Kingfishers, Dragonflies and Stones

Archbishop Denounces Election of Bishops

2008-06-19T21:20:00.001-07:00

Here I go again. It is difficult for me to resist commenting when a hubristic hierarch pops off. He thinks, I think, that he's going to get away with it, as he always does, with imperial impunity. Guess I just want to let him know that some of us people called lay can pop off, too. More better, more kinder, because we are common folk. Numbers tell the story about our clergy and us the people. In America, according to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops – USCCB – the statistics are at: http://www.usccb.org/comm/statisti.shtml:

Cardinals: active as heads of large dioceses. 20 in all.
Archbishops: 25 active. 16 retired
Bishops: 193 Diocesan. 74 Auxiliary. 141 retired
Priests: 42,307
Common Folk: 67,515,016

224 active hierarchs and 67 ½ million people. Archbishop Curtiss, apparently, speaks for the hierarchs. Who speaks for the people? Nobody actually. There are spokespeople here and there, but only for the groups to which they belong. A person speaking without a group is a loner.

Several times in the last six years, one of the ideas put up was the creation of a United States Conference of Catholic People – USCCP. Just like the USCCB in Washington, DC. We'll pay for it. We already pay for the USCCB. At the present time, there is no spokesperson for all the people.

Still, the Church proclaims that the Magisterium includes a Sensus Fidelium – The Sense of the Faithful. How? Where? Who speaks or writes? The myriad groups with acronymic names are an alphabet soup of the people: ARCC, CTA, TBOC, and so many others. They have produced scholars, whether theological, legal, logical, or cultural. Professors have wandered out of academe. A leader here, another there, have begun to stand and speak truth to power. These people are like ourselves, we who write and others who read. We are the largest group in the Church, almost 70,000,000 in America, over 1,200,000,000 in the world. Within that enormous population is a Sensus Fidelium.

May I offer some thoughts, then, random, dormant for a lifetime, now surging to be heard, pricked by a slow reading line by line, on Archbishop Elden Francis Curtiss of Omaha, Nebraska. He wrote a letter to Commonweal protesting the proposal of Fr. Thomas Reese, SJ, that bishops be elected by the people in the diocese.

Archbishop Curtiss may be one of the 25 active archbishops in America, but this letter is my first contact with his pronouncements. It is not fair to criticize a person on such a small, singular publication, but his letter must not go unchallenged. Following his distinctive manner of using all three of his names, I am Layman Emanuel Paul Kelly. We don't have any arch-lay people, so there is no other title to give me some status. I am aware of the hubris in and out of me, for it is not a quality of bishops and cardinals alone. There are, then, some similarities between the hierarch and the layman.

For credentials, a bother, a needless bother: husband, father, grandfather, retired litigator, was a Jesuit scholastic briefly in my youth 60 years ago, unknown, lay as in laity, sort of a people-people person who thinks authority figures are more to be challenged than admired. So, I am a composite Catholic, sometime in the clergy, though not ordained, and the rest as a lay person, though not acclaimed.

Curtiss, a singularity, is a typical archbishop, I guess, the kind Rome requires to keep Rome as Rome and us as Romans, if not necessarily as Catholics. I am American, more or less a typical lay person, pretty fed up with Rome and its tiny covey of high priests. And I am Catholic, a singularity, too, among universality.

Here's the Archbishop's letter to Commonweal. Wonder whether he was aware that he exposed himself . . Perhaps the title for this piece should have been: "The Lord Archbishop Has No Clothes."

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2248

June 6, 2008 / Volume CXXXV, Number 11

CHURCH REFORM

AGAINST ELECTIONS

In his April 25 article, "Reforming the Vatican," Thomas J. Reese, SJ, claims it would help the governance of the church if bishops were "elected by the local clergy, accepted by the people of his diocese, and consecrated by the bishops of his province."

As a bishop for thirty-two years, I have become increasingly convinced that it would be a disaster for the church if bishops were elected by local clergy, either in a bishop's diocese of origin or the diocese where he will serve. I suspect that the most popular priests, those who would offer the people of a diocese emotional support but little governance, would often be the ones elected bishop. They would add to the dismantling of episcopal authority and the diminishment of papal oversight and accountability.

Local election of bishops would move the church toward a congregationalist model of governance that would undermine the international unity of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. It is a great blessing for a diocese when a bishop is appointed from elsewhere on the basis of his real pastoral gifts and not on his previous popularity as a hail-fellow. It is a primary duty of a bishop to help keep his diocese in union with the universal church under the leadership of the successor of St. Peter who, with the other apostles, was not elected by his peers.

I can assure your readers that the collective wisdom of the church, with two thousand years of experience, will not let her return to the selection of bishops by the local clergy and laity. Bishops are expected to govern with authority that comes not from clergy or people but from the Lord himself.

Whatever the weaknesses of the present system for appointing bishops, we are much better served by the work of the papal nuncio and the Congregation of Bishops working directly with the Holy Father than we would be by local diocesan political processes.

(MOST REV.) ELDEN FRANCIS CURTISS

Omaha, Neb.

++++++++++

MY COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS

1 – Disaster

Archbishop: "As a bishop for thirty-two years, I have become increasingly convinced that it would be a disaster for the church if bishops were elected by local clergy . . . "

Comment: What a terrible thing to say about his own priests. What a terrible way to indict as disastrous, the honor that equals offer to another priest and cloak him with popularity, their way of showing respect, admiration. For the archbishop popularity in and of itself is a contagious disease, like AIDS, leprosy. I don't know him, so can't say he is totally inadequate as a human being, but this opening sentence surely takes off his costumes and leaves him naked as one of the top elite American clergymen worthy enough to run a diocese.

What this horrible sentence says is that this archbishop doesn't trust his own people, dislikes intensely his own priests, and is comfortable only with other Ordinaries. There are 193 dioceses in America. Archbishop Curtiss is the sole Ordinary of one of them, and the other 192 are the only people in the American Church whom he respects. That's awful. It is also sad. Of that 192, only 25 are Archbishops.

He emphasizes his 32 years as a bishop. I had merely eight years as a Jesuit scholastic but 45 years as a practicing lawyer. Neither number brings me any closer to his augustness. There was a great uncle on my mother's side, though, who was an archbishop, too, and for 36 years, in Winnipeg, Ontario. Only met him once. Never got to know him, outside the legends my mother and aunts created about him. I'm afraid , too, that he was popular and that is a defect of character for the archbishop of Omaha.

Question: Why did Archbishop Curtiss turn against his own priests and demean them as unfit to run a diocese, if elected by fellow clergy? And yet, he is OK with himself selecting potential bishops from out the clergy pool? Why does he castigate the election of bishops by clergy alone, excluding lay people completely from the procedure? Does he feel that lay people are worthy of no consideration at all? If he doesn't like priests, why would he like lay people? Is he a Catholic? Strange one, if he is. He doesn't like Catholics, whether lay or clergy, just hierarchs.

2- Popularity Not Governance

Archbishop: "I suspect that the most popular priests, those who would offer the people of a diocese emotional support but little governance, would often be the ones elected bishop."

Comment: He says, I think, that when a person is elected, it is only because of "popularity", which may offer "emotional support" but not "governance." Often. But, when bishops write three names as bishopibile– the Terna – and send it to the Apostolic Nuncio, and he forwards their thoughts to Rome, the Pope, or a subordinate, chooses one. Popular priests never land on a Terna, at least not in Omaha.

That, of course, is not "popularity" but infallible wisdom for and only for "governance." Really? Popes, like Presidents, select their own to pack the College of Bishops with their ilk. Lessens controversy in the dictatorship style of governance favored by the one doing the packing.

Omaha's bishop goes over the top in dismissing elections as based on "popularity" not "governance." His letter, a slur on democracy, manifests a keen tyrannical mindset that the people have no power, are not wise, nor are they free as God intended they be free. This archbishop absolutely believes that he and his confreres are particularly outstanding human beings, chosen by God and his Vicar, with prompting from those given the scarlet and the purple, to select not elect bishops who know how to march in the lockstep of salvation. And nobody, but nobody, is going to tweak that mindset. That is hubris in the highest.

Question: Why do we put up with this autocratic conduct from a "king of the hill?"

2. Dismantling, Diminishing

Archbishop: "They would add to the dismantling of episcopal authority and the diminishment of papal oversight and accountability."

Comment:

Dismantling of episcopal authority? Of course. Except it is not authority. It is tyranny that is about to be dismantled. There is a difference. All authority is a gift from God. Tyranny is an abuse of that gift. Ever hear of Lay Authority? We have a lot of it, you know. Early on, we gave some of it to our Elders, who later took on the name of Episcopus, Overseer, Bishop. I wrote a paper for the MA years ago, "The Origin of Authority in a Direct Democracy." Never thought it would come back out of my remembery, the place where memories are stored in slumber, to be awakened from time to time. The conclusion to that paper was: The People from God. All power, all authority is given by God to the people. There is no Divine Right of Kings, as bishops like to think and act. That was just a burp in the history of civilization. Didn't last long.
Diminishment of papal oversight? Hardly. There is none. Neither Pope John Paul II nor Benedict XVI exercised oversight. They held absolute power and crushed anyone who opposed it, questioned it, gave it a curious glance. That is not oversight. It is the hallmark of the brutal overseer of slaves chained in a work gang, All black. The overseer is white. The Latin "episcopus" means "overseer ---- "epi" - over, "scopus" – seer." Clergy are white. Laity are black. In the RCC. Extraordinary Ordinaries are the Overseers.
And accountability? I don't want to laugh here, not out loud, nor snicker as some kind of superior being to archbishops, but once again, I see myself on the elementary school playground at recess, watching a bishop as "king of the hill." I ponder how he got there. By ambition alone? A fierce ambition, driving, consuming, to be on a ladder with rungs to climb? By being noticed by one higher up a rung or two? By playing his cards tightly, always pleasing superiors, eschewing mere childish popularity?

