for America Tour. They see that her entire political strategy consists of waiting for primary states as boring as she is."

Then Brooks gets to the true heart the Democrats' quandry. Doubts that Obama's preaching has any substance beyond the inspirational might lead people "to the question that is the Unholy of the Unholies for Obama-maniacs: How exactly would all this unity he talks about come to pass?

"How is a 47-year-old novice going to unify highly polarized 70-something committee chairs? What will happen if the nation's 261,000 lobbyists don't see the light, even after the laying on of hands? Does The Changemaker have the guts to take on the special interests in his own party--the trial lawyers, the teachers' unions, the AARP?"

Hillary's supports think they know the answers. They believe she has a better chance of cajoling these stubborn forces into cooperating than he does. But it appears that the majority of Democratic voters have stopped listening to them.

Radical Islamic Extremism Is Not "The Transcendent Challenge of the 21st Century"

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. says that John McCain is wrong in his claim that "the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical Islamic extremists"--and that deflating that notion undermines the best rationale for electing him:

"Presumably, he's saying that Islamic extremism is more important than everything else--the rise of China and India as global powers, growing resistance to American influence in Europe, the weakening of America's global economic position, the disorder and poverty in large parts of Africa, the alienation of significant parts of Latin America from the United States." I'd certainly add global warming to the list.

But, Dionne asks,"Is it in our national interest for all these issues to take a back seat to terrorism?" He says no.

He cites early neoconservative Owen Harries' argument that viewing terrorism as an ideological challenge akin to Nazism or Soviet communism is neither accurate nor prudent. Quoting Harries:

"I think it's to belittle the historical experiences of World War II, not to speak of the Cold War, to equate the terrorists of today and the damage they're capable of with the totalitarian regimes of the previous century."

Dionne concludes: "Underestimating our enemies is a mistake, but so too is endowing them with more power than they have." Unfortunately, the years since 9/11 have given free rein to the latter. McCain really needs to explain why more of this same failed policy makes any sense.

Hillary Does Better in States That "Look Like America," Where Diversity Breeds Realists

Syndicated columnist Jonathan Goldberg, another whose thought processes I don't always find persuasive, seems to be onto something when he notes contrasting demographics in the states where Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have done well among Democratic voters.

Obama has done very well among black voters in states with large black populations, and very well among white voters in states with few black residents. "But in states that actually 'look like America,' he tends to get beaten by Hillary Clinton. He lost melting-pot states such as Nevada, California, Massachusetts and New York largely because he couldn't accumulate nearly enough white or Latino votes."

Goldberg suggests that Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, might have explained why this is so in some controversial findings he released in 2006. Goldberg says Putnam told the Financial Times: "In the presence of diversity, we hunker down. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us."

This could be taken to mean that diverse communities breed racism and ethnic resentment. Goldberg suggests another option: "increased diversity breeds not so much resentment as realism--at least among rank-and-file voters."

Having been deeply inspired by John F. Kennedy while I was in high school, then deeply disappointed later by revelations of his personal antics in the White House, his mistakes in authorizing the Bay of Pigs invasion, his reluctance to join the civil rights movement, and above all foreign policy blunders that led directly to the Vietnam debacle, I might add that experiencing diversity also includes experiencing disappointment with political crusades.

Thus even though I can be moved by Obama's vision and rhetoric, I am wary of his ability to achieve them. We need to heed the warning of Old Testament writers about the hazards of putting our trust in princes. Goldberg's closing words ring true:

"It's easy for upscale liberals to talk about the glories of diversity because they live at Olympian heights, above the reality of multicultural America. For Obama's wealthy, white, liberal supporters, diversity is knowing a rich black lawyer, a wealthy Latino accountant and lots of well-to-do gay folks.

"Meanwhile, for working-class white liberals who live in places such as Iowa or Maine, its easy to see our racial divide in almost purely theoretical terms and therefore believe that purely rhetorical responses are sufficient; Obama says the right words, and that's all we need.

"But for much of the rest of the country, people are more skeptical that high-flying talk about diversity and unity, married to fairly conventional liberal politics on affirmative action, immigration and the like, will do much to solve the real problems we face. They may have never heard such rhetoric delivered so well. But they've certainly heard it before."

Global Warming Solutions: Biofuels Foolish, But Other Options Are Better and Faster

The Los Angeles Times says that two studies published yesterday in the journal Science have found that the rush to grow biofuel crops is actually increasing greenhouse gases rather than reducing them:

The first study looked at the amount of carbon in forests and grasslands that is released into the air when soils are overturned and existing vegetation rots or is burned away. It found that "clearing forests and grasslands to grow the crops releases vast amounts of carbon into the air--far more than the carbon spared from the atmosphere by burning biofuels instead of gasoline."

