Stealth Provision Denies Tax Rebates to Millions of Retirees

Millions of retirees will not get a tax rebate under the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008.

The Economic Stimulus Payment Calculator at irs.gov says they will. But fine print hidden in fact sheets and Frequently Asked Questions still being updated tells another story:

If your income is entirely from a state, federal or private pension or annuity, it doesn’t qualify for a rebate under the stimulus law.

Yes, it’s unfair, especially since such pensions and annuities are pretty much taxed in full (except for the small portion that comes from employee contributions that were taxed already).

And maybe the unfairness explains why the government has barely communicated this exclusion—and is not doing so consistently, even today.

But Congress worded the law so that the rebates go only to people who are working or receiving Social Security, Veterans or Railroad Retirement benefits. Those who receive other pensions and annuities get nothing.

I find this distressing on several levels: as a 27-year IRS employee, much of it in management; as a federal retiree whose present income consists entirely of annuities; and as an Enrolled Agent (now authorized to practice before IRS) who has found the Service’s communication of this exclusion woefully deficient.

How did this happen?

Blame goes first to Congress for passing a law that excluded so many retirees. Except for Social Security, Veterans and Railroad Retirement benefits, the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 defined “qualifying income” for the tax rebates as “earned income,” as described in Internal Revenue Code Section 32. Like most people—and apparently most members of Congress—I did not rush to the code to see what Section 32 says. In fact, it covers procedures for the Earned Income Credit.

Alas, Section 32(c)(2)(A) defines earned income as wages, salaries, tips, and other employee compensation or net earnings from self-employment. In case there was any doubt as to whether this includes retirement income, Section 32(c)(2)(B)ii adds: “no amount received as a pension or annuity shall be taken into account.”

As careless and mindless as Congress in enacting the wording of the act, President Bush signed it into law, leaving it to IRS to implement in the middle of the annual 1040 filing season.

To say that IRS never communicated the retiree exclusion at all would be inaccurate. But IRS should be faulted for not communicating it sooner, more effectively and above all more conspicuously.

It is true that an IRS fact sheet in February of 2008 included one sentence about the retiree exclusion. But I missed it, and I suspect most readers did, because it was tucked away after several other exclusions that had nothing to do with retirement:

“Dividends, interest and capital gains income is not included when determining qualifying income. Supplemental Security Income (SSI) does not count as qualifying income for the stimulus payment. Also not included in qualifying income are non-veterans or non-Social Security pension income (such as those from Individual Retirement Accounts).”

The section would have communicated the act’s true intent better if the paragraph had been entitled “Earned Income Test” and preceded by a sentence that said only earned income would qualify. But it didn’t.

On March 26th IRS experts conducted a national phone forum on the rebates for taxpayer representatives. It struck me that someone on the conference call alluded to retirement income being excluded, but it was an aside during discussion of another topic, and I thought it was referencing the separate treatment of Social Security and other government-benefit income. IRS missed another opportunity to emphasize a rebate exclusion impacting millions of taxpayers.

Only more recently has IRS begun to address the retiree exclusion directly—and even now irs.gov is not handling the topic consistently.

Originally, the FAQs at irs.gov did not mention pension and annuity income. Finally in April, the FAQs were updated to say that pensions and annuities from private employers were not qualifying income for a rebate.

It was not until yesterday that the Economic Stimulus FAQs were updated again to include state and federal retirees:

Q. Are pension and annuity amounts provided by state, federal or private sector employers considered qualifying income in determining eligibility for the economic stimulus payment?

No, these payments are not included in the legal definition of qualifying income. [Updated 5/7/08]

Yet even now, as observed at the outset, the Economic Stimulus Payment Calculator does not exclude such retirement income. A state, federal or private retiree who dutifully completes all of the boxes is told they are getting a rebate. Clearly the calculator needs to be updated with the same last-minute changes as the FAQs.

The way two branches of the federal government have handled the retiree exclusion is embarrassing. Of course, it is also inequitable.

There is no valid reason retirees who pay thousands of dollars annually on their retirement income should not receive the same rebate as wage-earners. It was a slap in their faces to deny them the rebate.

And on top of the financial unfairness, it was a special act of ingratitude to millions of state and federal retirees who served the public decade after decade with under-funded resources, technology and wages.

Congress should reverse this inequity promptly. If not, the excluded retirees should file a class-action lawsuit on the grounds that Congress is not giving all taxpayers equal protection of the law.