Tell me, what accountability was ever required of John Paul II? Benedict XVI? None, right? I hear Pope Pius IX, was it he, the pusher of the doctrine of infallibility, when criticized by his own select colleagues for trying to ram that doctrine through Vatican I –wasn't there before for over one thousand, eight hundred years, you know – and losing it. He roared in anger, screamed, 'I AM THE POPE!!!!!" Then, cannily, transferred the locale of the Council to a distant city, upped the schedule to make it faster, ignored bishops who simply couldn't change their own schedules to get there, and clapped his hands when his supporters voted Infallibility in as one of the unchanging doctrines of the official teachings of the RCC.

I may have embellished the political maneuverings a bit, you know. At any rate, Infallibility has been a dogma since 1869. Before that date, Popes were able to make mistakes. Since that time, the pure gold of never being wrong. Cardinals Wojtyla and Ratzinger lusted after that, for they regarded themselves as infallible when they were teenagers in Poland and Germany. Their self-assessments were confirmed by being elected popes in 1978 and 2005. wonder how Archbishop Curtiss distinguishes their elections by clergy from the paltry "popularity" of "hail-fellows" the usual spawn of such elections . . . The Archbishop is inconsistent, methinks.

Question: Not "Why do we put up with this oligarchic proclamation from a "king of the hill?" But, "Why do I go apoplectic, when hierarchs justify their conduct with such preposterous statements?" Do they really, truly, actually believe that we the laity are that stupid? That could be the greatest gulf. Perhaps. We have allowed them and this Church of ours to be so. We rarely stood to speak truth to power. It just was not done.

The hierarchs of the RCC do so believe. God help them. Not us, though, for Vatican II called us to serve this Church of ours. Our response must be free, relying on the grace of the Holy Spirit and the promise of Jesus – "Where two or more are gathered together in my name . . . " We do not need an overseer's permission to be, to act, to stand, to speak. We could use a servant of the servants of God or two. And so, we pray that the Holy Spirit will see to it that we get them.

Deeply, I do not think there has ever been a time in the recorded history of the RCC, that such abuse of power, such insufferable hubris emanating from so many hierarchs, was made manifest in the epiphanies going on now, out of so many chanceries around the world. It is not Ordinary, though that is the sacred office to which hierarchs are ordained, after having been so carefully selected not elected. The missing "S", which is the single most important letter in the alphabet of RCCism. Rome Selects. Rome will never Elect.

You do not accept this? Go, read that sentence of Archbishop Curtiss one more time. Slowly. If we elect bishops, he said, we will automatically, "dismantle episcopal authority, diminish papal oversight and accountability." That is one helluva charge by an archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church. That's like saying, "If you vote for X as President of the United States, you will automatically dismantle governmental authority, diminish presidential oversight and accountability. You will be committing treason."Just by our selecting our own Elders, as the first Christians did. Exactly as they did, for hundreds of years. This Archbishop from Omaha wouldn't dare let lay people make such a choice. And he sure isn't going to let his clergy have the vote either. Nor will Rome. Only he and his friends have, in their own judgment, the skill, integrity and wisdom to lead. All others must follow. They are Overseers. We are but slaves. Ipse dixit. Solus.

3. Move And Undermine

Archbishop: "Local election of bishops would move the church toward a congregationalist model of governance that would undermine the international unity of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church."

Comment:

International unity? There is none. The RCC is a-splintering, busting up all over. Thousands, thousands have left, fed up with childishness, able to see behind the curtain, now that it has been rent by the scandal of all time, the sexual abuse of children by men in black – and purple – and scarlet – and white. No hierarch is beyond the weight of great millstones.

The three Ds – Dogma, Doctrine, Discipline – are now but one D – Discipline – as hierarchs come down strong and quick and mean and nasty, to whip their slaves into line: Cardinal Mahony and his nine obedient bishops dropped all pretense of love and fellowship and basic Christian hospitality by banning and barring Bishop Geoffrey Robinson of Sydney, Australia, from speaking, writing, even stepping foot into his diocese, while a guest in our country.

Unity of what? Why, "the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church," of course.

It is not "one" now. Just look within your own dioceses and its closing and clustering of parishes. Look around the world, especially South America, Africa, Southeast Asia. Rome yells the charade, "One." The rest of the world yells the actuality, "Many."
It is truly "holy," though, for no church can suffer the onslaughts of ours and still survive, without holiness. Just look at Jesus' crucifixion. The Church right now is being crucified. By its own. The high priests. The Church, our Church, is so holy that not even its high priests can stain it out of existence. The Roman Church will decline and fall like its namesake, mostly because it is man-made.
It is not "catholic", for it is not universal, nor is it the only church, the sole religion. Even though it insists that it is. Try this, without laughing. "Believe me, EPaul, who writes this. I know. I am wise and graced and aged. Heed me. Do what I order you to do. Or I will not let you go to Communion. Tick me off and I'll toss you out. Now, kneel and I'll give you my blessing." Anyone yield yet to my wield of power? Not one? C'mon . . . I want to be a bishop, never wrong, always right, and I'm heavy on the power, as heavy as on the covet when I was younger and eagerer.
It is not even "apostolic." The RCC is based on two men, Saints Peter and Paul. Peter is just one of the original twelve. Paul was no original, a sort of a Johnny-come-lately, who used to persecute, got knocked off his horse, and changed his mind. Might better call the Church Petric or Paulic, rather than Catholic. Leave the "Roman" qualifier attached, until it falls off from its own weighty bloat.

How many of us know the names of the other eleven – plus the add-on to replace the one who kissed? Please do not scorn me for being smarty here, but we don't actually know accurately who they were. Before you read what follows, write down all the names of Apostles you can remember. If really smart, jot down the places where they founded Churches. Any with the name of "Roman?" Were those Churches "Apostolic?" Where are they now?

Wikipedia – good for quick research – says:

The four Gospels give varying names of the twelve. According to the list occurring in each of the three Synoptic Gospels (Mark 3:13-19, Matthew 10:1-4, Luke 6:12-16), the Twelve chosen by Jesus near the beginning of his ministry, those whom also He named Apostles, were, according to the Gospels of Mark and Matthew:

Peter: Renamed by Jesus, his original name was Simon (Mark 3:16); was a fisherman from the Bethsaida "of Galilee" (John 1:44, cf. John 12:21). Also known as Simon bar Jonah, Simon bar Jochanan (Aram.), Cephas (Aram.), and Simon Peter.

James, son of Zebedee: The brother of John.

John: The brother of James. Jesus named both of them Bo-aner'ges, which means "sons of thunder".(Mark 3:17)

Andrew: The brother of Simon/Peter, a Bethsaida fisherman, and a former disciple of John the Baptist.

Philip: From the Bethsaida of Galilee (John 1:44, John 12:21)

Bartholomew, son of Talemai: It has been suggested that he is the same person as Nathanael, who is mentioned in John 1:45-51.

Matthew: The tax collector.

Thomas: Also known as Judas Thomas Didymus - Aramaic T'oma' = twin, and Greek Didymous = twin.

James, son of Alphaeus: Generally identified with "James the Less", and also identified by Roman Catholics with "James the Just". [9]

Thaddeus: In some manuscripts of Matthew, the name "Lebbaeus" occurs in this place. Thaddeus is traditionally identified with Jude; see below.

Simon the Zealot: Some have identified him with Simeon of Jerusalem. [10]

Judas Iscariot: The disciple who later betrayed Jesus. (Mark 3:19) The name Iscariot may refer to the Judaean towns of Kerioth or to the sicarii (Jewish nationalist insurrectionists), or to Issachar. Also referred to as "Judas, the son of Simon" (John 6:71 and John 13:26). He was replaced as an apostle shortly after Jesus' resurrection by Matthias.

The Gospel of Luke differs slightly, listing a "Judas, son of James" and not listing a "Thaddeus." In order to harmonize the accounts, some traditions have said that Luke's "Judas, son of James" refers to the same person as Mark and Matthew's "Thaddeus," though it is not clear whether this has a good basis in the text or the use of the names historically. Luke has "Simon the Zealot" in place of "Simon the Cananean". It is unclear whether these two Simons refer to the same person.