The second study found that "Even converting existing farmland from food to biofuel crops increases greenhouse gas emissions as food production is shifted to other parts of the world, resulting in the destruction of more forests and grasslands to make way for farmland."

The second analysis said a cornfield devoted to producing ethanol would have to be worked for 167 years before it would start to achieve a net reduction in emissions.

The Times said several scientists believe the biofuel industry needs to focus on sources that do not increase pressure on land, like municipal trash, crop waste and prairie grasses. Alex Farrell, professor of energy and resources at UC Berkeley, summed it up: "We need better biofuels before we need more biofuels."

Meanwhile, two researchers from Rice University have compiled a list of alternatives that actually will achieve real results, and faster than biofuels.

In line with the studies above, they put curtailing world deforestation, especially tropical deforestation, at the top of their list. They say it causes 20% of global carbon emissions each year.

They also suggest an international agreement to ban natural gas flaring, which adds about 400 million tons of carbon a year--"the same scale of emissions from all vehicles in the United Kingdom, France and Germany." The leading contributors: Nigeria, Russia, Iran, Algeria, Mexico, Venezuela, Indonesia and the U.S.

They say U.S. fuel efficiency standards which Congress passed in December will reduce greenhouse emissions by 185 million tons, or about 25%, between now and 2030.

They also favor phasing out non-sensible subsidies for corn-based ethanol as well as consumer-friendly fuel subsidies by China, Iran, Russia and Mexico.

The Associated Press also reports that researchers have developed a device that generates electrical power from the swing of a walking person's knee. By helping the leg to decelerate it generates power without requiring much additional energy from the person walking. Potential applications include powering cell phones and portable GPS locators, motorized prothetic joints or implanted drug pumps.

The article doesn't mention it. But is it too far-fetched to imagine that the same kind of device might eventually be adapted to bring power to a small electric bicycle motor?

In short, there is a whole portfolio of alternatives to biofuels. And unlike biofuels, they do not have to make climate change worse before they help make it better.

The Pope and Galileo: Benedict Fails Whitehead’s Theory of Limits, Once Again

In a posting May 24, 2007, I commented on misstatements Pope Benedict XVI made about religious freedom and the forced conversion of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Applying Alfred North Whitehead’s Theory of Limits, I argued that the pope had pushed his assertions well beyond accuracy and truth.

In January the media gave much attention to a Rome university’s charge that the pope, in 1990 remarks as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, defended the Catholic Inquisition’s 1633 condemnation of Galileo. They found that position an affront to science and to academic freedom.

A group of professors and students from Rome’s La Sapienza University, including the entire physics faculty, wrote a letter protesting a planned January 17th lecture by the pope for the opening of the academic year. The pope eventually cancelled the appearance.

It strikes me that the 1990 remarks which the university protested and the January episode that Benedict failed to handle productively are other occasions where he could have learned from Whitehead’s theory.

Whitehead’s Theory of Limits provides an important tool for weighing the importance and accuracy of assertions. His oft repeated formula, “All things work between limits,” means that the truth or falsehood of an assertion depends on its scope of useful application. In other words, a given assertion is true only within strict limits; if those limits are forgotten, the assertion begins to do the work of a falsehood.

The 1990 remarks were delivered when Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the lineal successor of the Inquisition. His overall theme was that the Galileo verdict could be defended because the church was trying to emphasize the limits of science and the horrors science could produce if the limits were ignored. He sought to portray the church as being well ahead of science in appreciating “modernity’s doubts about itself.”

To bolster his argument, he cited the opinion of Ernst Bloch that by abolishing the notion of absolute space, the Theory of Relativity had made it impossible to say whether the heliocentrism advocated by Galileo or the geocentrism of his opponents was a more accurate description of reality.

Ratzinger quoted Bloch favorably: “From the moment that…movement is no longer produced towards something, but there’s only a relative movement of bodies among themselves, and therefore the measurement of that [movement] depends to a great extent on the choice of a body to serve as a point of reference, in this case is it not merely the complexity of calculations that renders the [geocentric] hypothesis impractical?”

So Ratzinger used Bloch’s interpretation to say that the church rightly condemned Galileo for claiming heliocentrism was an objective truth, when in fact its objective truth could not be empirically demonstrated. Summarizing Bloch’s interpretation, Ratzinger said “The advantage of the heliocentric system over the geocentric, he suggested, does not consist in a greater correspondence to objective truth, but solely in the fact that it offers us a greater ease of calculation.”

Ratzinger also quoted agnostic-skeptic philosopher Paul Feyerabend: “The church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just…”

Ratzinger then iced that cake by saying that “C.F. von Weizsacker takes another step forward, when he identifies a ‘very direct path’ that leads from Galileo to the atomic bomb.”