U.S. and European Fundamentalists Do Not Know the Bible as Well as "Critics"

The National Catholic Reporter says a sociological survey done in the United States and Europe shows that, surprisingly, those who hold that the Bible should be taken literally do not rank highest in reading the Bible accurately.

The poll was commissioned by the international Roman Catholic Synod of Bishops, who plan to address the theme "The Word of God" at a meeting in October. NCR writes:

"Sponsored by the Catholic Biblical Federation and carried out by GFK Eurisko, Italy’s leading market research organization, the survey polled people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Holland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Poland and Russia.

"Plans call for four other countries shortly to be added to the mix, all in the global South: Argentina, South Africa, the Philippines, and Australia."

Among the more striking findings, NCR cites:

• The United States has by far the highest level of its adult population that claims to have read at least one passage from the Bible in the last year (75%) and to have a Bible at home (93%), but it doesn’t score better than anyone else on tests of basic Biblical literacy. For example, large numbers of Americans, just like people in the other eight countries surveyed, mistakenly thought that Jesus had authored a book of the Bible, and couldn’t correctly distinguish between Paul and Moses in terms of which figure belongs to the Old Testament.

• Fundamentalists, or those who take a literal view of Scripture, do not know more about the Bible than anyone else. In fact, researchers said, it’s readers whose attitudes they described as “critical,” meaning that they see the Bible as the word of God but in need of interpretation, who are over-represented at the highest levels of Biblical literacy. In other words, fundamentalists actually score lower on basic Biblical awareness.

• In virtually every country surveyed, those who take a “critical” view of the Bible represent a larger share of the population than either “fundamentalists” or “reductionists,” meaning those who see the Bible simply as literature or a collection of myths and legends. In the United States, “fundamentalists” are 27 percent of the population, “critics” 51 percent, and “reductionists” 20 percent. Interestingly, both Poland and Russia have a similar share of “fundamentalists,” despite lacking the strong Evangelical Protestant tradition familiar in the U.S.

• There is no apparent correlation between reading the Bible and any particular political orientation. In other words, it’s not the case that the more someone reads the Bible, the more likely they are to be a political conservative or liberal.

• There no longer appear to be major differences in Biblical reading patterns and Biblical familiarity between countries with Catholic majorities and those with Protestant majorities, suggesting that, in the words of Bishop Vincenzo Paglia of Terni, Italy, the president of the Catholic Biblical Federation, the Bible has become “the ecumenical book of all believers.”

Time to Nationalize Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell and BP?

Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company, has announced another quarter of record profits—and another quarter of declining production, just like ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil, as well as British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell, the British-Dutch conglomerate.

In a column published before Chevron’s announcement today, Houston Chronicle business analyst Loren Steffy cautioned that the most serious problem facing national and world economies is not these record profits but that the decline in production by all of the investor-owned, non-nationalized oil companies is getting steadily worse.

Given the planet’s increasing demand for oil, the decline in the investor-owned companies’ contribution to the world’s supply is one of the chief factors raising the price of oil.

Which is one reason Steffy agrees with other analysts that the Clinton-McCain summer gas tax holiday is a very bad idea—because by lowering the price at the pump for the short term, it would only increase consumption and thus further exacerbate both the short supply of oil and its price.

Yet Steffy implies that a windfall profits tax would be a bad idea too, not only because it would not increase the investor-owned companies’ production, but also because it would deprive them of profits that should be diverted to exploration and production instead.

That concern would make sense if the investor-owned oil companies were in fact putting their profits to that use. But that isn’t their track record. All they have proved adept at doing is siphoning off the profits to enrich their investors and above all their corporate officers. That such action is suicidal to their longevity seems to have escaped them. Maybe some tough love would help.

Since windfall profits taxes have not convinced them before, how about something more drastic? Either the investor-owned oil companies document that, starting with the first quarter’s windfall, they are investing every dime of profit in exploration or production, or the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands will do it for them—by nationalizing any oil company that refuses to comply.

Absent such compliance, nationalization appears to be the only way to force the investors to stop enriching themselves at the expense of every oil consumer on the planet—which includes food producers and other businesses that have to increase their prices to cover spiraling oil-related costs.

If the three Western democracies were to take this draconian action, they might have to acknowledge that Hugo Chavez was right about something. If so, however, it will be because the investor-owned oil companies proved him right: they have shown over several years that the free market system is not an equitable way to deliver basic human necessities like energy. Rather, profit-making trumps delivery of resources necessary for life. People literally starve while the profiteers prosper.

