Bilgrimage

Mr. Dolan and His "Pro-Life" "Moral" Crusade: Shell Games, Moral Leadership, and $55.6 Million

2012-01-31T11:24:00.001-06:00

As the U.S. Catholic bishops continue their "moral" crusade to protect "pro-life" values against ObamaCare, it might not be a bad idea for those trying to keep the conversation honest to hold the following observation I wrote earlier today in the forefront of their minds:

Official Catholic teaching notwithstanding, Mr. Dolan is far more closely connected to Wall Street and its (male, affluent, socially elite, Republican, and white) leaders than he is to the significant body of Catholic teaching which suggests that structures like Wall Street might be at the very center of the problems that are tagged as the "culture of death."

And this is clearly why he saw no problem in choosing the Wall Street Journal to mount a political attack against ObamaCare that purports to be all about attacking the "culture of death" and promoting "pro-life" values.

Mr. Dolan is leading the "moral" crusade against ObamaCare as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. And so as we assess his fitness to lead such a "moral" crusade, while we're paying attention to his exceptionally cozy ties to bankers and other members of the Wall Street elite who are not in any way imaginable "pro-life" in the Catholic sense, it might also help to take a look at what Jason Berry is now reporting about Mr. Dolan in National Catholic Reporter.

Berry reports that before he left Milwaukee, where he was archbishop before he jumped up to New York (where he's now cardinal-in-the-making), Mr. Dolan did the following: he "renamed" $55.6 million in diocesan assets to remove them from the books in a shell game designed to pave the way for the diocese's decision to declare Chapter 11.

Just as it appeared that archdiocesan officials were nearing a point where they'd have to reveal in legal depositions what they knew about cases of abuse of minors by diocesan clergy . . . . The transfer of the $55.6 million designated for the care of Catholic cemeteries from the balance sheet of the diocesan ledger allowed the archdiocese to take bankruptcy, impeding the attempts of victims of childhood clerical abuse to seek legal redress against the archdiocese.

Keeping the public moral conversation in American Catholicism honest: this shifty wheeling and dealing with money in order to shield diocesan officials from deposing about what they knew vis-a-vis abuse of minors is not the action of any admirable moral leader about which I've ever heard. How about you? Do you know of admirable moral leaders capable of wheeling and dealing in this breathtaking way with $55.6 million of church money, pitting dead Catholics against living Catholics who have endured sexual abuse by priests when they were children?

What Mr. Dolan did in Milwaukee may certainly be the action of someone close to Wall Street officials and Wall Street lawyers who wouldn't turn a hair as they employed this shady, dishonest fiscal maneuver.

If we're going to keep the Catholic conversation about the bishops-vs.-ObamaCare honest right now, however, how can we possibly avoid looking at the real lives and real actions of the real bishops who are leading the moral crusade vs. ObamaCare? I don't see how we can do that and call ourselves honest.

Though I imagine many Catholic intellectuals and media arbiters who have gladly lined up behind Mr. Dolan in his current "pro-life" "moral" crusade against the Obama administration will be perfectly capable of ruling these real-life questions out of the conversation. Since real-life questions just don't seem to count for the intellectual elite running the media show for the bishops in the American public square . . . .

Kevin Clarke Comments at America on H.H.S. Guidelines and Politics

2012-01-31T10:47:00.002-06:00

It goes without saying that as an editor of America, Kevin Clarke argues that the Obama administration made a wrong decision about the HHS guidelines. Even so, he frames his commentary about the HHS debate with the following telling observations:

The U.S. bishops this week continued a scorching rhetorical response to the recent H.H.S. decision to maintain a narrow religious exemption for contraception requirements in new health insurance plans, but some reporters have noted a small problem with all the outrage. Primarily its absence in previous years as Catholic employers grappled with state requirements regarding contraception and health insurance. At least 28 states require that contraception be included in health plans; of these 19 states offer some form of a religious exemption and/or secular pass on contraception. What many people are wondering now is exactly what have Catholic institutional employers been doing in states without exemptions. Are some perhaps not even aware of what is in the fine print of their health plans? (I would not be in the least surprised.) Have some come up with strategies that could prove workable at the national level or have they simply acquiesced to state regs as the lesser of two evils?

This issue appears to have flown under the radar for a long time, leading some to suspect that the outrage worked up by the bishops this week derives more from a general antipathy to Obama than fury at H.H.S. It could be that many bishops simply weren’t aware of the laws regarding contraception and health insurance in their states until the federal involvement brought the issue to their attention.

I commend Kevin Clarke for his honesty here. I also maintain that it would be equally honest--and would serve the purpose of keeping the Catholic conversation about these issues as honest as possible--for Catholic media spokespersons commenting on this controversy to begin talking honestly about the 90%+ of fellow Catholics who have long since rejected magisterial teaching about contraception.

And why they're making this choice. And what the choice portends for the bishops' manufactured moral-political controversy.

The conversation in Catholic circles needs to be far more honest than it is right now about these matters. It needs to aim at honesty if only because we're not even beginning to talk about the real issues if we keep floating above the reality of faithful Catholics' rejection of magisterial teaching about contraception and other sexual ethical issues and if we pretend that that rejection is just not there.

And it needs to aim at honesty because sound and compelling moral positions are never promoted by dishonesty.

Mr. Dolan and ObamaCare: An Historian of the Future Looks Back (2)

2012-01-31T10:30:00.000-06:00

You're now at stage two of your research as an historian trying to unravel the conflicting arguments of the bishops-vs.-ObamaCare debate in the early 21st century: now that you've found out how downright confusing (and misleading: you're still baffled by Mr. Dolan's patently false assertion that the Obama administration's approval of guidelines for contraceptive coverage requires Catholic taxpayers to support abortion!) these arguments are, you've decided to turn for clarification and light to the intellectual and media arbiters of the American Catholic church of Dolan's day.

You do so reasoning that if anyone can sort out conflicting arguments, figure out what's fallacious in them, point to underlying connections that expose the falsehoods of officialspeak, and help keep a religious body on a credible moral course, it's the intellectual leaders of that religious body. Since they're trained to deal in truth and uncover falsehood--certainly not to be media mouthpieces for officials who use deceptive officialspeak to play fast and free with the truth.

At this stage of your research, you decide to do what you did at your initial stage, when you began by reading comments about the Wall Street Journal essay Mr. Dolan wrote to defend the values of life against ObamaCare in January 2012. You turn to one of the leading American Catholic intellectual forums of the period--perhaps the leading forum, a journal called Commonweal. And as you scan through one of its many discussions of the HHS guidelines and the Obama administration, you're struck by the following statement:

[T]here’s good reason to argue that that [i.e., religious freedom] is the real issue, not bishops, not contraception.

You're struck by this statement for a variety of reasons. First, it's being written by the former editor of the journal Commonweal, who, along with her husband, wields enormous influence in American Catholic intellectual and media circles. And who, because of her prominent position and that of her husband, is closely connected to more than one of the bishops about whom she's writing in the previous comment.

You're also struck by the willingness of one of the leading Catholic intellectual spokespersons of the day to swallow--seemingly uncritically--what is essentially the bishops' own argument of the period: namely, that they are defending "religious freedom" against the intrusion of secular bodies antithetical to religious freedom in matters such as ObamaCare. You seem to recall that the bishops made this claim such a media priority as the 21st century began that they even set up a special office to "protect" religious freedom, as they claimed that religious freedom was under attack.

But you're struck by the statement for another reason: your research has led you quickly to see that contraception is, in fact, most certainly the "real issue" (or, at the very least, one of the most significant "real issues") in the bishops-vs.-ObamaCare debate, and you find it baffling that leading Catholic intellectuals would seek to gloss over that "real issue" as they help the bishops spread their propaganda.

But also that they should simply refuse to discuss the issue altogether. To be specific: you find it baffling that anyone interested in keeping this conversation oriented to "real issues" and the truth would seek to declare off-limits the finding that 90%+ of American Catholics practiced contraception in the period you're researching. Or, when they do advert to this finding, that they dismissively ignore it as a "majoritarian" finding--as though they, an intellectual elite defending a magisterial teaching that has not been received by almost all of their brother and sister Catholics, have a uniquely correct optic on this issue.

But they aren't obliged to discuss how they've arrived at this optic when the vast majority of their brother and sister Catholics have reached different conclusions. The rightness of these intellectuals' position is self-evident: it goes without saying because they are an intellectual elite. And discussing what the other 90%+ of Catholics who are not in their elite circles do is vulgar and unintellectual, beneath the notice of real intellectuals.

You're struck, too, by the implication running through this commentary of significant Catholic intellectual and media spokespersons closely tied to the bishops that the phrase "religious freedom" is a magic shibboleth that should in and of itself shut down all argumentation. Just making the statement, "This is about religious freedom," seems to be an argument deemed sufficient to stop debate. Since what religious freedom is and is about, you conclude these Catholic intellectuals are asking others to believe, is beyond question. It's a value whose worth is self-evident, and those who week to weigh this value against other conflicting values deriving from the common good in the bishops-vs.-ObamaCare debate are off-track in their analysis.

But as an historian, you know this can't possibly be the case, since there have been, by the early 21st century, significant precedents in which even the Supreme Court chose to override the religious freedom of institutions owned by religious bodies to serve values considered essential to the common good. One of these, you recall, was the case of Bob Jones University v. United States (1983), in which the university claimed that its religious beliefs should permit it to forbid interracial dating and marriage among its students.

But, even though it was easy for the university to demonstrate that it was correct in maintaining that the religious beliefs of its founding religious body did, in fact, condemn interracial dating and marriage on faith-based grounds, the Supreme Court held that the school's attempt to promote that faith-based position within its own policies was "contrary to public policy" and "violate[d] deeply and widely held views of elementary justice" among citizens who did not share the peculiar faith-based views of the university. And so the court upheld the removal of the school's tax-exempt status by the IRS as long as the school insisted on its right, per "religious freedom," to enshrine prejudice in its code of student and employee conduct.

As an historian, you also seem to recall that this Supreme Court decision came down during the administration of Ronald Reagan. A Republican.

And you wonder (again, your historian's penchant for looking at "real issues" through the real-life optic of the past is in evidence here) why leading Catholic intellectuals of the 21st century who helped the bishops spread their rhetoric treating "religious freedom" as a not-to-be-questioned rhetorical shibboleth seem to have no knowledge of precedents like this, which call into question their simplistic and not exceptionally honest approach to religious freedom.

You're troubled by the implication of these leading Catholic intellectuals that, if Catholics do it, it must be right. Catholics, they seem to imagine, can't possibly be like those faith-based groups of the American South that once stoutly resisted the intrusion of federal executive, legislative, and judicial bodies on their religious freedom as they chose to defend segregation. As an historian, you remember that another historian from the 21st century, Amanda Porterfield, wrote about that moment in American history in her book The Protestant Experience in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006), noting that as President Truman sought to integrate the armed services, "[p]roponents of racial segregation were fierce believers in God and religious freedom who believed that the Bible sanctioned racial segregation and that morality and social order depended on it" ("Introduction," p. xxxvii).

You wonder why Catholic intellectuals who appear to assume that if Catholics do it in the name of religious freedom it's okay and unquestionable don't want to discuss these historical precedents that, at the very least, complicate their appeal to religious freedom as a shibboleth. They're as unwilling to look at or talk about these historical precedents in which religious groups sought to use religious freedom to enshrine discrimination in their institutions as they are unwilling to look at or talk about the "real issue" of contraception in the real lives of 90%+ of their real Catholic brothers and sisters.

And you're struck by another point, as you read around in the literature generated by leading American Catholic intellectual forums of the period under consideration--by journals like Commonweal. It begins to strike you that, anytime one of these religious freedom-vs.-human rights issues comes along in cultural debates, it's always about religious freedom as the "real issue." Or so they claim, as they try to shut down the discussion of everything except the abstract phrase "religious freedom."

For these intellectual arbiters of what Catholicism means in the public square, it's never about, say, the human rights of gay and lesbian persons. Or of women in debates about contraception. It's always about the "real issue" of religious freedom. It's never about real human beings whose real human lives are made difficult or tortured in some way by those who insist on their right to practice discrimination on grounds of religious freedom.

All of this strikes you as baffling for a variety of reasons. In the first place, you can't escape the strong feeling that American Catholic intellectual leaders and media spokespersons of the early 20th century were somehow spectacularly evading their responsibility as intellectual leaders in these debates, when they lined up behind the bishops' misleading rhetoric and tried to shut down honest discussions of the "real issues" and the real lives affected by the real issues they declared off-limits in their debates about religious freedom. Leading Catholic intellectuals in the U.S. were abandoning their calling within the Catholic community, it seems to you, to act as checks against misleading rhetorical claims of the pastoral leaders of their community that damaged Catholic moral credibility in the public square (e.g., "Catholics will be paying for abortion now, under the ObamaCare HHS guidelines"). And leading Catholic intellectuals were actively assisting the bishops in promoting--in the name of "pro-life" teachings--political candidates and political leaders who could not have been further from the pro-life positions set forth in Catholic teaching.

And in the second place, there's that word "honest": something strikes you, as you look back from the perspective of history at how the intellectual leaders of American Catholicism handled these issues, as eminently lacking in elementary honesty. Something strikes you as eminently dishonest about the claims of the intellectual arbiters of American Catholicism that contraception was not a "real issue" in debates about religious freedom and contraception, when 90%+ of Catholics were practicing contraception.

Or that gay and lesbian lives were not "real issues" (or even real lives) when the bishops chose to claim rights, on the grounds of religious freedom, to ride roughshod over those human lives, while their "liberal" intellectual defenders stood by in silence or--equally opprobrious--even helped the bishops craft intellectual justifications for their abuse of these fellow human beings.

As an historian, you wonder how it was possible for the intellectual arbiters of American Catholicism who were its primary media spokespersons ever to imagine that by promoting dishonesty, they were assisting and defending the Catholic church and serving its core values. You clearly need to do further study to understand that conundrum.

Mr. Dolan and ObamaCare: An Historian of the Future Looks Back

2012-01-31T09:12:00.000-06:00

Suppose that, 100 years from now and removed from the artificially engineered hype of the U.S. Catholic bishops and their morally obtuse media mouthpieces of the early 21st century, you're an historian wanting to figure out what was really going on with the manufactured political controversy over the Obama administration's HHS guidelines. To start your research, you take a look at the online Wall Street Journal article in which the leader of the U.S. Catholic bishops, Mr. Dolan, has written that the Obama administration (you notice that the article's title uses the politically loaded term "ObamaCare") is trampling on Catholic religious freedom by mandating contraceptive coverage in health care plans, and

[t]here is no free lunch, and you can be sure there's no free abortion, sterilization or contraception. There will be a source of funding: you.

You focus specifically on the comments section following Mr. Dolan's political essay. As an historian, you want to figure out who allied himself with Mr. Dolan and the bishops in the "moral" crusade against contraceptive coverage in the early 21st century. And why he allied himself with Mr. Dolan in this crusade, why he regarded Mr. Dolan as a pre-eminent moral leader of the early 21st century and a defender of the values of "life" . . . .

And so, as you begin scrolling through the comments bubbling over with moral outrage that ObamaCare is taking away the religious freedom of Americans and attacking the moral values of Catholics, you immediately notice something rather interesting: from the very first set of comments forward, almost 100% of those logging in to vent this moral outrage and support Mr. Dolan are men.

As a trained historian, you have no choice except to notice this and to think about its significance, since your training has taught you that ideas and moral positions always presuppose a socioeconomic location in which gender counts along with other socioeconomic indicators. If you want to understand ideas and moral positions, you need to look at who promoted particular ideas at any given time and why they did so.

Your discovery about the gender of the defenders of life in Mr. Dolan's crusade against ObamaCare spurs you to do more digging to uncover their socioeconomic location: precisely who were these men so energized by the bishops' moral crusade against contraceptive coverage, you wonder? Who were these men who assumed that their moral outlook and their moral interests represented morality in general for their society, and for the Catholic church of the early 21st century? What was their predominant racial make-up, for instance? Where did they fit on the economic scale in the society in which they lived? Were they economically secure or economically marginal? How did they fit into the power networks of their society: were they connected or disconnected? Were they Democrats or Republicans?

And then it hits you: that title, Wall Street Journal. I seem to recall something important about Wall Street in the early years of the 21st century, you tell yourself: wasn't there significant turmoil surrounding Wall Street at the same time Mr. Dolan wrote this "pro-life" essay in the Wall Street Journal? The severe economic upheaval that made life extremely difficult for many American citizens, and that emanated from the U.S. throughout the globe: wasn't much of that economic suffering actually emanating from Wall Street itself? And so why is the leader of the U.S. Catholic bishops, Mr. Dolan, who claims his essay about ObamaCare is all about defending "pro-life" values, choosing the Wall Street Journal, of all publications, in which to mount his attack on ObamaCare?

Did Mr. Dolan choose the Wall Street Journal as a platform to stage nationwide political opposition of Catholics to ObamaCare because the Wall Street Journal had the reputation of being a "pro-life" publication in the early 21st century? So perhaps Wall Street itself really was all about serving and protecting the values of life, you tell yourself, and your memory of what was going on in the early 21st century is somehow radically askew. You need to do more digging, that's clear.

You need to dig more and understand better, because surely the leader of a group that wanted to function as credible moral arbiters for a whole religious body and the society in which they lived wouldn't have been brazen and foolish enough to mount a bona fide "pro-life" political crusade against ObamaCare in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, if Wall Street was a serious part of the problem when it came to the "culture of death" the bishops were attacking. Mr. Dolan couldn't possibly have imagined that people would hop onto his crusading bandwagon that claimed to be all about attacking the "culture of death" as he chose the Wall Street Journal for his venue in launching the crusade, if there were serious moral questions circulating around at the time about whether Wall Street stood for the culture of life or the culture of death.

As a good historian (and one intrigued by this Chinese puzzle of historical argumentation in which what's on the surface seems very different from what's underneath), you keep digging, you continue reading. And you come to a surprising and rather confusing conclusion: Wall Street, it turns out, was, indeed, considered by many citizens of the planet at the time Mr. Dolan used the Wall Street Journal to mount his "moral" crusade against ObamaCare to be a serious part of the problem vis-a-vis a pro-life ethic. Wall Street's economic policies and practices were thought to be rapacious, cruel, all about advancing the interests of a super-rich elite called the 1%, and not in the least about protecting the 99% who were struggling merely to get by in the first part of the 21st century.

And there's more, much more to create confusion for you as an historian: the Wall Street Journal in which Mr. Dolan mounted his "pro-life" attack on ObamaCare had even published, a few months before Mr. Dolan came out all guns blazing for life and against the ObamaCare "culture of death," an essay mocking the "liberal elite" for its opposition to the death penalty! The essay applauds crowds who cheered when the governor of Texas, Mr. Perry, a leader of the "pro-life" Republican party promoted by Mr. Dolan and his fellow bishops, answered a debate question about the 234 people he had sent to the death chambers of his state. The essay concludes that the crowds doing the cheering were motivated by a laudable "patriotic pride."

Something seems just not to hang together with this whole story about the U.S. Catholic bishops as the defenders of life against a culture of death, you tell yourself as you keep reading. Instead of attacking Wall Street and pointing out that its economic policies were morally unjustifiable because they were contributing to a culture of death, the bishops chose to use a journal that actually touts itself as Wall Street's journal to attack, instead, guidelines suggesting that contraceptives be made widely available in health insurance plans. And there's more that seems not to hang together: when they took this rather perplexing moral step, they also claimed that they were defending the moral views and religious freedom of Catholics.

But all the studies you can find anywhere to demonstrate what Catholics thought and did vis-a-vis contraception at this point in history tell you that well over 90% of Catholics in the U.S. practiced contraception. And approved of contraceptive use. And regarded stewardship of their reproductive lives as a morally praiseworthy goal--something that served the values of life rather than contributed to the culture of death.

And then it hits you: didn't the leaders of the Catholic church have quite a bit to say about other "pro-life" issues beyond the narrow issue of contraception in the early 21st century? Didn't they condemn the death penalty? Didn't they link the culture of death to rapacious economic practices that treated workers as things and not persons? Didn't they call for moral reform of unbridled capitalism? Didn't they write major church documents calling for Catholics to assess the viability and morality of economic structures by adopting the perspective of those on the margins--and not the perspective of Wall Street and the men inclined to read the journal of Wall Street?

The men bit: you can't lose sight of that initial discovery that led you on this tortuous research path where wrong seems masquerade as right. It was primarily men who were identifying themselves, along with Mr. Dolan and his brother bishops, as the defenders of life in the crusade against ObamaCare. Men who were also economically affluent and socially elite. Which is also to say, white men, for the most part. And it goes without saying, Republican men.

And so you begin leafing through issues of the Wall Street Journal prior to the one in which the Wall Street Journal came out as unambiguously "pro-life" and a defender of Catholic pro-life values with Mr. Dolan's attack on ObamaCare and contraception, and you find the following: there's nothing at all in the Wall Street Journal for years prior to this sudden "pro-life" declaration which indicates that the Wall Street Journal endorses Catholic pro-life values. Not in any shape, form, or fashion. There's complete silence about all those aspects of Catholic social teaching you remember in which socioeconomic analysis goes hand in hand with analysis of cultures of life and death.

And there's more: when the Wall Street Journal does deign to mention those teachings, it does so always scornfully, always dismissively--never in support of those teachings. And so you come to the following conclusion: when the Wall Street Journal uses the terms "Catholic teaching" and "pro-life," it's referring only to contraception and abortion.

As is Mr. Dolan, who chose the Wall Street Journal in which to mount his "pro-life" attack on ObamaCare. Official Catholic teaching notwithstanding, Mr. Dolan is far more closely connected to Wall Street and its (male, affluent, socially elite, Republican, and white) leaders than he is to the significant body of Catholic teaching which suggests that structures like Wall Street might be at the very center of the problems that are tagged as the "culture of death."

And this is clearly why he saw no problem in choosing the Wall Street Journal to mount a political attack against ObamaCare that purports to be all about attacking the "culture of death" and promoting "pro-life" values. But to come to this conclusion is hardly to solve the problem of severe cognitive dissonance into which you've unexpectedly walked through your historical research, since this conclusion only intensifies your problem:

Which is to explain how on earth the U.S. Catholic bishops ever imagined that people would take them seriously, when they claimed they were promoting "pro-life" values in this particular political crusade? To figure that out, you conclude, you're going to have to do some research now to see what leading Catholic intellectuals and media spokespersons at this period were saying about the bishops' moral and pastoral leadership in this and other political crusades they led as the new millennium got underway.

Since people with trained minds and a dedication to pursuing the truth, people educated to spot sham, hype, and immoral insincerity from a mile away: these folks, surely, had some scathing things to say about how the bishops' sham, hype, and immoral insincerity in their moral crusade against ObamaCare betrayed authentic Catholic pro-life values.

Didn't they?