The Gospel of John, unlike the Synoptic Gospels, does not offer a formal list of apostles, though it does refer to the Twelve in 6:67, 6:70, and 6:71. The following ten apostles are identified by name:

Peter

Andrew (identified as Peter's brother)

the sons of Zebedee (plural form implies at least two apostles)

Philip

Nathanael

Thomas (also called Didymus (11:16, 20:24, 21:2))

Judas Iscariot

Judas (not Iscariot) (14:22)

The individual that the Gospel of John names as Nathanael has traditionally been identified as the same person that the other Gospels call Bartholomew. The other three Gospels, however, contain a complete list of the twelve and contain no reference to a "Nathanael." Thus, the four Gospel accounts do not agree as to the names of the twelve. The sons of Zebedee presumably refers to James and John, while Judas (not Iscariot) probably refers to the same Jude, son of James, as the Gospel of Luke's list, traditionally identified with Thaddeus. Missing from the Gospel of John are James, son of Alphaeus, Matthew, and Simon the Canaanite/Zealot. In any case, the author certainly does not bring up any explicit denial of those two apostles, and never actually lists the twelve.

By the second century, the presence of two individuals named Simon (Peter and Simon the Zealot) in the list of the Synoptic Gospels allowed a case to be made for Simon Magus being the other Simon, and hence one of the twelve apostles. The second Simon may also have been Simeon of Jerusalem, the second leader of the Jerusalem church.

The similarity between Matthew 9:9-10, Mark 2:14-15 and Luke 5:27-29 may indicate that Matthew was also known as Levi.

I know that "the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church," is in our Creeds, but isn't it more better, more OK, truthful, accurate to say that those four qualities are sort of wishful rather than actual? Is not our Church, the Catholic Church, without an adjective from an ancient and great city like Rome. Wonder where we'd be, had Antioch or Corinth or Lyons or Alexandria become the Primus inter pares – First among equals -- in those early centuries? Hippo? Dublin? Tokyo?

Question: Why can't we just look at our Church – and love it? Seeing it, without the propaganda, for what it does for people, rather than by these credal statements composed by hierarchs down the labyrinthine years of church history? It is a good Church. It is for "the many, holy, for all people, and a Petrine church?" Better than "one, holy, catholic and apostolic." Which simply is not true, though must be believed, as Rome says.

4. Hail-Fellows

Archbishop: "It is a great blessing for a diocese when a bishop is appointed from elsewhere on the basis of his real pastoral gifts and not on his previous popularity as a hail-fellow."

Comment: Well, this one is too tempting to treat seriously. "Hail-fellow" and "Bishop" are not compatible. What strips this bishop naked and unclothes his inhuman self-love, a sickening adoring of self and selves like him, is that he and they have "real pastoral gifts." I agree that he and they are devoid, totally devoid of any "popularity as a hail-fellow." They aren't even nice. They being himself and those who think and glint and speak and hiss, and write and destruct as does he. Calling that wield of absolute power "real pastoral gifts" is blasphemy. It is hubris, though, impure and complex.

Question: Why is that we laity kind of dream a little, hope a little, pray a lot that a real bishop, with real pastoral gifts would come and be one of us, with all of us as an Elder, with wisdom, age and grace among us men and women. That would be pure and simple, wouldn't it? Humble, even, a quality our current Selected, not elected, Hierarchs, don't seem to possess, or even know. Each of us knows such priests, and some bishops, a pope or two – remember John XXIII? – last century. What was it called? Vatican 2. Right?

5. The Primary Duty of a Bishop

Archbishop: "It is a primary duty of a bishop to help keep his diocese in union with the universal church under the leadership of the successor of St. Peter who, with the other apostles, was not elected by his peers."

Comment: Oh! No, that is not the primary duty of a bishop. Archbishop Curtiss made that one up. And it is erroneous historically. Jesus called the apostles, one by one. He didn't go to a Town Meeting and ask for nominations and an election. That came later, after he went home to his Father. When Judas hanged himself, the remaining eleven elected Matthias. First time they had the power of the vote. Went to it right away, without hesitation. Curtiss doesn't know his church history, or, if he does, he falsifies it. Ideologues do that frequently. It's how they operate to keep the power of control.

The primary duty of a bishop is to serve the people of God and help them enter the Kingdom. Curtiss speaks of a "union with the universal church." There is no such union, no such universal church, just a tiny city-state of the Vatican. And the Vatican is not Rome. We use "Rome" and "Roman" out of millennia of habit, without realizing how wrong it is. The actual name for the Archbishop's Church is The Vatican Church, and the religion is not Catholicism but Vaticanism. Accuracy helps us know what city or town and which religion is clamoring for our obeisance.

As far as those "other apostles . . . not elected by his peers," are concerned, I bet the Bishop of Omaha could not name them all, perhaps not even four. Oh!, and Jesus was not elected by his peers either. Be they the other two persons of the Trinity, or his apostles, disciples, or women friends. Jesus invites, calls. While here, he never, not even once, demanded of any man or woman, "Come, follow me." Jesus asks. He does not command. Nor does he excommunicate. Nor does he crucify those who won't come and follow him.

Saint Peter, by the way, was never ordained a priest. He was not a bishop. Never thought of himself as a pope. He was a fisherman, married, a stony one. Saint Paul, too, was no priest, bishop or pope. Not even an original Apostle out of the twelve. Jesus, before and after his crucifixion and resurrection, was, perhaps, a rabbi. He was not a high priest. He didn't like high priests, or those who lord it over others, but allowed others to call him, "Lord, Lord . . . " Wonder what Bishop Curtiss really thinks of Jesus and Peter and Paul . . .

I wonder whether this Archbishop who is so terrified of elections and of popularity, i.e. of people, that he never had the chance to find out who Jesus is in his own episcopal life. I wonder whether he ever talks to or listens to the Lord. Or the cardinal in a nearby diocese. Perhaps, just the Pope? He's heavy on that union stuff with Rome as the sole, solitary, primary duty of a bishop, isn't he? Sad. This poor guy is so fouled up. He doesn't know who Jesus is. He has no idea of what a bishop is supposed to do. And he writes letters to Commonweal!

Question: Does Archbishop Curtiss know anything in the New Testament, or about the first few years of the Church, say from 29 AD, the crucifixion and resurrection, up to 100, AD, another 71 years? Wikipedia tell us at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_of_Rome

The Bishop of Rome is the bishop of the Holy See, more often referred to in the Catholic tradition as the Pope. The first Bishop of Rome to bear the title of "Pope" was Boniface III in 607, the first to assume the title of "Universal Bishop" by decree of Emperor Phocas. (602-610) Earlier Bishops of Rome are customarily extended the title Pope as a courtesy, except in strict historical discourse. The title "Bishop of Rome" is also used in preference to Pope by some members of Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant denominations, to reflect their rejection of papal authority over the Christian Church.

The word Pope – Papa in Latin and Greek – was used by many bishops around the Mediterranean in the first few centuries of the Church. A century is one hundred years. I'm not being cute. I'm asking readers to think of how long a hundred years is, longer than a lifetime, and five centuries is five hundred years. Think on that span of time, from 29, when Jesus died and rose from the dead, to 607 when Boniface III became the first man ever to claim the title of "Pope" rather than just Bishop of Rome. That was 578 years after Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead.

To put it in focus, 578 years ago was 1430. Columbus had not yet discovered America. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen, on May 30, 1431. She was 19. The 15th century was the beginning of the Age of Exploration. There was a world outside of Europe. Magellan and Vasco da Gama and Columbus. Aztecs and Incas. Imagine, no Popes as such for about 550 years. What is all this stuff "the official teachings of the Roman Church" claims as the historical record from St. Peter the Apostle, a fisherman was neither pope nor bishop nor priest but a fisherman?

The first pope to pop up was Boniface III in 607. Historians have granted the courtesy of being pope to his predecessors, all the way back to St. Peter. But the first pope qua pope didn't arrive until the seventh century. Wikipedia says at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_conclave:

In the early centuries of Christianity the bishop of Rome (like other bishops) was chosen by the consensus of the clergy and people of Rome. The body of electors was more precisely defined when, in 1059, the College of Cardinals was designated the sole body of electors. . . And At the Lateran Synod of 13 April
1059 Nicholas II decreed (In nomine Domini) that the pope is to be elected by the six cardinal bishops.

Sorry, Archbishop Curtiss, those are the facts. That's church history. Popes elected by Cardinals didn't come around until the eleventh century, a thousand years after Jesus walked the earth and the waters in Palestine. During all those centuries, Bishops were elected by the clergy and by the people. Archbishop Curtiss' condemnation of elections of bishops is silly, contrary to the facts of history. To put it rather bluntly, he doesn't even know his own Church and its traditions over the two thousand years since Jesus became incarnate.

6. Two Thousand Years of Experience

Archbishop: "I can assure your readers that the collective wisdom of the church, with two thousand years of experience, will not let her return to the selection of bishops by the local clergy and laity. Bishops are expected to govern with authority that comes not from clergy or people but from the Lord himself."

Comment: This confused archbishop can 'assure" Commonweal's readers all he wants, but his assurances melt in the hot sun of the historical fact over a thousand years of Church History that bishops were elected by a consensus of both clergy and the people. Archbishop Curtiss had a slip of the tongue, not Freudian, but revealing, when he wrote above that the "wisdom of the church . . . will not let her return to the selection of bishops by the local clergy and laity." He knew well that bishops were elected for one thousand years of the church's history, even as he was trying to pull the wool over our eyes that election of bishops was so monstrous a concept that it had never-ever-ever happened in the church before. I can't say that this bishop lied. I can say that he made an egregious mistake and doesn't know what he is writing about.