Every person on earth has a right to those resources. A financial system which allows a few to subordinate that right to their greed is seriously in need of revision.

Several Economists and Pundits Slam "Clinton-McCain" Gas Tax Holiday

Reuters and CNN report that several respected economists find the proposal by John McCain and Hillary Clinton to suspend the gas tax for the summer a very bad idea--and that only Barack Obama grasps that the best way to reduce the price of oil is to use less of it.

The economists, from a spectrum of political backgrounds, include: Greg Mankiw, a former chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers; Eric Toder, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington; Gilbert Metclaf, a economics professor at Tufts University currently working with the National Bureau of Economic Research; and even New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, an economics professor at Princeton and a regular Clinton advisor, who has also questioned her hostility to NAFTA and CAFTA.

Summing up the economists' unanimous opinion on the gas tax holiday, Krugman wrote in his blog yesterday: “It’s Econ 101: the tax cut really goes to the oil companies.”

New York Times syndicated columnist Thomas Friedman, who has written repeatedly and extensively on the dire state of U.S. energy policy, also heaps sarcasm on the idea in a column today entitled "Dumb as We Wanna Be:

"It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

"When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit." He continues:

"The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: 'Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.'

"Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.

"But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage--gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars--and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage--new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite."

The opposite includes failure by the administration and Congress to provide incentives to viable alternatives like wind and solar power--while Shell and Exxon Mobile announce record profits. Friedman quotes another expert:

"It is also alarming, says Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, that the U.S. has reached a point 'where the priorities of Congress could become so distorted by politics' that it would turn its back on the next great global industry--clean power--'but that’s exactly what is happening.' If the wind and solar credits expire, said Resch, the impact in just 2009 would be more than 100,000 jobs either lost or not created in these industries, and $20 billion worth of investments that won’t be made.

"While all the presidential candidates were railing about lost manufacturing jobs in Ohio, no one noticed that America’s premier solar company, First Solar, from Toledo, Ohio, was opening its newest factory in the former East Germany--540 high-paying engineering jobs --because Germany has created a booming solar market and America has not.

"In 1997, said Resch, America was the leader in solar energy technology, with 40 percent of global solar production. 'Last year, we were less than 8 percent, and even most of that was manufacturing for overseas markets.'"

Friedman concludes: "The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious--the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout."

Wright's Jeremiads As American As the Earliest New England Pulpits

Barack Obama's public divorce from his former pastor notwithstanding, a columnist has developed a thought I posted here on March 28th. Rosemary Radford Ruether agrees that Jeremiah Wright's cursing of America has recent precedent from today's religious right. But, she adds, it's also a religious tradition of left and right that's as old as the earliest New England Puritans.

She quotes some of the conservative fundamentalists whose condemnations after 9/11 I alluded to, including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. She also recalls the judgment of Robertson and John Hagee after Hurricane Katrina that the catastrophe was God's judgment against sexual sinners in New Orleans. (Hagee, by the way, has endorsed John McCain for president. McCain says he disagrees with Hagee on Katrina, but he won't disown anyone who supports his candidacy! Sounds familiar.)

After noting that the prophet Jeremiah condemned Israel for sins both sexual and social, Ruether cites similar jeremiads by John Winthrop, the first governor of the Puritans' Massachusetts Bay colony, in a shipboard address while the settlers were still at sea; and by Nicolas Street, pastor of the New Haven Congregational Church during the American Revolution.

Another contribution Ruether makes to the discussion is to quote one of Wright's more infamous passages at greater length: "The government gives [black people] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America--that's in the Bible--for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

The full context reinforces why Wright says God condemns America: above all for our self-worship, our lording it over those less well-off and powerful than us, instead of being the servant people the Puritans hoped we would be.

This does not relieve Wright or Obama from specifying the limits within which Wright's assertions are true. But it does indicate that Wright made some effort to do so.

[Apologies, by the way, for misspelling Ruether's last name in my April 9th post.]

Left Ventricular Assist Devices (LVADs) Can Create End-of-Life Ethical Dilemmas

MSNBC is publicizing an important article in the Washington Post that describes why the latest and most effective heart pumps can cause serious end-of-life ethical dilemmas.

Left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) originated as a way to keep damaged hearts functioning while heart-transplant candidates waited for donated organs. But the devices did such a good job that permanent implants are becoming the therapy of choice for patients with chronic heart failure.

The procedure costs about $200,000 and Medicare will pay for it. U.S. centers are implanting about 1,000 per year now. But the experts expect that to rise to 10,000 per year within the next five years.