"Catholics" in Anti-Contraceptive Crusader Mode: An Addendum

2012-01-30T13:27:00.002-06:00

A quick footnote to flesh out something I said in my first posting today: I stated that the U.S. Catholic bishops' current righteous crusade against the Obama administration vis-a-vis contraceptive coverage asks us--unbelievable!--to imagine that the U.S. Catholic bishops and their right-wing religious and political allies are trustworthy moral guides at this moment of history.

And I'd like now to cite two points of evidence that should, I would argue, give pause to think for anyone inclined to give the bishops the benefit of the doubts as they beat their warm drums to place a Republican in the White House:

1. In the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, a trial date has just been set for Bishop Robert Finn, who is under criminal indictment for failure to report suspected child abuse to criminal authorities in the case of Father Shawn Ratigan.

2. And in the archdiocese of Philadelphia, where the former secretary for clergy, Monsignor William J. Lynn, is also under criminal indictment on similar charges, and where the district attorney has just contended that the diocese kept a priest in ministry four decades after it knew of his sadomachostic activity with youngsters, the archdiocese has just been labeled an "unindicted co-conspirator" in Lynn's trial.

As the bishops go on the political warpath right now, and as Catholics of the right and center line up behind them, it might be important to keep those two pieces of information in mind--if one really does care about the moral standing and moral credibility of Catholic teaching in the public square.

It might also be wise to keep in mind what the bishops and their cronies imagine they're gaining by diverting our attention to the "moral" crusade against contraception: they're diverting our attention from what really should engage our moral attention, if we care about the moral credibility of the Catholic church.

And this is their spectacular, and ongoing, failure to be bona fide pastoral leaders.

Sally Denton on Romney as Mormon Candidate: The Presidency as Theological Office

2012-01-30T11:06:00.000-06:00

Sally Denton is not much liked among Mormons--perhaps because, though she has long Mormon roots, she has written books, including her work on the Mountain Meadows massacre, that scrutinize key points of LDS history from a strongly critical viewpoint. For my part, I've always found her work illuminating, since I tend to think that it's those shoved to the margins of a righteous tribe who often have the most accurate fix on the shortcomings of that tribe. And on its history.

And so I suspect what Denton is writing now about the need to look carefully at the theological roots of Mitt Romney's bid for the presidency will be hotly contested by many Mormons, and by members of the Republican elite who want to declare religion off-limits as Romney is vetted as a presidential candidate. But I think we'd be foolish to ignore Denton's insider warning about what may well hang on Romney's presidential campaign, theologically speaking--and for the future of our political life, if he succeeds in becoming president.

For what it's worth, here's what Denton herself thinks, as a marginalized member of the LDS tribe, what hangs theologically (and politically) on Mitt's Mormon bid for the presidency:

Called a "militant millennial movement" by renowned Mormon historian David L. Bigler, Mormonism’s founding theology was based upon a literal takeover of the U.S. government. In light of the theology and divine prophecies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, unamended by the LDS hierarchy, it would seem that the office of the American presidency is the ultimate ecclesiastical position to which a Mormon leader might aspire. So it is not the LDS cosmology that is relevant to Romney’s candidacy, but whether devout 21stcentury Mormons like Romney believe that the American presidency is also a theological position.

Since his first campaign in 2008, Romney has attempted to keep debate about his religion out of the political discourse. The issue is not whether there is a religious test for political office; the Constitution prohibits it. Instead, the question is whether, past all of the flip-flops on virtually every policy, he has an underlying religious conception of the presidency and the American government. At the recent GOP presidential debate in Florida, Romney professed that the Declaration of Independence is a theological document, not specific to the rebellious 13 colonies, but establishing a covenant "between God and man." Which would suggest that Mitt Romney views the American presidency as a theological office.

As I say, I think it's worth taking into consideration what Sally Denton has to say. Because she knows whereof she speaks.

Katrina vanden Heuvel on the Occupy Effect: Resetting the Media Narrative

2012-01-30T10:51:00.000-06:00

Katrina vanden Heuvel writing in The Nation about how the Occupy movement has, indeed, had a significant effect on American political discourse:

A few short months ago, the corporate media and inside-the-Beltway chatter was all debt and deficits, all the time.

Occupy changed that. It reset the media narrative so it’s more aligned with the true crises of our times—income inequality, downward mobility and economic fairness. It’s also renewed attention to corporate accountability and the corrosive role of corporate money in politics.

Interesting, isn't it? The Occupy movement has "reset the media narrative" so that we're now talking about "the true crises of our time," which include income inequality and economic fairness.

But the moral leaders of American Catholicism--the U.S. Catholic bishops--want us to talk instead about contraception. As if we're still living in the 1960s.

And about same-sex love and loving same-sex couples as if human beings seeking to fulfill their God-given natures and form lasting and loving relationships represent the most significant moral threat possible--a more significant threat by far than rapacious greed, militarism, economic inequality, the exploitation of workers and the planet, etc.

None so blind as those who see. Again, I'm taking my chances with the blind as the USCCB tries to shift the American Catholic church into righteous crusader mode these days, to score points for the "pro-life" Republican party.

"Catholics" Shift into Righteous Crusader Mode re: HHS Contraception Guidelines: None So Blind as Those Who See

2012-01-30T10:39:00.000-06:00

Saturday, I wrote,

I have news for American Catholic intellectuals of the center: every tribe can be spectacularly wrong. And the more certain a tribe is that it and its leaders have the moral edge on every other tribe in the world, the more likely it is to be spectacularly wrong. The more certain and set apart a tribe is, the more likely it is to be ignoring valuable information necessary to making well-rounded intellectual and moral judgments.

And today, I'm interested to read (via a link at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish) Ben Shattuck's take-home conclusions about recent research into the reasons the righteous, religious, law-abiding Puritan colony of Massachusetts executed witches in the foundational period of what became the United States:

The take-home from the trials shouldn’t be that poisonous plants can make you hallucinate, but that a perfectly capable, religious, and law-abiding community that laid the roots for American justice legally and conscientiously executed 20 of its own innocent citizens; that over 150 people in Salem that year who were charged as having consorted with the Devil. In Witten’s theory, the girls went crazy. In Norton’s, the town went crazy.

Every tribe can be spectacularly wrong. And the more certain a tribe is that it and its leaders have the moral edge on every other tribe in the world, the more likely it is to be spectacularly wrong.

And, A perfectly capable, religious, and law-abiding community that laid the roots for American justice legally and conscientiously executed 20 of its own innocent citizens.

These are historical points to be taken into serious consideration as the U.S. Catholic bishops work up an unholy partisan political dither these days to try to place their anointed party in the White House in 2012. And as centrist Catholic intellectual leaders jump onto the unholy bandwagon and exult that "Catholics" are finally united behind righteous leaders in a righteous crusade.

 A crusade that ruthlessly and deliberately identifies the overwhelming percentage of Catholics approving the use of contraceptives as the unrighteous and impure.

 A crusade that asks us to believe the U.S. Catholic bishops, with their abysmal record as pastoral leaders, have suddenly become moral exemplars.

 A crusade that asks us to believe that the Republican party as represented by people like Mr. Gingrich or Mr. Romney is uniquely pro-life, interested in promoting the values of life, and concerned to address the root causes of abortion.

 A crusade that asks us to believe and disseminate a bald lie--that contraceptives are abortifacients, and we're now being asked by the Obama administration to support abortions with taxpayer dollars.

 A crusade that asks us to ignore well-documented and longstanding research that making contraception widely available prevents abortion.

 A crusade that asks us to believe that the righteous Catholic crusaders who are perfectly willing to define the majority of their own brother and sister Catholics out of the Catholic church somehow represent the Catholic ideal (and pro-life values) in some exemplary way.

None so blind as those who see--particularly when those who see are in righteous crusader mode.

I think I'll take my chances with the blind about this issue. Particularly if the new standard-bearers of morality in the American political sphere are the U.S. Catholic bishops, Mr. Gingrich, the eminently anti-life Catholic right who promote leaders and policies entirely antithetical to a pro-life ethic, and the morally blind centrists who have never recognized the danger these righteous, politicized Catholics of the right pose to Catholic values as we seek to transmit those values to the public sphere.

P.S. There's an addendum to this posting here.

More Reports on Bishops Cranking Up Republican Voting Machine over Contraceptive Guidelines

2012-01-28T10:34:00.000-06:00

More and more bishops are piling on, as the USCCB cranks up its Republican voting machine to try to use the HHS guidelines for contraceptive coverage to drive Catholic voters to the polls to vote "right" in 2012. Several Catholic journals have just published online pieces that provide updated information about bishops issuing statements to do their bit to get the Republican machine cranking.

One of these pieces is a Commonweal blog discussion to which I pointed readers a moment ago. But since I didn't mention in my previous posting that this piece specifically discusses recent statements of bishops calling for Catholics to protest the Obama administration's HHS decision, I'll note Grant Gallicho's posting about this topic at Commonweal again.

Gallicho reports something I hadn't seen elsewhere: namely, that the U.S. Catholic bishops' spokesperson Sr. Mary Ann Walsh has stated that the USCCB "provided a template [letter]" for individual bishops to use in this political crusade. This is, in other words, an orchestrated campaign that is emanating from the center of the USCCB's exceptionally well-funded political lobby. It's an overt, organized pro-Republican political campaign on the part of the whole body of the USCCB.

Also, at National Catholic Reporter Nancy Frazier O'Brien reports for Catholic News Service on various bishops who have now issued letters calling on Catholics to fight the Obama administration vis-a-vis the HHS guidelines. As I noted yesterday, these include Zubik of Pittsburgh, who claims the administration is telling his Catholics, "To hell with your freedom of conscience"; Jenky of Peoria, who wants his Catholics to pray to St. Michael the Archangel to combat "this unprecedented governmental assault upon the moral convictions of our faith"; Olmsted of Phoenix, who says his Catholics are being "stripped of their God-given rights"; Aymond of New Orleans, who insists that his Catholics "must be able to live the message of Christ in the U.S. and follow our conscience," and on and on. Ad nauseam.

O'Brien also reports the following,

Writing in The Wall Street Journal Jan. 25, Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the HHS decision rejected the "loud and strong appeals" by "hundreds of religious institutions and hundreds of thousands of individual citizens" since the comment period began last August.

He said it is naive to think that contraception and sterilization will be "free" under the HHS mandate.

"There is no free lunch, and you can be sure there's no free abortion, sterilization or contraception," he wrote. "There will be a source of funding: you."

And of all the wild, mendacious, over-the-top politicized claims the Catholic reverend gentlemen who have no shame and no moral credibility are now making to unseat a Democratic administration, that's perhaps the most despicable set of statements I've yet to read. From the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and a cardinal-elect.

". . . You can be sure there's no free abortion, sterilization or contraception. There will be a source of funding: you." And as I feel absolutely sure Mr. Dolan knows very well, abortion has never been on the table in the HHS guidelines-discussion. Abortions are not funded by taxpayer dollars, they cannot be funded by taxpayer dollars per federal mandates, they have never been under consideration as discussion has been underway about providing access to contraception in health care plans.

Contraception is not abortion, no matter how loudly "pro-life" activists with no regard for the truth want to keep saying the two are the same. Mr. Dolan is unscrupulously conflating abortion and contraception to gin up hostility to the Obama administration among Catholic voters.

And though the lying and blatant pro-Republican politicking may keep him in the good graces of his rich friends in high places, they're hardly going to regain for him the moral credibility he and his brother bishops have squandered so freely in recent years, through their abysmal pastoral leadership of the American church.

Human Rights and Catholic Conscience: Discerning History's Moral Arc

2012-01-28T09:30:00.000-06:00

It's illuminating for me to read Jay Michaelson at Religion Dispatches today on the international struggle for LGBT human rights side by side with Christopher Brauchli at Common Dreams on how the U.S. Catholic bishops (and their defenders) persistently subordinate human rights to doctrinal purity when it comes to enforcing official Catholic sexual teaching.

Michaelson writes,

. . . LGBT equality is a (I won’t say the) defining civil rights issue of our time. This is not because LGBT people are at more risk than, say, undocumented immigrants, or that our struggle for equality is more compelling than that of the Arab Spring. Rather, LGBT issues are a way in which we in America and around the world are defining ourselves and living out (or not) our deepest values. Are those values ones of hidebound traditionalism, regardless of the consequences to human beings? Or are they compassion and honesty, even if our integrity and lovingkindness demands a fresh reengagement with opinions of which we once were certain? For better or for worse, this is the litmus test of how human we dare to be.

And Brauchli writes,

He [i.e., Archbishop Timothy Dolan] said: "To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable. It is as much an attack on access to health care as on religious freedom. Historically this represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty. We’re unable to live with this." There is, of course, no reason to think that church employees will be foregoing access to health care if the rule is enforced unless the soon to be Archbishop* is suggesting that the Church would be prepared to drop all employer health insurance plans rather than comply with the requirement. Non-church members would find that a shocking way of expressing the church’s disapproval of the rule. Given the precedent set by Catholic Charities, however, that would not be beyond the realm of possibility. After all, when Church doctrine bumps into human’s rights, doctrine must prevail.

Human rights on one side. Doctrinal purity and its enforcement on the other.

This is why, in the final analysis, I find the conversations of Catholic intellectual centrists who continue to think (or pretend?) that the U.S. bishops have a moral leg to stand on so stultifying. The central issue in these significant global moral debates about women's rights and gay rights is pretty clear: it's a question of human rights. And whether human rights will prevail, or whether the "conscience" of believers opposed to human rights will prevail.

The Catholic church should be unambiguously on the side of human rights. Period.

It's not to the credit of Commonweal that some of its top spokespersons first took a position opposing marriage equality in New York, and then down the road defending the USCCB in its battle with the Obama administration over "conscience exemptions" about contraception. In both respects, the intellectual leaders of the Catholic church are taking wrong-headed--and pretty embarrassing--stands against significant breakthroughs for human rights at this point in history.

These stands will one day come back to haunt defenders of the faith, the intellectual class of the Catholic church, in precisely the same way we are now haunted by the recognition that many defenders of the faith in the church's intellectual class once wrote justifications for burning witches, for slavery, and for the takeover of many European nations by fascism in the early 20th century.

Intellectuals and the elites they defend are sometimes flatly wrong. If we who think and write for a living paid attention to history, we'd certainly realize that. But when we're absolutely sure that our tribe and its perspective are right, and when we discount the testimony of real human beings about their real human lives, history doesn't have much to say to us, because it's about those real human beings and their real human lives, after all.

While we're primarily concerned to be on the right side here and now.

* I think "soon to be Cardinal" is correct here.

The graphic is Stacy Youdin's rendition of Dr. King's statement about the moral arc of the universe at Open Salon.

Catholics Good, Jehovah's Witnesses Bad: Telling Admissions re: "Conscience Exemptions" Argument

2012-01-28T08:58:00.000-06:00

Though Vincent Miller opposes the recent decision by the Obama administration to accept guidelines to make contraceptives accessible through health care plans, he recognizes that what he, the Catholic bishops, and their supporters are demanding vis-a-vis "conscience exemptions" is precisely what he would not endorse, if Jehovah's Witnesses sought conscience exemptions to deny health care coverage for blood transfusions. Miller writes:

Switching the content however, I become ambivalent. I would hesitate to say religious liberty requires that Christian Science or Jehovah’s Witness affiliated organizations not provide policies that cover surgery or blood transfusions. And, alas, Catholic teaching on contraception enjoys only slightly more support than these other strongly held religious beliefs.

I find this a telling admission. In the discussion of the HHS guidelines that has been going on at various Catholic websites lately--notably in several threads at Commonweal (here, here, and here)--one can see richly displayed a kind of tribalism that eats corrosively at meaningful, thoughtful discourse about this and other issues among American Catholic intellectuals of the center.

The underlying mentality, which the centrist intellectuals share with their brother and sister Catholics of the far right, is an us-vs.-them mentality. It assumes that we are right and above reproach. Our tribe can't do and hasn't done wrong in the same way that other tribes can do and have done wrong.

Point out to these tribal, ethnocentric, and exceedingly parochial Catholic thinkers that what they're arguing for with these conscience exemptions is precisely what many white Southern Christians demanded at the time of the Civil Rights movement, and they'll quickly take umbrage: "But we aren't racists. Catholics have always deplored racism. This is different."

I'm particularly struck by the interchange between Luke Hill and Ann Olivier and others in the first Commonweal thread to which I've pointed readers above. Luke Hill raises the eminently reasonable point that it seems rather strange to claim we're defending the rights of "conscience" against the Obama administration, when 90%+ of American Catholic couples have long been known to be using contraceptives.

Those responding to Luke Hill's eminently sane observation then do what ethnocentric, tribal centrist Catholics predictably do when someone tries to move conversations like this to the experiential level: they claim that what real-life people, real-life Catholics, do doesn't count in an intellectual discussion. They close ranks and continue talking about abstractions as though those abstractions have nothing at all to do with the lives of the 90%+ of their brother and sister Catholics practicing contraception.

They close ranks and act as if the entire church, with all its diversity and real-life complexity, on whose behalf they claim to be speaking as "the" Catholic voice, simply doesn't exist.

These exceedingly parochial, embarrassingly abstract (in the worst sense of that word: evading, disguising, and manipulating experiential reality), tribal, defensive, ethnocentric conversations between centrist Catholics and their soulmates of the political and religious right: they ultimately have little to offer the church as a whole. Or the public square.

They have little to offer because they're inward-turned and elitist. They don't take into account the experiences, stories, and lives of the majority of Catholics on whose behalf centrists claim to be speaking. They don't listen with any real respect to the testimony of brother and sister Catholics outside the closed, elitist circles within which the centrists live. They refuse to think or talk about the effect of their abstract theories on real lives.

And they assume that if Catholics think or do it, it has to be right. All of which leads to some pretty atrocious and uncatholic behavior on the part of those adopting these defensive, closed postures as they defend the indefensible in precisely the same way previous groups of Catholic intellectuals were capable of defending the indefensible during the periods of witch burning, slave trading, or fascist takeover of much of Europe in the first part of the 20th century.

I have news for American Catholic intellectuals of the center: every tribe can be spectacularly wrong. And the more certain a tribe is that it and its leaders have the moral edge on every other tribe in the world, the more likely it is to be spectacularly wrong. The more certain and set apart a tribe is, the more likely it is to be ignoring valuable information necessary to making well-rounded intellectual and moral judgments.

Which happens to be a point the gospels make when they insist that the Spirit chooses to speak to the so-certain and set-apart through just those the righteous and chosen have decided to discount, when the outsider from an impure tribe, the Samaritan, grasps a crucial moral insight by tending to a man wounded by the wayside, while the religious experts of the pure tribe, the ~~bishops~~ priest and ~~their centrist intellectual defenders~~ Levite, miss the insight altogether.

Catholic Bishops Crank Up Republican Voting Machine in Response to HHS Guidelines

2012-01-27T08:23:00.000-06:00

Here is an example of the kind of wild over-the-top, scare-infused political rhetoric we can begin to expect from many U.S. Catholic bishops now that the Obama administration has accepted guidelines for HHS to require contraceptive coverage in health insurance plans: Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria says the new regulations may close down "every Catholic school, hospital, and other public ministries of our Church."

They will do nothing of the sort, and it's hard to imagine Jenky isn't fully aware of this as he issues a letter to be read in every parish in his diocese urging Catholics to resist the new guidelines. This is raw politicking. It's an attempt by the U.S. Catholic bishops to mobilize the Catholic church in the U.S. as a Republican voting machine in the coming elections.

As Jenky and other bishops (and here and here) now using this tactic certainly know very well, many Catholic institutions have already been covering contraceptives in their health care plans. And the church has carried on. It hasn't toppled. Its schools, hospitals, and other institutions have continued their services unabated, even when a number of these Catholic workplaces have long been offering contraceptive coverage for their employees. Even the fringe-right Catholic college now suing the U.S. government over these guidelines, Belmont Abbey College, was already offering contraceptive coverage in its own health care plan prior to 2007.

The insinuation that the new guidelines will shut down Catholic institutions and the wild over-the-top scare rhetoric are part and parcel of the response of many Catholic commentators who support the USCCB to the new guidelines. As I noted a few days ago, Michael Sean Winters of National Catholic Reporter, who has done everything but stand on his head to promote the USCCB position in this debate, immediately responded to the acceptance of the new guidelines by claiming that the administration has

essentially told us, as Catholics, that there is no room in this great country of ours for the institutions our Church has built over the years to be Catholic in ways that are important to us . . . .

Winters has gone on to pen an equally non-reality-based appeal to the bishops to chain themselves to the White House fence in protest of the new guidelines--as if defending Humanae Vitae and its magisterial teaching about birth control, which more than 90% of Catholics long ago rejected for theologically sound reasons, is the burning issue as Catholicism deals with the world today. And not the preferential concern for the poor and those shoved to the margins of society that we claim is our central concern in our interaction with the public square . . . .

Readers may recall that Jenky has previously announced that the Obama administration is at war with Catholics (since, evidently, Catholics = Jenky and his fellow bishops). So his latest we're-at-war screed is nothing in the least new.

What is new about this tactic is that it's part of a wider picture of bishops seeking to mobilize parishes and Catholics in general to bring in the vote for the Republicans in the coming elections. We're seeing with this orchestrated campaign on the part of the USCCB the political face of the Catholic church at its ugliest. This is an undisguised get-out-the-vote effort, and it's hardly to the credit of the bishops involved in this campaign (or to Mr. Winters) that they're willing to sling around absurd fabricated claims that the current administration is at war with "Catholics" and trying to shut down Catholic institutions--something they certainly know is not true.

A tiny footnote to this discussion of the USCCB in partisan political (= Republican machine) mode: remember how the bishops are up in arms after the Pew Forum published a report showing them, in terms of dollars spent, the second largest faith-based lobbying group in D.C.? They are seeking to maintain that Pew got it wrong, and has classified money they spend in Washington for advocacy as lobbying money.

For those who have been following this discussion, I highly recommend today's New York Times editorial, "So Who's a Lobbyist?" As it notes, the current federal guidelines for defining who's engaged in lobbying are so loosey-goosey that even Newt Gingrich can legitimately claim he's not a lobbyist. And so, the American Bar Association is recommending a tightening of federal lobbying guidelines that would close loopholes and "require far more people to register as lobbyists, and subject them to ethics and disclosure requirements."

The reason the bishops are able to play the lobbying-vs.-advocacy game when it comes to counting the dollars they spend politicking in D.C.? It has everything to do with the slipperiness permitted by the federal lobbying guidelines.

If they want their new welcome-back campaign to have any real effectiveness for the many, many Catholics who've been alienated by their abandonment of authentic pastoral leadership, maybe they need to tone down the politicking and money counting and saber rattling, and start acting like real pastors for a change. You know, like the kind of pastors who visit and console the sick, see that the homeless are clothed and sheltered, comfort the grieving, and so forth.