It is true that Ratzinger characterized Feyerabend’s opinion as “much more drastic” than Bloch’s and seemed to refer to all three commentators when he said at the end of his remarks “It would be absurd, on the basis of these affirmations, to construct a hurried apologetics.” But he never disavowed their positions.

It is no wonder that the faculty and students at La Sapienza found these 1990 remarks so incendiary. The observations push beyond valid limits in so many directions, it is difficult to know where to begin.

The limit exceeded most egregiously is historical accuracy. It would be convenient for Ratzinger’s 1990 analysis if the church had shown any concern in 1633 of anticipating Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by two centuries. But where is the evidence that the church ever raised this concern in the Galileo case?

Instead, the Inquisition’s verdict was: "The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.” The 17th century Catholic Church misread several scriptural passages as requiring geocentrism: Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, Psalm 104:5, 1 Chronicles 16:30, and Ecclesiastes 1:5. It was disingenuous for Ratzinger read any other motives back into the condemnation of Galileo.

Another limitation Ratzinger failed to recognize was the partiality of Bloch’s description of relativity. The fact that the earth and the sun are both in motion with respect to other bodies in no way rules out the sun as the gravitational anchor of our solar system. Calculations become easier with heliocentrism because the sun is the object around which all of the planets orbit. The sun and other planets do no orbit around the earth. Relativity does not change the objective truth of that observation.

Perhaps Ratzinger’s most careless and annoying failure to respect limits was his cavalier use of language. He tries to have it far too many ways. Like an attorney trying to make a jury aware of prejudicial information that the judge has ruled out of bounds, he wants to highlight the outrageous positions of Bloch and Feyerabend and Weizsacker but deny that he is trying to make a case for them, or with them.

What in fact he was trying to do was to suggest that the Inquistion had some valid reason to condemn Galileo. That, of course, flies in the face of the last three centuries, when the church gradually decided it had been wrong.

That trajectory began in 1718, when the ban on reprinting Galileo’s books was partially lifted. It continued in 1737, when Galileo’s body was moved from an obsure room off a back corridor of the Basilica of Santa Croce to a monument erected in his honor in the main body of the basilica. In 1741 Pope Benedict XIV authorized publication of Galileo’s complete scientific works. In 1758 all books on heliocentrism were removed from the Index of Forbidden Books except for those of Galileo and Capernicus. Theirs were finally removed in 1835.

Just after his election to the papacy in 1939, Pope Pius XII told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that Galileo was among “the most audacious heroes of research…not afraid of the stumbling blocks and the risks along the way…” And in 1992, as the result of study conducted by the Pontifical Council for Culture, Pope John Paul II officially conceded that the earth was not stationary and expressed regret for how the Galileo affair was handled.

Thus the wise motivation and constructive role Ratzinger tried to attribute to the Inquisition’s verdict in 1633 are a throwback to a defensive position that no other reputable leader in official Catholicism salutes.

What is disturbing to scientists is that it renews the specter of the pope trying to block scientific research when it suits him and inhibit the academic freedom which is the raison d’etre of any university system.

Benedict could have taken advantage of the uproar at La Sapienza as an opportunity to show that he “gets it,” i.e., that he realizes how seriously his 1990 assertions go beyond reasonable limits and if he wishes to be taken seriously, how much he needs to reign them back within the bounds of accuracy and truth.

Instead he chose to continue his relentless march backward from the best discoveries of the postmodern world.

Pope Rewrites Prayer for Jews, But They Must Still "Acknowledge Jesus Christ"

The New York Times reports that yesterday Pope Benedict XVI issued a replacement for a prayer in the Latin version of the Good Friday ritual that referred to the "blindness" of the Jews and asked that God "may lift the veil from their hearts."

The move is signficant because it is at least an implicit admission that the pope should not have authorized more widespread use of the Latin ritual without first updating wording that conflicted with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which affirmed explicitly that the Jews have a unique and unsurpassable role in salvation history.

As observed in my January 15th posting on this topic, the admission increases pressure on Rome to revise additional Latin wording that conflicts with other official teachings of Vatican II.

However, the rewrite is deficient because the revised prayer still departs from the Vatican II position that God has a special relationship with the Jewish people which can never be abridged.

The unofficial translation of the new prayer reads: "Let us pray for the Jews. May the Lord our God enlighten their hearts so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, the savior of all men. Almighty and everlasting God, you who want all men to be saved and to reach the awareness of the truth, graciously grant that, with the fullness of peoples entering into your church, all Israel may be saved."

Rabbi David Rosen, who has worked with the pope for 20 years on Jewish-Catholic relations and is presently director of Inter-Religious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee, says he is disappointed in the wording, especially because he knows for a fact that Benedict does care about Catholic-Jewish relations.