He can expostulate, too, all he wants about the gift of authority from God. Authority is given to the people, not to hierarchs solely. God does not bypass his people for the favored few oligarchs locked in the costumes and mindsets of the Middle Ages. God gives gifts to his people, and the gift of authority is, just as this bishop asserts, "from the Lord himself." It comes from the Lord to the people and the clergy, just as it did for the first thousand years, and then it comes from the clergy and the people to the bishops. Bishop Curtiss is confused and in serious error. He thinks he and his colleagues are separate and apart from the people in a tiny cubicle of the Vatican, which they think is the church. Just them.

The "collective wisdom of the church," of which this bishop is assured does not reside in bishops alone. It is the hallmark, the lodestar, the essence of church. And the church is the people of God: we who are called laity, and priests on various rungs of the ladder, who are called clergy. Neither one alone is church. Together, we are church. I write this to show that I am not anticlerical. I am simply anti-absolute power as wielded by some, too many for comfort, high up on the rungs of the church's ladder of power.

Question: When a hierarch like Elden Francis Curtiss of Omaha, Nebraska, speaks out so erroneously and austerely and autocratically, riddled with errors and falsehoods, and yet from on high about the election of bishops, we are more deeply inspired to Take Back Our Church. CTA, in its current membership drive, is asking us to ponder, "I've had enough…." Of what? Of 1- Intolerance and 2- Injustice and 3- Lack of Accountability. By whom? By Bishops and Cardinals and Popes, who have forgotten who they are: servants of the servants of God. When? Now.

Does anyone reading this think that Archbishop Curtiss will retract his terrible letter? At least correct the obvious historical errors? Or will he excommunicate me for challenging him to face the reality of our church. It is not his. Or mine. It is ours. Ours. As a gift from the Lord himself.

Join CTA. I did. A few weeks ago, realizing that I can write and write and write and achieve nothing alone. With membership in a group like CTA, I can work with others to Take Back Our Church before unskilled, uneducated, untrained, and worst of all, unqualified bishops like Curtiss of Omaha destroys it.

If we cannot join CTA now, let us reconsider later, please, when we can quietly say,

"We've had enough of intolerance, injustice and lack of accountability. We've had enough of hierarchical pomposity and disregard of historical fact. The Lord himself gave us our church. We should honor it, love it, protect it from those who do it harm."

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USCCP -- United States Conference of Catholic People

2008-06-19T20:58:00.001-07:00

Bottom of Form

In the fall of 2002, when I was jumping in to write about the Church, I got upset at the alphabet soup of lay people activity. There were so many groups: ARCC, CTA, VOTF, et al. But, there was no spokes-group or -person for the laity. In a frustrated mood, I wrote a piece later on March 25, 2005, about starting up a United States Conference of Catholic People – USCCP. It was to be fashioned on the USCCB. I even wanted USCCP to have its offices in the same building with USCCB in Washington. We the people would pay for it, because we were already paying for the USCCB. And we the people would have a central office, in which all the alphabits could find a home and start talking to each other and working together. It would be one powerful organization, the USCCP would. For, then, the Sensus Fidelium would have its own platform from which to vitalize and make real The Magisterium itself, of which it is an essential partner. The piece written then went on and on, as is usual for me.

That article was in a former blog, Paul of Pine Point, and I am re-postging here in this blog, because VOTF had just called for a National Peoples Synod, and that has awakened that old dream. We the people need to come together in a central place under a central umbrella, to shelter our national spokespersons and feature writers. I think the USCCB would sit up and say "Welcome, People, we were hoping you would come join us. We need you so much." A dream? Perhaps. But so was Christianity when Jesus spoke in parables. The People's Synod looks exciting, the perfect vehicle in which we can all fit to travel together and rebuild our Church. It may or may not evolve into a USCCP, but it will surely bring us together. And even the USCCB will listen up. And then we become a genuine Church, people and clergy, clerical and lay. We might even succeed in abrogating the adjective "Roman" before "Catholic," so that we have an authentic Catholic Church.

First, then, the VOTF announcement received today:

People's Synod

By Susan Vogt

Periodically, Popes call Vatican Councils and Bishops call Diocesan Synods. Sometimes the voices of lay people are heard through these forums but too often it is a gathering of church professionals and clerics with a tightly orchestrated agenda and predetermined outcomes. It is a breath of fresh air when this doesn't happen (like Vatican Council II) but that was over 40 years ago. The time has come for a different kind of council – a people's synod. This is consistent with VOTF's philosophy of being a vehicle for the voices of the faithful and working toward common ground together.

A national gathering of Catholics has also been on the minds of many Catholic organizations for awhile and VOTF has taken the role of midwife. Thus, a National People's Synod –
a
potentially transformative project for the Church in the U.S. – is ready to launch. Although we are walking into an unknown future, one thing we do know is that a synod will happen best if it is not solely a VOTF project but rather a collaborative partnership with the support of a wide spectrum of Catholic leaders and organizations.

We are, therefore, now at the point of transitioning from a VOTF planning committee to forming the Synod Planning Partnership (SPP). VOTF will be the convener, but it is time for us to join our energy with that of other national groups. Don't get too attached to these initials, however, since we've also played around with calling it a National People's Council (a la Vatican II). The newly formed Planning Partnership will make the final call on the name and all accompanying logistical decisions.

So who will make up the Synod Planning Partnership? It will be 25 prominent Catholics and/or their organizations who are willing to put time into making this dream a reality. The date and location of the Synod are tentative although we are aiming for 2010-2011 in a large Midwestern city with proximity to an international airport and facilities large enough to accommodate the numbers we are looking to attend.

Guiding principles of the synod are:

In the spirit of Vatican II we want to renew the Church through adding many voices to the decision making process.
VOTF will act as a catalyst to convene other groups which, together with VOTF, will prompt those who care about the future of our Church to plan and participate in this history making movement within the Church.
It will afford time and opportunity for the Spirit, to define our role in renewal.
The foundation of such a gathering will be respect, including assenting and dissenting voices, in the belief that truth emerges when all sides of an issue are explored and different perspectives are represented.
An atmosphere of co-ownership and responsibility.

A challenge and a goal of the synod will be to bring together a broad spectrum of Catholics and to really listen to their concerns and ideas for reinvigorating the Church we love. Given this listening, we trust that strategies and actions will evolve to move us closer to the church Jesus inspired. Over 25 Planning Partners have been invited and we are in the process of finalizing the Partnership. Stay tuned for ongoing progress.

++++++++++

And now the article on USCCP

Paul of Pine Point

To engage the future of the Church in the 21st Century.

Friday, March 25, 2005

The USCCP

The Roundtable and Other Groups

On March 14, The National Leadership Roundtable On Church Management released its Final Report as the launching of a new group of lay persons, religious, clergy and hierarchy, to render assistance to the church.
The web site for the NLRCM is http://www.nlrcm.org.
The 88 page report is available at: http://www.nlrcm.org/pdf/Final%20Report.pdf
For the last three years, many groups of Catholics have been hard at work to help those harmed by the sexual abuse of minors by some deviant Catholic priests, aided and abetted by some covering-up bishops, and to make sure that such crimes against humanity never happen again.
These groups are many. ARCC, CTA, Survivors First, Future Church, VOTF, SNAP, BishopAccountability, CORPUS, CITI, and so many, many others. Many of them are banned and barred from church property. Some CTA people have been formally excommunicated. The most accurate term for depicting the relationship of those groups to those bishops is Polarization. A few have called it The Roman Church Civil War.

A Stalemate of Silence
The bishops of those dioceses have decreed A Stalemate of Silence to the repeated request from those groups for dialogue in this time of perhaps the most serious crisis in the history of the Roman church.
The bishops will not talk, despite the exhortations of a dying Pope to his priests and bishops throughout Christendom. Here are a few words from the spokesman, Cardinal Hummes. Why do American bishops ignore these words in their hostile treatment of their own people?

Dialogue Seen as a Tool of Church's Service
Cardinal Hummes Addresses Congress on "Gaudium et Spes"
VATICAN CITY, MARCH 17, 2005 (Zenit.org).-

The Church must constantly exercise dialogue in its commitment to serve people and protect their fundamental rights, says Cardinal Claudio Hummes. . . .

The prelate spoke of the Church's role in relation to the world, expressed in "a dialogue with courage -- open, frank, sensible and humble. A dialogue with contemporary man, with human reason, the sciences, the progress in biotechnology, with philosophies and cultures, with politics and economics, with everything that refers to social justice, human rights, solidarity with the poor. A dialogue with the whole of society and its segments." . . .

"The Church supports and favors all the present efforts to seek the full development of the personality of every human being and to promote his fundamental rights, dignity and freedom," said Cardinal Hummes.

Our bishops gave no heed to these words, but they seek relief in the courts, against the charges being made for their mismanagement of church affairs. It is as if they and their institution were corporations and citizens of the states and country, where they have long reigned as entities above the law. They refuse to release information about who and where the predator priests are, even today. Our children, thousands upon thousands, over 100,000 in some estimates, were and still are at risk. The bishops seem not to care.