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: Tics, Gesticulations, Swoops, and Flourishes Amidst Liturgical Bedlam

2012-01-26T09:09:00.002-06:00

So many droppings, so little time. I want to frame today's piece with a snippet that a reader sent to Andrew Sullivan recently. The following isn't the birdcage dropping per se. Instead, please regard it as the scoop with which I'll then pick up the Catholic birdcage dropping on which I really intend to focus:

It's funny that you linked to the story regarding the Catholic Church's position on the birth control under the health care insurance rules. My wife, daughter and I went to mass on Long Island on Saturday night at 5PM, a mass that tends to be an older crowd though some families are mixed in. Our pastor was the celebrant and his sermon amounted to him yelling for 15 minutes about abortion, the administration's anti-religious attacks, and contraception. He was particularly upset about the contraception rules - yelling about taking money out of his insurance premiums to subsidy the pill - to the point that he took the Lord's name in vain as he walked in front of the altar. When he was screaming about the money, the only thought that went through my mind was the amount of money I've put into the collection box that was used by the Church to cover up pedophile priest cases.

And so I want to talk about the Catholic liturgy. And what it is now becoming. I want to suggest that for many Catholics, the central act of worship in which we gather to celebrate God's loving presence is threatening to become a bedlam experience in a period marked by intense and angry reaction among the top leaders of the church. In a period of angry reaction in which an angry, reactionary priest can, per a parishioner's report, precede the lifting of the chalice of benediction by raging about how his insurance premiums subsidize contraception and then shouting a blasphemy from the altar to cap off his performance of reactionary liturgical-political rage.

This is what the central act of worship in the Catholic community has become in the experience of some Catholics, because it's all that's on offer now in the market maintained by the church of reactionary restorationism. This is now the brand of choice on tap in the liturgical pub of the restorationist church that is, for lay Catholics, the only pub in town: taste and see the sweetness of the Lord in our newly-brewed brand of liturgy! And so I'm writing this particular Catholic birdcage-dropping piece to pursue further reflections about the last time Steve and I went to liturgy, on Christmas eve at old St. Mary's cathedral in Chinatown in San Francisco, and, in that light, to talk about what we see the liturgy becoming at this moment of Catholic history just after the "new" translation has been imposed on English-speaking Catholics.

As the posting to which I've just pointed reports, what struck both of us at that liturgy, in particular, was the communion segment of the service. We've continued to dissect this event and to try to figure out just what it was about that particular piece of liturgical theater that so engaged our attention. And here's the conclusion we've reached:

In this period of Catholic reaction, of the reform of the reform in which a ridiculously wooden and stilted translation has just been imposed on lay Catholics who did not ask for or want changes in the liturgy, the moment of communion that is the most central liturgical sign of the unity of the church is becoming a wild smorgasbord of individualized ritualized tics, gesticulations, swoops, and flourishes that are far more like a spectacle out of bedlam than a bona fide liturgical celebration of unity. The grand irony of the liturgical "reforms" that have just been imposed on Catholics who did not ask for them is that they are being imposed precisely in the name of creating greater unity in the church. When, in fact, the overriding logic of the reactionary movement from which these liturgical "reforms" are emanating is all about significantly fracturing the unity of the church.

Before I get to this point, a few preliminary provisos. I'm making these observations about what the Catholic liturgy has become of late as an outsider. We no longer attend liturgy for reasons I've previously explained.

We drop in now and again when some obligation to family or friends takes us to church. And so these observations are, as it were, the observations of an anthropologist who is not a member of the tribe whose behavior he's observing. He's looking at a culture that is not precisely his own, but which has enough familiarity that he can perceive the contours of this or that social or ritual act sufficiently well to decipher some of its significance, albeit as an outsider to the acts. But though these are the observations of an outsider, they're also the observations of an informed outsider who may be seeing what those on the inside are missing, simply because they've become thoroughly familiar with strains of madness that strike an outsider as, well, perhaps more than a tad crazy.

I also know that the moment of communion in the Catholic liturgy is an intensely sacred moment at which the point of worship is not to stare at one's fellow worshippers and observe their tics, gesticulations, swoops, and flourishes. It's a moment to commune with the Lord and through Christ, with everyone else in the church. And people's choice of particular devotional gestures is very much personal, and neither I nor anyone else can measure the level of genuine piety that lies behind the choice of any given liturgical gesture.

However, for a trained theologian whose training is all about observing, reading texts and unraveling the strands of meaning that comprise them, relating liturgical proclamation to the church's ethical proclamations in the public sphere, it's also almost impossible not to look. And to wonder and think. And it does have to be admitted: the liturgical theater that the restorationist leaders of the church are now actively encouraging in every way possible is downright entertaining, and is meant to be engrossing.

It's in the liturgy above all that Catholics of the right (including the top leaders of the church) are egging each other on to act out. To be flamboyant. To make bold, significant gestures. To show those quasi-orthodox brothers and sisters how it is really done by people of sound faith who haven't caved in to radical secularism and liberal theological eclecticism.

The moment of communion, the moment at which lay Catholics approach the altar, has become in this restorationist period of angry reaction a moment of high theatrical spectacle in which, in some Catholic parishes, Catholics seek to outdo brother and sister Catholics in lavish gestures of devotion and orthodox faith. Steve and I first became aware of the extent to which this is going on nowadays in one of our last family-induced liturgical obligations prior to the Christmas liturgy about which I wrote in the posting to which the last link points.

At this gathering of Steve's family that included the obligation of Mass-going, we first began to see, through the tics, gesticulations, swoops, and flourishes of various members of his family who have adopted a strongly reactionary Catholicism, what the reform of the reform portends for Catholic liturgy. As I've noted, Steve's family now includes a sister and brother-in-law who no longer attend any non-Latin liturgies. They repudiate Vatican II and stand with the Pius X schismatic faction. And when, as with this event, they do attend the debased vernacular liturgy of the post-Vatican II church because family commitments require this, they signpost their participation with a number of indicators designed to proclaim their adherence to the purer old faith of the "true" Latin Mass.

These signposts include, of course, heavy mantillas and "modest" all-enswathing dresses (never pants) for the womenfolks. They also include telling little flourishes at points in the liturgy at which the debased vernacular has departed from the purity of the Latin that Jesus spoke--a different credal word here, a bowing and crossing unique to true believers there.

That's one sibling and her family. As I've also noted, there's another sister who, while she hasn't outright broken with the debased vernacular-liturgy church, leans Latin and wants the liturgy reformed according to her particular liturgical lights--which mandate increasingly dramatic gestures like a full prostration (heavy mantilla floating about her head) before she receives communion, and kneeling on the bare floor (no wimpy kneelers allowed) at moments in the liturgy when others are standing.

Needless to say, the moment of communion also becomes, for these über-orthodox right-wing Catholic siblings of Steve's, a moment of accentuated gestures that are all about demonstrating that their faith and devotion are purer than those of other less pure Catholics. And this is where the really interesting performances came on stage at the family gathering on which I'm commenting here.

At that gathering, there was serious competition between the two mantilla-draped sisters, one now with the schismatic Lefebvrite faction, the other Latin-leaning but hanging in with the debased vernacular, and a sister-in-law who regards herself as equally orthodox, but who hasn't gone the Latin route. Or the mantilla route, for that matter. This happens to be the sister-in-law whose daughter refused to invite me or the partner of her other gay uncle to her wedding several years ago, as her mother explained that a "true" Catholic wedding cannot, of course, include gay couples among the guests, since Catholic believe marriage is only about a man and a woman.

And so, while the two sisters of the far right received communion on the tongue (that goes without saying) after various bows, flourishes, and signings, the sister-in-law in competition with them for the title of purest of the pure did the following. To demonstrate that she's in full communion with Rome (giving her a one-up status over the Latin-faction and Latin-leaning sisters-in-law), she received communion in the hand.

But to demonstrate that she's more orthodox than the rest of the common lot who grasp hold of the consecrated host, she then stopped in front of the priest, having received the eucharist and blessed herself, and for a full minute held up the communion line as she plucked carefully at the palm of her hand to remove any perceptible trace of the communion wafer from her hand. Since that's what orthodox Catholics do, you understand, to demonstrate that they're receiving communion in the hand with real faith in the real presence of Christ in the eucharist.

And that plucking at the palm says much about what the liturgy has made of itself in the period of the reform of the reform. There's at work in the Catholic world today an increasingly magical-materialistic notion of the eucharist, which is centered on defiant and ever-increasing gestures of real belief in the real presence--as if most Catholics have given up such real belief and we need these gestures to sort the pure from the impure. This magical-materialistic notion of the eucharist, which is fueled by hysterical bogus claims that Catholics have stopped believing in the real presence, promotes a constantly burgeoning array of tics, gesticulations, swoops, and flourishes by which individual believers demonstrate that they do believe in the real presence.

And that you don't. There's not merely an exhibitionary impulse at the root of this burgeoning array of ritual gestures: there's also a getting-the-rest-of-you told impulse. They positively have to increase and vary in order for me to demonstrate to the rest of you that my faith is purer than yours, in a period in which the reform of the reform keeps insisting that ordinary Catholics are waning in their belief in the real presence of Christ in the eucharist. And in the right-wing political commitments that are thought by the hierarchy and certain segments of the Catholic population energized by the hierarchy to go hand in hand with liturgical purity.

And this way madness lies: hence my bedlam metaphor. There is something more than a little crazy, after all, is there not, about standing in front of one's parish priest (and the entire parish) after one has received communion, and picking at the skin of one's palm to remove traces of the eucharistic bread--when anything we touch leaves minute, imperceptible traces of itself on our hands, and we cannot possibly remove all of those atoms short of searing off our skin.

And why, after all, should one even want to remove particles of the host from one's hand, when one believes that one has just taken the eucharistic Christ into one's own body by eating it? If the whole point of communion is to commune with Christ by receiving the bread that is Christ physically into one's body, what difference is there between receiving the eucharistic bread by consuming it and having an atom of it on one's fingertips?

There's a certain craziness, a bedlam quality, about what the Catholic liturgy has made of itself in the period of the reform of the reform. Tics abound. Swoops and flourishes proliferate. Gesticulations thrive. And all--supreme irony!--in the name of assuring and imposing from on high a unity said to be waning among the people of God . . . .

In fact, it now becomes positively dangerous to go to communion in some Catholic churches these days since one never knows whether the person ahead of oneself in the communion line is going to stop suddenly and execute a profound bow from the waist, as we saw several grim young Catholics do at our Christmas eve liturgy in San Francisco (almost tripping the unsuspecting communion-goers behind them). Or one never knows when the person ahead of oneself is going to fling herself on the floor as she reaches the priest, courting a fall for the hapless soul next in line. Or whether a flying elbow of someone suddenly signing himself with an unexpected sign of the cross at an unanticipated moment (now, it's often before and after receiving the host, frequently with a little nod-curtsey in the direction of the altar afterwards, and a sudden stop to perform this ritual) is going to belt one in the eye as one walks back to one's place in the pew.

Dangerous, a bit. And more than a little crazy. It's as if one is observing an unexpected return to some of those periods of Catholic history in which there was such widespread social hysteria about a cultural event--e.g., the outbreak of the bubonic plague in Europe, periods of war and rumors of war--that people began to dance the danse macabre in the streets to appease the wrathful Lord assumed to be behind all the suffering. Or to flagellate themselves in public processions.

Or to burn witches and Jews and heretics to prove the purity of the faith at a moment at which the waning of faith was blamed for a whole array of social ills.

This is where the Catholic church has chosen to go as the 21st century begins. This is where the top pastoral leaders of the church have worked hard to make it go. This march to bedlam could hardly have been predicted when the bright promise of Vatican II broke upon the church in the middle of the last century. That the church has ended up here in bedlam a half century later is one of the grand mysteries of the recent history of Catholicism, about which scholars of the future will, I suspect, have as much to say as they now do about the insane periods in which the danse macabre, the witch hunts and pogroms and heretic burnings and public self-flagellations, throve.

"Of Late, We Are Here": Remembering David Kato

2012-01-26T08:19:00.000-06:00

A year ago today, human-rights activist David Kato, an out gay man, was bludgeoned to death at his home in Uganda. Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall commemorate Kato and his legacy in a moving short film linked to this New York Times article today.

"They kept on saying we are not here. But of late, we are here": it has taken and continues to take untold sums of courage for gay and lesbian people simply to claim visibility in many parts of the world today. To claim the very right to be here. To exist.

The entire purpose of the cruel, lying tag the current pope gave to his gay brothers and sisters in his 1986 document on the pastoral care of homosexual persons--"intrinsically disordered"--is to mandate gay invisibility. It is about commanding gay people not to be here, in the name of God.

"But of late, we are here." And David Kato's brief, courageous, hope-filled life continues, even after he was brutally murdered, to proclaim that message in the face of the lies and hatred he gave his life to overcome.

Amanda Marcotte on the Newt as the Living Id of the Republican Party: Entitlement and More Entitlement

2012-01-26T08:00:00.000-06:00

Amanda Marcotte offers insightful analysis of the double standard used by American conservatives (and the mainstream media and religious right) to assess the sexual infractions of political leaders: if he's a rich, powerful white man with right-wing views, adultery and serial marriages don't matter at all, even if he's mouthing pieties about traditional family values while cheating on a string of wives:

Gingrich doesn’t live by the strict sexual rules laid out by conservatives, because those rules are meant for other people. Sex is a weapon being used against all those classes of Americans they don’t like: non-white people, gays, non-Christians, liberals, Democrats, people who have to work for a living, poor people, Democratic politicians.

With rising levels of pious posing amongst Republicans, there has been some half-hearted attempts to pretend that they hold everyone to the same standards, which helped created the spectacle of Gov. Mark Sanford’s resignation. Gingrich represents a tossing-away of that feigned concern for fairness and a return to what conservatives really love best, a pedal-to-the-metal defense of straight white male privilege, especially that of wealthy white men. He’s the living id of the Republican Party: a spoiled brat who takes what he wants without apology, and then dresses down perceived inferiors for their supposed lack of morals and work ethic.

A wealthy white man who's the living id of the Republican party, a spoiled brat who takes what he wants without apology, and then shamelessly postures about the intrusiveness of the media if anyone asks him about the huge gap between what he preaches and what he practices: Marcotte is right, it seems to me. And, given the craven, chastened-puppy way in which John King let Gingrich lecture him the other evening when he dared to raise a question about Newt's hypocrisy, I don't think we should expect the media to pursue the question of Newt's infidelity and serial monogamy with anywhere near the ferocity with which they pursued Clinton at Newt's urging.

Glaring double standards at work here. When it's a rich, powerful white Republican man, he's just doing what men do and have a right to do. If he's anybody else, he's a threat to the strong moral values of the nation God has set atop a hill.

(P.S. I see that the Gene Lyons article I recommended yesterday about the Newt's particular appeal to the neo-Confederate wing of the Republican party has now appeared in Salon.)

Political Commentary on Southern Themes (and the Newt): Abby Zimet, Ernest Dumas, and Gene Lyons

2012-01-25T09:53:00.000-06:00

This report by Abby Zimet at Common Dreams fairly well encapsulates for me what's gone incredibly awry in the political (and cultural, and religious, and ethical) priorities of many Americans today: Zimet notes that while governor Steve Beshear of Kentucky is cutting his state's budget for education and other basic services to the bone, he continues to earmark a $43 million tax break for a creationist-themed amusement park with a honking big replica of Noah's ark.

As Zimet observes, the park's promoters hope that it will "teach the world about God’s Word and the message of salvation!" Zimet's rejoinder: "If people in Kentucky still know how to read [i.e., after their education budgets have been cut to the bone to build the faith-based park]."

Meanwhile, my fellow Arkansans Ernest Dumas and Gene Lyons explain in the forthcoming weekly edition of Arkansas Times why the Newt is going over so very well in the bible-belt heartland of the American South. Dumas sees Gingrich as a "practiced fabulist" who doesn't turn a hair as he shamelessly bends the truth (e.g., taking the 10.8% unemployment rate of Reagan's administration and sticking it on the Carter administration, where the rate was 5.6-7.8%).

But as Dumas says, why bother with a niggling matter like bare little old truth when richly embellished fable and myth perform so very much better--especially in the case of an American South that has always hungered for mythology:

Southerners, or a good portion of them, are accustomed to a mythical view of history and celebrate it. And when a debater is unconstrained by facts or even a rough approximation of the truth, he gains a great advantage. So it was with Gingrich in South Carolina, and so is it likely to be in the Republican primaries across the South.

And Lyons:

Judging by the whooping and hollering of the CNN debate audience, the GOP’s neo-Confederate wing wishes for nothing less than an electoral replay of Pickett’s charge—the doomed infantry attack at Gettysburg most historians believe marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War. A sizeable proportion of South Carolinians have yearned for a rematch ever since.

If the Newt gets elected, we may have a bible in every hand instead of a chicken in every pot, honking big replicas of Noah's mythical ark instead of books in classrooms, and Confederate battle flags flying jubilantly over the statehouses of the newly revived Confederacy.

But who needs truth when we can have myth to sustain us? Or chickens, schoolbooks, and racial justice when we can have, well, whatever it is unreconstructed Southerners think they'll be getting as they wildly celebrate the Newt's unabashed shame and his chutzpah in standing up to the first African-American president?

One Pastor's Take on the "New" Liturgy: Fr. Nobert Dlabal on New Trans as Akin to KGB Document

2012-01-25T09:28:00.001-06:00

Father Norbert Dlabal, pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Goodland, KS, and Holy Ghost in Sharon Springs, KS, weighs in on the "new" liturgical translations at National Catholic Reporter:

Another, and an even more fundamental, question comes to my mind regarding all of this. Who wrote that dour document, Liturgiam Authenticam? It, too, has all the marks of something schoolboys would have written. A person can pick up and read any of the documents of the Second Vatican Council and find that they inspire buoyancy and optimism. They sing of good news and hope for the future. Liturgiam Authenticam reads like something the KGB might have written for the citizens of the Soviet Union.

Fr. Dlabal is 76 years old and has been a parish priest for 40 years. The impudent and ill-informed schoolboys running things in the Vatican would be well-advised to listen to the experience of parish priests like this honorable gentleman.

Bethune-Cookman University under Leadership of Trudie Kibbe Reed: The Role of the Southern Association of Colleges

2012-01-25T09:05:00.000-06:00

To add to what I wrote yesterday about Bethune-Cookman University and the recent resignation/retirement of its president Trudie Kibbe Reed: as the university's accrediting body the Southern Association of Colleges prepared to review the school for reaccreditation in 2010, it invited third-party comments from members of the public. I submitted a third-party comment to SACS as someone who had served as the school's highest academic officer, its vice-president for academic affairs.

The conclusion of my document reads as follows:

BCU is now dominated by an administration with an autocratic, capricious, and even destructive leadership style that is not building an academically strong institution with sound values. In key respects, the current leadership team of BCU is ethically compromised. I strongly recommend that the SACS review team look very carefully at the quality of leadership at this school, and at the record of its president when she was president of Philander Smith College. Even if you choose to dismiss my report as that of a disgruntled former employee (and it’s not that: I am genuinely concerned about BCU and its future), you would be wise to listen to the growing number of former employees of the current administration who once endorsed its vision and worked very hard to defend and assist the school’s leader, but who are now thoroughly disenchanted by the quality of leadership at this institution.

In 15 single-spaced pages, I provided abundant information to support this conclusion.

After I submitted my third-party statement to SACS, I received a letter from Dr. Gerald Lord, a SACS official, informing me that my statement could not be taken into consideration since it arrived after SACS's deadline for the submission of third-party statements. But unfortunately for Dr. Lord, it was rather easy for me to disprove the claim that my statement had reached SACS after its submission deadline, since I had sent my document by special delivery mail and had the signed and dated signature of the SACS staff member who received the document to show when it arrived--before the deadline.

I sent this information to Dr. Lord, and to the best of my recollection, did not hear back from him in response to my proof that my third-party statement had arrived prior to the submission deadline. It struck me then and now as . . . odd . . . that an academic accrediting body whose accreditation standards are entirely hinged on the notion of integrity invites third-party submissions from the public and then informs those who submit these submissions that they will not be considered in the accreditation process--and, in my case, does so by sending out false information about when the submission has been received.

It strikes me as even more odd that the testimony of someone who has served as the chief academic officer of an institution, who has much well-documented insider information about what is going on at the leadership level of a university at which he or she has served, would be treated in this cavalier and downright disrespectful way. If, that is, SACS is really interested in integrity and academic excellence in the institutions it accredits . . . .

As I noted yesterday, shortly before SACS gave Bethune-Cookman reaccreditation, she was placed on the SACS board of trustees. Her school's press statement announcing this in May 2010 states that the primary mission of SACS's trustees is to "guide the organization's work and to implement the accreditation process."

Then this happened: after SACS re-accredited Bethune-Cookman University in December 2010 (with a glowing review of the university, per the school's press release to which my posting yesterday linked), the American Association of University Professors went on in June 2011 to censure the school, noting serious questions about integrity raised by how the school's top leaders had wielded power, and concluding,

A pervasive atmosphere currently exists at Bethune-Cookman University in which the administration supports favorites and ignores or punishes those who fall out of favor or who question, contend, or appeal. No adequate mechanism or procedure exists for the impartial or balanced hearing of grievances.

The AAUP censure came six months after SACS, which stresses integrity above all in its criteria for accrediting institutions, had given Bethune-Cookman a glowing bill of health. According to media reports, the president to whose leadership SACS gave its thumbs-up in the reaccreditation process in 2010, Trudie Kibbe Reed, has now just resigned with 30 of the 33 trustees on her board voting to accept the resignation.

There's something wrong with this picture, isn't there? There's something wrong with the claim that integrity counts first and foremost in the reaccreditation process for academic institutions, when third-party statements by very competent witnesses are not only ignored, but dismissed on the basis of false claims about when they arrived.

There's something seriously wrong with the claim that integrity is front and center in the thinking of an academic accrediting body when its officials are capable of behaving in this dismissive, disrespectful way towards those from whom they invite testimony as they re-accredit a school.

The results of that dismissive, disrespectful treatment of highly qualified witnesses, when a school is re-accredited, can be as follows: a leader who is functioning without integrity as her or his lodestar, who is autocratic, capricious, and often downright cruel in her or his exercise of leadership, can inflict significant damage to a whole chain of hapless individuals, while one of the key institutions designed to oversee the quality of leadership in the school stands by and does nothing to stop the harm, and the erosion of values absolutely essential to an academic life that means anything at all.

Values like speaking the truth . . . . Or values (which would seem to absolutely essential to a United Methodist institution) like treating all individuals with respect . . . . And values like respecting the human rights of employees, granting them due process and fair hearings when they're fired . . . .

As I said yesterday, I hold the Southern Association of Colleges, along with the United Methodist Church and the board of trustees at Bethune-Cookman University, responsible for permitting the destruction of a number of good folks' well-being, reputations, and livelihood to continue long after there was strong reason to stop the destruction. I hold these institutions responsible for their lack of careful supervision of and response to what has been happening at Bethune-Cookman University for some time now, which has had a significantly negative impact on the academic life of an illustrious HBCU that deserves far better.