Quoting the Times: "Rabbi Rosen, while saying he was pleased that language he found offensive was removed, objected to the new prayer because it specified that Jews should find redemption specifically in Christ. He noted that the standard Mass, issued after the liberalizations of the Second Vatican Council, also contained a prayer for the Jews' 'redemption' but did not specifically invoke Christ, stressing rather God's original covenant with the Jews."

I agree with Rabbi Rosen. The wording so closely associates the salvation of the Jews with acknowledging Jesus Christ as savior and entering the Catholic Church that it seems to leave no room for Vatican II's teaching that the Jews are able to experience redemption on their own, within the covenant God offered them. Among other things, the teaching was designed to deligitimize any Christian basis for anti-semitism.

But this, of course, is the inevitable fruit of Benedict's larger positions that there is no salvation for anyone outside Jesus Christ and his one true church (Roman Catholicism). Those positions also contradict the clear teaching of the world's Catholic bishops at Vatican II, officially promulgated by Pope Paul VI. Benedict has yet to explain where he gets the authority to override that official teaching.

How the Super Tuesday Primaries Changed from a Blessing to a Curse

Two syndicated columnists from widely divergent places on the conservative-liberal spectrum agree in op-ed pieces that for multiple reasons--some foreseeable and some not--today's Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses have turned out to be a very bad idea.

Though I am generally loath to agree with him on anything, ultra-conservative Robert Novak has a cogent analysis of how the Democrats painted themselves into a corner. He places most of the blame on their 35-year experiment with proportional representation:

"Under proportional representation, a candidate collects delegates by achieveing the 15 percent viability level either statewide or in a congressional district. In a four-delegate district, Clinton could win 59 percent of the vote and still split the delegates with Obama, two to two. The impact of California consequently is dissipated..."

Thus Novak says that despite the Clinton campaign's belief that it could guarantee her nomination by front-loading the primaries, it turns out there is "no mathematical possibility" that Democrats voting today in 22 states for 1,681 delegates can gain Clinton or Obama the 2,025 delegates needed to sow up the nomination. Novak argues that the two candidates are so close in the polls that the outcome may not be decided by March 4th (the Texas and Ohio primaries) or even by April 22nd (Pennsylvania).

He regards this and "Clinton fatigue" as more or less foreseeable factors. Less foreseeable were Obama's recent surge in popularity and "the surprising list of senators who endorsed Obama after Clinton won the New Hampshire primary." This suggests to Novak that Clinton is more distrusted by her Senate colleagues than anyone realized, and that many of the 796 "super delegates" may remain undecided right up to the convention in Denver.

Writing from the more moderate-liberal end of the spectrum, David Broder says the national geography involved in today's voting, so soon after the single-state contests in South Carolina and Florida, does a real disservice to the Super Tuesday voters. There is no way the candidates of either party can do justice to so many far-flung voters at once:

"What has developed in this election cycle is a system in which the best-informed people have the fewest votes to bestow, while the people with the most votes have the least chance to examine the credentials of the candidates. Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada had graduate-school time to study the field, while the voters in the Feb. 5 states got only a CliffNotes version of the campaign."

The wise states were the ones that avoided the temptation to join the Super Tuesday stampede and opted instead to have their primaries later in February, March or April. Broder would like to hope that this experience will slow the race to join the Super Tuesday model. But even though the Super Tuesday voters have become the losers in the process, he is not optimistic that any state will volunteer to leave "the first tier" or that more won't be lured to join it.

Another element is the elements. Neither columnist mentions it, but today's weather is forecast to be snowy and bitterly cold in several of the Super Tuesday states--to the point that it may keep significant numbers of voters from getting to the polls. This, of course, is not abnormal for February 5th. But it is another factor that those who hyped Super Tuesday failed to take into account.

John Edwards Back-Pedals Cynically on Every Position He Supported in the Senate

It appears that columnist Charles Krauthammer is right: John Edwards knows he will not be president but stays in the race because Hillary and Barack might end up very close in delegate counts, allowing Edwards to play kingmaker and maybe trade for a cabinet position.

But Krauthammer is also right to bemoan the manner in which Edwards has campaigned--running against every important position he took in the Senate, then claiming that his latest positions are "the cause of my life."

Krauthammer's judgment: "Breathtaking. People can change their minds about something. But everything?"

Not only does this call into question the reliability of any stance Edwards might take. It calls into question Edwards' personal integrity. And the columnist notes that even a consistently liberal Democratic Senator says so. Krauthammer concludes:

By his own endlessly self-confessed record, his current pose is a coat of paint newly acquired. His claim that it is an expression of his inner soul is a farce.

A cynical farce that is particularly galling to left-liberals of real authenticity. "The one (presidential candidate) that is the most problematic is Edwards," Sen. Russ Feingold told The Post-Crescent in Appleton, Wis., "who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq War. ... He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record."

It profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world. But for 4 percent of the Nevada caucuses?