Bishops and Knights of the Roundtable
There is only one thing about which the bishops of America do care, and with ferocity: The Roman Church, the institutional church. Each one of the bishops has taken an oath never to break secrecy lest scandal or harm come to the church. Truly, Omerta! The institution is more important than the people, be they little children or any of the non-ordained.
And yet and yet, it now appears that bishops have talked and will continue to talk to a high-powered group of 225 leaders from investment banking, the corporate world, professions, and other successful business persons in America. It is The Roundtable—NLRCM. The banned and barred lay groups are wondering where they got the clout and why the bishops chose to dialogue with them.
A friend wrote on reading info from John Moynihan of the VOTF National Representative Council

". . . it seems that this group is accomplishing in a very short period of time all that we have been working towards . . . [T]his self described group of "influential" people has caught the attention of even the most reluctant bishop. Where do we go from here? Is the Roundtable group now taking the lead?"

Questions worth asking and deserving an answer, not only from the NLRCM but also from the USCCB. These prompted more:

• What's the big secret?
• What's happening?
• Who is taking our church somewhere?
• Why are we being told two years after the bankers and the bishops started their private dialogue?
• Will the USCCB grant formal recognition of the NLRCM at the June meeting this year?
• Are any members of the NLRCM also members of a lay group which is currently banned and barred and standing?
• How come the bishops are talking with you?
• Is the NLRCM aware that we People are standing still in A Stalemate of Silence, yet trying to realize that we may have to Toss the Gantlet that we will go it alone as the People of God sanctioned by Vatican II?

Can Grown-Ups Make A Tree Out Of Splinters?
For two and a half years now, suggestions have been urged, that lay organizations should think about bringing all their groups together, so as to speak with one voice.
The Roundtable, nicer sounding than the forbidding acronym of NLRCM, pronounced reverently as Enn-el-er-see-um, made its announcement just two weeks ago. It was obvious that those people got together, and with the clout they have, got bishops interested. While nobody has said yet that they have episcopal approval, it looks as if their group is going to be considered at the June meeting of the USCCB.
The program they offer is astounding. Were any of us to make a similar announcement, we would be instantly dismissed as wallowing in dissidence and usurping authority. The Knights of the Roundtable seem to have avoided that. Perhaps we should have named ourselves something with a Camelot in the title. Instead we came out as VOTF, SNAP, ARCC, CORPUS, CTA, pronounced, in snarls, as Vote-uff, Sh-nap, Arc or Arch, Core-poose, and See-tee- yeah!
Each one out loud is better than USCCB – Us-ku-ka-bub. Surely better than the one I will shortly propose: USCCP – Us-ku-ka-pee.

Roundtable and Us -- Dialogue or Silence?
Leaders of our groups ought to be asked, whether we should get in touch with Roundtable, or they with us. They might prefer to stay self-contained, like the Jesuits, especially when they started up in 1540, almost as a personal prelature of Pope Paul III, or Opus Dei, actually a personal prelature of Pope John Paul II.
The Roundtable is intent on solidifying their relationship with the USCCB in June, and from the looks of their 88 page report, will go it alone. Not sure yet, if they will be puppets of the bishops, or friends, advisors, perhaps even equals in every respect. Unlike the National Lay Review Board, selected by the USCCB, it looks as if the Roundtable selected the USCCB.
Common sense suggests that there were a few bishops as pretty good client/investors, or moles within investment banking, With the number of people disclosed so far in Roundtable, the quality of their reputations in business, schools, professions, their obvious success and know how, it's easy to see how they have come so far in such a short time. They know how to operate in marble halls and the corridors of power.
The Knights are successful people, as America judges success: Their demeanor and vestments manifest wealth and power. They could be called, pardon the pun, Lay Bishops. They are definitely not from our common herd. You might see them after Mass on Sunday; they're the ones shaking hands with a beaming celebrant, deeply pleased they waited to say, "Nice homily, Father." Perhaps, they usually attend a bishop's Mass, in the Cathedral or private chapels.
One account did say that a bishop was pretty noncommittal about them, his reserve indicating that they may not be granted favored treatment by the USCCB, on the age old shibboleth of absolute power, which is absolutely never to be delegated to any inferior.
Almost every bishop is prickly about his authority, except when the Pope or a Curial Cardinal treats him like the altar boy he actually is, notwithstanding his grey hair and the paunch, accompanying him as time wends into eternity. Wonder whether any bishop ever thinks of that Judgment Day prior to eternity. Common folk do, and they call it Conscience.

Dialogue -- Dialogue -- Dialogue
More information from Roundtable is needed. We should always be leery of contempt without examination. Intuition, though, may whisper: Why not go straight to the Roundtable leaders and ask them, "What's up? Are you people going to go it alone. Do you have any interest in rounding up all the lay groups and bringing them into one tent? Would you prefer that we stay out of your way?"
We might, I suppose, ask the bishops, but that would probably engender more disdain, contempt, silence. Simon and Garfunkel could have written their immortal The Sounds of Silence, with us and the bishops in mind.

Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping, Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain,
Still remains, within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone, Narrow streets of cobblestone,
'neath the halo of a street lamp, I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night, and touched the sound of silence.

And in the naked light I saw, Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening,
People writing songs, that voices never share.
And no one dared, Disturb the sound of silence.

"Fools" said I, "You do not know, Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you, Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed, In the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed, To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning, In the words that it was forming.
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls." and whisper'd in the sounds of silence

The USCCP
That haunting song should be our hymn in The Stalemate of Silence, as we back off a bit from our relentless daily work, think, then pray, for a while, gather our collective breath, find a way to come together as one group for one People.
What would ever happen in and to the Catholic Church in America, were we to announce the formation of a new organization: The United States Conference of Catholic People?
The USCCP. With an office in trendy Washington, DC, an executive director or President, an educated and qualified staff. Funding is no problem. Just change the name of The Bishop's Appeal to The People's Appeal. There are 67 million of us, at $0.10 per person, for a total of $6,700,00. That's a start with clout. The kind that should awaken our American bishops to become aware of the simple reality that the days of absolute power are over.
For those concerned about underwriting the USCCP, ask just one question. Who underwrites the USCCB? The church does not earn money. It collects it. From us. Most Sundays now we have a series of Collections -- First, Second, Third. We support each of the 195 dioceses and each agency and parish and ministry within them. We do, in fact, pay for the entire Roman church in the United States, including the USCCB. When the money gets low, we are asked to donate more in Special Appeals. When that is gone, as it is now in three dioceses so far, they file for bankruptcy protection. It is exquisitely sad to hear the accusations that the blame for poor financial conditions is, believe it or not, due to the claims of the Survivors, the victims of ecclesiastical crimes. Jesus himself has promised to lay the blame on those who harmed the children, with a punishment far worse than a great millstone.
It's crazy that money talks, and bishops won't. And it seems like going down on their low level of silent disdain, when we threaten to withhold funds needed for the ministries of our church, particularly to the marginalized. We must never forget that our church does much good, truly helps those unable to help themselves, is based on and does live in the three great theological virtues: Faith, Hope, Love. How much better it would be to let the bishops become aware that that we will continue to support the church, provided funds are allocated to the establishment and maintenance of the USCCP.
If they refuse, or if the silence continues, then with the advice and consent of enough of the People to assure us we are on the correct way, we establish a National Trust Fund for a USCCP and donate our $0.10 per person there, while continuing to meet our obligations to the church, which is, of course, the People of God.
With the One Voice of the USCCP being heard, the dialogue can begin. Soon, the tyranny will end. No more brutality from: absolute power and its twin, absolute corruption; the feudal remnants of thralls in thralldom; authoritarian control of our lives and our minds and our hearts and our souls. Gone. All gone. It will be over. It will be all over. Inalienable rights and dignities will be honored not squelched. Together, we are the People of God and we are Church.

A Spiritual Guide On Splinters
Long ago in law school, we used to spend many afternoons with Father Tobin, officially the Spiritual Father for us students, actually a Jesuit elder allowed to relax a bit in pasture, well earned after years of managing the Science Department at B.C. and placing thousands of graduates in medical schools or doctorate programs in the sciences. As fledgling lawyers-to-be, we were blessed to have as our guide a humble Jesuit priest, who was also a genius and a saint.
One day we talked about Israel surrounded by Arab countries, with millions of men and boys ready to kill the heathen. We felt Israel was outnumbered and would be obliterated in the next all-out war. Fr. Tobin told us not to worry, explaining that the Israelites knew well that the hostile countries were little splinter groups, each one powerful and zealous, but so splintered there was no way they could ever come together and defeat Israel. That was 1957. It's 2005 now, and Israel is still here. It might even have a neighbor soon, a democracy exported mightily into the splinters.
The last few years have demonstrated that American bishops, as wise as Israelis, think the same way about us. We are so splintered. As the People, we do have a few standouts like Tom Doyle and friends; old-timers such as ARCC and CTA; a couple of strong, new groups in VOTF and SNAP; many skilled and moving writers in the new books coming out. But like the Arabs, we're splintered splinters. I don't even think we talk with each other, let alone with the bishops. We can, through a USCCP.