Not to mention the significantly negative impact the irresponsibility has had on the lives of many individuals who offered their talents to this institution, were assured those talents were wanted and needed, and who were then treated with an amazing lack of respect when they were suddenly fired--in one case after another, fired when armed guards appeared at their offices and ordered them to clean out their desks and leave the campus immediately, with no hearing, warning, or chance to defend themselves prior to these humiliating dismissals.

These kinds of firings became the leitmotiv of Reed's leadership style as president of Bethune-Cookman. I can well understand why the business elites to which many newspapers report at an editorial level would celebrate such behavior. For corporate leaders, what's not to like in ruthless firing of employees with no hearings, no respect for their human rights, with armed guards carrying out the peremptory firings?

But for a United Methodist institution with Wesleyan Christian values? For an institution that wants to build a sound academic life and which is expected to abide by canons of academic life applicable throughout the U.S., which call for due process and a chance to defend oneself as one is fired?

Not so much. The values conveyed by the string of repeated firings under Reed's leadership at B-CU, in which armed guards appeared at people's desks to order them off campus: these have nothing at all to do with the core values of the United Methodist Church and with academic life at any institution that expects to be regarded with respect.

And when the employees Reed was humiliating in this way were in some cases openly gay employees who have no legal protection against discrimination in Daytona Beach and the state of Florida, what is the local newspaper really saying in the pro-Reed editorial to which I've just linked? Does the paper think that promoting discrimination based on sexual orientation is good for the economic and cultural life of the community? Does the paper think that sending armed guards to escort openly gay employees (about whose "lifestyle" you've made discriminatory statements in writing) from a local campus, when they have had no evaluation, no hearing, no due process in which they can defend themselves against whatever charges are used as the basis of their sudden firing, is good for business in any community? Does the Daytona paper imagine that behavior of this sort will attract creative, educated people to its community?

When the legal system of the state and community give a gay employee no chance to challenge this treatment on any legal grounds? And when the institution behaving in this discriminatory way towards the gay employee has tremendous financial resources at its disposal to crush anyone who challenges it? And when the leader of that institution has placed the gay employee she's treating in this way in a financial crisis by making false promises to the employee--and when she knows that the employee who is already in financial crisis due to her broken promises will endure even more serious financial hardship if he tries to mount a futile legal challenge to the injustice?

Lots of well-respected researchers, including Richard Florida, might strongly disagree with the Daytona paper that this kind of discriminatory anti-gay behavior is good for building a vibrant community. Or that it attracts the kind of creative and educated people to a community that a community needs in order to thrive.

Bill Moyers Continues Series on Intersection of Money and Politics

2012-01-24T10:42:00.000-06:00

Moyers & Company Show 102: On Crony Capitalism from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Speaking of issues of integrity and leadership (I'm building here on what I just posted about Bethune-Cookman University): Bill Moyers continues with his extremely important new series of hard-hitting, truth-telling commentary on the American political scene. His last show focuses on the corrosive effects of crony capitalism on American politics and American leaders today.

At Alternet, Moyers provides a summary of the program's analysis. As he notes, the show interviews Ronald Reagan's former budget director David Stockman, who maintains,

Crony capitalism is about the aggressive and proactive use of political resources, lobbying, campaign contributions, influence-peddling of one type or another to gain something from the governmental process that wouldn't otherwise be achievable in the market. And as the time has progressed over the last two or three decades, I think it's gotten much worse. Money dominates politics.

Moyers is, to my mind, a national treasure--a journalist of unparalleled integrity who has continued digging for and telling the truth in season and out of season through years of seismic shifts in American politics and journalism, which have led, in many quarters, to the collapse of journalism to ideological doublespeak crafted by political leaders who are themselves functioning as mouthpieces for the very rich.

We would do well to listen to Bill Moyers before it's too late. If, that is, we believe we have a culture worth saving.

In Higher Education News: Bethune-Cookman University President Trudie Kibbe Reed Resigns/Retires

2012-01-24T10:17:00.002-06:00

In the world of higher education, a very strange story now coming out of Bethune-Cookman University in Florida: as Michael Stratford reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, the university president, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, has retired in the middle of the academic year. At least, that appears to be the story. But getting a clear picture of whether this is a resignation or a retirement or why it's taking place: that's another story altogether.

To the best of my knowledge, the first media outlet to report this story was the Miami-based paper the Florida Courier, which reported last Friday that Reed was resigning and the board chair, Larry Handfield, would be stepping down as well. The Daytona Beach paper the News-Journal then followed with an article yesterday stating that Reed was resigning and that at a board meeting last Friday, 30 of the school's 33 trustees voted to accept the resignation.

The Orlando Sentinel then followed with a similar report in an article that later disappeared from its website. This article was followed by another in the same paper reporting that Reed is retiring and not resigning. This piece cites a trustee, Rev. Randolph Bracy, who contradicted the initial report of the board chair, Handfield, and who told the Sentinel the following:

The chair of the board misspoke. Resignation is out of the question. The chairman is out of order and will be dealt with.

The Sentinel reports that Bracy's information was substantiated by another trustee, who had stated that "the issue had not been discussed at Friday's meeting." According to the Sentinel, the welter of conflicting reports even got local political figures concerned about the story: the Sentinel cites Rep. Dwayne Taylor of Daytona Beach, who told the media that the local community has a vested interest in knowing what is happening at this important local institution, and who stated,

We need, in the community, clarity on what is going to take place and how it is going to take place.

And then the Daytona paper followed with another article, now stating that Reed has retired (when its first report had used the word "resigned"), noting that Handfield is also stepping down as board chair but reporting that Handfield says this has nothing to do with Reed's retirement announcement, and reminding readers that the board had chosen to keep Reed on as president at a fall meeting at which the media reported that the report of an outside evaluator had raised critical questions about her leadership.

That fall meeting and the report of the outside evaluator are extensively discussed in a series of articles the Miami paper the Courier did last fall, which interested readers can find here. Rev. Randolph Bracy, the trustee cited above, responded to the Courier's series with an op-ed piece defending Reed, as the paper reported on various questions that were being raised about her leadership.

As the Chronicle of Higher Education notes in its opening paragraph about Reed's resignation/retirement, she "has twice presided over a college while it was censured by the American Association of University Professors over its firing of faculty." The article notes that she came to Bethune-Cookman from Philander Smith College in Little Rock. In her history as a college president, she has been president of two colleges/universities, both historically black United Methodist institutions, both of which were placed under AAUP censure for alleged violations of the academic freedom of faculty and for violations of due process in firing faculty.

As the Chronicle article and the series in the Florida Courier also report, B-CU now faces a series of lawsuits due to several of the firing incidents, and Reed herself is named personally as a defendant in a number of these lawsuits. Shortly before the American Association of University Professors censured Bethune-Cookman University with claims that the president's violations of the rights of faculty members had undermined the institution's integrity, the Southern Association of Colleges, whose accreditation guidelines note that integrity is the governing principle by which SACS judges institutions as it accredits them, re-accredited Bethune-Cookman University.* The school's press statement announcing the reaccreditation states that SACS found no standards that the school did not meet, placing it in the top two percent of schools accredited by SACS during that accrediting cycle.

Prior to the re-accreditation actions, Reed had been placed by SACS on its executive council. She was elected to the SACS board of trustees in May 2010.

I write about this story with a vested interest in understanding what is going on at this important historically black university, since I have fifteen years' experience teaching and doing administrative work in HBCUs, and a long commitment to helping assure their academic excellence. I also know Bethune-Cookman University in a very personal way: I was academic dean under Trudie Kibbe Reed at Philander Smith College for a number of years, and when she took her position at Bethune-Cookman, she asked Steve and me to join her there and offered me the job of academic vice-president.

After one year, she fired me under atrociously unjust conditions. I have recounted here the story of that atrociously unjust firing and of her violation of a promise to Steve and me to provide a job for us up to our retirement, which resulted in our buying a house in Florida that we do not want or need but with which we're now stuck. As I've noted, homophobic prejudice played a very clear, discernible, and easily proven role in what Reed did to us at Bethune-Cookman--and I am willing to provide details about this story all over again to anyone who might be interested in it.

In all that I have written about this story in the past, I have not named the institution or the president who has made our lives extremely difficult by luring us to indebt ourselves on the basis of promises she broke, who willingly used homophobia to cover the gross injustice of her treatment of us, and who has been permitted by the United Methodist church, her board of trustees, and the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities to behave in similar fashion and with impunity to a long string of other employees.

I am naming Dr. Reed and Bethune-Cookman University now because what is happening at the school at this moment provides an opening for changes that might--if someone with strong integrity and leadership ability chooses to act--place this valuable HBCU on a sound footing again. B-CU deserves the very best leadership it can obtain. It does not deserve the shoddy and integrity-challenged leadership it has had recently at its top administrative and board level--shoddy, integrity-challenged leadership that the United Methodist Church and SACS could and should have challenged, but have not chosen to challenge in any effective way, to the strong discredit of both institutions.

On the same day that Reed's resignation was announced, an announcement was issued that Bethune-Cookman has been named to the Civil Rights Hall of Fame. Because of its illustrious, courageous founder, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, and its long and distinguished history educating generations of well-trained African-American students, this university deserves the best leadership it can obtain. It deserves capable, astute leaders with strong integrity and a strong commitment to academic excellence.

I hope that what is taking place at this school right now will open the door to a new future for the school, the kind of future it richly deserves. But the school cannot go through that door until those with governing responsibility for it--its board, the United Methodist Church, and the Southern Association of Colleges--begin facing honestly what has been taking place at the school in recent years, and begin dealing with the serious injury inflicted on more than one person by the school's abysmal lack of good leadership in the recent past. And until these dignitaries begin acting justly towards those who have been significantly harmed in this period of the school's history, listening to our stories, and seeking, as is mandated for a Methodist institution, to heal some of the deep wounds inflicted on some of those associated with this school in the recent past.

* For an addendum to the preceding posting that further discusses the role of SACS, see this subsequent posting.

P.S. The Chronicle of Higher Education is a highly esteemed national publication. Through this esteemed national publication, Bethune-Cookman University is receiving national publicity right now. I wonder if that publicity, with the conflicting reports by trustees and the information about Reed's track record getting two schools in a row on AAUP's censure list, works to the advantage of the school. More than that: I wonder how those with leadership positions and responsibility for this outstanding historic HBCU can reclaim the credibility the school is losing with these reports.

Dating God Blog Critiques March for Life: A Voice for American Catholicism to Hear

2012-01-24T08:57:00.000-06:00

Brother Daniel Horan

Franciscan brother Daniel Horan has a posting up at his Dating God site which, to my way of thinking, interjects much-needed truth-telling into the Catholic public discussion of the abortion issue. And which brings this public discussion to a much-needed level of moral maturity. Joshua McElwee reports on Horan's posting and adds his own valuable reflections at National Catholic Reporter.

The occasion for Br. Dan's reflection is the so-called March for Life that is taking place today in D.C. In some Catholic circles, it has become well-nigh obligatory to participate in this annual "pro-life" event. Many Catholic colleges, notably those on the right end of the political and religious spectrum, send busloads of students to the event annually. The March for Life event has even entered the narrative of the abuse crisis in the past year or so, when it came out that the priest whom Kansas-City-St. Joseph Bishop Robert Finn sheltered after child porn was found on his computer--Father Shawn Ratigan--had gone with Finn to a March for Life event in D.C. in 2007.

In some Catholic circles today, in the over-heated rhetorical climate created by John Paul II's recurring rhetorical motif "culture of life vs. culture of death," not attending the March for Life can get you into trouble. Asking critical public questions about the event can cause more trouble for you. If you want to court grief for yourself as an administrator of a blog commenting on Catholic issues, dare to try to say anything sane and measured about the topics of abortion and contraception, and then watch to see how long it will be before people begin to bombard your blog with crazy counterfactual assertions that "contraceptives are abortifacients" and dare you to prove otherwise. Dare you to prove that a lie is not the truth . . . .

And so it's to Brother Dan's credit that he is willing to tackle this issue around which there is so much plain bullying in the Catholic "culture of life" created by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Horan's posting tells readers that he's not going to the March for Life and doesn't support it, and it explains why.

Anyone concerned about the Catholic teaching that life is sacred--anyone who cares about preserving and promoting this teaching--needs to read Horan's (and McElwee's) posting and think carefully about why some faithful Catholics who support this teaching are calling on their fellow pro-life Catholics to stop the bullying and the rhetorical (and very politicized and partisan) overkill about the abortion issue. Horan provides three critical reasons for his decision to withhold support from the event:

1. The disingenuousness of its title.

2. The lack of desired effect and absence of purpose.

3. The fact that the event has become an exercise in self-congratulatory fanfare.

I won't provide a blow-by-blow summary of either Horan's or McElwee's statement. I do encourage readers interested in the pro-life discussion to read both of them. Here's, to my mind, Horan's most insightful observation:

What strikes me as most egregious in this whole extravaganza is the simplistic distillation of an incredibly complex moral and political issue into the binary “good vs. evil” construction. It is not that simple. Furthermore, as stated above, anything in the Catholic tradition that claims to be “pro-life” – person or event – must also include those other important issues of life and dignity, issues that most of these marchers would otherwise prefer to forget: war, poverty, torture, capital punishment, economic inequality, and the like.

It is sad that a boutique, albeit legitimate, issue in the Catholic moral tradition has been made to be the singular and defining catholicity litmus test for so many. Who is in and who is out is rarely determined by one’s profession of faith and baptism (that is, by the way, what makes someone a Christian), but where they fall in the pseudo-reality of binary moral categories: “pro-life or not?” which always really means: “anti-abortion” – if only nominally, because no one marching who knows anything about the political system in the US actually thinks a president or a congressman or a supreme court justice can overturn such a contentious and constitutionally protected law – “or not?”

A boutique issue that now functions as a litmus test to determine who's in and who's out, in which the issue of abortion has been conveniently unhitched from all the other significant issues of life that have to be considered alongside it if we expect anything we say about the value of life vis-a-vis abortion to be taken seriously: this is extremely important analysis. It's analysis that needs to be heard by those who are shaping that insider-vs.-outsider, black-white, Manichean worldview that now dominates Catholic thinking about almost any issue at all.

Though I doubt very much that anyone with authority to make necessary changes in this Catholic culture intends to listen seriously to these arguments, because the abortion litmus test has become such a convenient weapon for those in the Catholic community who want to bludgeon their political enemies within the Catholic community into submission to their single-party will.

And more's the pity, if one really does care about maintaining and transmitting the Catholic message of life to the culture at large.

Lemony Snicket Now an Agony Aunt on Twitter?!

2012-01-24T06:29:00.000-06:00

Lemony Snicket now giving love advice via Twitter? I think I may have died and just gone to heaven.

Here's a sample:

Q: "I have a crush on a work superior who I probably am not allowed to go out with. What should I do?" #DHhelpsU

A: Say to him, “Your Holiness, this is awkward, but...”

If you haven't read Daniel Handler's Lemony Snicket series, run--don't walk--to the nearest bookstore and buy the series immediately. Or so I advise.

As the preceding snippet of dialogue suggests, the novels are wicked in the extreme.

In the very best sense of that word, you understand.

The graphic is Jim Carrey playing the villainous Count Olaf in the film version of the Lemony Snicket series.

Another Gay Teen Suicide: Phillip Parker, Tennessee

2012-01-23T11:12:00.001-06:00

How soon will it be until we click on to another story or change the channel when yet another of these tragic suicides of gay teens makes news in the U.S.? That's what people eventually do, after all, when something is reported over and over in the news, and it seems not nearly enough is happening to stop a particular kind of tragedy from occurring.

Not nearly enough is happening to stop the tragedy: as in, religious leaders speaking out! As in, the Catholic bishops of the U.S. speaking out.

These stories break again and again, and the U.S. Catholic bishops have uttered not one word about the problem. But they expect to be listened to as credible moral leaders when they tell us they defend human rights and the values of life.

Silence is complicity.

Martin Marty on Supreme Court Hosanna-Tabor Ruling: Religious Exemptions and the Common Good

2012-01-23T10:51:00.002-06:00

Martin Marty

At the Ekklesia website, noted scholar of American church history Martin Marty weighs in on the recent "ministerial exception" ruling of the Supreme Court. Marty's take: the Supremes' willingness to grant churches a "ministerial exception" in laws outlawing discrimination for other employers is hardly surprising in a nation with the soul of a church. "Ministerial exception" now goes side by side with "tax exemption" in the nation's lexicon for matters in which religion and the public square interface.

Does the special treatment that religious institutions enjoy in a unique way in the American context pose any dangers to either the body politic or to religious bodies themselves? Marty thinks so. He sees certain dangers on both fronts:

Does this mean that the church, which is supposed to be prophetic, has to mute critical roles and support religious institutions even when they have, in the eyes of their critics, malign purposes and malignant practices. Yes. Being uncritical is a price religious institutions pay for the goods they derive for their prosperity in a free republic and letting the institutions go free from taxing is the price it pays when it can only wink at religions damaging the public good, as many of them do.

But Marty concludes that, even with these risks, the American arrangement of privileging religion in certain ways and granting religious bodies exceptions and exemptions not given to anyone else works, ultimately, to the advantage of both religious groups and the body politic, which benefits in manifold ways from the contributions of faith-based communities when they're left free to operate according to their own dictates.

And they are left free to do so in the U.S., Marty insists. He flatly discounts the overblown rhetoric of those (and these include the U.S. Catholic bishops and, most recently, Benedict XVI) who spot dangers on all sides from a "radical secularism" that is said to be attacking religion in the U.S.

Marty's conclusion:

There are many assaults on faiths, including Christianity, in the culture at large. But the generally free ride given religious institutions even in a “secular time” should inspire thought: With all its contradictions, the United States remains a wonderful place in which religions can prosper. They do well when they serve the common good freely and openly.

As I said when I first commented on the recent Supreme Court Hosanna-Tabor ruling, I certainly recognize the right of religious bodies to manage their own affairs and make decisions ad intra in matters having to do with determining their identity and who speaks on their behalf in an official capacity.

But on the other hand, I also see strong values weighing against this absolutist interpretation of religious freedom in the American context. I think there are ways in which the common good is not always well-served by permitting religious groups and their leaders to have carte blanche to flaunt laws that apply to everyone else, particularly in the area of discrimination. There are values to be maintained and served on the other side of the scales, as we weigh religious freedom against these countervailing values.

These values include the obligation to eradicate discrimination in all of our social and religious institutions, and to protect despised minorities against the tyranny and abuse of the majority. And when religious bodies not only defend but actively drive social discrimination--as they frequently do--and are obdurate about their unfettered "right" to do so, sometimes judicial and legal strictures are necessary to counter that (mis)application of religion within a society. To counter it for the common good.

I don't doubt for a moment, for instance, that many religious groups today genuinely believe that women and gay folks should be subordinated to heterosexual males. What I do doubt is that permitting religious groups unquestioned freedom to practice discrimination--including in their employment practices re: "ministers"--necessarily serves the common good, and should go unchallenged by those concerned for the common good.

I say all this as someone who grew up in the midst of the Civil Rights struggle in the American South, when white churches positively and actively drove much of the racial discrimination enshrined in the peculiar laws of the Southern states. I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the white Christians among whom I grew up--and of whom I was one--genuinely believed that God and the bible mandate the separation of the races and the subjugation of people of color to white people.

But, eventually, a decision was made within the culture at large and then at the federal level to begin pushing back against those beliefs and the legal discrimination they enshrined. And the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court eventually took the lead in dismantling the system of segregation despite the objections of white Southern Christians that what was being dismantled was mandated by divine will and these legal-judicial interventions in our culture represented an intrusion on religious freedom.

On the whole, these developments in the Civil Rights period strike me as very significant developments to move in the direction of the common good for all citizens. And so I'm less sanguine than Marty is that the United States is "a wonderful place" in which we all benefit when religious bodies are allowed to prosper and serve the common good freely and openly.

There's another side to American history, and another side to the role religion has played in American history, that those who have lived with the underside see more clearly. And from that underside, religion is altogether a more ambiguous phenomenon, and deserves much stronger critique and judicial-legal scrutiny than Mary appears to recognize, imho.

On Conscience, the U.S. Bishops, and Manufactured Battles with the Obama Administration: David DeCosse at NCR

2012-01-23T10:16:00.001-06:00

National Catholic Reporter is now carrying valuable commentary by David DeCosse, director of campus ethics programs at Santa Clara University, about the model of conscience the U.S. Catholic bishops are applying in their clashes with the Obama administration over "religious freedom" issues. DeCosse focuses, in particular, on the recent battle about the HHS guidelines recommending coverage of contraception in health care plans, including in religiously owned institutions.

DeCosse frames the discussion by looking at two concepts of conscience: the model the bishops are now promoting, and the traditional Catholic model derived from the theology of Thomas Aquinas. I find DeCosse's analysis cogent and extremely helpful. As I noted in my own reflections on the HHS decision last week, Catholic media gurus like Michael Sean Winters, who have been defending the USCCB in its clashes with the Obama administration, seem to me to be employing a view of conscience that is so narrow that it applies exclusively to the bishops.

And so when Winters et al. speak of how the Obama administration's support of the National Academy of Science Institute of Medicine's recommendation that all women have access to contraceptive coverage in health plans violates Catholic "conscience," they're acting as if the only Catholic conscience that matters in this debate is the hierarchical conscience. This claim is mind-boggling in the face of the well-nigh universal dissent of faithful Catholics from what the magisterium teaches about contraception in Humanae Vitae. It's mind-boggling because it treats that faithful dissent as non-existent, and in doing so, it treats the consciences of the large majority of Catholics who faithfully dissent from hierarchical teaching on the matter of contraception as if they do not count.

Winters and others in the Catholic commentariat defending the USCCB in its manufactured battles with the current administration make mincemeat of the traditional Catholic notion of conscience, and they implicitly insult the large percentage of their brother and sister Catholics whose conscientious decision about contraception rejects magisterial teaching. DeCosse's commentary helps to frame this discussion by pointing to the disconnect between the bishops' understanding of conscience and that found in the classic theology of Aquinas.

DeCosse notes that the bishops (and, here, they're following Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI) want to create a "perfect closed circle of conscience" in which the faithful are compelled, if they want to identify themselves as Catholic, to accept hierarchical teaching on matters moral. No dissent allowed here: this becomes the invisible sign posted at the door of every Catholic church under the last two papacies, and the unspoken precondition for defining oneself as Catholic under these two papacies. The bishops (again, they're following JPII and Benedict here) have traded Aquinas's very traditional notion of liberty of conscience and of the obligation of faithful Catholics to follow their informed consciences for a notion of conscience that is entirely law-bound.

Following JPII's lead in Veritatis Splendor, the bishops want to argue that there are moral absolutes--and these are transmitted to the faithful by hierarchical teaching--which bind the consciences of faithful Catholics, so that dissent from these absolutes as formulated in magisterial teaching is impossible. It's impossible if one wishes to identify oneself as a faithful Catholic.

But over against this understanding of conscience and how it operates, DeCosse reminds readers, is the notion of practical reason emphasized by Aquinas, which strongly emphasizes the need for every Christian to take into the inner forum of conscience, in which we are encounter God, all the factors that must be weighed in order to come to a decision of informed conscience in any situation. These factors certainly include magisterial teaching. And scripture. And pastoral counsel.