Fred Phelps Plans More Gay Hate at U.S. Memorial Service for Heath Ledger

Heath Ledger, left, played Ennis Del Mar, a gay cowboy who falls in love with Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, right, in the film "Brokeback Mountain."

MSNBC reports that fundamentalist preacher Fred Phelps, whose tasteless bigotry against gay people was highlighted in a post here 11/1/07, is at it again. Not content with carrying signs saying "God Hates Fags" at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, he now plans to do the same at the U.S. memorial service for Heath Ledger. Hopefully all kinds of people will sue him, again, and win, again.

By Courtney Hazlett
The Scoop
1/23/08

The radical Baptist church known for picketing the funerals of American soldiers who lost their lives in Iraq has announced that they intend to protest Heath Ledger’s stateside memorial service because he played a gay character in “Brokeback Mountain.”

"You cannot live in defiance of God. He (Ledger) got on that big screen with a big, fat message: God is a liar and it's OK to be gay,” said Shirley Phelps in a statement sent out by the Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church.

The only compelling reason to ignore Westboro Baptist’s reprehensible intentions is that highlighting the vast inappropriateness of their thoughts and actions only brings the church more publicity. However, if the members of Westboro Baptist get to speak their minds, every individual who feels that this is an affront to most basic standards of human ethics should be able to as well.

“Wow, that should make his family feel great,” one person close to Ledger said angrily in response to the announcement. “I seriously don’t understand what is wrong with people. This is the last thing his family needs.”

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) told me, “We sincerely hope that Heath Ledger is laid to rest and his family is allowed to grieve in a private and peaceful ceremony.”

On Jan. 22, GLAAD said that “Heath Ledger will forever be remembered for his groundbreaking role as Ennis del Mar in ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ His powerful portrayal changed hearts and minds in immeasurable ways.” Those close to Ledger agree. But moreover, those close to him want Ledger to be remembered as a man who loved his family and appreciated the career he’d had.

To be fair, the people of the Westboro Baptist Church aren’t the only ones displaying poor taste.

Fox News’ John Gibson on Jan. 22 opened his radio show with funeral music and mocked a signature line from “Brokeback,” saying, “Well, he found out how to quit you.” (When Gibson was contacted to explain his comments, he declined.)

Surge Begets Splurge: Foreigners Buy Big Chunks of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd says the U.S. economy has compounded its addiction to foreign oil with a new dependence on foreign loans to stay afloat. The result is a "Red, White and Blue Tag Sale," allowing wealthy foreign investors to gain ownership in and critical leverage over major U.S. institutions like Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. The second half of her column follows.

Two decades ago, we fretted that Japan was taking over America when Sony bought Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought a chunk of Rockefeller Center. But they overpaid for everything.

Now, because of Wall Street’s overreaching, our economy depends on foreign oil and foreign loans to stay afloat.

China and Arab countries have a staggering amount of treasury securities. And the oil-rich countries are sitting on so many petrodollars that they are looking beyond prestige hotels and fashion labels and taking advantage of the fire sale to buy eye-popping stakes in our major financial institutions.

Like the president, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch came with tin cups to Middle Eastern, Asian and American investors last week, for a combined total of nearly $19.1 billion, after the subprime mortgage debacle blew up their books.

Citigroup, which raised $7.5 billion from Abu Dhabi in November, raised another $12.5 billion, including from Singapore, Kuwait and Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal. Merrill Lynch gave $6.6 billion in preferred stock to Kuwait, South Korea, a Japanese bank and others.

(While the great sage Bob Rubin was advising Hillary Clinton on sound fiscal policy, he seemed to be asleep at the Citigroup switch.)

As Warren Buffett has said, we are giving ourselves a party to feed our appetite for oil and imported goods and paying for it by selling off the furniture, our most precious assets.

When the president got back Thursday night from a trip that made it clear he has no clout overseas, he had to rush the ailing economy into intensive care.

Next to the cool, strong euro, the dollar is a comparative runt in the world’s currencies. The weak dollar lets foreigners snap up real estate in Manhattan.

It is striking that the Bush scion, who has tried so hard to do the opposite of his father, also ends up facing the prospect of a recession in his final year in office.

Maybe if the president had spent the trillion he squandered on his Iraq odyssey on energy research, we might have broken the oil addiction.

Now it’s a race between Iraq, stupid, or the economy, stupid, to see which one will usher out W.

The country is engaged in a fit of nativism and Lou Dobbsism, obsessing about the millions of Mexicans who might be sneaking across the border when billions in foreign money are pouring into Citigroup. You figure out what might be a bigger problem.

The national boundaries that really matter are the financial ones: Who’s going to own the American economy?