No Splinters When United In A Conference
The United States Conference of Catholic People -- USCCP -- will not only end the splintered weaknesses inherent in scattered groups, but it will also afford the People their proper place in the church as members. The USCCP will be equal to the USCCB, and People will be side by side with Priests and Hierarchy, without petty banning or barring, free from The Stalemate of Silence, all polarization abolished. We will all be living and breathing and walking and working together to engage the future of the American Catholic Church in the 21st century.
The groups -- ARCC, CORPUS, VOTF, just to name three -- will remain and grow in wisdom and grace, more easily dedicated to their precise missions. Those groups are like the numerous Orders and Congregations of Religious and Clergy -- Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans -- again a symbolic three, each with their unique missions.
The USCCP, as a counterpart to the USCCB, will speak for all of the 67,000,000 People. They now speak in a cacophony of splintered voices. They should have the timbre and clarity and resonance of One Voice. They have received the Faith That Dares To Speak. With the USCCP, they will find and claim the courage and humility to stand and speak. And be heard.
When that One Voice speaks, no bishop will dare to pout in A Stalemate of Silence. When that One Voice speaks, the process for accountability will begin for those bishops responsible for the cover-upping and criminal negligence and malfeasance in their overseeing duties. They will have to lay down their crooked Croziers and doff their two-faced Mitres. They will be called for an accounting. And they will be held accountable. When that One Voice speaks, the confessions will come, the amends will be made, and we will be the American Catholic Church.
Survivors and their families, friends and supporters will have hope that Justice will be rendered in this life, and their healing may continue in peace. Whether People or Bishop, we know well that another accounting is coming, the one reserved for each and every one of us, and in particular the one about the Great Millstones for those who have harmed a child. We cannot pass into the transition from this life to eternal life without standing for our personal Final Judgment. In that accounting, may we be judged with mercy. May we remember that mercy now, as we are judging others around us, particularly in their response to the Church's need for reformation and renewal in this 21st century.
In time, the USCCB and the USCCP will merge into the USCPG -- The United States Conference of the People of God. And we will be one, apostolic and holy.
May we imagine the Holy Spirit telling us,

"It could be done, you know, if you come together as equals, not as favored groups or prelatures. If you really become a Catholic Church. If you are the People of God."

You Can Go Home Again

2008-06-13T10:44:00.001-07:00

Some readers know that Jean and I are going home tomorrow, despite Tom Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again." He also wrote, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died." And that one's not true, either. We lived in Manchester, NH, for almost forty years, raised our family of four sons there, and spent a good part of each year at Jean's family home, which her parents had bought in 1940. The Brown House on Sea Rose Lane, in Pine Point, Maine, where our front yard was Grand Beach, seven miles long.

We left New Hampshire in 1997 for our discovery of the West, settled in Fort Collins, Colorado, and worked for a company based at Lake Tahoe, California. It had offices in San Diego and Dover, NH, back where our roots were. We toured all the western states and criss-crossed America, from the Pacific to the Atlantic twelve times during the next four years. Indeed, our Great Adventure.

Retirement came in 2001. Our home in NH had been long sold. The one in Maine beckoned us full-time, and we stayed in sort of a gentile retirement, until taxes and our own wander-wonder-lust moved us on and out and back to – you guessed it, Colorado, that unique among states with three geologies. On the east, the High Plains, at 5,000 feet, nestled up against the foothills to the Rocky Mountains, known to Coloradans as The Front Range. This time we chose Longmont, about twenty miles south of Fort Collins where we had lived before. Longs Peak, 14,255 feet, is framed by our bedroom window. It is one of the 14-ers, those Rocky Mountains which exceed 14,000 feet. The Rockies are the second of the geologies, surging down through the middle of the state. The third is the Great Plateau, all the way west to the Sierras, through Utah and Nevada into California.

Easterners, particularly New Englanders, who do live in another of America's treasure lands, can never know the grandeur of the West, until they spend several years living here. It is magnificent. It is awesome. And it is hard to leave, even when going home.

In a blog recently, I wrote:

All the above sounds good, reads well. But, it is a close one. Like 9 - 7, in the bottom of the ninth, with two men on, two outs, and the slugger of the team at bat. The pitcher is tired. Or, it's 4^th and 1 in the Super Bowl, the losing team on its own 45, 24 - 21, a few more yards for a field goal try, 30 seconds on the clock. But it could be what the ultras jeer it is: just pie in the sky, or Lucy in the sky with diamonds.

That eases the pain of leaving Colorado to be with our youngest grandchildren in Manchester, NH, ages 5 and 3, because the sports references show that we are going home to the sports capitol of the world. The Celtics came back last night from 20 points down to beat the Lakers 97 – 91. My home town of Boston hosts the Bruins and the Red Sox. All of New England claims the Patriots.

You Can Go Home Again.

As a farewell to one of the greatest of our 50, we spent a week with our oldest son in Dillon, smack square in the middle of Summit County in the heart of the Rockies. From there we went to the places which had taken our hearts: the Front Range, from Cheyenne, Wyoming, all the way down to Taos, New Mexico, and back up through the Sangre di Cristo mountains valley; a long awaited adventurous drive in our RAV4 on Trail Ridge Road, the highest paved road in the USA, around 12,000 feet – like Lake Tahoe, where we spent many working visits at the highest mountain lake in the USA, making our high points the highest on land and on water; to Leadville, an old mining town that looks like it used to be, though a bit touristy, not too much, at 10,150 feet; and the trip of trips yesterday due west out of Dillon and Frisco and Copper Mountain, west on I-70, to Glenwood Springs. The last part of that trip is through Glenwood Canyon, rivaling Emerald Bay in Lake Tahoe, as the most beautiful, inspiring places in this country of ours. When we get off the plane tomorrow, in Manchester,NH, at 4:22,pm, home after eleven years away, and back in the Merrimack Valley, we will always have our Great Adventure in the West deep in our remembery.

Imperial Impunity

2008-06-13T08:03:00.001-07:00

It would seem in post-Nazism and post-coldwarism that a giant of democracy and a foremost proponent of the Rule of Law would show leadership to the world by how it protects and preserves humanity and decency and the fine art of jurisprudence, particularly in the way in which it deals with those accused and waiting for their day in court. The common folk call it "Due Process." Some in the legal profession, be they lawyer or judge, used to do so, too, but not now. No sham can be honored with the word "Due" in front of the word "Process."

Many of us who grew up as children in WWII, too young to be patriotic all the way and march in parades, sing songs of war and go off to Europe or Asia to defeat the enemy, as our older teenage brothers did, often heard stories of that enemy, hoping that their capture would be effected by American troops. Americans were kind, gave chocolate bars to kids, bartered cigarettes for silk stockings, laughed a lot, even though dirty, scummed with the mud of battle, weary, yet deadly in a firefight, awesome with power of machine and weapon that simply could not be beaten.

And, my God, they were brave, brave beyond the calculated assessment of the hardened, professional, battle-proven, best and bravest of Japan and Germany. They thought American kids off the streets and the farms were amateurs. And yet, and yet, as the war grew on and on, it became evident, even to us youngsters and our parents, awash as we were in daily propaganda Dr. Goebbels would have given his eye-teeth, both arms and eyes for, we poured out our instinctive respect and love for our troops.

I learned this after the war, in a scholastics' rec room in Tokyo, listening to Bob Arrowsmith tell stories of his paratrooper days in the Pacific theatre, and Franz Schaffenberger talk of Mass for the troops by a German Jesuit prior to the Battle of the Bulge. I sat there, 25 years old, staring at two men just a few years older than I, who had been there, done that, in the bloodiest war of history. I was touching courage and decency and honor in each of them. I knew, in the early years of my own adulthood, schooling done, that I would never understand "war."

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not glorifying war. War is hell. Period. But, down on the ground, up in the air, on the seas, it was not always fought by inhuman monsters. Nor were wars won by torture of captured enemies. Even in the slaughter of the innocents, as in modern warfare, with pattern bombing, submarine sinkings, Coventry, Nanking, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, there is something called human decency which forbids the torture and killing of those who fought against our troops and were captured when their side lost. I'm pretty sure it is accurate to say that America did not have Abu Ghraib prisons in WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Panama, Granada, the great wars in which we onlookers were no long kids too young to serve, but grown-ups, still swallowing the patent obfuscations of reality that our government sent out daily as the "gospel truth" about what is going on over there.

Today, our observations are those of the title in one of Thomas Merton's masterpieces – Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. In our battle to squash Iraq, for a presidential emotive justification, or worse, a neoconical reason, and in those other skirmishes where we hope to wipe out the fanatics of Al Qaeda, we have "become accustomed to her face," the face of degrading, humiliating water boarding and plain, old-fashioned executions. Not by them. By us. And we Americans are demeaned. Democracy is but a buzz word. The Rule of Law was abrogated. We never noticed their passing.

All the above sounds good, reads well. But, it is a close one. Like 9 - 7, in the bottom of the ninth, with two men on, two outs, and the slugger of the team at bat. The pitcher is tired. Or, it's 4^th and 1 in the Super Bowl, the losing team on its own 45, 24 - 21, a few more yards for a field goal try, 30 seconds on the clock. But it could be what the ultras jeer it is: just pie in the sky, or Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Because the United States Supreme Court's decision about the denial of Habeas Corpus to Guantanamo detainees was 5 – 4. The New York Times lead editorial on June 13, 2008 was "Justice 5, Brutality 4." That editorial is so insightful, that I copy it here below. The "Brutal Four" are Chief Justice Roberts, and his first team members, Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito.