But they include more than that. They include information accessible to our consciences via reason, as it's informed by the natural and social sciences, for instance--because the Catholic tradition at its best has always understood that the same God who is the author of revealed truth is the author of all other truth which comes to us through the channels of human reason.

If one steps back a moment from the various political debates now eliciting renewed discussion of the role of conscience in the Catholic tradition, and if one takes a close look at what the period of restoration, the "reform of the reform" under JPII and Benedict, has meant for Catholic notions of conscience, it's hard to avoid the following conclusion: there has been, under the last two popes and now through the USCCB in the American context, an ongoing, concerted attack by the hierarchy on the notion of the informed conscience of lay Catholics. There has been a strong erosion, from the very top of the Catholic church, of traditional, long-held notions of conscience rooted in Aquinas, with a deliberate attempt to strong-arm the consciences of faithful Catholics by equating conscience with unquestioning fidelity to hierarchical teaching.

And the results of this campaign have been extremely dismal for the church as a whole. They have resulted in widespread moral infantilism among precisely that set of Catholics who most vocally represent themselves as the defining voice of Catholicism in the public square.

By its very nature, conscience requires that we be conscious. We do not--we cannot--become fully conscious when we don't think. When we don't learn. When we don't consider every bit of information accessible to us. When we don't diligently search for all the pieces of information pertinent as we make an informed judgment about a matter we're considering.

The coercive law-based strong-arm approach of the hierarchy to moral issues in this restorationist moment of Catholic history implicitly teaches "faithful" Catholics that they may dispense from the hard work of mature conscience by simply accepting without question what is handed down to them from the top, as if hierarchical teaching is divine truth in toto. This approach to conscience hollows out everything the tradition has ever understood as the operation of mature and informed conscience, and it permits those who understand conscience as unquestioning obedience to hierarchical dictate to dispense from the hard work of becoming adult believers who exercise informed conscience.

It keeps those Catholics who buy into the restorationist approach to conscience at an infantile level of moral development. And it inculcates this moral infantilism deliberately, to serve the control needs of the hierarchy. Infants are far easier to control than adults, and when the accent of a church's leadership is on control backed by coercion, it positively needs to produce a morally and intellectually infantile population of churchgoers who obey without question and who willingly sequester themselves in an intellectually barren, set-apart, parochial enclave in which church leaders rule and faithful Catholics obey without question.

One can look at history and find all kinds of examples to demonstrate that the creation of such intellectually barren, parochial, authoritarian cultural enclaves is dangerous precisely because people who have not been taught to think--to develop and use adult consciences--lack the tools to understand complex moral and political issues, and as a result, become tools themselves. And when no leader of any human community, moral or otherwise, is ever free from the tendency to misuse power, peoples reduced to the level of tools, who place themselves in the hands of leaders who define themselves and their words as holy, almost inevitably end up doing not good but evil in the world.

This is how things work when people are not challenged to become informed, educated, thoughtful, and conscientious. It is how history shows us repeatedly that things work under these conditions--and the result is always and everywhere, throughout history, unhappy in the end.

The tremendous tragedy of the current papacy and its predecessor is that things might have been very different, after Vatican II. Vatican II introduced within Catholicism a new moment that had the potential to change the Catholic church and its relationship to secular culture in all sorts of ways, not the least of which was by assuring sound, well-rounded catechesis of the faithful, so that they could become productive citizens of the societies in which they live, transmitting the values of the Catholic tradition at its best to secular culture in careful, conscientious dialogue with culture.

Instead, the top leaders of the Catholic church have chosen the path of retrenchment, of re-parochialization, of re-mystification of hierarchical teaching and hierarchical roles. The top leaders of the Catholic church have chosen not respectful dialogue with the laity about disputed matters such as contraception, but top-down coercion of the kind a bad parent uses when that parent substitutes because-I-say-so authoritarianism rather than reason or good role-modeling to teach children how to behave.

The results of these tragic decisions to waste the creativity provided by the Vatican II movement, to reduce "faithful" Catholics to infants, to ignore the voice of the Spirit speaking through the council and through lay Catholics: the results have been dismal in the extreme. And they grow more dismal with each new moral inanity that falls from the mouths of the Catholic bishops in the U.S. in their made-up and politically driven battles to try to unseat a Democratic president whom they imagine as less amenable to their control than a Republican president would be.

Who Has Known the Mind of the Corgi, and Who Has Been Her Counselor? (Act Three)

2012-01-22T13:04:00.001-06:00

In my second-act posting about the unfathomable mind of the corgi, I told you about Valentine's newly developed fetish for attacking--and soundly trouncing--plants. I reported that his enemies of the Kingdom of Flora and Fauna have included the following (outside our garden, which is now thoroughly trounced):

1. A freshly planted shrub in a garden up the hill from us, en route to the park, which he uprooted one day in a fierce lunge (and which we shamefacedly replanted);

2. Several old roses overhanging a stone wall on the street to the park:

3. Strands of ivy overhanging that same stone wall;

4. Clumps of dried pampas grass in the next garden after the house with roses and ivy on its wall.

And now I regret to inform you that we discover the range of his garden destruction is increasing. He continues to lunge for the shrub he previously uprooted (and for anything he can reach in that particular beautifully maintained garden). But we have now developed the smarts to anticipate the feints and to curtail the range of his leash.

We can't so easily prevent the attacks on the roses, ivy, and pampas grass, since these are all right along the sidewalk we have to use to reach the park. Said attacks continue, and continued right through our walk today, always with growls and yelps accompanying the pounce-shake-snap process.

And now there's this:

1. On the way back from the park to our house, we have realized in the past week, he quickly attacks an azalea bush along the sidewalk.

2. And a forsythia.

3. And a small tree I can't identify, since its leaves have fallen, which ~~has~~ a beautiful weeping shape and overhangs the sidewalk (correction: it had a right pretty weeping shape until Valentine began clipping bits of it each time he passes it on our daily walks).

4. A row of boxwood.

5. A row of hedge (which, for us, means Ligustrum vulgare and is everywhere in Little Rock, along fence lines and walls).

All of these are now suffering from his quick predations as we take the three dogs for their daily walk, at points on the walk where he can easily reach them as he passes by. It's impossible to stop him from the predations, short of walking him in the street, because we can't anticipate what he'll decide to attack and clip on any given day.

It appears to give him great pleasure, a perceptibly smug sense of absolute triumph, to clip his plant-enemies as we walk. For us, it brings great shame.

And the kinds of questions I know for certain my mother asked on more than one occasion as my brothers and I grew up: how on earth did we manage to raise such an ungovernable and shame-making child?

The picture: me in the park today--a foggy cool winter day for us here. Steve snapped it on his cell phone.

David Clohessy's Kansas City Deposition Unsealed: Notes on SNAP Press Statement

2012-01-22T10:21:00.001-06:00

The SNAP website has a good media statement from last week addressing the unprecedented demand in two Missouri cities, Kansas City and St. Louis, that SNAP open its files to the scrutiny of lawyers hired by Catholic officials to defend priests accused of sex crimes with minors. As the press release notes, a judge has just unsealed the six-hour deposition that David Clohessy of SNAP was required to make in Kansas City recently, and it will be uploaded to the SNAP site when it's available.

The media statement also notes that the demands for disclosure being made in both Kansas City and St. Louis are sweeping, and represent an entirely new tactic in the Catholic hierarchy's battle to defend priests accused of sex crimes against children. SNAP is not involved in either of the suits in which these demands are being made, and Catholic officials are demanding access to private communications involving thousands of individuals who have never met either of the parties in the two lawsuits for which disclosure is being demanded, and who have nothing at all to do with either case.

SNAP's conclusion about what's going on (and this conclusion is echoed in the National Catholic Reporter editorial supporting SNAP to which the second link above points):

It’s a cynical, shrewd legal maneuver to deter victims, witnesses, whistleblowers, police, prosecutors, journalists and others from exposing predators, protecting kids and seeking help from SNAP.

And it threatens the long-standing privacy protections that almost all crime victims – not just child sex victims of predatory clerics’ victims - have enjoyed for years.

And why is this happening right now? Why are Catholic officials shifting their tactics in abuse cases to this new, unprecedented attempt to demand disclosure of private communications from SNAP's files unrelated to the cases for which the communications are being demanded? Why are Catholic officials so intent on breaking the back of SNAP right now, and intimidating survivors of childhood clerical sexual abuse who might wish to turn to SNAP or other survivor-advocacy groups for assistance?

Here's SNAP's answer to these questions:

Step back and consider the larger context. Last year must have been extraordinarily tough for the US Catholic hierarchy. For the first time ever, two high ranking church officials face criminal charges for concealing child sex crimes – Bishop Finn in Kansas City and Monsignor William Lynn in Philadelphia. The hierarchy also knows that victims finding other victims and joining together for support, healing and justice will, in turn, lead to more victims coming forward and exposing even more (and more recent) clerical sex offenders and cover ups.

So, they have got to find a tactic—even if it ultimately loses in court—for scaring and stopping victims from coming forward to SNAP and other agencies where they find the strength and courage to call law enforcement.

At one level, what Catholic officials are doing in these Missouri cases is an act of legal desperation, which indicates just how decisively SNAP and others working to address the abuse situation have succeeded in exposing the Catholic hierarchy's ongoing cover-up of abuse cases. At another level, in retaliation, the Catholic hierarchy is now willing to employ a dangerous, cynical, and highly hurtful hardball legal that will have negative ramifications for people seeking assistance from organizations preventing abuse of children and women across the nation.

The tactic itself, of course, further damages the moral credibility of the U.S. Catholic bishops. But when the tactic is upheld by courts, as it has been in Missouri, much will now depend on the willingness of Catholics and others who are fed up with the behavior of the bishops and outraged at their continuing willingness to attack abuse victims to speak up. And to push back.

And to keep the sunshine of good investigative journalism shining brightly into the dark corners of chanceries, bishops' palaces, diocesan offices, and rectories, where the many secret personnel files still held by Catholic officials continue to be stored away under lock and key.

The graphic is a snapshot of SNAP leader David Clohessy protesting outside the headquarters of the Philadelphia archdiocese in Feb. 2011; credit to Alejandro A. Alvarez of Philly.com.

Abortion and Contraception: A WHO Study and Implications for Catholic Pro-Lifers

2012-01-22T09:52:00.001-06:00

Yesterday, I summed up my reflections on the decision of the Obama administration to support the recommendation of the National Academy of Science's Institute for Medicine to assure access to contraception as part of a comprehensive health care plan for women, when I wrote,

Many of us, in fact, will be applauding the decision of the current administration to assure that women have access to contraceptive coverage in health care plans--if only because, among other reasons, we care about the value of life, and know that increasing access to contraceptives will diminish the abortions that the USCCB and its friends have always claimed they, too, desperately want to diminish at all cost.

In response to my posting, Crystal Watson provided a link to a recent posting of Bryan Cones at the U.S. Catholic blog site. Cones is reporting on a recent World Health Organization study of abortion rates worldwide. As this BBC News report on the study indicates, it finds that abortion rates around the world have remained steady at a rate of 28 per 1,000 women per year.

But the percentage of abortions that entail serious dangers to the lives of women is rising--particularly in the developing sectors of the world, and, specifically, in those nations that have the most restrictive abortion laws. Another finding of the study is that many nations with the most restrictive abortion laws of all actually show increases in abortion rates in recent years.

As Bryan Cones notes, these findings should give American pro-lifers cause to stop and think about their strategies vis-a-vis promoting the values of life. The American Catholic pro-life movement, as led by the U.S. Catholic bishops, has put all of its eggs into the basket of trying to reverse Roe v. Wade and return to the period in which abortion was criminalized in the U.S.

But abundant data from many sectors for many years now have suggested that when abortion is outlawed, women will still seek to have abortions--and while it does not decrease the number of abortions women have, criminalizing abortion significantly increases the danger of abortions.

And then there's this: as Cones notes, there's a clear link between preventing abortions and permitting women to have access to contraceptives, particularly in the developing parts of the globe in which access to contraceptives has been severely restricted for many women. Access to contraception prevents unplanned pregnancies and therefore prevents abortions.

Cones concludes,

But key to reducing abortions must also be preventing unintended pregnancies, especially giving women the power to decide when to conceive (and when not to). If being pro-life means being pro-women and pro-children already born in addition to being pro-unborn life, then perhaps it is time to focus equally on giving women power to decide when to get pregnant in the first place.

I think that the point Cones makes here is inarguable. It is intuitively obvious--and abundant empirical data support this conclusion--that broadening women's access to contraception and giving women more control over decisions about their reproductive lives diminishes rather than increases abortions.

And so it has long since seemed incomprehensible to me that those Catholics in the U.S. who argue most loudly that abortion should be the primary litmus test of our political choices, and stopping abortion at all costs should be the primary moral goal of the church at this point in history, also argue against women's access to birth control. And that these same ardent pro-lifers are now trying to press that point all over again in the debate about the HHS guidelines vis-a-vis contraception.

As I've said before, the only conclusion I can reach--and this is deeply saddening to me--when I look closely at the bishops' rhetoric and that of their media spokespersons about these issues is that they are motivated far less by the desire to serve the values of life as they oppose abortion and contraception, than by the desire to control and demean women. There's a boys' club mentality woven so deep into the clerical system--and it's shared by the centrist Catholic media gurus who go to bat for the USCCB--that scoring points against women seems to matter more to these old boys than preserving life.

No matter what they say to the contrary.

South Carolina Votes, and the Race Heads into the Gutter

2012-01-22T08:36:00.001-06:00

The New York Times judges that Mr. Gingrich "pulled the [Republican presidential] race into the gutter" in South Carolina. And it worked for him. Big-time.

It worked in a state 24% of whose voters described themselves as "very conservative" in 2000, but 37% of whom now say (after the election of the first African-American president in U.S. history) they're "very conservative," and two-thirds of whom are tea partiers. It is, always has been, and continues to be about race for a huge percentage of the Republican base--for the large majority of white Southern evangelical voters who shifted to the Republican party in the wake of Lyndon B. Johnson's (D.) Civil Rights act and Nixon's (R.) Southern strategy, and who now form the Republican base.

It's also about a quite specific, highly refracted and politicized, notion of religion as a vehicle of social discontent--a notion of religion deliberately cultivated by economic elites to keep the nation divided, confused, and unable to understand the economic sources from which its misery arises. That these themes would continue to dominate the thinking of South Carolinians is hardly surprising, since, as Thomas Schaller notes in his book Whistling Past Dixie, if there's a lost cause anywhere to be found--one that would bring the entire nation backwards rather than forwards--we can expect South Carolina to be at the very front of the troops battling for that cause.

And, in particular, for undying racism. It's about race. It is, always has been and continues to be about race for the Republican base. And about using a certain form of religion to control and demean those considered inferior, other, different in a stigmatizing way. And about keeping the very rich in control of the social and economic process, as we imagine that we're serving God by doing so.

Why the U.S. Catholic bishops and their media mouthpieces like Michael Sean Winters would ever have thought any of this misapplied religiosity and sham morality represents the future of a viable, humane society is beyond me to understand. Why they--and so many American Catholics of the intellectual center, who should know better and see better--have spent so many years now legitimating and arguing for this hot mess of racially tinged religiosity that is, at base, all about protecting and serving the very rich--is impossible for me to fathom.

This I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt: it has nothing at all to do with authentic Catholic values. Slapping the label "Catholic" on a hot mess like Newt Gingrich doesn't turn the mess into anything other than what it has always been. One big old hot mess.

Commemorating Etta James: "At Last"

2012-01-21T11:33:00.001-06:00

And to commemorate Etta James, the powerful and deep-souled blues singer who died yesterday at age 73, a performance of her iconic song "At Last." Born to a single mother who was often absent during her upbringing, James never knew her father. But, despite her lifelong struggles with addiction problems, she kept on keeping on, and produced significant vocal work that bridges rhythm and blues and rock and roll.

And she richly deserves to be remembered for all she offered us.

Obama Administration Rejects USCCB Pressure re: HHS Guidelines: Catholic Commentariat Reacts

2012-01-21T11:22:00.000-06:00

And, to piggyback on what I have just posted about the religious right's game plan to make the 2012 elections all about God--well, "God" of a highly refracted, politically selective sort--there's this interesting update: though I had predicted here in a number of postings that the Obama administration would cave to the considerable pressure of the highly funded U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' lobby as it demanded an expanded "conscience exemption" for Catholic institutions vis-a-vis contraceptive coverage in health care plans, the administration has just announced that it's going to implement the proposed HHS guidelines that recommend such coverage.

For reports on the decision, see Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches, Laura Bassett at Huffington Post, and Jessica Arons at Think Progress. The USCCB issued an inflammatory statement immediately, which I haven't seen as a press statement on the USCCB website, but which was disseminated yesterday by Catholic media figures who apparently had immediate access to it. These include, of course, Michael Sean Winters at National Catholic Reporter and Kevin Clarke at the America "In All Things" blog. Clarke had also published an initial summary of the administration's decision at the same blog site before the USCCB statement appeared.

Since Winters has been acting as an unofficial USCCB mouthpiece for some time now as the media have discussed this issue, he's predictably in fettle--though perhaps not fine fettle--now that a decision has been made to call the bishops' political bluff, and has just issued a hot postscript entitled, "J'ACCUSE!" (all caps and exclamation point in original) stating that he won't vote for Mr. Obama for dogcatcher or anything else, ever again.

Well, the dogcatcher bit is my embellishment. Michael states (disingenuously, in my estimation) that he's not a Catholic special-pleader and not anti-contraception--but he immediately undercuts the latter statement by adding, ". . . I must say that Humanae Vitae in its entirety reads better, and more presciently, every year." (Remember that, as I've pointed out constantly in my responses to Winters on the HHS contraceptive-guidelines issue, he's claimed from the outset that the debate was never about contraception--when it patently was about contraception all along, and about his and other Catholics' attempt to enforce conformity to the teaching of Humanae Vitae years after the huge majority of Catholics have rejected that teaching and have continued to claim Catholic identity despite our dissent from magisterial teaching about sexual ethics.)

Michael's primary reason for accusing Obama of treason: it's all about conscience. It's about the "rights of conscience" and freedom of conscience. It's about--this goes without saying--the rights of the bishops' consciences and the freedom of the bishops' consciences. Nowhere in Winters's arguments does any recognition of the rights of the consciences of the vast percentage of the Catholic laity who not only approve of but use contraceptives ever crop up. Not at a single point.

It's as if all those brother and sister Catholics simply do not exist. As if they do not matter. As if they do not have consciences at all. Only he and his USCCB cronies exhibit conscience, we're supposed to imagine.

And so Mr. Obama is, Winters proposes, attacking Holy Mother Church (yes, he does use that phrase) by accepting the recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine that preventive health care for women should, as a matter of course, include access to contraception. Michael's wild, over-the-top conclusion:

[T]he president’s decision yesterday essentially told us, as Catholics, that there is no room in this great country of ours for the institutions our Church has built over the years to be Catholic in ways that are important to us . . .

It did nothing of the sort, of course. Nothing about yesterday's decision implies that Catholic institutions--many of which have already been providing contraceptive coverage in their health care plans--will cease to function or are being shut down by a decision to assure that all employers provide contraceptive coverage in health care plans. And yesterday's decision only "essentially told us, as Catholics" that the administration does not support us and our institutions if we buy into magisterial teaching about contraception.

The large majority of us do not. And, despite what Michael and the bishops want to tell us, we do have consciences. And we use our consciences, and have been using them in our decision to dissent from magisterial teaching about contraception.

The assault on Catholic conscience implied in Winters's assessment of the administration's decision--the refusal to respect or even admit the existence of widespread faithful dissent from magisterial teaching about birth control--reflects the equally outrageous rhetoric of the USCCB old boys' club for which he's a media mouthpiece. The USCCB press statement that Michael reprints in his first piece on the HHS decision for which I provide a link above states,

"The government should not force Americans to act as if pregnancy is a disease to be prevented at all costs," added Cardinal-designate Dolan.

I suspect it will come as a great surprise to the 90+ of faithful Catholics in the U.S. who have long since chosen to use contraceptives that they are making this choice because they regard pregnancy as "a disease to be prevented at all costs." What this implies about the maturity of Catholics' conscience--about the rights of the consciences of Catholics--is odious. It's distasteful in the extreme.

This inflammatory, rightward-skewed (and politically charged) statement tramples on the rights of the consciences of millions of Catholics by implying that the large percentage of faithful Catholics who choose on grounds of conscience to use birth control are doing so to prevent a non-existent "disease" of pregnancy. And not because they choose to exercise good stewardship in their reproductive lives and with their reproductive choices, employing the medical technology at their disposal in this area as they use medical technology in every other area of their lives to be good stewards of their bodies and resources.

I began these reflections by noting that I'm piggybacking on what I wrote earlier today about the hyped-up "religious" rhetoric of the 2012 election cycle--a campaign in which the religious right is doing everything in its power to assure that a Republican, any Republican, be handed the White House in 2012. To their discredit, what the American Catholic bishops chose to do by drawing an artificial line in the sand with their demand for an expanded "conscience exemption" is all about playing dirty politics, and nothing else. It's about colluding in the strategy of the religious right in general during this campaign cycle to assure that a Republican be elected in 2012 and the Obama administration evicted from the White House.

The USCCB has artificially manufactured a non-existent controversy about the HHS contraceptive guidelines as a political tool to try to muster Catholic opposition to the Democrats in 2012. The demand for an expanded "conscience exemption" came along during this campaign cycle years down the road after many Catholic institutions long since decided to cover contraceptives in their health care plans.

Even the fringe-right Catholic college, Belmont Abbey, which is now suing the federal government about the HHS guidelines, was already providing contraceptive coverage in its health care plan up to 2007, until its then new president William Thierfelder, who came to the college through an ad in the Legionaries of Christ-owned National Catholic Register, suddenly "discovered" that the college health care plan covered contraception and, without consulting the faculty, unilaterally chose to discontinue this coverage. This despite the fact that the Benedictine monastery that owns Belmont Abbey College owns the land on which a lucrative shopping center nearby is located, where a number of stores make a great deal of money selling contraceptives--money that then pours into the monastic coffers by way of rent.

The controversy over Catholic institutions' coverage of contraception in health care plans is an artificially engineered one. It's being created at the very top of the Catholic church in order to score political points for the Republican party in the 2012 elections. The pope himself is part and parcel of this political strategy, as his remarks about "radical secularism" and religious freedom two days ago to a group of U.S. Catholic bishops making their ad limina visits suggest.

And it's perhaps all to the good that the decision the Obama administration has just made has now caused at least one of the centrist Catholic media commentators who purports to be a liberal Democrat but who has shilled unabashedly for the USCCB and the religious right to come out of the closet. It's not in the least a surprise to hear that Michael Sean Winters defends Humanae Vitae and supports the bishops when they attempt to reduce the rights of Catholic consciences to the rights of their own consciences.