Library of Congress Curator Finds Three Photos of Lincoln's Second Inaugural

In an amazing turn of events, a curator at the Library of Congress has discovered three photographs of Lincoln's Second Inaugural that previously been associated with another event. America Online has an excellent spread of the new photos with explanatory captions, along with two that had been identified previously.

How King and Kennedy and Johnson and Dirksen Passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964

It was unfortunate that so much negativity was directed toward Hillary Clinton's observation that "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964... It took a president to get it done." But now that Barack Obama has instructed his supporters to stop trying to inflame a controversy where there really shouldn't be one, perhaps we can at least gain from the episode by improving our understanding of the 1960s.

There was nothing inaccurate about Clinton's remarks. Her point was the pivotal role of presidents in moving the country forward. In fact the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 could not have become law without the support of several presidents. That doesn't mean that Clinton could not have said more. But what she said was factual and apt.

Her statement presumed that Martin Luther King was the civil rights leader most responsible for proposing the Civil Rights Act and getting it enacted. She could have highlighted other civil rights leaders who preceded him and worked with him, as well as Christian and Jewish leaders who supported him and often walked in demonstrations with him.

In highlighting the role of presidents, she also could have added that John F. Kennedy was the first president to propose the Civil Rights Act, which he sent to Congress on June 19, 1963 (not coincidentally, on the day celebrated as Juneteenth in several states of the former Confederacy). But it took the emotional outpouring after Kennedy's assassination, skillfully managed by Lyndon Johnson applying his lengthy experience as Senate Majority leader, to finally get the act passed. She also could have added that Kennedy had not always been an enthusiastic advocate of civil rights and that it was primarily pressure from King that led JFK to propose the measure, as it had been pressure from earlier civil rights activists that pushed President Eisenhower to use military force in Little Rock to integrate the public schools in the 1950s. (See post of 9/25/07.)

Clinton also could have added that from the time he supported the act as Vice President, Johnson knew that it would be so unpopular in the South that those states would no longer vote Democratic. When he pushed the bill as president, senators of his own party warned him it would cost him the 1964 election. As it turned out, Johnson soundly defeated Barry Goldwater, even in most of the southern states. But the South turned solidly Republican for decades afterwards.

As Clarence Page pointed out recently, Clinton could also have acknowledged that because of strident opposition within Johnson's own party, the act could not have been passed without some votes from prominent Republicans. Page singled out "Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirkson of Illinois, who rounded up enough Republican votes to offset strong opposition from Johnson's fellow Southern Democrats." In the Senate the bill was passed by 27 Northern Republicans joining 45 Northern Democrats. The only Southern Democrat voting in favor of the bill was Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas. The breakdown in the House was similar.

So a more complete telling of the story emphasizes that the Civil Rights Act would not have become law without a lot of work, cooperation, courage and sacrifice from people in the civil rights movement, two presidents, and several members of Congress, including many Republicans.

But the story makes it clear how critical presidential leadership was. Lyndon Johnson's leadership in particular was probably the best of his presidency, and it should be remembered and treasured and held up as inspiration to future presidents. That he did so poorly leading later on Vietnam does not undo his remarkable achievements in civil rights. It simply cautions us that presidents who achieve magnificently can also fail tragically. That, of course, is another lesson the candidates should take to heart.

Ironically, Jews Push Catholics To Stay True to the Reforms of the Second Vatican Council

In an online posting 1/9, National Catholic Reporter columnist John Allen Jr. observes that Pope Benedict XVI has painted himself into a corner—by reauthorizing the use of a Good Friday prayer which the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) found offensive to Jews—and the pope has just nine weeks before Good Friday to fix the problem, or face a direct confrontation three weeks later when he meets in the United States with an inter-religious delegation that will include Jews.

Last July, when he authorized more widespread use of Rome’s 1962 missal for masses in Latin, Benedict also allowed priests to use the Latin prayers for Holy Week. Among them is a Good Friday prayer for conversion of the Jews, which asks God to “lift the veil from their hearts.”

Such a prayer did not square with Vatican II’s statements condemning anti-semitism and affirming that the Jews have a unique and irreplaceable role in salvation history. When the liturgy for Holy Week was rewritten in the decade after Vatican II, it was eliminated. The new prayer asked that the Jews “may arrive at the fullness of redemption.”

As I noted in a posting on 7/19/07, Jews had raised public objection to the news that Benedict planned to reauthorize the offensive language, but he went ahead with it anyway and could not be bothered to even address their concern in his decree or the documents that accompanied it.

But Allen notes that Jews do not plan to let this issue die quietly: “If a reminder were needed of Jewish sensitivities about the Good Friday prayer, … the Anti-Defamation League included it on a late December list of ‘Top Ten Issues Affecting Jews in 2007.’ The ADL called the possible revival of the prayer ‘a theological setback to the reforms of Vatican II, and a challenge to Catholic-Jewish relations.’”