If you are concerned with my language, because you know I am a retired lawyer, know that I spoke this way when active in the practice of law. I do not like and fear Neocons, even if they wear judicial robes. Particularly, if they wear those robes in a court of last resort, which is the source of their Imperial Impunity. And I will so speak and write until I die, not even huffing that my opponents can then wrench the keyboard from my cold, dead hands, because I give it to one of my friends, who picks it up to go join the thousands of others whose keyboards tingle in tune together. We are being heard. We are being read. Time we should have been, but that's our own procrastination and apathy, isn't it? On which, they used to count and rely with Imperial Impunity.

May God preserve us from brutality, doing it rather than receiving it, for Jesus didn't duck the crucifixion at the high hands of Imperial Impunity and high priests who knew not what they were doing.

Also, and finally, a new phrase, you may have notice, has emerged to describe our country and its current administration: Imperial Impunity. That is why it's the title of this piece, thanks to its creator Tom Engelhardt, of TomDispatch at Truthout. The article in which it appeared is " 'E' for Expeditionary: One Man's Online Journey Through Bush's Alphabet Soup." At: http://www.truthout.org/article/one-mans-online-journey-through-bushs-alphabet-soup?print.

I think this acknowledgment is very important, because it is also a two-word description of the politics of the Vatican, its pope, its curia, and its cardinals, the top guns who are not accountable to anyone but God, so they say. We hope that is so, with great millstones biblically, but want basic responsibility from our leaders, based on tolerance, justice and accountability, now. Collegiality is no panacea, because the two Colleges – of Cardinals and of Bishops – have been selectively packed with look-alikes, walk-alikes, talk-alikes, one by one, since 1978, by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

That makes Bishop Geoffrey Robinson such a rarity that his own brothers must try to hush him up. So far, cardinalitial croziers and episcopal feet, dancing choreographically, are pounding sand.

Imperial Impunity is no Church.

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June 13, 2008

Editorial

Justice 5, Brutality 4

For years, with the help of compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats in Congress, President Bush has denied the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency to the hundreds of men that he decided to label "unlawful enemy combatants" and throw into never-ending detention.

Twice the Supreme Court swatted back his imperial overreaching, and twice Congress helped Mr. Bush try to open a gaping loophole in the Constitution. On Thursday, the court turned back the most recent effort to subvert justice with a stirring defense of habeas corpus, the right of anyone being held by the government to challenge his confinement before a judge.

The court ruled that the detainees being held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have that cherished right, and that the process for them to challenge their confinement is inadequate. It was a very good day for people who value freedom and abhor Mr. Bush's attempts to turn Guantánamo Bay into a constitutional-rights-free zone.

The right of habeas corpus is so central to the American legal system that it has its own clause in the Constitution: it cannot be suspended except "when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."

Despite this, the Bush administration repeatedly tried to strip away habeas rights. First, it herded prisoners who were seized in Afghanistan, and in other foreign countries, into the United States Navy base at Guantánamo Bay and claimed that since the base is on foreign territory, the detainees' habeas cases could not be heard in the federal courts. In 2004, the court rejected that argument, ruling that Guantánamo, which is under American control, is effectively part of the United States.

In 2006, the court handed the administration another defeat, ruling that it had relied improperly on the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to hold the detainees on Guantánamo without giving them habeas rights. Since then, Congress passed another law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that tried — and failed horribly — to fix the problems with the Detainee Treatment Act.

Now, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court has affirmed the detainees' habeas rights. The majority, in an opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruled that the Military Commissions Act violates the Suspension Clause, by eliminating habeas corpus although the requirements of the Constitution — invasion or rebellion — do not exist.

The court ruled that the military tribunals that are hearing the detainees' cases — the administration's weak alternative to habeas proceedings in a federal court — are not an adequate substitute. The hearings cut back on basic due process protections, like the right to counsel and the right to present evidence of innocence.

It was disturbing that four justices dissented from this eminently reasonable decision. The lead dissent, by Chief Justice John Roberts, dismisses habeas as "most fundamentally a procedural right." Chief Justice Roberts thinks the detainees receive such "generous" protections at their hearings that the majority should not have worried about whether they had habeas rights.

There is an enormous gulf between the substance and tone of the majority opinion, with its rich appreciation of the liberties that the founders wrote into the Constitution, and the what-is-all-the-fuss-about dissent. It is sobering to think that habeas hangs by a single vote in the Supreme Court of the United States — a reminder that the composition of the court could depend on the outcome of this year's presidential election. The ruling is a major victory for civil liberties — but a timely reminder of how fragile they are.

[Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/opinion/13fri1.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin]

The Critical Issues To Save The Catholic Church Are Political Not Doctrinal

2008-06-11T19:02:00.001-07:00

It has to be obvious that I am whelmed by the horror of the hierarch. It is obvious that I do not speak in the measured, detached tones of the appellate lawyer before the five justices of our New Hampshire Supreme Court, as was done so many times over 40 years of immersion in the river of jurisprudence. Professionals rarely emote. Jurisprudence itself is a discipline that cannot feel, but knows and finds clarity out of obfuscation.

Not too long ago, though, jurisprudence began to feel, when it stared at the crime of sexual abuse in which the perpetrator was a 30 year old man wearing a Roman collar and the female victim was a six year old child, wearing nothing, her First Communion dress crumpled by her side. I knew emotion then, racking, raging, enormous, whelming. Our only granddaughter, Alayna, was 12. During the ensuing six years, my knowledge grew as did my emotions. Alayna is 18, saved, perhaps, because her father became an Evangelical Christian. Our new grandchildren are Seanna, 5 ½ years old, and her brother Ryan, 3. As modern Catholic parents, since January 2002, their vigilance is constant, steady – well what better word? -- vigilant.

Keith, their father, is still a parishioner at St. Catherine Church, Manchester, NH, where he was baptized in 1962. He does not approve of my being whelmed and would rather see his father as the detached, professional litigator he used to be. But, he has never once said, "Look, Pop, I'm their father. You're just a grandfather." Others have. And wished they hadn't. One pastor in Maine said to me, "Why so angry? It's not just priests, not just clergymen from other religions. It's pedophilia and is widespread. You are way over the top. Stop beating up on the Church. Looks like you've lost the Faith and are trying to cover up your own fault." I wrestled with that one for a long time. Cannot agree with him. It's impossible to deny my traditions, without which I am nothing.

In January of 2002, the secrecy of sexual abuse of minors was rent like the curtain of the temple when Jesus was crucified. Those of us who knew about it for decades – I was abused by a parish priest in my mid-teens, fended off advances made by a theol during villa – came to realize in the glare of salacious publicity that the secret was now out and in the open. Stunned into a roaring, raging silence, men like me, celibate for years as a seminarian, married for far more years with four children as emblems of our love, saw with a clarity that could rival private revelation that the issue was not sex. It was power. And we rose to take on the leaders of our Church.

The issues we raised were not biology, ephebophilia, pedophilia, a hankering for boys rather than girls, the curse of celibacy overwhelming its blessings, the "official teachings of the Church" on sex, not even the natural law and sexual morality. We saw, as the excrement of absolute power, three issues:

Intolerance
Injustice
Absence of accountability

We spoke out. We were for the most part ignored by Cardinals and Bishops, who were themselves vowed as it were in sacred silence and quite content to hang onto the absolutism of their power. A few clobbered back: banning, barring, locking parish hall doors, denouncing from the pulpit, thundering with judgmental judgments of mortal sins of disobedience, lack of respect, dissidence, heresy, and the worst of them all, refusal to bow down before their authority. Some were aghast. Most were terrified. And still are. Make no mistake. They are not incompetent opponents, nor are they weak, frightened men. They are afraid, yes, but for the horror of losing their power and perks, and not for loss of the Church.

Roman Catholic Hierarchs, approximately 4,850 total, do not really care whether they rule absolutely over 1,200,000,000 people of God all over the world. They do care that those they rule over are absolutely subservient silently unto them, even if there are only a couple of hundred thousand Roman Catholics, and could probably be satisfied with a few ten thousand or so. I don't know the average size of a diocese, but Portland ME, our last diocese is listed at 198,296
The Boston Archdiocese lists its population as of 2004, at 2,079,730. Denver, in which I sit at this moment, is 407,500, while the good, old USA ranges from 67,515,016 to 76,900,000.

I think there are 195 dioceses with either a cardinal, archbishop or bishop as the Ordinary. There are a lot more retired, yes, but all they do is hang around. They have absolute power, but are powerless. It is safe to say that 193 Ordinaries claim absolute power over approximately 77,000,000 Catholic human beings in America. It is the power that feeds the lust, not the numbers of people who bow down. As a college football fan – a son coaches – the numbers amaze me. There are only 193 hierarchs to confront in the good, old U.S. of A. A mere handful. If 50 of us oldtimers yelled "BOO!!" they'd scatter in a second. For a chancery or a basilica. Then again, maybe they wouldn't. They do seem impervious to insults, and Tom Engelhardt who prompted this piece uses a marvelous phrase for politicians, which we could easily borrow for our own leaders, filled with an "unbounded sense of imperial impunity."