These penchants have, after all, been barely disguised in everything he's written about these issues in recent years, and it's good that the public now knows what the game plan has been all along with Michael Sean Winters, and, implicitly, with all the so-called liberal-centrist Catholic media gurus who profess to lean left while they do everything in their power to try to beat the Democratic party into submission to the will of the Catholic bishops, as if those governing the United States have some special responsibility to consult the bishops as they make governing decisions in a pluralistic secular democracy.

Whether Michael's defection portends the defection of all Catholics from the Democrats in 2012, as he seems to think it will, remains to be seen. I suspect that those Catholics who intended to oppose Mr. Obama in the 2012 elections have long since made up their mind to do so, and the decision about the HHS guidelines--that is, about a game being played by beltway powerbrokers who only imagine that they speak for the rest of us--will simply confirm what they've already chosen to believe.

And I continue to maintain that more Catholics have--and use--conscience than Michael and the bishops want to think. And if the moral and political conclusions to which many of us Catholics come are not the same moral and political conclusions Michael Sean Winters and the bishops reach, they are every bit as much conscience-based as the ones to which Winters and the bishops exclusively apply the term "rights of conscience." Many of us, in fact, will be applauding the decision of the current administration to assure that women have access to contraceptive coverage in health care plans--if only because, among other reasons, we care about the value of life, and know that increasing access to contraceptives will diminish the abortions that the USCCB and its friends have always claimed they, too, desperately want to diminish at all cost.

Religious Right Redivivus: Commentary on the Newt's Ascendancy

2012-01-21T09:37:00.001-06:00

Good commentary in the past two days on how the Newt has managed to reinvent himself as the religious right's latest, best go-to boy, despite his spectacularly sordid past and his history of egregious failure as a Republican party leader. This may well be the political story of the year--an illuminatory narrative about the extent to which a highly refracted, politically charged religiosity--of a sort--continues to drive the political future of the nation with the soul of a church. And about the bottomless pit of cynicism from which that highly selective political religiosity of a sort emanates.

At Talk to Action, Rachel Tabachnick does an outstanding job of summarizing precisely why the religious right is choosing to rehabilitate the warmed over mess that is Newt as its latest anointed-of-God go-to boy. One of her points--"Of the remaining candidates, Gingrich best verbalizes the politics of resentment"--also forms the centerpiece of Charles Blow's analysis of the Newt's sudden surge in the New York Times today.

Blow notes the cynical political calculation underlying the Newt's decision to play to the resentments of the religious-right base that is now the Republican party tout court, particularly in its demographic heartland, the South. Hence the overt racism Newt is now willing to parade proudly in South Carolina, the dog whistles about political correctness and liberal intellectual and media elites: Blow writes,

In steps Gingrich, with more baggage than Prince Akeem in “Coming to America.” But many Republicans are willing to forgive his flaws and his past because he connects with a silent slice of their core convictions — their deep-seated, long-simmering issues with an “elite” media bias, minority “privilege” and Obama’s “otherness.”

And more valuable commentary about how the religious right has deliberately strategized to make the 2012 elections all about "God": Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State writing in Alternet. This article is one from earlier in January that Alternet appears to be featuring again now that Newt's star is rising in South Carolina.

Boston notes that this primary season has been unusually "religion-soaked," with God informing people right and left about His predilection for first this and then that candidate: Republicans who have claimed that God tapped them on the shoulder and commanded that they run include Mr. Cain, Ms. Bachmann, and Mr. Perry. God has also communicated with Mr. Santorum's wife about His particular delight in Mr. Santorum. (And it shouldn't be forgotten that God has also been busy communicating with that stalwart old warhorse of the religious right, Rev. Robertson, who has had private alerts from the Deity informing him of the identity of the president-to-be.)

Also well worth reading: Adele Stan's analysis of how Gingrich's ascendancy demonstrates that the religious right's defense of family values has never been about family values in the least. It's a defense of patriarchy. The religious right is more than ready to forgive the Newt his serial marriages and adulteries, even while it trumpets its commitment to "traditional" marriage, because the family values crusade has never been about saving marriage in the first place.

It has been about assuring that entitled men remain on top. Entitled. And, as I noted yesterday, boys' clubs always manage to find ways to excuse the adultery of powerful men who happen to be club members. They're even capable of suggesting, as Dr. Keith Ablow has just done, that persistent adultery and serial monogamy actually make a man more eminently qualified for leadership positions. Since the adultery and serial monogamy demonstrate his power . . . .

They're even capable of pushing these arguments precisely as they simultaneously advance arguments about how gay folks represent an incomparable threat to the institution of marriage as it has traditionally been conceived. Boys' clubs are capable of any and all arguments--no matter how blatantly cynical and patently morally vacuous--that promote the power of heterosexual men over everyone else in the world.

And if the religious right is anything at all, it's a boys' club. Even if some of the old boys in the club do happen to be boys of the opposite gender.

Republican Party and the South: Then-and-Now, An Addendum

2012-01-20T14:17:00.001-06:00

In what I posted earlier today, I also intended to note Dr. Wilson Bachelor's view of the death penalty. That detail somehow got away from me when I finalized the posting, and so here is this small addendum:

In an undated essay (but one probably written in the 1890s), he explicitly addresses the death penalty. That's, in fact, the focus of the essay, which argues that capital punishment is a "relic of barbarianism" in civilized societies. And he notes that, when the death penalty was abolished in Holland, Switzerland, Portugal, Belgium, Rumania, and Michigan, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Maine, crime did not increase.

And so he concludes that the death penalty does not deter crime, but to the contrary, it hardens the sensibilities of everyone in a society that employs capital punishment and, ironically, increases the likelihood of violent crimes:

So far from preventing crime it seems often to stimulate it by blunting the sensibilities, hardening the heart and strangely fascinating the animal propensities.

He also observes that "sometimes innocent people are executed," and notes that the legal system is set up to serve the needs of the ruling class, and the use of the death penalty is radically skewed against those on the bottom of society--making its use even more barbaric and unacceptable in civilized societies.

In this and another essay he appears to have written in the same period, he also addresses the phenomenon of lynching, which was becoming horrifically common in the American South in the 1890s, as every attempt possible was made by white citizens who had regained control of the political process once Reconstruction had ended to push black citizens back into a state of semi-servitude, and to use terroristic tactics to achieve this end.

In his essay "Hellhounds" in the book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000), ed. James Allen, Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack, Litwack notes that in the late 19th and early 20th century, two or three black Southerners were hanged, burned at the stake, or quietly murdered every week (p. 12). In the 1890s, Litwack indicates, an average of 139 lives were claimed each year by lynching in the U.S. (almost exclusively in the Southern states), and the vast majority of the victims of these crimes were black (ibid.). Few who engaged in these activities were ever brought to trial (p. 20), and juries routinely concluded that those lynched had met their deaths at the hands of unknown parties even when an entire community knew who had done the lynching (p. 20).

Echoing his essay on the death penalty, Dr. Bachelor's essay on the "mob rule" that lynchings represented concludes,

What is the leading spirit of a Mob? Answer: Revenge. Every good citizen should say down with mob law. Let the courts and juries do their duties fearlessly and people should be satisfied. Appeal to mob law is to enthrone a Robespierre and inaugurate a reign of terror. It is a relict of barbarianism, a twin sister of medieval cruelty, a stigma on the intelligence of the nineteenth century.

Again, that was then. This is a Republican leader in the backwards state of Arkansas writing towards the end of the 19th century to challenge some of the prevailing (and, often, church-endorsed and even church-promoted) attitudes of his culture--in the name of core principles of the Republican party of which he was a local leader.

That was then. This is decidedly not how Republicans behave today. Certainly not in their heartland, the Southern states of the U.S.

The Republican Party and the South: A Then-and-Now Perspective

2012-01-20T12:23:00.000-06:00

Wilson Bachelor (1827-1903), Arkansas Republican Leader

In that posting taking note of Fr. Martin's recent call for renewed respect, compassion, and sensitivity among Catholics as they deal with their gay brothers and sisters, I noted that the recurring cycles of disdain openly vented in the American political context against those who are gay (vented with overt Catholic complicity in many cases) tend to wear on me. More than just a tad.

The racism, the homophobia, the toxic discourse now commonplace in our political process, the downright lies: these have me worn to a nubbin as this work week ends. But there's another, a quite specific and discrete, reason that I'm finding this election cycle especially hard to bear. This has to do with the work I'm doing on that book about which I've told readers.

As my previous comments have noted, I'm working on a transcription of (and commentary about) a diary, a collection of essays, and some letters written by a pioneer doctor in Arkansas in the latter part of the 19th century.* This man also happens to have been a Republican leader in the northwest part of the state. He came to Arkansas after having been placed by the federal government as physician in charge at the national cemetery at Pittsburg Landing in Tennessee when it began to be constructed--the cemetery that later became Shiloh National Cemetery.

And so, in addition to commenting on matters medical, his writings also often comment on political issues of his period. And when I compare what one Republican leader was writing in the postbellum period in an isolated and rather backwards Southern state with what the leaders of the Republican party now want to maintain, I'm shocked by the discrepancy between where this political party once found itself, and where it is now. Wilson Bachelor, the subject of the book on which I'm collaborating, would have been run out on a rail--and very quickly--by any Republican party group about which I have any knowledge today. And most certainly by the Republican party in Arkansas, who might have tried to hang, draw, and quarter the man as an infidel, before they resorted to the rail-running.

Here are some of the things I find him writing in the occasional pieces I'm now reading and drafting footnotes about:

1. Slavery: In an undated letter-essay he wrote to U.S. Representative Thomas Boles (R-Arkansas) that appears to have been composed around 1892, he writes,

Now I ask was it not a higher civilization and more liberal ideas that freed the slave? Of course it was. For there is not a highly civilized nation on earth that today enslaved a Race.

2. Science and religion: that same letter also states,

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

3. Women's rights: in an undated letter-essay he wrote to the editor of a local newspaper sometime in the 1890s, evidently with the intent that it be published as a kind of op-ed piece, he sharply critiques the religiously based notion that women should be subjugated to men, and he writes,

I contend the emancipation and elevation of women to be the first step in "Societal Parity". So long ss she remains a slave subject to a Master having no rights of her own, "Societal Parity" is hampered. Give her all the rights of womanhood.

4. Workers' rights: again and again throughout his writings, Dr. Bachelor stresses the need to safeguard and promote the rights of workers, of the laboring poor. An example: as the 1893 world's fair was being planned, churches and Christian organizations around the nation called on people to pressure Congress to withhold funding from this event unless the fair closed on Sunday. Christians from all across the U.S. were urged to send petitions to Congress demanding Sabbath closing of the fair. As Josephine C. Bateham, a leader of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, stated at the time, this crusade was necessary because the nation was at a turning point and would fall apart if Christians lost control of the political process: "If the Christianity of the nation can control this question, they can control the career of this country," she wrote.

Dr. Bachelor opposed the attempt to force government to do the bidding of the churches here for two reasons. The first was that the intrusion of churches in secular decisions obliterated the line between church and state. But the second was that the people on whose backs the Sabbath closing would primarily fall were working people who had no other day to attend the fair. He wrote,

Is it a National sin and crime to let the poor people see the Fair on Sunday, the only day they can lose, for they cannot afford to lose a single day's pay during the working days? At the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1870 70,000 laborers and mechanics pleaded for admission on Sunday but were refused through the influence of the Clergy. At the coming world Fair ten times that number will be turned away if it is closed on Sunday. Will this be treating the poor people right? The wealthy can go to their fine carriages through the week and rest and go to church on Sunday but not so with poor laboring men.

5. Church-state relationship: as the preceding remarks indicate, Dr. Bachelor also stoutly opposed the attempt of faith-based communities to dictate to and control the political process. In that same essay on Sabbath closing and the 1893 world's fair, he wrote,

This incessant talk about Sunday laws and Christian government is enough to make one tired. This is not a Christian government. George Washington said, "The government of the United States is not a Christian government." George Washington said, "The government of the United States is not in any way founded on the Christian religion." Nor is it true that Christianity is the common law of our country. The name of God is not in our Constitution neither is it used when a President of the United States takes the oath of office.

6. The political process and orthodoxy litmus tests: Dr. Bachelor was dismayed by what he saw as a growing trend to impose litmus tests in the political sphere, requiring political leaders to sign onto one or another statement assuring their political or religious orthodoxy. He saw this as a development that would corrupt the political process and foster hypocrisy among political leaders. On the eve of the 1892 elections, when he found promise in neither the Republican nor the Democratic presidential candidate, he wrote,

I see the signs of the times point to the future when politics will determine everything. When a man now proposes to run for an Office in some place, he is asked if he is for or against license or alliance. In others is he of a labor organization. The time is coming when he will be asked if he is a Catholic or Methodist or Baptist or Agnostic and according to the answer he will be boycotted or supported. This tends to make politics more corrupt for candidates will be, and act the hypocrites for votes. While I deprecate this tendency, I accept this situation and hold liberty of thought above all political organizations.

7. The corrupting influence of money on the political process: as the political process grew increasingly corrupt on all sides in the gilded age, as money flowed on both sides of the partisan system to assure control of the political process by the super-rich, Dr. Bachelor wrote in 1896,

Urged on by cheap orators of school house notoriety, the greed for money and office makes men pour their phillipics and vituperations upon the government and lawmaking power, as all are wanting government Pap.

A bipartisan political system controlled by the super-rich, who employ orthodoxy litmus tests to control political discussion, fosters corruption and hypocrisy. This nation was not founded to be a theocracy. Permitting religious bodies to control the political sphere contributes to political corruption. Workers, women, and people of color have human rights that must be defended by political leaders if we expect to build a more humane world. When we permit religious belief to dictate science, we erode the foundations of civilized societies working towards a more humane world:

All of these points were being made, I repeat, by a Republican leader in the isolated, backwards state of Arkansas in the latter half of the 19th century. Not a single one of them would be acceptable today to the Republican party as it is now constituted. If we want to see what that party now is and what it has made of itself, we need, as Ben Adler writes from Greenville, South Carolina, yesterday, to look carefully at the state of South Carolina, where the religious right completely controls the political process--and where the real Republican party is on full display for all of us to see in the primary debates now occurring there.

Not a heartening picture, particularly when one studies the history of this party and sees what it might have made of itself, after its leaders courageously took the morally correct side vis-a-vis slavery in the middle of the 19th century. The disconnect between that might-have-been history and the party we now see center-stage in South Carolina: it's downright dismaying for anyone who believes that people do have the possibility of learning, growing, developing, changing. And learning from their mistakes.

And learning from history about dead-ends and cul de sacs, and how dangerous it is for leaders to move bodies of people and nations down roads that lead in those directions. If the goal of those leaders is or ever has been to build a better, more humane society for all of us.

P.S. Please see the addendum to this post here.

*I should note that descendants of Wilson Bachelor who own the original documents have generously made them available to the group of us collaborating on this book. They are themselves collaborators in the project, and will be credited when the book is published. I'm not mentioning them here by name since I don't want to invade their privacy--but I do want to acknowledge their generosity, without which none of this scholarship could be taking place.

More Commentary on Newt's Infidelities: Ablow and Sullivan

2012-01-20T10:12:00.001-06:00

Dr. Keith Ablow, Media Matters' "LGBT Misinformer of the Year," offers a Bluebeard argument for how the Newt's multiple woman make him eminently qualified to be POTUS: if three women in a row fell for him, two of those knowing he was married, he must be full of "emotional energy and intellect."

Well, full of something. And so is Ablow, imho. But whatever both of these gentlemen are full of, it's not the stuff of which leaders building a humane society are made. Not in any shape, form, or fashion.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan, predictably and to his discredit, finds Newt the adulterer just a man. Just a man with a libido like all other men.

And so his former wife is "bitter, bitter, bitter" because she dares to tell the world on the eve of his South Carolina primary race that he wanted an open marriage.

These predictable (and hugely self-congratulatory and self-exculpating) memes of powerful insider men--it's just what men do; it actually proves their manhood and powerful intellects and emotional dominance--are more than a little misogynistic, it seems to me. And more than a little male-entitled.

We need to move beyond these predictable male-entitled forms of political and moral analysis, if we expect ever to become a more humane society. We need to move beyond blaming "bitter" women for decrying the damage male-entitled infidelity does to them. We need to move to a form of social analysis that looks not at the pseudo-biological basis for male infidelity (and the "natural" male right to dominate and use) to social analysis that looks at the unfair ways in which powers is distributed and operates in our world.

We need, in other words, to get outside the confines of the boys' club and realize that the world has a lot more interesting voices in it than the tiny few to which we listen obsessively, inside our privileged male beltway clubs. We need to do this, that is, if we truly expect to build a more humane society for all--gays and lesbians and women included.

Minnesota, Catholic Church, Marriage Amendment: Tom Roberts Updates the Story

2012-01-20T09:33:00.001-06:00

I just mentioned Michael Bayly in my previous posting about Phil Ewing's Blue-Eyed Ennis site. Michael's contributions to the Catholic blogosphere also received well-deserved notice yesterday in something Tom Roberts posted at the National Catholic Reporter site.

As I mentioned midweek, in Minnesota right now, where the Catholic bishops of the state have done everything possible to turn the Catholic church into a lean, mean political machine to help pass a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, the state's top prelate, Archbishop John Nienstedt, continues to issue threats to punish any priests who refuse to toe the church's anti-gay party line. One doughty priest in the area, Fr. Michael Tegeder, has refused to shut up about his discomfort at seeing the Catholic church turn itself into a political machine.

I blogged about Fr. Tegeder, who first began challenging the transformation of his state's Catholic community into a political machine, back in October 2010. At that time, Fr. Tegeder was raising pointed questions about the choice of the Catholic bishops of Minnesota to take what appears to have been a large sum of money from an unnamed donor(s) to create an expensive c.d. that was then mailed to every Catholic household in the state, to reinforce the message that the Catholic church stands against same-sex marriage.

This video went out on the eve of the state's gubernatorial election, in which same-sex marriage was never a significant issue, but in which a single gubernatorial candidate, Republican Tom Emmer, was on the books vocally opposing same-sex marriage. And so the bishops' choice to send out this video was widely regarded (in my view, correctly so) as a form of political lobbying for Emmer--hence the concern that Catholic bishops in many places today are choosing to turn the Catholic church into a partisan political machine, one with a specifically anti-gay intent.

Tom Roberts' article updates the story of Fr. Tegeder's continuing opposition to this politicization of his state's Catholic church. And at the end of the article, Roberts provides a number of links to sites with valuable resources for anyone seeking to follow this story. These links include Michael Bayly's Progressive Catholic Voice site.

Resources for Catholic Conversations with Gay Folks: Phil Ewing's Blue-Eyed Ennis Site

2012-01-20T09:10:00.000-06:00

Fra Bartolommeo, "Christ Appearing on the Road to Emmaus"

As the work week ends, I want to take notice of several valuable resources that have appeared recently at Phil Ewing's beautiful Blue-Eyed Ennis site. As I noted in a posting several days ago, Fr. James Martin recently posted a piece at the America blog site, calling for Catholics to give renewed attention to the catechetical teaching that gay and lesbian persons should be treated with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. My brief response to Fr. Martin's posting is at the first link above.

Phil has chosen to follow Fr. Martin's posting by doing a considerable amount of online research to gather together valuable resources from powerful contemporary gay Catholic thinkers including Michael Bayly and James Alison. Her posting gathering these resources together is here.

I like very much Phil's statement about why she cares enough to spend time she had earmarked as down time doing this online digging, when she herself is not gay. As she notes, she has a number of friends who are gay and who have shared with her their pain at being defined by a Christian institution as objectively disordered. A common thread in the stories she hears from her friends is that they began to have inklings that they were gay when they were very young.

And so Phil asks, What harm do Christian communities do to young people who are beginning to sense that they are gay, when these communities define gay people as disordered? for

Phil cares--as a faithful Catholic, she walks along with fellow human beings who happen to be gay--because a great deal hinges, for young, developing human beings, on what the church teaches and does vis-a-vis those who are gay. And how people of faith behave towards those who are gay.

A study done by the Public Religion Research Institute in the U.S. finds that two-thirds of Americans believe that the messages given to gay young people by faith communities contribute to the phenomenon of gay teen suicide. We cannot unlink the statements and behavior of people of faith from what happens to young gay and lesbian persons. We cannot absolve ourselves of responsibility for the young by pretending that this link does not exist--and that what we say and do regarding these issues does not have significant implications for young, developing human beings.

And these insights, which Phil develops in the posting to which the link above points, are further developed in a follow-up posting she's just made, drawing her readers' attention to a series of videos produced in 2008 when the group Acceptance Sydney sponsored a forum for LGBT youth during the Catholic World Youth Day in Australia.

I haven't yet had a chance to watch any of the videos to which this link points (and I haven't, in fact, had a chance to re-read most of the resources to which Phil's first posting leads--I've read most of them in the past). I do look forward to watching the videos, though, and re-reading Michael Bayly's and James Alison's essays, both which I found full of wisdom and inspiration when I first read them.

Most of all, I'm grateful to Phil for being a compañera (Luke 24:13-35) who cares enough to walk along with her brothers and sisters who happen to have been created gay. As I note in my response to Fr. James Martin's welcome words about respect, compassion, and sensitivity, nothing much will change as long as the considerations remain at the level of words.

Solidarity requires action. It requires walking along with others on the margins--in this case, with those who are gay. One's ears can't really be open to the testimony of those who are gay until one walks a while alongside someone who is gay. Until one walks the same road in the same pair of shoes for a while.

As Phil says, this is imperative, when it comes to gay young people. It's imperative if we care about whether those young people will have any kind of bright future at all. If we care about whether they will even have a life.

I'm deeply grateful to Phil for caring, as a Catholic woman of faith (who also happens to have one of the most moving and gorgeous Catholic blogs anywhere on line, one that makes me wonder, every time I visit it, why on earth I'm wasting my time piddling with this blog when the likes of Blue-Eyed Ennis is out there to feed people's spirits.)

Politics, Strange Bedfellows, the LDS-Catholic Alliance, and Mr. Gingrich

2012-01-19T11:42:00.005-06:00

Well, maybe I spoke too soon when I noted previously the irony of the Catholic-Mormon alliance to defend the "traditional" model of family. As I said, the Catholic and Mormon understandings of what makes family tick couldn't be further apart, when the former preaches the one-man, one-woman, for-life model, and the latter has roots going back to its very foundations that have comprised polygamous models of marriage.

If Marianne Ginther Gingrich is speaking truth when she now says that the Newt wanted an "open marriage" with her and Callista--Newt + Marianne + Callista--then the Catholic model of marriage may, indeed, be closer to the Mormon model than I had previously realized.

Callista being a "devout Catholic," of course. And the ostensible cause for Newt's conversion to Catholicism.

The old saying, Politics makes for strange bedfellows, surely does seem to apply to the Mormon-Catholic alliance to defend "traditional" family and "traditional" marriage. But in the case of Newt the Catholic (and now, it seems, of the Catholic bishops through their alliance with the Mormons), it might need to be altered to read, Politics makes for many bedfellows.