Given the pope’s nonresponsiveness in July and since, there is little clear evidence that Benedict is really motivated to address the issue. Allen suggests it is positive that “the Vatican is working on a document clarifying implementation of the pope’s ruling,” but he concedes he detects no sense of urgency.

This is especially remarkable because a top Vatican official has already suggested a very simple fix. Allen reports: “Last July, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, said the problem could be solved by substituting the prayer for Jews found in the post-Vatican II liturgy for Good Friday, which no longer refers to conversion but rather asks that Jews ‘may arrive at the fullness of redemption.’ Since the original texts of the new liturgy are in Latin, it would be fairly simple to ask communities celebrating the old rite to use the Latin version of the more recent prayer.”

So why not do that? The real issue seems to be that the pope would have to admit that he screwed up in not addressing the Jews’ concern and in other particulars of reauthorizing use of the Latin texts. Allen’s language is more diplomatic than mine, but that’s what it boils down to.

The fear is that if Benedict revises the prayer for the Jews because it reflects a theology that was surpassed at Vatican II, won’t he also have to replace Latin formulations which do the same on several other theological issues?

The answer is yes. Precisely.

As I also noted in the 7/19/07 posting, facing this issue is what Benedict tried unsuccessfully to avoid in his decree, by mischaracterizing the old Latin Mass and the 13 official eucharistic prayers that resulted from Vatican II as “two usages of the one Roman rite” or “a twofold use of one and the same rite.” The old ritual reflects an old theology which the church eschewed in several specific pronouncements at Vatican II. Because the new rituals reflect an improved theology, they surpassed the old one. The officially surpassed rituals should not be allowed to revive the officially surpassed theology.

I have argued here in multiple postings (7/17/06, 5/4/07, 5/24/07, 7/12/07, 7/19/07, 9/6/07) that no one church or liturgy can possibly capture the living God or exhaust the mystery of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the Catholic church needs both a normative liturgy and the widest possible variety of alternative liturgies. The latter should include experiments aimed at improving the liturgy and limited use of older liturgies that have been surpassed by better ones. But I have also drawn the line at liturgical language and practices that contradict sound theology or even undermine the church’s mission to proclaim the gospel.

The objections of the Jews and the numerous other theological issues Allen mentions show how much of the old Latin language needed to be corrected or replaced before use of the 1962 Latin missal was reauthorized. Benedict erred in not doing so.

It is ironic that on this point the Jews are being more accurate than the pope and more faithful to Vatican II. But the Jews are clearly stakeholders in Vatican II, and this won’t be the first time that their insights have reformed Christianity.

Nanu Nanu to Tata's Nano: Critics Say Hello--and Goodbye!

CNN and the Associated Press report that Ratan Tata has unveiled his $2,500 car and dubbed it the Nano, but critics say the Smart Car look-alike is thumbing its snub nose at efforts to reduce global warming.

Climate change experts are not persuaded by Mr. Tata's claims that the Nano will meet Indian and European emission standards. By adding millions more vehicles to India's already clogged roads, the Nano will idle in traffic jams and belch tons of additional greenhouse gases into the planet's already overtaxed atmosphere.

Chief U.N. climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri, who shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize, is not the only one "having nightmares" about the prospect. The Asian Development Bank says that in 2005, Indian vehicles released 219 million tons of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, but by 2035, that number is projected to increase to 1,467 million tons, due largely to the expanding middle-class and the expected rise of low-cost cars.

Yesterday Houston Chronicle business columnist Loren Steffy noted another negative impact: though the Nano, with its lawn-mower size engine, may get 50 miles per gallon, "even the addition of several hundred million lawn mowers" to the road will so increase the demand for oil that the $2,500 car could easily drive the price of oil to $200 per barrel.

'Pin-Head' Monarch Butterfly Shows Incredible Mental Capacity

Basic to Alfred North Whitehead's organic philosophy is the position that a mental pole is at work in every occasion of experience, no matter how primitive the organism that is the subject of the experience.

An Associated Press article in today's Houston Chronicle provides novel confirmation of Whitehead's view, with a report of new discoveries on how mentality works at the level of a monarch butterfly.

The article covers just published scientific findings that the monarchs, with a brain "no bigger than the head of a pin," have a unique cicadian clock that enables them to find their way from Canada to winter nesting grounds in Mexico by using the sun as a compass.

The story says a seven-member research team led by Dr. Steven Reppert, a neurobiologist at the University of Massachusetts, genetically mapped the butterflies' biological clocks at the molecular level and found proteins common to insects and mammals.

The study was published online yesterday by the Public Library of Science and the PLoS Biology Journal, which has a synopsis providing amazing technical details about the proteins involved and how they work differently in mammals, fruit flies and butterflies.