The ethical problems arise when the devices begin to lose their effectiveness, either with further deterioration of the heart itself or related conditions that leave the patient with little or no quality of life.

The article says that most physicians equate the devices with ventilators, feeding tubes and other forms of life support that patients have the right to stop if their condition deteriorates or becomes intolerable. But others say the devices become a functioning part of the patient's heart, so that to shut off the devices is to do harm and even actively kill the patient.

Given this ethical debate, experts are recommending a lot more counseling and analysis before an individual patient gets an LVAD, including weighing cautiously if a patient is too old or too sick to really benefit from the device. However, this would not be of much help to patients in emergency situations who are not in a position to give informed consent to the procedure.

The article also notes extreme situations where LVAD recipients have become so distressed with their doctors' failure to address end-of-life frustration and pain that the patients have powered off the devices themselves.

Hopefully a new ethical consensus will develop on what options should and should not be available in dealing with this new technology.

Pope Did Not Prevent Pro-Choice Politicians from Sharing in Communion

National Catholic Reporter columnist John Allen Jr. notes that during two of the eucharistic liturgies Pope Benedict XVI led last week in Washington D.C. and New York City there was no effort to prevent three prominent pro-choice politicians from sharing in the communion service. In an article posted April 20th, Allen reports that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator John Kerry went to communion at Nationals Stadium and Rudy Giuliani at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

This is significant for a couple reasons. First, as Allen reminds us, several of the most conservative U.S. bishops have threatened to deny communion to Catholic politicans who do not work to make the right-to-life position law. He writes:

"During the 2004 elections, several American bishops announced that they would deny communion to Kerry because of his stance in favor of abortion rights. A majority of bishops, however, shrunk from that stance, worrying that it could politicize the Eucharist.

"Eventually, a commission of the bishops’ conference led by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick reached the conclusion that a uniform policy on the question could not be reached, and that it would be up to each bishop to set policy in his own diocese.

"Since that time debate has continued, with both sides citing broad statements of principle from the Vatican in order to bolster their case."

Pelosi even made a point of announcing the day before the liturgy that she planned to share in communion. So it is significant that when the pope had very public opportunities to adopt the conservative bishops' policy at his own liturgies, he declined.

These developments are also significant for interpreting what the pope meant April 16th when he asked the U.S. bishops: "Is it consistent for practicing Catholics...to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?" While the pope obviously disagrees with pro-choice politicians, evidently he does not mean to push his position to the point of denying them communion.

That at least is much more in keeping with the dialogue approach that Vatican II favored. As I noted in my post yesterday, the pope would gain from using that model across the board, rather than berating Catholics who have not been convinced by some of Rome's official positions.

Pope Benedict’s 'Consistent' Catholicism Is Not Consistent with Vatican II's

I am grateful to Washington Post syndicated columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. for highlighting the following statement that Pope Benedict XVI made to the U.S. Catholic bishops at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on April 16th. I didn’t see it covered anywhere else. Benedict asked:

“Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?”

The answer Benedict wants is “no.”

That, certainly, was the answer required of each of the bishops before they were promoted to their current jobs—almost all of them by Pope John Paul II or by Benedict himself. Of course, the answer could vary in intensity: U.S. Catholicism has devoted considerably more energy and resources to upholding the right to life than to effectively helping the poor and marginalized.

The answer I want to defend is “yes.”

It is, to be sure, a qualified yes. But the fact that it can be yes at all is the fundamental difference between my theological attitude toward the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the attitude of the two popes.

And that difference is why the way in which Benedict thinks the church should provide hope and leadership to the world is ultimately not productive, but the Vatican II model is.

The popes’ diagnosis is that the world is confused and grappling for answers in all the wrong places. The popes’ vision is that only official leadership of the Catholic Church has the divinely revealed absolute truths that provide the answers the world needs.

The Vatican II diagnosis—expressed in several of its documents but most pointedly and repeatedly in Gaudium et spes, its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World—agrees that human beings are searching for answers. In contrast, however, the answers are implanted in all of creation, in every human heart, in every human interaction, in every religion the Creator has inspired and in every human experience, yesterday, today and tomorrow.

The church in this model is the pilgrim people of God. Its calling is not to tell the world what the answers are, but by constant dialogue with human beings in all their social, political and religious groupings, to discover with them and to learn with greater and greater precision the answers we already have or that novel human creativity needs to craft.

Using the Vatican II model, the answers to Benedict’s questions become much more nuanced and thus more realistic.

“Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized?”

As the liberation theologians taught all of us, including Benedict, there is no doubt that the Christian calling requires a preferential option for the poor. Faithful Catholics cannot defend a stance that does nothing for the poor and the marginalized, let alone ignore them. But as Benedict himself shows by disagreeing with some of the concrete actions proposed by liberation theology, there are many different ways for Christians to work to improve the lot of the poor. It is not possible for the church to adopt a single set of solutions and characterize everything else as exploiting them.

The diversity of options comes to light when the church in the United States tries to defend the rights of immigrants. The pope is correct to insist that any immigration reform should respect the fundamental human right of families to remain together. But that guideline does not yield a monolithic U.S. Catholic answer for practicing Catholics to follow. Practicing Catholics conscientiously disagree on how to control our borders, address those who have crossed illegally, decide if U.S. employers should have a legal source of non-citizen labor, or prevent the problems of the last two decades from happening all over again.

“Is it consistent for practicing Catholics…to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching?”

If the Catholic moral teaching on sexual behavior were only that emphasized by recent popes, it would be inconsistent for practicing Catholics not to follow it and not to at least encourage others to. The fact is, however, that based on their personal experiences, practicing Catholics are persuaded conscientiously that the Catholic position should permit more alternatives than the popes want to allow. They do not buy the papal position that the only legitimate sexual behavior is in a marriage between one man and one woman where each instance is open to the production of offspring.

It is no secret that over several decades practicing U.S. Catholics have disagreed with the popes in increasing numbers on issues such as birth control, divorce and remarriage, sex before marriage, homosexuals’ right to express their love sexually and aspire to lasting unions, the value of priestly celibacy, and the exclusion of women from the priesthood.

What is inconsistent is not the steady, growing resistance of practicing Catholics to the narrow view of human sexuality the popes want to retain, but the popes’ refusal to acknowledge that most U.S. Catholics (as well as those in Europe and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere) have not found the papal teaching persuasive. Consistency requires the popes to listen to the experience of the faithful, not to dismiss it in favor of abstract philosophical positions that had started to unravel even before Vatican II.

“Is it consistent for practicing Catholics…to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?”

Here again the consistency issue is the failure of the popes to sell their position to enough practicing Catholics. The failure has been most conspicuous on the papal opposition to stem cell research and a more recent effort to mandate extraordinary end-of-life measures which even the most traditional Catholic theology did not require. But even on abortion, where the papal position has probably gained the most assent among practicing U.S. Catholics, only a slim majority of them favor imposing the official Catholic position on non-Catholic Americans.

The popes face a number of challenges if they want practicing Catholics to do more on these issues than they already have. One is basing their answer on when life begins on an arcane philosophical model that admits of multiple answers. Another is assuming that in a pluralistic democracy the church can demand that politicians who are practicing Catholics have an obligation to impose one of those answers as public policy. Another is assuming that Catholic politicians who believe conscientiously that other public policies do more to advance the papal position than imposing it are somehow not in communion with the church.

In short, what is consistent for practicing Catholics is for them to keep telling church officials when they find official positions defective—so that the officials can carry out their own duty to re-examine the soundness of their positions or their effectiveness in trying to communicate them.

Berating practicing Catholics for being unconvinced is unlikely convince many more.

Pope's Handling of Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis Is Surprising, and Most Encouraging

Pope Benedict XVI has surprised just about everyone with how candidly, compassionately and effectively he has dealt with the clergy sex abuse crisis during his trip to the United States this week. Publicly and privately he took several actions that demonstrate beyond doubt that he has personally reviewed several of the victims' cases and was profoundly moved by how badly the Catholic Church treated them.

He made a point of talking about it as one of only four topics he addressed during his flight. He told the U.S. bishops they had handled the entire affair very badly and they needed to improve their administrative and pastoral response to it. He asked the 45,000 people who attended his liturgy in Washington Nationals stadium to take an active role in the pastoral response. Then, in the biggest surprise of all, he met privately with a few of the victims and Cardinal Sean O'Malley from the Boston archdiocese, where the nationwide scandal began. O'Malley said he gave the pope a notebook that listed all of the Boston victims by name--more than 1,000 in all--and asked the pope to remember them in his prayers.

For many it was a surprise that the pope mentioned the topic at all. Even better was the manner in which he discussed it, saying forthrightly how shameful it was and how committed he is to preventing such abuse from ever happening again. For the victims and the millions of U.S. Catholics who share their pain, it was probably the most encouraging week of his papacy.