And Newt endorsed the right-wing Christian "marriage pledge," saying he "uphold[s] the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my spouse and respect for the marital bonds of others"? Has the man no shame at all?

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Mormons Join Catholic Bishops' Discrimination Party in Minnesota

2012-01-19T09:35:00.001-06:00

Guess who's coming to dinner? The dinner being the discrimination-gala the Catholic bishops of Minnesota have been throwing the past few years, as they make combating the gays and the human rights of gay citizens their major priority.

The new dinner guests (to no one's real surprise): the Mormons. As Joanna Brooks (she's Mormon herself, it's worth noting, but someone who has consistently supported gay rights) reports at Religion Dispatches yesterday, this past Sunday LDS church leaders read a statement in all LDS churches throughout Minnesota encouraging Mormons to work to pass the amendment to the state constitution that Minnesota's Catholic bishops are actively promoting--to ban same-sex marriage in the state.

The decision of Minnesota Mormons to jump openly into this particular political fray will inevitably bring back memories for many folks of the strong support the LDS church gave to proposition 8 in California. Mormon money and Mormon organizational skills carried the day in California in stripping the right of civil marriage from gay citizens of that state.

Political activist Fred Karger has carefully studied the LDS involvement in the prop 8 battle in California. Karger has amassed very strong evidence that, behind the scenes, the LDS church more or less funded the entire proposition 8 machine, and that it funneled money through hidden channels directly from Mormon churches and Salt Lake City into the political operations in California, using its religious tax-exempt status as a shield to avoid disclosure of its use of church funds to carry out a political campaign.

What's happening in Minnesota will also bring back memories for many people of the decision that the Catholic archbishop of San Francisco, George Niederauer, made in the prop 8 campaign to bring Mormons into the picture. Niederauer had previously been the Catholic bishop of Salt Lake City, and he knew Mormon organizational skills (and Mormon money) well. As many news outlets reported during the prop 8 battle, Niederauer apparently worked out an agreement with LDS leaders that had the Mormon church footing the campaign financially and through its extensive pool of volunteer workers, while the Catholic church carried the campaign forward in the public sphere and media--since Mormons have a history of being distrusted by the American mainstream and did not want to court negative publicity for their church by taking a high public profile in the prop 8 campaign.

As I noted recently when I spoke about the endorsement of Romney's candidacy by a group of former ambassadors to the Vatican, there's no little irony about the fact that two churches with such wildly divergent understandings of what family is all about are now openly and actively colluding in the battle to save the "traditional" family. With its history of openness in its very foundations and at the very top of its structures to the idea of polygamy and with its various other non-standard (from the viewpoint of Christian orthodoxy) theological embellishments, the Mormon theology of the family could not be more different from the Catholic notion of family.

And so one has to ask precisely what notion of the "traditional" family--apart from the exclusion of same-sex couples from any model of family--the two churches imagine they're collaborating in defending, as they work first in California and now in Minnesota to defend the "traditional" family. What is clear is that this is an alliance that the Catholic right (including the U.S. Catholic bishops) has been working very hard to cement--a judgment confirmed by the announcement in 2010 by the Mormon-owned newspaper in Salt Lake City, Deseret News, that it had invited the éminence grise of Catholic right-wing intellectual life (and mastermind of the Manhattan Declaration) Robert P. George to join its editorial board.

One can only conclude that the animating force of this LDS-Catholic alliance to defend the "traditional" family is not the traditional family at all, since the two churches do not share a theology of family that is in any way congruent. What's driving the alliance is blatant prejudice against those who are gay and lesbian, and the need of both churches, with their completely discrepant notions of family, to exclude gay and lesbian citizens from the notion of family. And from a civil right enacted through the decisions of the civil secular sphere, when it chooses to permit same-sex couples to marry.

Notions of family (or of religion, for that matter) that need to be built around excluding, discriminating, demeaning minorities and stripping away their rights, coercing the public sphere to do the bidding of religious groups: how viable can these be, when such a price has to be paid to maintain them? History seldom judges such raw discrimination practiced in the name of religion as a praiseworthy demonstration of the power of religious belief and religious ideas.

The graphic is a photograph of the past president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Francis George, greeting members of the LDS Quorum of the Twelve Apostles M. Russell Ballard and Quentin L. Cook in Salt Lake City in February 2010.

American Marines Urinating on Enemy Corpses: Jerry Lembcke's Moral Analysis

2012-01-19T08:38:00.004-06:00

The conclusion to Jerry Lembcke's thoughtful and morally sensitive analysis at NCR of the photos circulating online, showing U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban members they had just shot:

It is said that pictures can be worth a thousand words, but it will take many thousands of words to write the back-story of the pictures coming home from the new American wars of the 21st century.

When the clouds of denial, confusion and excuse-making generated by the photographs are parted, we'll see beyond the insensitivity and narcissism of the posing poseurs and see the still-uglier sight of a country that lost its sense of place in history, its people supporting wars only because the troops have been sent to fight them, its troops displaying their own degradation as a badge of honor.

The empty spectacle of the absurd that our American political campaigns have become: it's a counterpoint to, a complementary diptych piece for, the hyper-macho, brutal, militarized self-image that is now dominating American cultural life these days. The two go hand in hand, and have been designed to go together by the 1% who now control the political process and who positively need for the rest of us to engage in the theater of political absurdity and the defiant swaggering and posturing and enemy-bashing.

Because otherwise we might wake up to the real danger against which we should be directing our energies, if we want to save our democracy from the ruin into which it has long since begun to head under the control of the super-rich.

(To complement the graphic, a famous quotation from Lincoln's first inaugural address:

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stre[t]ching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.)

Newt Spotting in South Carolina

2012-01-19T08:18:00.001-06:00

Red-Spotted Newt

With his star ascending in the Palmetto state, the Newt is back in the news in a big way this morning.

Joan Walsh reports that the Newt's raw, cynical race-baiting is playing well in South Carolina, where a voter told him yesterday, "I would like to thank you for putting Mr. Juan Williams in his place." Said voter being white, of course, and Mr. Williams being black--a subtext that can never be ignored when one talks about precisely why the white South became and remains solidly Republican.

But evangelical voters (who predominate in South Carolina) are debating whether they can forgive Newt his serial marriages and multiple infidelities. As Walsh reports, Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, who endorsed Santorum early on, is finding it hard to understand how some other evangelical women can whitewash Newt's past. She told Ariel Levy at the New Yorker recently,

Initially, my reaction to Newt Gingrich and to Callista is that the third wife doesn’t get to be the First Lady. I came at it completely believing that evangelical women would not even consider him, and I’ve been surprised by their willingness to listen and forgive. I attended an event he had here with evangelicals, and there were some pretty tough questions. The most interesting thing to me was not the answers but how he handled them. The old Newt that I knew would not have handled it very well, but this Newt did. He really tried to divine what was at the heart of the question and didn’t come across as rude or arrogant.

But then she concluded,

We cannot allow Newt Gingrich or anyone else’s moral failure to be used as an excuse by others for their own wrongdoing and saying "Hey, I can still be President!"

And as Steve Kornacki and others are also reporting, things may become even hotter for the Newt if ABC airs, as the rumor-mill says it will, a tell-all "Nightline" interview this evening with Newt's second wife Marianne Ginther Gingrich. It was to Marianne that he said, when he informed her that he had traded her in for a new model, Callista, with whom he'd been having an affair,

It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.

This was when she asked him how he could return from having delivered a glowing family-values speech to inform his wife when he got home that he was cheating on her. And this was when Newt was spearheading the movement to have President Clinton impeached for his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

As both Walsh and Kornacki also note, Newt may face trouble when Romney's big money machine revs itself up and starts reminding memory-challenged voters of who Newt really was in the 1990s, as Republican house speaker, when his ill-tempered outbursts, imperious and non-collegial ways, plain flaky self-aggrandizing proclamations, and unrelenting desire to pick symbolic fights with the Democrats (keeping himself center-stage) ran the party into the ground.

And because none of this--or the infidelities and hypocrisy of promoting "family values" while carrying on multiple affairs--has ever been a big secret, I remain floored by two memes that continue to be shopped around by the beltway commentariat, some Catholic journalists included. One is the meme of Newt the intellectual giant, which Michael Sean Winters was still trying (shamefully, in my view) to keep alive at National Catholic Reporter as late as yesterday (and a reader has called him on this).

The other is the meme of Callista the devout Catholic. This has been everywhere in the mainstream media throughout the campaign--e.g., here at NPR towards the end of December. Salty it may be, and coming out of the mouth of a gay ex-Catholic, but I'll take Dan Savage's assessment of that meme over the dishonesty of the meme itself.

Because Savage tells the truth. What these other "reporters" imagine they're telling with the memes of Newt the genius and Callista the devout Catholic is beyond me. Truth it decidedly does not appear to be.

Richard Rapaport Echoes James Petigru on South Carolina: "Too Big to Be an Asylum"

2012-01-18T10:41:00.000-06:00

At Salon, Richard Rapaport takes a good look at South Carolina's long, long history of refractory behavior that puts the future of the entire nation on the bargaining table, until South Carolinians get their way. Rappaport finds the Palmetto state proud, reactionary, and more than a little crazy--echoing the state's native son James L. Petigru, who once observed that the state is "too small to be a republic, too big to be an asylum."

At Huffington Post, Jesse Jackson notes that the proud, defiant, refractory, and very raw race-baiting that has been taking place in South Carolina with Republican candidates for the presidency shows just how far we still have to go as a nation. And he's right.

Just this past week, I happened on an article in the December 1937 issue of the Rotarian magazine which simultaneously suggests to me how far along we have come in terms of racial awareness and relationships in the U.S., and how far we still have to go--as leading political figures in this nation campaigning for the highest office in the land continue to stir the kind of racism that was once taken for granted in the American South. The article, by L. Mell Glenn, secretary of Greenville, South Carolina's Chamber of Commerce, reports on a "pickanniny" Christmas party the Greenville Rotarians had been proudly sponsoring. It's illustrated with one of those photos of grinning black children once so beloved by white Southerners.

As I say, I happened on this article last week as I was doing research for the book I'm now writing, which deals with commentary made by the man on whom I'm focusing about racial relations in northwest Arkansas in the latter half of the 19th century. Something for which I was searching as I did my research made this particular link pop up, and I was glad it did, because the article was a valuable wake-up call to me, as the South Carolina primaries were just getting underway, of what life was like in much of the American South right up into my own childhood and adolescence.

The attitude, the terminology, the photograph: these could easily have been lifted right out of the world in which I came of age in south Arkansas in the 1950s and 1960s. Much has changed since then.

But much has not changed, and listening to the unabashed racial dog whistles now being used by almost all the Republican campaigners in South Carolina makes me ashamed to note how little many of us white folks in the American South have changed--at all, in one iota--when it comes to matters racial, from the days in which a community development club in Greenville could boast about sponsoring a Christmas party for "pickaninnies," up to the present.

And here's why this should matter to everyone in the U.S.: through its primary, the state God made proud, reactionary, and more than a little crazy calls the political shots for all of us. Not only that: the tea party--which is to say, the base of the entire Republican party--emanates from places like South Carolina. As a number of political commentators have been noting recently, including Matt Bai in the New York Times, the tea party emanates quite directly from South Carolina, and Greenville is one of its major hubs.

Greenville has become a bastion of Christian right-wing movements, and in recent years, has actively solicited the relocation of people affiliated with these groups to the community. And in writing about this area and this phenomenon, I want to make it clear that I am writing about my own people. These are people I know. I grew up among their cousins who moved west from the South Carolina upcountry as the cotton kingdom began expanding to places like Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas in the first half of the 19th century. I am critiquing my own people and myself as I make these observations.

I know--from my own experience and my own upbringing--how a certain narrowness of viewpoint and lack of strong respect for education contribute to the ability of people to hold onto ideas (e.g., about race) that harm not only those the ideas target, but those holding these ideas, as well. And an entire society imbued with racist ideas . . . .

One of the most interesting cousins I've run across in my years of doing family history is a man named James Edward Calhoun (1798-1889). James was, in key respects, a South Carolina wild man--"that strange James Edward Calhoun," Mary Elizabeth Moragné wrote in her diary on 19 July 1838, when he made a proper fool of himself (to her way of thinking) courting several of his cousins and waltzing with them at a point in South Carolina history when the waltz was still a novelty and considered slightly scandalous.

James Edward went a-sailing as a naval officer early in his life, and for years after he joined the navy, he roamed the globe, picking up a polyglot assortment of languages, some of which he sought to study in depth by hiring tutors to help him perfect his use of the languages. Because he roved and failed to marry, settle down, and manage his planation in South Carolina, his mother, Floride Bonneau Colhoun, wrote one peppery letter after another, pleading with him to mend his wild ways and do what a good Christian son ought to do: make Mama happy.

After he had gotten one such letter in 1825, he did return home for a period of time, reluctantly and unhappily because, as an entry he wrote in his diary on 29 Sept. of that year notes, he had wanted to remain "at the North" (that is, in New York City) for a period of time to learn Hebrew and German and perfect his Spanish. And as he also notes a day later in his diary, these pursuits were not easily understood in South Carolina, since "we 'Southrons' are little given to the pencil and hardly deserve to be called a thinking people."

As I say, I know these people. I know how they think. I know this because they're my own people. James's father John Ewing Colhoun was a brother of an ancestor of mine, Mary Calhoun Kerr. And this is also worth noting: James's sister Floride Bonneau Colhoun (named for her mother, hence the duplication of that name here) married her cousin John Caldwell Calhoun, the U.S. vice-president and senator who, in a very direct way, paved the path for the secession of South Carolina by fiercely asserting the doctrine of states' rights as he defended slavery and the right of the Southern states to hold onto the practice of slavery.

Another South Carolina wild man, another cousin of mine, and one who ought not to be forgotten as we sift the claims being made by Republican presidential candidates who are overtly wooing my people, my cousins to the east in the Palmetto state (and across the South, truth be told) with direct appeals to racism right now. In 2012. In the new millennium, when we had hoped and thought (misguidedly) that all this was far behind us, in the past.

Oh the Humanity! U.S. Catholic Bishops Continue Attack on Gay Community

2012-01-18T09:12:00.002-06:00

And as a complement to what I just posted about the possibility of learning from the animal kingdom ways to be more humane towards our fellow human beings:

For those who may not be keeping a running tally of what various U.S. Catholic bishops have been saying and doing in the very recent past, vis-a-vis their brothers and sisters who are gay, I'd note the following:

1. With other religious right leaders, top leaders of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops signed onto a statement last week attacking marriage equality;

2. The Catholic bishops of Washington state have just issued a directive to Catholics in that state to fight against marriage equality;

3. In Minnesota, where the Catholic bishops have for some time now been spending huge sums of money from an undisclosed donor or donors to attack marriage equality (even as they close parishes and schools), the Archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis, John Nienstedt, is reiterating threats against any priests who do not toe the party line as the bishops work to help pass an amendment altering the state constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage;

4. And all this comes, of course, on the heels of the controversy the previous president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops stirred up around Christmas time when he compared his gay brothers and sisters to the Ku Klux Klan (though he later apologized).

5. As suicides of gay or gender-questioning teens continue in the U.S., the U.S. Catholic bishops keep their mouths tight-shut, though a significant percentage of Americans think what the churches do and say to and about their gay brothers and sisters is contributing to these suicides.

Oh, the humanity!

But somehow, I don't think that increasing numbers of people in the U.S., Catholic or otherwise, see what the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church are doing to those who are gay in quite those terms. Not as a demonstration of humanity at its best.

Not in the least.

The graphic is Ferdinand Hodler's rendition of the Good Samaritan story in Luke's gospel (10:25-37), in which Jesus tells his followers to bind up the wounds of those we find lying by the wayside.

Terry Weldon on Catholic Magisterial Teaching about Human Sexuality: Animal Considerations

2012-01-18T08:42:00.001-06:00

Terry Weldon has a brilliant posting up right now at his Queering the Church website.* It notes that, by reducing the analysis of human sexuality to the level of acts, Catholic magisterial teaching insults not only those who are gay (and who are the primary and usual target of that teaching these days).

It also insults everyone who has lived in or lives in a committed intimate relationship. It insults heterosexual Catholics along with homosexual ones by implying that, when all is said and done, the meaning of human sexuality is summed up by animal behavior.

And not by the relational context in which intimate acts occur. Not by the myriad, manifold ways in which we enact relational intimacy on a daily basis in the context of our intimate relationships. It's all about being in bed together and measuring what happens in sexual acts, for Catholic magisterial teaching.

It's not about cooking together, doing the dishes together, watching television together, gathering with friends for an evening out to share a drink and catch up on the latest local news.

And--here's the brilliant twist Terry makes with the magisterial argument--the Catholic magisterial teaching about sexual ethics insults even the animals it implicitly uses as its yardstick as it measures the meaning of human sexuality. Even animals (especially animals?) are often surprisingly far more relational than the reductionistic, animalistic magisterial approach to sexual ethics seems to imagine.

A point Terry makes even more brilliantly by his choice of a graphic--the one I've lifted from his posting and put at the top of this one.

This is something about which I've been thinking lately--the surprising generosity and surprising relationally of many animals of the "lower" rungs of creation. The ones we Christians and Jews have long thought of as "lower" because we have read the dominion imperative of the Genesis narratives in a way that creates such a hierarchy in the created world--with ourselves at the top of the ladder.

I alluded to some of my recent reflections about these matters on Sunday, when I posted about Will Doig's painful analysis of what is happening to feral dogs and cats in many parts of the world today. The inhumanity of what humans frequently do to the "lower" orders of the animal world, contrasted with the humanity some of those "lower" orders exhibit towards us, was fresh on my mind when I read Doig's article, because Steve and I had just watched Jon Turteltaub's 1999 movie "Instinct," which has Anthony Hopkins playing an anthropologist who has, quite literally, gone native--as in living with and finding great apes in Africa more humane by far, in some instances, than his fellow humans. "Instinct" is loosely based on Daniel Quinn's 1992 novel Ishmael.

The reverend fathers in the Vatican and the episcopal palaces of the world, and all the rest of us, might have something of value to learn from Brother and Sister Ape? I, for one, think this is entirely possible.

(Perhaps how to be a little more human/humane?)

*As T. Weldon notes in a comment below, he developed his posting on this topic in response to the valuable insights of Jennifer Hynes on the topic of magisterial Catholic sexual ethics--and I hadn't noted that when I posted earlier today on the topic. I do think Terry deserves credit for adding the bit about animals, and it was to that bit that I was referring when I noted the brilliance of his posting (and his use of the picture above). I surely didn't intend to overlook Jennifer Hynes and her quotation, however, and want to credit her for the insight that magisterial teaching is insulting to heterosexual as well as homosexual couples in its lack of regard for the relational dimension.

Jonathan Weiler on Journalism by the Elite, for the Elite: Implications for American Catholic Conversation

2012-01-17T10:26:00.001-06:00

Jonathan Weiler's analysis of what has happened to journalism since the 1970s and how that has affected the national political discourse of the U.S. is illuminating for me. It helps me understand better what I've long found so disquieting about the centrist perspective of many high-profile members of the Catholic media-intellectual commentariat, who are entirely divorced from (and seemingly impervious to) lived sympathy for those who are gay. And, increasingly, from the viewpoints of a large majority of the faithful on issues like gay right and marriage equality.

Echoing Howard Kurtz in his book Media Circus, Weiler thinks that around 1970, American journalism took a turn from its traditional social location reflecting working-class roots and began to professionalize itself. As it did so, it moved away from its historic stance of advocating for those excluded from circles of power, and began to incorporate the perspectives of a new commentariat whose social location and social interests were closer to those within the circles of power than outside them.

The upshot:

Those elite professional strata most responsible for shaping our political and economic discourse (with exceptions, of course) have at once grown richer and, predictably, have increasingly articulated an ideological worldview justifying their privileged positions. The priorities they've articulated -- business-friendly economic policies (including a generally knee-jerk hostility to unionism and uncritical support for "free" trade), a mostly indulgent attitude toward expansions of the national security state and deference to government prerogatives in prosecuting the "war on terror," moderation and prudence in addressing major social problems (with a tendency to focus on the necessity of individual behavioral changes and discomfort with significant government intervention in the economy except when it comes to bailing out major financial interests), a concern for bi-partisanship and civility in elite discourse -- make perfect sense for people who enjoy full material security and all of the perks associated with professional prestige and opportunity. And stenographic journalism is a good fit for that worldview. A rancorous press corps, unafraid of losing access and committed to stirring up trouble and to provoking the powerful might open the floodgates to a much more contentious, wide-ranging debate that would examine the real roots of wealth and power in America. By contrast, he-said/she-said journalism, while it does convey clearly (if in a fundamentally flawed way) the deeply polarized nature of our partisan politics, works well to obscure the deeper divide between the one percent and the ninety-percent.

What becomes more clear than ever to me as I read this commentary is that the inability (and unwillingness) of centrist Catholic intellectual-and-media gurus to muster empathy for their gay brothers and sisters has everything to do with the social location and interests of those at the center. That social location and those interests are with the U.S. Catholic bishops in their battle against the gays.

Not with fellow Catholics who are gay or all the gay citizens of the U.S. who also suffer when the bishops make it their business to mount increasingly shrill attacks on the entire gay community in the U.S.

Centrist Catholics are writing who they are or who they imagine themselves to be, when they either refuse to raise their voices against the stepped-up attacks of the bishops on gay human beings or actively collude with those attacks. They are or imagine themselves to be heterosexual, for the most part. (Or they imagine that they have a sanitized and safe public heterosexual journalistic persona, even when they also claim to be openly gay.)

They are or imagine themselves to be the benchmark by which authentic Catholicity is to be measured--the heterosexual benchmark by which authentic Catholicity is to be measured.

They are closely connected to the U.S. Catholic bishops in manifold ways, and they will not--of course they will not--open their mouths to criticize the bishops when the bishops seek to remove and block the rights of gay citizens.

Meanwhile, as Joel Connelly notes in an op-ed piece in yesterday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a growing majority of the American Catholic laity rejects the bishops' position about those who are gay and deplores the hurt it inflicts on family members, friends, coworkers, and the entire Catholic church. And so to the extent that the centrist commentariat continues to walk lockstep with the USCCB about the human rights of the gay community, it places itself outside where the moral center of Catholic discourse about these issues is quickly moving, in the public square.

And it becomes as irrelevant as, say, an intellectual defense of a geocentric worldview is today. Or as an intellectual defense of creationism is today.

Silence in the face of glaring injustice and needless pain inflicted on fellow human beings does have a way of making us irrelevant, especially when our silence goes hand in hand with our claim to be intellectual arbiters of the core moral values of a religious tradition. "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends": M.L. King.

The graphic is Armand Hosmi's cartoon depiction of what centrism looks like in the struggle for democratic values and human rights in the Arab nations, in An-Nahar (2 July 2011), via the Tajaddod Youth blog site. As the cartoonist recognizes, and as liberation theologians have long argued, the pretense of "objectivity," of not taking sides in a battle between two unequal sides, is really standing on the side of those who have power.