The synopsis says "In a new study, Haisun Zhu, Steven Reppert, and colleagues reveal the details of the clockwork in the monarch butterfly and show that it has aspects of clocks from both the mouse and the fly, the only other clock types known in [non-human] animals."

The synopsis concludes: "the results in this study suggest that part of the remarkable navigational ability of the butterfly relies on its ability to integrate temporal information from the clock with spatial information from its visual system. This allows the monarch to correct its course as light shifts across the sky over the course of the day."

Will Tata Motors Lead India's Ta-Ta to Fixing Climate Change?

The New York Times reports that Tata Motors of India will unveil a super-cheap car 1/10 that will allow Third World drivers who have had to get around on two wheels to afford four--but that it will likely fail emission standards on any Western road.

The statement is buried in a cryptic single sentence. The main focus of the article is what Tata's technicians were able to achieve with so-called Gandhian engineering, asking "Do we really need that" about every component of the vehicle. Unfortunately, Tata appears to have decided that one of the things the developing world can live without for now is any contribution to repairing global warming by limiting vehicle pollution.

This is the kind of disaster many climate change experts have been warning about for years. It is one of the scenarios they have predicted would make global warming exponentially worse. Their fear has been that, lacking any responsible leadership from the U.S., India and China would imitate the most climate-polluting aspects of American industrial development--and do so at a pace and scale that will rapidly surpass the volume of greenhouse gases Americans pump into the atmosphere.

It looks like we're about 48 hours away from Tata announcing that it will take the lead in helping India turn this climate-change nightmare into a grim reality.

Vatican’s Top Liturgist Retires, But Says Liturgical Reform Is Irreversible

Archbishop Piero Marini, from 1987 to 2007 the Vatican’s top liturgist and master of ceremonies for papal masses and other liturgical events, has just published a new book, A Challenging Reform: Realizing the Vision of the Liturgical Renewal.

Long regarded as the chief in-house champion of the liturgical reforms endorsed by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and implemented by Pope Paul VI in 1969, Marini knew by the end of his career that his enthusiasm had been well corralled.

So it was no surprise that his book gives a new public pitch for the reforms he never let John Paul II or Benedict XVI forget, as he quietly stage-managed them at their sides during their public liturgies.

But given Rome’s efforts over the last 40 years to turn back the clock on the church’s official liturgy, what is remarkable is Marini’s confidence that the liturgical reforms launched by Vatican II were necessary, inescapable and “permanently valid,” and that they set the church on a path that is irreversible.

Not only that: Marini believes that the Consilium—the collegial, consultative, international group of liturgical experts which guided the initial implementation of Vatican II’s liturgical reforms despite having no judicial authority of its own—is a model for a new way the Vatican could operate.

These were his themes in an interview with John Allen Jr., published in the 12/28 print edition of the National Catholic Reporter.

Marini sees nostalgia for the church’s liturgical past as unproductive, and dangerous. Speaking of young priests so afflicted, he asks: “How is it possible to be nostalgic for an era they didn’t experience? I remember this period. From the age of 6 until I was 23, in other words for 18 years, I lived with the Mass of Pius V. I grew up in this rite, and I was formed by it. I saw the necessity of the changes of Vatican II.”

He compares those who long to march backwards to “the woman from the Old Testament who turned around and became a pillar of salt.”

He finds several principles of Vatican II’s liturgical reforms perennial:

Insistence that liturgy celebrates what is contained in the Bible.

Ensuring that liturgy remains grounded in the practices of the early church.

Remembering that the priesthood of liturgical presiders is derivative from the priesthood of all believers, and not the other way around.

The possibility of adaptation in liturgical language.

Liturgy as both the summit and the source of the church’s communal life.

Marini’s book was finished before last July, when Benedict XVI made it easier for local priests to celebrate the old Latin Mass. Marini tries really hard not to comment on the change. He tells Allen calmly “I might have different ideas.” But he says the pope needs to be taken seriously on two statements that accompanied his decree: that his motive was to re-establish unity with disaffected Catholic conservatives, and that greater availability of the Latin rite “in no way detracts from the validity of the liturgical reform.”

It is no secret that a major piece of Vatican II’s unfinished business is the reform of the Vatican curia, the complex bureaucracy of “congregations” instituted by the pope in 1588 to implement the Counter-Reformation policies of the Council of Trent.

Noting that the church got along for over 1,000 years without the Roman congregations, Marini says “eventually it will be necessary to return to the Consilium as an example of how to streamline the congregations, so that they are not just organisms bound by certain rigid norms, but more flexible bodies for resolving the problems of the world today.”

Marini says this necessitates that the bishops be more involved in decisions about the church. He says that was the intention of Paul VI in creating the Synod of Bishops and encouraging national bishops’ conferences. Unfortunately, he notes, these bodies have been reduced to appendages for creating documents and giving the pope advice.