As the victims' advocates have pointed out, what is needed for the encouragement to last is for the pope to commence the long-delayed final act in this sad drama: publicly holding accountable the bishops who enabled the sexual predators by transferring them from parish to parish so that they could find fresh victims to prey over. They should include Cardinal Bernard Law, archbishop of Boston during much of the time the predators reigned, who now languishes in a cushy job at the Vatican; and Cardinal Roger Mahoney, Archbishop of Los Angeles, who was not too busy building a multi-million dollar cathedral to spend years obstructing disclosure and prosecution of the predators he supervised.

The pope's surprising, encouraging actions merit sustained applause. He has given the victims the first real hope they have had in decades. If he wants to keep that hope alive, he needs to teach the bishops how grievously they erred and how important it is for them to face the consequences of their shameful behavior.

Poland Helps Jews Honor 65th Anniversary of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Against Nazis

The Associated Press and MSNBC report that in Warsaw today Polish officials hosted Israeli President Shimon Perez and Jews from several countries to honor the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazi troops, 65 years ago this week. The AP report says:

"The uprising was the first act of large-scale armed civilian resistance against the Germans in occupied Poland during World War II. On April 19, 1943, German troops started to liquidate the ghetto by sending tens of thousands of its residents to death camps. Several hundred young Jews took to arms in defense of the civilians. Outnumbered and outgunned, they held off German troops for three weeks with homemade explosives and a cache of smuggled weapons. The Nazis killed most of fighters and then burned down the ghetto street by street."

At the start of World War II the Jewish community in Warsaw alone numbered 400,000--the largest in Europe and behind New York the second largest in the world. This week's ceremonies began at the site where the Nazis sent more than 350,000 Jews by train to the Treblinka death camp, 60 miles to the Northeast.

The picture above shows Cantor Joseph Malovany from New York singing a prayer in front of the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes monument. Poland's chief orthodox rabbi, Michael Schudrich, read out the Kaddish, or Jewish prayer for the dead.

Survivor Hela Rufeisen, who took part in the fight as an 18-year-old and lived to tell about it, was one of the few ghetto-uprising survivors to attend.

The AP reported that "on Saturday, the last surviving leader of the ghetto's struggle, 89-year-old Marek Edelman, will lay flowers at the ghetto monument, and the Jewish community is planning a seder meal in memory of the ghetto victims."

Broadcasts Give More Really Convincing Reasons to Stop Adding Bodies to the Planet

ABC News, 20/20 and National Geographic have teamed up for broadcasts tonight and Sunday that paint a really ugly picture of how much the average American consumes and throws away from cradle to grave.

On ABC World News tonight, 20/20 later this evening, and the National Geographic Channel on Sunday, the broadcasters will show stark visual displays of the nearly 4,000 disposable diapers the typical U.S. child will go through; the 13,000 plus pints of milk and almost 90,000 slices of bread each of us consumes; the 22,500 gallons of water each of us drinks and the additional 28,000 gallons each of us showers away.

The reports estimates that if everyone on the planet lived like us, we'd need four or five more planets just to produce the resources and bury the waste. The point is to encourage modest cuts in U.S. consumption.

But doesn't all this argue--again--that it's time for us to stop adding bodies to the planet, until we can sustain the needs of the people we already have?

Like 5th Circuit, Louisiana Supreme Court Says Insurance Did Not Cover Levee Breaches

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that on April 8th the Louisiana Supreme Court, in a major post-Katrina decision, decided that insurance policies that did not cover flood damage also did not cover the levee breaches that flooded 80% of New Orleans. The decision overruled two lower courts and basically agreed with an earlier ruling by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The report emphasized that the Louisiana Supreme Court ruling was even more important than the 5th Circuit's, "because state law holds sway in insurance disputes."

The ruling again seems to point to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as the only entity that might be held responsible for the massive loss of property and life caused by the levee breaches. So far, however, the Corps has proved all too adept at preventing itself from getting sued. Excerpts from the article follow:

The court said the lower courts should have looked at the "plain, ordinary and generally prevailing definition" of the word "flood."

"Contrary to the court of appeal's reasoning, this definition (of 'flood') does not change or depend on whether the event is a natural disaster or a man-made one -- in either case, a large amount of water covers an area that is usually dry," the Supreme Court opinion said.

Justice Chet Traylor of Winnsboro, writing the majority decision, went a step further, saying the flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was not caused by man, only aided by human errors.