Patriarchy, Violence, and the Battle for the Soul of World Religions: The Case of a Catholic Theologian and Jewish Rabbi

2012-01-17T09:55:00.000-06:00

I read openly gay German Catholic theologian David Berger describing his experiences with some fellow Catholics after he came out of the closet in 2010, and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach talking about his similar experiences with fellow Jews after word got around that he had written a book with the title Kosher Jesus, and I realize I'm reading two versions of the same story. One is Catholic, the other Jewish. One chocolate, the other vanilla.

But the underlying thing of which the two separate stories are alternative flavors is the same thing: hatred and violence spun forth in the name of God and holiness.

Here's what some fellow Catholics told David Berger in emails and other communications after he came out of the closet, according to Rudolf Neumaier in Süddeutsche Zeitung*:

・People like you don’t have a right to live.

・And this Christmas message: Mr. Berger, you are a disgrace to our holy church!!!! Stop badmouthing our church in the media!!!! I’m warning you!!!!! I know some people who want to do something to you in the near future!!! So apologize to the church, and take back what you said!! Understand me?

・And this, which came with a video showing skinheads jumping up and down on the head of an African man they had shoved to the ground: This is what we will do to you.

And here's what some fellow Jews (rabbis, for the most part, he thinks) have told Rabbi Shmuley Boteach after they got word that he intends to publish a book arguing that Jesus was an observant Jewish teacher whose teaching is rooted in traditional Judaism. The following are comments posted online:

・[Boteach] has to be crushed to a pulp, as he deserves.

・Shmuley, if I ever see you I will throw rocks at your car, spit on you and chuck dirty diapers at your house.

・The soton (Satan) has in every generation someone in who he dresses up to do his work.

・It is time for boteach to print a book with the name THE KOSHER CHAZER (PIG) 0- and to put his picture on the front cover.

・SB needs to be crucified with yoshke (Jesus).

・BURN!

What elicits such hate, such threats of violence in the name of God, I ask myself? Part of the answer, which is increasingly clear to me (particularly after a weekend spent fielding one ugly comment after another here by a married heterosexual white man incensed by my analysis, vis-a-vis Tim Tebow, that white heterosexual American men may well imagine God as a big version of Themselves in the Sky all they wish, but this isn't going to make God one of them):

Part of the answer is that, for a variety of historical and cultural reasons, at this moment in human history religion has become a channel of the violence of men intent on destroying anything and everything that stands in their way, as they assert their claim to supremacy--solely because they are men and ostensibly heterosexual--over anything and anyone else in the world. We live at a moment of human history in which violence is being released in an unprecedented way in the service of patriarchal values.

Well, perhaps "unprecedented" is a stretch. History has, after all, seen similar eructations of testosterone-fueled violence in the name of God. Those previous periods of violence, however, often had a religion vs. religion intent. The violence in those periods was more often acted out by one religious group against another, so that it had the character of interreligious violence rather than pan-religious violence against a demonized Other despised by all the religious groups acting in concert.

What we see today, by contrast, and this is true even when tensions continue to exist between Christianity and Islam, is the growing coalescence of patriarchal males across religious groups willing to stoop to violence to keep women (and gays) in their place. And so it's entirely predictable that evangelical Protestant leaders who once held Catholics in disdain would endorse right-wing Catholic Rick Santorum in the presidential race. Or that powerful right-wing Catholic political leaders would endorse right-wing Mormon Mitt Romney in the same race. Santorum and Romney both being, it's clear to anyone with much political acumen at all, on the right side of the misogynistic-homophobic line, no matter how much tea party activists question Romney's conservative cred.

What remains constant is the intent to deploy violence--at first rhetorical, then outright--if women and gay men insist on claiming their full range of human rights in the world today. What also remains constant is the willingness of each of these religious bodies to rewrite its core religious teachings--all of which center on mercy, justice, and practical compassion--to assert that those teachings are all about setting gender roles in stone. And enacting violence in the name of God against anyone who questions their presuppositions about gender.

One of the most significant cultural battles of this period of history is the battle for the soul of the world religions. At an official level, the religions of the world are, to a great extent today, being hijacked by patriarchal extremists who want--in the case of Judaism and Christianity, for example--to rewrite the scriptures of world religions to make them all about God's intent concern to divide humanity between male and female, and to assure the subjugation of the latter to the former.

The battle for the soul of world religions centers around the need of the many adherents of various religions who know better--who know that the core of their religious tradition centers on mercy, justice, and practical compassion, and not writing female subordination in stone in God's name--to reclaim their hijacked religious beliefs and their hijacked religious bodies. And this is not going to be easy, when so much cultural power continues to reside, almost everywhere in the world, among men--and, in particular, men who are heterosexual or profess to be heterosexual, and who are intent on keeping women and gay men in their place.

P.S. In case it's not clear from the preceding discussion how Shmuley Boteach might fit into the intra-Jewish battle about human rights for gay folks, see here, here, and here. This is just a sampling. Boteach's willingness to defend the human rights of those who are gay is front and center in the violent reaction some of his fellow observant Jews have to his thought.

*I'm relying on a translation that Alan McCornick of the Hepzibah blog site has generously made available.

In Honor of M.L. King Day: Audre Lorde on Truth-Telling

2012-01-16T08:00:00.000-06:00

And, finally, in commemoration of today's Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, the following from Audre Lorde's book A Burst of Light (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1988):

And I wonder what I may be risking as I become more and more committed to telling whatever truth comes across my eyes my tongue my pen—no matter how difficult—the world as I see it, people as I feel them (pp. 51-2).

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my nose holes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe (pp. 76-7).

Lorde wrote these words as she faced a terminal diagnosis with cancer. She died in 1992, having battled incredible odds to write--and to write the truth, unreservedly--as an African-American woman who also happened to be lesbian. She epitomizes for me the courage and creativity of an indomitable human being who refuses to permit society's assessment of her worth to dictate what she is. And what she does.

And it was for people like Audre Lorde that Martin Luther King worked and gave his life. So that they might have a chance, at last, and we might all benefit from their talents, which do not have a hearing or a playing field in societies dictated by prejudice.

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "The Chalice of Benediction"

2012-01-16T07:41:00.000-06:00

This from a Facebook page linked to mine, a page belonging to a young home-schooling mother who is Catholic. And Catholic again. Catholic added to Catholic.

Catholic of a certain sort, though, you understand. Catholic of the JPII generation. She shares a recording of "Panis Angelicus," and prefaces it with the following quotation, which surprises me so much (and not in a heartwarming way) that I never get to the recording itself: "The chalice of benediction, which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? And the bread, which we break, is it not the partaking of the body of the Lord?” (1 Corinthians 10:16).

And when I read the scripture passage, I ask myself--because the language is so entirely unfamiliar--if it's lifted from the "new" liturgy. So I do some googling and find a site that gives parallel translations of the verse from all the major English translations for many years now, and find that one single, solitary translation uses the phrase "the chalice of benediction which we bless" to render this passage from 1 Corinthians.

And that translation is the Douay-Rheims translation, which dates from 1582. Which, as this Wikipedia entry notes, is so "densely latinate" that it is "in places unreadable." And so there were revisions of the translation almost immediately and over the years, and eventually English-speaking Catholics began to use (with good reason: so that they could understand the bible) the Jerusalem bible, the New American bible, the RSV and NRSV. So that they could understand the bible, it bears repeating.

What's to be gained, I wonder, in calling a cup a chalice, when every other standard English translation that has long since been in use by English-speaking Christians rightly renders this verse, "the cup of blessing which we bless"? And do younger Catholics who want to hurl us back to 1582 really and truly not understand that the Greek word being rendered as calix in Latin means "cup"?

And that calling a plain, ordinary cup a chalice simply because the latter word has a Latin root places us in no universe more sacrosanct or real than using the word "cup" places us in? Perhaps to the contrary: since the goal of reading the bible is to understand the bible.

And how the bible relates to the plain, ordinary world in which we live and move and have our being. Daily.

Which is full of cups. But not of chalices.

Catholic Diocesan Money and SNAP: Goliath, Meet David

2012-01-16T07:12:00.000-06:00

As the recent National Catholic Reporter editorial defending SNAP in the Missouri subpoena situation about which I blogged on the weekend notes, SNAP is a modestly funded organization that is run on a shoestring budget and mostly by volunteers. Its total operating budget for a year is around $350,000.

And place this financial observation beside this report by Judy Thomas in the Kansas City Star last week: the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph (where SNAP is under heavy fire from church-hired lawyers) spent over $1 million in four months of 2011 in connection with cases of sexual abuse by priests. There are 24 pending lawsuits for abuse now facing the diocese and its employees. From 1 July 2002 through 31 Oct. 2011, the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph has paid out $14.8 million on matters connected related to allegations of clerical sexual abuse.

And we're asked by the likes of Bill Donohue, who functions as a virtual mouthpiece for the U.S. Catholic bishops, to imagine that the Catholic church is the victim of an ugly conspiracy of SNAP and abuse survivors who want to attack the church and tear it down? And that SNAP and abuse survivors function on a playing field level to that on which the church itself plays?

When I look at the figures--in a single diocese--I'm not buying that analysis. Not for a moment.

The graphic is Osmar Schindler's lithograph (c. 1888) of David confronting Goliath.

Will Doig on Rising Population of Feral Dogs and Cats in U.S. Cities: Apocalypse Now

2012-01-16T06:55:00.000-06:00

There's something approaching the apocalyptic in the story Will Doig tells at Salon last Saturday about the growing population of feral dogs and cats in many American cities (and in cities around the world). In particular, what the story says about the kind of civilization we're becoming strikes me as well-nigh apocalyptic.

Doig writes,

In depopulating Rust Belt cities, where nature is reclaiming entire swaths of the landscape, packs of dogs and colonies of cats are living in a world that’s nearly their own. New York Times Magazine writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis, who’s writing a book about dogs, spent time with Grim in East St. Louis and describes a world where people are scarce and dogs live wild once again.

And if I were a Richard Adams or a P.D. James, I could spin a convincing tale around these observations and what they tell us about who we now are in many "developed" parts of the world, as economic systems crumble and social bonds disintegrate.

If I had talent to write the novel that's demanding to be written here (and I don't), I'd write it to suggest that the cities now being left to decay as our economies falter might be better off left to the animals. And, for all the atrocious suffering they now endure living on their own, they might even be better off themselves, these dogs and cats, than living with humans, seeing what we've been capable of doing to the world we imagine God has given into our hands.

Controversy Over Statue of JPII in Rome: A New Head to Be Supplied

2012-01-16T06:28:00.000-06:00

This isn't specifically a dropping from the Catholic birdcage, but it does strike me as almost birdcage-worthy: Alessandro Speciale reports for Religion News Service that people in Rome are worried about John Paul II's head. Not the real head, you understand. His head on a statue outside the main railway station in Rome.

The problem? It's too round. And therefore it's a "sacrilegious mud stain" on the pope's memory, according to Federico Mollicone, head of the Roman city council's commission on culture.

The solution? Give the pope a new head. The round head is hollow, removable, and like a sentry box, so it can be yanked off and another one put on in its place. The artistic idea behind the hollow, removable, round head was, according to sculptor Oliviero Rainaldi, "to showcase the late pope's desire to welcome humanity."

And who knew it would be so easy to give the former pope a new head?

(The Vatican has, by the way, been opposed to the statue from the outset. See the video at the head of this positing for a discussion of the Vatican's response.)

Seven Questions about the Tebow Phenomenon: My Two Cents' Worth

2012-01-15T11:24:00.001-06:00

My two cents (and they're not worth much, I feel pretty sure) on the Tim Tebow phenomenon, in the form of questions:

1. Would the media be lionizing Tim Tebow if she were Tammy Tebow?

2. And if she were black?

3. And Muslim?

4. Would the media be lionizing Tim Tebow if he were gay?

5. And not an evangelical Christian?

6. And not middle-class and American?

7. And if his "big wins" were on the stage in a ballet performance and not on the football field?

We're celebrating ourselves when we celebrate Tim Tebow.

We're celebrating our white, middle-class, American, God-endorsed male heterosexist supremacy in the world. We're celebrating our right to be better than those we despise. We're celebrating our right to despise. We're celebrating our right to lord it over, misuse, and abuse our "inferiors."

And we're imagining that, in all of this, we have God on our side and that we're pro-life, pro-family, pro-God. And that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is about winners and losers--about us as winners, because we play God's game on God's big American football field.

And that the gospel is about everyone else in the world as losers on whom we have the God-given right to urinate after we've brutalized them.

And so God have mercy on our souls and on the souls of everyone our nation, the city on a hill, the light glowing in the darkness of the world, the nation with the soul of a church, encounters.

A Reader Writes: Post-Constantinean Catholics Look for Persuasion, not Force

2012-01-15T09:26:00.001-06:00

Donation of Constantine, Sylvester Chapel, Santi Quatro Coronati, Rome

Several days ago, a reader, Evagrius, made a valuable comment in response to my posting about re-claiming the moral center of Catholicism in the public square. I'd like to lift Evagrius's comment from the combox following that posting and post it as a stand-alone posting so that more readers may benefit from it.

Evagrius writes:

I've just read a theology article that may shed some light on all of this. I happen to like Origen and read him and about him when I can. I was able to obtain Origenia Septima, the compendium of an Origen confrence held in 1999. The last article, by Kurt Anders Richardson, entitled, "Origen and the contexts of Christian theology conditional similarities of pre and post-Constantinians" ( pp. 753-764), struck me as extremely relevant when reading your post. Essentially, Richardson argues that Christianity is now in a post-Constantinian age, that is, it no longer has the State to butress it or enforce its decrees or support it through socio-political pressure etc. In other words, Christians are in a similar position they were in before Constantine. They could not use force, certainly of public officials, ( not sympathetic to them in the least), to settle disputes, heresies, etc; etc. Instead, they had to depend on chaps like Origen, brilliant, spiritually deep theologians who used persuasion, philosophical, theological, poetic, spiritual to convince others of the truths of Christianity, ( that's one reason I like him so much). The present Pope refuse, along with the Curia and so many others in hierarchy and the rest of the Church, especially, I suppose in the U.S., to recognize and acknowledge this situation. Hence he, and the Vatican, are trying desperately to pretend that Constantinian power is still available. Hence his naming so many as cardinals who still hold that view. But I think that many Catholics realize that they are now in a post-Constatinian age. They look for persuasion, not force, to help them live a Christian life and they are looking everywhere for those who have that persuasive skill based on deep spirituality, deep experience. I don't think we can go back to the good old days of Constantine.

Evagrius's comment notes that he had previously posted the same remarks at Colleen Baker's Enlightened Catholicism site, in response to her brilliant commentary about Benedict's latest batch of men earning scarlet beanies. The only editing I've done as I post Evagrius's comment is to add spacing between sentences and to change punctuation in several places.

I find Evagrius's theological analysis very important for the following reasons:

1. The analysis identifies one of the key rifts in the contemporary Catholic church as follows: while many lay (and clerical) Catholics would prefer to see their church use persuasion and not force to make its case in the public square, the leaders who control the church from the top down clearly prefer to rely on force rather than persuasion.

2. As Evagrius notes, the persuasion that many Catholics would prefer to see the church applying in the public square (as opposed to force) is the persuasion of compelling theological analysis based on "deep spirituality, deep experience."

3. By contrast, the leaders of the Catholic church, at the top, are in a reactionary mode in which they are seeking to revive a Constantinean arrangement that permits them to rely on the state to use force to enforce their dictates--even when (but precisely because) Christianity has moved into a post-Constantinean moment, in which it can no longer rely on the state to buttress its authority.

I think this analysis is absolutely correct. I also think that the increasingly belligerent and even hysterical way in which top Catholic officials now want to assert their claims to moral supremacy and to special faith-based "rights" in the public square at this moment in history has everything to do with their recognition that the Constantinean paradigm that afforded them those special "rights" and that supremacy is a thing of the past and cannot be retrieved--though they intend to hinge the future of the church on their proposal to try to force Western culture back into some semblance of that paradigm, even if this strategic choice negates the church's own witness in Vatican II and drives huge numbers of Catholics from the church.

What we see going on in the U.S. right now, as the Catholic bishops at an official level, led by their president Mr. Dolan, push their claims to special faith-based "rights" and "ministerial exceptions" with ever greater ferocity, is an attempt to bully the state into submission to the bishops, insofar as the course of contemporary culture diverges from what Catholic officials demand--e.g., with the decision to recognize the right of same-sex couples to marry. Catholic officials now openly demand the right to bully the state into upholding their moral dictates. And when the state refuses to accede to this demand, they claim that the state is persecuting them and the Catholic church.

This is, at heart, an assertion by the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church of their "right" to control what the state thinks, decides, and does, in areas in which these pastoral leaders claim a divine authority that supersedes that of secular government. It is at heart a demand to keep the Constantinean arrangement alive at a moment in history in which that arrangement has effectively died--as Vatican II recognized.

And this imperious bullying behavior on the part of the top leaders of the Catholic church vitiates the very claims these pastoral officials purport to be defending in the public square. It does so because the claims are grounded not on the spiritual experience to which many Catholics increasingly turn as they seek to ground the claims of Catholic faith, or on cogent, persuasive theology rooted in spiritual experience, but on raw force.

And so in winning, the church (that is, the church as represented by its top leaders) loses. When the U.S. bishops score a "big win" with a Supreme Court decision granting them a unique "ministerial exception" to discriminate against marginalized minority groups, and when lawyers working for the bishops succeed in getting state courts to permit them to bully an organization working for survivors of sexual abuse, the church as a whole loses.

It loses its right to introduce compelling spirituality-based claims into public discourse. It loses its right to credibility when it points to the gospels as the clear and primary source for its theological and moral claims in the public square. It loses its right to appeal to conscience and cogent theological argument, as it presents its moral claims in the public square.

The church as a whole loses when its pastoral leaders choose force over persuasion as they seek to make "the" Catholic voice heard in the public arena. And the church as a whole loses when its top officials seek to control, constrain, channel, and restrict the voices of theologians, who are those within the Christian community who have been given by the Spirit the charism to think about and formulate the church's moral and religious claims in a cogent way within particular culture frameworks.

From the time the top leaders of the Catholic church under Pope John Paul II and his right-hand man Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, began the reassertion of the Constantinean claims of the church in their reform of the reform, theologians have been under the gun. Rather than welcoming their charismatic contribution to the Christian community, top church officials have sought in every way possible to stifle the witness of the Spirit to the community through the ministry of theologians.

And the results of this process of stifling the witness of the Spirit offered to the community through theologians and their ministry have been beyond dismal. The last two papacies have effectively gutted the intellectual class within the church most equipped to carry the church into the new millennium via cogent, persuasive theological reflection. The leaders of the church have relied on assertion backed by force to try to make their points in the public square, and not on well-reasoned theological analysis.

As a corollary to their decision to squelch the voice of the Spirit within the theological community of the church, the top leaders of the Catholic church are also actively working to rebrand Catholicism as a privileged enclave for heterosexual males--and, in this way, suppressing the witness and invalidating the contributions of women and gay and lesbian persons as much as they have suppressed the witness and invalidated the contributions of theologians. The leaders of the church have made their decision to rebrand Catholicism as a country club for privileged heterosexual males on the basis of a cynical, non-gospel-based judgment that their strategy of using force rather than persuasion to carry the day is more likely to be upheld by heterosexual males than by any other groups within the church.

The upshot of these decisions to employ a strategy to revive the Constantinean arrangement in a post-Constantinean world, and to rebrand the church as an exclusive club for heterosexual (or pretend-heterosexual) men: the entire church is suffering and is withering on the vine. Because the voice of the Spirit within the people of God is being stifled, restricted (by those who claim to interpret the Spirit's voice for the Catholic community at an official level) to a small minority within the Christian community--to church leaders backed by the heterosexual males they empower in an exclusive way at this point in Christian history.

Institutions that wish to have a bright future rely on the talents of everyone within the institution in order to make that future happen. Institutions that are mission-driven seek to root their strategic decisions about the future in their mission. Both of these statements should be true a fortiori in the case of the Catholic church, whose fundamental mission is to be an effective sacramental sign of God's love for all in the world.

The strategic decisions of the current papacy and its predecessor, which have been all about seeking to keep the Constantinean church alive through a reliance on raw power and force more than persuasion, do not bode well for the future of the Catholic church and the effectiveness of its work to proclaim its mission to the world at large in the 21st century.

Commemorating Mary Raftery

2012-01-15T08:08:00.000-06:00

To commemorate the courageous and deep-hearted Irish journalist Mary Raftery, who did so much to inform people in her country about abuse of children in the Irish Catholic church, Turlough O'Carolan's beautiful lament for Owen Roe O'Neill, played by John Doan.

As Tom Doyle's commemoration to which the link above points says, the Murphy report, which exposed the depths of abuse in the Dublin archdiocese (and how the abuse had been covered up), happened in large part because Raftery's documentary Cardinal Secrets began to uncover the abuse.

Deducant te angeli, Mary Raftery.

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "My Aunt Is a Sister . . . ."

2012-01-14T15:33:00.001-06:00

From this week's edition of "Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage": this anonymous reader responds to National Catholic Reporter's latest report about the Vatican investigation of American religious women by suggesting that orders of American nuns which implemented the reforms of Vatican II are dying, while conservative communities that have resisted Vatican II are thriving:

I can tell you that my aunt is a sister in Nebraska. She lives alone, has a regular day job, frequents a casino, and every once in a while will meet up with colleagues in her order for a meal. This is the life of a religious sister who can "Live in the questions"?

1. She lives alone:

v. "Julian of Norwich," Catholic Encyclopedia.

2. Has a regular day job:

v. Acts 18:3, "Paul went to see them [i.e., Aquila and Priscilla], and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them."

3. Frequents a casino:

v. Matthew 11:19, "The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and other sinners!'"

v. Mark 2:16, "And when the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples, 'Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?'"

A recurring theme in the responses to NCR's article is that younger Catholics of the JPII generation (many of whom are logging in with these dismissive comments about nuns of the Vatican II period) represent the salvation of a decadent church ruined by Vatican II and the "hippie generation."

As I've said before, I have serious doubts about this thesis, particularly when so many Catholics of the generation making these claims have been deplorably catechized--and, in the case of Anonymous, appear not to know anything much at all about the long, venerable tradition of eremitic religious life in the church, or about the gospels' warnings against the danger of slinging around charges about "frequenting casinos."

Or about the rich and varied history of religious life in the Catholic church, which has long included apostolates and jobs for both religious men and women who live apart from their communities as they're engaged in their apostolic work and who gather for shared meals when their schedules permit this to happen--since the monastic model developed by Benedict, with its rules about communal living and eating, wonderful though that model is, began to prove inadequate as the sole roadmap of religious life early in the history of the church, particularly when urban centers grew up, requiring men and women religious to live and work among people in those urban centers, and not always in cloistered communities in the countryside.

It's hard to save the church when you don't know much about the church's history and foundations--even as you claim to have exclusive enlightenment that surpasses the enlightenment of all other generations.