"The flood was caused by Hurricane Katrina, not by man," Traylor wrote. "The levees did not cause the flood, they, whether through faulty design, faulty construction, or some other reason, failed to prevent the flood."

Attorney John Houghtaling , who joined the lawsuit on behalf of the state of Louisiana, said, "This is the end of the road here. This is a very, very sad day for anyone who isn't an insurance executive."

Houghtaling said he was "shocked by the ruling" and thought the insurance industry had "pulled the wool over the eyes of another court." In addition to 1,500 homeowners Houghtaling represented against insurers, he was also retained by former Attorney General Charles Foti to argue that the state's Road Home program, which uses federal taxpayer dollars to cover gaps in insurance payments, should be reimbursed for at least $1 billion it paid for water damage homeowner policies should have covered.

Houghtaling's firm noted that in 2004, the industry asked the state insurance commissioner to approve new policy language making it clear that water from levee breaches wasn't covered in homeowner policies. Houghtaling said that proved the industry knew that previous policy language -- which remained in use by all but two firms at the time of Hurricane Katrina -- was ambiguous. The Supreme Court didn't address that argument in its ruling.

Shoah and Nakba Are Both Atrocities, and Neither Justifies Denying the Other

Widely respected Catholic theologian Rosemary Radford Ruther has an excellent piece in the April 4th National Catholic Reporter on the seemingly endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She says the major obstacle to resolving it is that both sides refuse to grant validity to the other's painful past.

Ruther, a regular contributor to NCR, is the Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA (from which I earned my Ph.D.). She acknowledges there are legitimate historical reasons for Israelis and Palestinians to despise each other, but that neither group bears sole responsibility for that history--and the Palestinian connection is especially remote.

Today's Palestinians have no direct responsibility for the Holocaust, known in Israel as the Shoah. As Iranian President Ahmadinejad is fond of pointing out, it was a crime perpetrated against Jews by the West, directly by Germany but with the complicity of every Western country that failed to stop it, including the United States. The closest the Palestinians get to responsibility is ancestors several centuries ago who drove the Jews from Palestine, forcing them into Europe and eventually the Western Hemisphere. Today's Palestinians are beneficiaries of that history. But it's a very unreasonable stretch to find them personally liable for it.

Yet, as Ruther emphasizes, the Shoah was used "as a claim to a unique entitlement of the Jewish people to a state built on Arab land." After the 1948-49 Israeli war of independence, the United Nations, largely to assuage the guilt of its Western founders, awarded Israel 54% of Palestine. It eventually grew to 73%. The Palestinian objection, also voiced by Ahmadinejad, is legitimate: "if you (the West) have committed this huge crime, why should the innocent nation of Palestine pay for it." Thus the Muslim hatred for the West is rooted in the fact that the Palestinians have had to pay much more dearly for the West's Holocaust than any people in the West.

Ruther says the Palestinians refer to the confiscation of their land as al Nakba (the catastrophe). The Nakba refers not only to the loss of territory, but to the 800,000 Palestinians who fled for their lives or were forcibly expelled from their towns and villages during the 1948-49 war, becoming refugees in Jordon, Lebanon and Egypt or internal refugees in Israel. Palestinians see the catastrophe as on-going and escalating today, with every new expropriation of their land and strategies like the wall built around Palestinian parts of the West Bank, designed as they see it to make their lives so intolerable they will have to leave.

Some of today's Israelis would argue that they are not directly responsible for the Nakba. And those who have opposed the progressive confiscation of Palestinian land would have a point. But as descendants or beneficiaries of the Zionists who basically conquered Palestine in 1949, the majority of today's Israelis have a much more proximate responsibility for the Nakba than today's Palestinians have for the Shoah. Those most directly responsible are those who support more appropriation of Palestinian land.

The Zionists, to be sure, operated from the conviction that another Holocaust could not be prevented unless the Jews reestablished Israel as their homeland in Palestine. But it was wrong of the Zionists and wrong of the United Nations to insist that the only way to achieve a Jewish state was to confiscate half or three-quarters of Palestine. That judgment does not deny the reality or the enormity of the Shoah. It does deny that the Shoah gave the Jews or the UN an entitlement to do what was done to the Palestinians.

Of course, the Palestinians and their sympathizers have made it a point to inflict some pain on the United States and Western Europe for their role in the Nakba. But a real resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not be possible until all of the parties stop denying the two atrocities done to Jews and Palestinians and the West's heavy responsibility for both of them. The way forward must compensate both Jews and Palestinians equitably and the compensation must come in some major way from the West.

Ruther sees the way forward foreshadowed by Khaled Muhameed, a Muslim Palestinian who has opened his own small Holocaust museum in Nazareth. It has pictures of Jews suffering in Europe during the Nazi era. It also has pictures of the Palestinian refugees from the 1948-49 war. Only when other Palestinians and Jews honestly acknowledge the suffering of both peoples can a real peace process begin.

Ruther's closing paragraph states the case exactly: "Clearly what is needed is a break-through to a compassionate sense of co-humanity in which Israelis and Palestinians can mourn each other's disasters and refuse to use one disaster to justify another."

Chertoff Breaks 34 Laws to Build Wall Against "Criminal Activity at the Border"

I applaud the Houston Chronicle's editorial Bulldozing the laws, which calls on Congress to act at once to reverse the "irresponsible grant of power" it gave Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff "to bypass all laws deemed obstacles to the expeditious construction of a security fence along the southern border with Mexico."

The editorial exposes the utter stupidity, arrogance and hypocrisy of those who see no higher priority than halting every "illegal" immigrant trying to gain access from our impoverished neighbor to the south--even if Chertoff has to violate 34 other federal laws to do so. Let's promote our blessed respect for the law by violating 34 of them! Let's trample decades of environmental protections, wildlife conservation projects, property rights statutes and court rulings to protect the sovereignty of the United States! Shouldn't that tell us how wrong-headed and dangerous the wall idea is?

I would add just one thought to the editorial: if Congress does not act quickly, impacted parties should seek an emergency restraining order against Chertoff in federal court, on the grounds that he is wildly exceeding the legislative intent of the waiver Congress allowed him for one specific space on the border. The editorial follows:

When Congress passed the Real ID Act three years ago, it included a little debated provision, section 102, giving the Homeland Security secretary extraordinary power to bypass all laws deemed obstacles to the expeditious construction of a security fence along the southern border with Mexico.

As is becoming increasingly obvious, it was an irresponsible grant of power by people elected to respect and defend the Constitution and our system of laws. They should have known better.

In his fourth exercise of the waiver provision, on April Fool's Day, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the broadest assertion of authority yet, declaring that 34 federal laws would be ignored in order to complete nearly 500 miles of fencing that will impact environmentally sensitive areas in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. The move will allow authorities to proceed with fence construction without issuing final environmental impact statements for which millions of taxpayer dollars have already been spent.

"Criminal activity at the border does not stop for endless debate or protracted litigation," stated Chertoff. "Congress and the American public have been adamant that they want and expect border security. We're serious about delivering it, and these waivers will enable important security projects to keep moving forward."

The waiver was initially promoted by congressional supporters as a limited exception designed to give federal officials flexibility in speeding the completion of a segment of fencing across environmentally sensitive wetlands near San Diego.

Unfortunately, as with so many other instances in which the Bush administration has asserted the right to ignore laws it found inconvenient, the waiver now is being used as an all-purpose bludgeon to flatten dozens of environmental and property rights statutes.

Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, chairman of a coalition of Texas border community officials, says the decision to override existing laws indicates that those incomplete environmental studies would have documented serious problems created by the fence construction, because "otherwise, the federal government wouldn't have to resort to such drastic measures." A spokesman for Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne confirmed that under existing legal requirements, the agency could not grant approvals to allow DHS to construct infrastructure on Interior Department border lands.

Earlier this month, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deputy director Kenneth Stansell warned in a letter to the executive director of the federal Customs and Border Protection agency that a new design for fence segments in Hidalgo County in South Texas would undermine a quarter-century of work in creating a 300-mile wildlife corridor. That land has helped conserve more than 20 endangered species that migrate between the U.S. and Mexico. According to Stansell, substituting an impermeable 16- to 18-foot wall built atop flood levees for a wildlife-friendly structure that allows small animals to pass through will impair the purpose of the wildlife corridor. Invoking the waiver stifles legal opposition to that reasonable alternative plan.

Already, managers of two South Texas nature refuges, the Sabal Palm Audubon Center and the Nature Conservancy Preserve, say the waivers will effectively close their facilities because their property would be isolated in a zone between Mexico and the fence.

The multibillion-dollar plan to erect a wall on the border was flawed from the beginning. Its folly now is being compounded by a calculated effort to undermine the precious system of laws that provide our real bulwark against tyranny. Congress should never have granted such power, and it must act promptly to minimize the damage by repealing the Real ID Act waiver.

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.