That "imperial impunity" was haughtily clear in the excommunications of late, that ancient relic of a battle axe, which usually brought entire empires to their knees rather quickly. A few of us, who had been through the formation of the holiest of men – so they told us – as celibate seminarians, were waiting with eager anticipation for an Interdict, a much wielded weapon of papal primacy, not as terminable as excommunication, but as vicious and effective. And then we were ready for the Great Guffaw in honor of the finest laical triumph in ecclesiology. We imagined whole dioceses snubbing Rome with, "So what. Go away."

[Aside: my sainted mother – three Rosaries per day, Stations every Friday -- would have been aghast: "Could this monster be my son?" Her supreme joy: the day I left for the Jesuits. Her deepest tragedy: the day I left the Jesuits.]

Relations between those martinet Ordinaries and what had been a placable people looked like the playground squabbles of elementary school years when the game was King of the Hill. A cardinal and a couple of bishops were pushed off the top of the hill by us kids. After being toppled, some fled to the safety and sanctuary of Roman Basilicas, where they have an allowance for keeping the floors clean and conducting grand tours for tourists, who like them, believe the Church isn't now what it used to be then. Supreme. Just a relic of the glory of the past. A museum of sorts. Architecture monstrous. Paintings magnificent. Sculpture statuesque. Gore, lots of it, heretics obliterated, crusades endless. Power is awesome. Absolute Power is the ultimate in corruption.

Recently, a Cardinal turned on a Bishop. Roger Mahony of Los Angeles ordered Geoffrey Robinson of Sidney, Australia, not to set foot on his cardinalatial fiefdom, to shut up, stop writing books, go home and enter a monastic order, maybe, do penance for life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Some sycophant Bishops follow the Cardinal slavishly and issued similar orders of Coventry-like banishment, lamenting the sorry state of public affairs in this 21^st century, where they are denied the dungeon and the rack, the stake and the fire, not to mention disembowelment, or the ultimate entertainment for the masses of a dissident being drawn and quartered.

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, a quiet, humble, learned man, a servant of the servants of God, is not cowed. No authentic man of God can be cowed by a dandy of a hierarch, particularly when he is a hierarch himself, without the dandy. His tour of America is quite successful. He speaks. People of God listen and say, "Yes." We feel sorry for the Mahonys and the Browns and the Chaputs and all the other little martinets who must have been bullies back in the first grade, too. More to be pitied after censured, as a new saying might go.

And yet. And yet. I speak and write, taking my inspiration from commentators of our political scene, be they left, right or in the middle, avoiding the extremes of neocons and fascists. One of them, just one, there are others, is Tom Engelhardt, who appears in Truthout, a daily website of observations of our world: http://www.truthout.org . His piece today is the best I've read over the years, because it is a history of what he has been about and what his new book will be about. He writes sentences I wish I could imitate but know I cannot. For example:

In these last years, the Bush administration's unbounded sense of imperial impunity, and an older American belief that this country possesses a moral code exceptional among nations, have proven a lethal geopolitical cocktail. This curious perspective has led our administration to commit acts of horror in our name, while absolving us from thinking about how others might look on those acts -- and by extension, how they think about us.

Listen up now. Go back to that quote and

Substitute "the Vatican administration" for "the Bush Administration."
Turn "an older American belief" into "an older Roman Catholic belief."

And you will see as clearly as do I, that the issues some of us old men are raising to the Roman Church are political not dogmatic, disciplinary not doctrinal. We, and I, believe that there is indeed a Catholic Church. We, and I, do not believe that it is a Roman Catholic Church. No need for qualifying adjectives of limitation, when the word "Catholic" means "Universal." The Roman Catholic Church is limited, narrow, reserved for hierarchs and their toadies, and can never ever be Catholic, unless it changes, or we change, its governmental structure.

And that, as far and as clearly as I can see, is politics, pure and simple, though brutal and possibly lethal, as far and as clearly as Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI – include, please, George W. Bush -- have demonstrated. Such men are followed obediently, without question, by Cardinal Roger Mahony, Bishop Todd Brown and eight others who demand that Bishop Geoffrey Robinson shut up and go home to Australia.

He won't. Neither will we. Why do we persist against such absolutely powerful odds? Go to Tom Engelhardt again, where he wrote:

Because, for years, so little on these, and similar, subjects made it into print or onto the TV news, there has been a special need and place for online political websites. We started - and maintained - discussions that only slowly seeped into the mainstream, even as readers from that world increasingly fled on-line. At the height of the Bush administration's power and narcissism, what TomDispatch and other sites like it represented was perhaps a simple urge not to let them set an agenda for all of America, and for the planet. This, it turns out, they were incapable of doing - and for that, perhaps, we should be modestly thankful. When the first histories of our desperate times are finally written, historians will have to turn to the record created by the world of the Internet, or their histories will be as incomplete, the dots as unconnected as they were in the mainstream in these sorry years.

Intuition tells me that you readers are ahead of me, but being a doubting Thomas most of my life – he's my favorite Apostle – I have to make sure.

Change "the Bush administration's power and narcissism" to – you know what – "the Vatican administration's power and narcissism."
Change the black font to red for "We started – and maintained – discussions that only slowly seeped into the mainstream ,. . . "
Do the same for "it represented was perhaps a simple urge not to let them set an agenda for all of Catholicism, and for the planet."

Bullets have a way of making the point. These are ours, not lethal, but filled with faith and hope and love.

We do what we do now, to stop the tyranny.
We seek tolerance, justice, accountability.
If we do not succeed now, those who come after us will, simply and only because we began this opposition to absolute power.
We will never go away.
Nor will we fall back into the servitude that the Roman Catholic Church demands.
We are the Catholic Church.
We are taking back our Church.

++++++++++

The entire article, which prompted this piece is a long one, entitled: " 'E' for Expeditionary: One Man's Online Journey Through Bush's Alphabet Soup." Written by: Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com, on Tuesday 10 June 2008. This article should be read by those whose eyes are open, ears are open, and minds are, therefore, just as open, to see the similarity between institutions, which lust for absolute power, with "an unbounded sense of imperial impunity." And which cause such irremediable harm.

Go to it now at: http://www.truthout.org/article/one-mans-online-journey-through-bushs-alphabet-soup?print

Please note the editor's explanation at the end of the article:

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media didn't cover, it is functionally an alternative history of the mad Bush years. This essay is adapted from that book's introduction. A brief video in which Engelhardt discusses the book and the American mega-bases in Iraq can be viewed by clicking here.

If clicking here didn't work from here, it would have been: http://www.tomdispatch.com/p/tdvideo/engelhardt06092008

The Current Campaign

2008-06-10T09:52:00.001-07:00

On a List I joined, some are posting deep thoughts and opinions on the current contenders. I'm out it. As many have seen, my political views – for state or for church – are all bollixed up in my loathing for and fear of neocons. To me they are not conservatives, whom I like and respect. Nor do I claim the term "liberal" for myself, and refuse "L" for "Left." Rejecting all pigeon-holed charismas of those on the left and those on the right, I refuse to use those terms. But "neocons" to me is an intransigent, deadly, implacable term that evokes loathing and fear in me. So, my opinions are worthless, because emotional, immature, not worthy of distinguished, professional discussion. A lot of pros on this List, you know.

You may remember an earlier piece in which I displayed my instinctive – I prefer intuitive – dislike of Barrack Obama. Vox et praeterea nihil. Hoping, against hope as it turned out, that you would readily see that it takes one to know one, for I am such a vox myself. I would never ever run for office and see too many of my selves wielding such power. Thus, my dismissal of Obama. Pretty simple: I just don't like him, and could spin out justifications, but that isn't necessary. There are a whole bunch of people I just don't like – without the need to rattle off a long line of reasons – just as there are another whole bunch – much, much larger, by the way – whom I do like and don't need reasons to justify their attraction for me.

As for McCain, he has terrified me ever since he became a walking POW on the public political stage. (I was graced by two students at Sophia: Major Tracy and Captain Evans, ( each, US Army ret.). Both were POWs of the Japanese during WWII. They never waved it as their medal of honor. They took almost all my courses, one each semester over the three years. I called them "My Uncles." We loved each other.) From the first time I saw and heard McCain on TV, I felt fear. He is a neocon, always was, always will be, and that's before we knew what neocons were, cloaked as they were back then in Goldwater Arizonaism, catchy, nice for those retired. Spiffy eyeglasses. Never thought Barry was a neocon. Sort of admired him for his conservatism. Not so with Reagan, I have to confess, for he was just on stage all the time, a fake, always in need of a script. Good delivery of another's lines.

Today's neocons are Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Cheney, and they terrify me. They are destroying America, unless they have already finished the job. There are several neocons splattered throughout the RCC Hierarchy, and they terrify me, too. Neocons are comfortable with Absolute Power, enjoy the thrill of the yield before its wield. Bush is not one; neocons are smart, intelligent.

With all that, avoiding the campaign of the Democrat Vox et praeterea with the Republican neocon, I have no vote. Just fear. The people will choose, but there isn't much choice.

For state, I'll wait four years for a good and decent Republican candidate to duel with a good and decent Democrat to risk his/her life and reputation and offer themselves. For church, I'll wait out another lifetime, until another Bishop Geoffrey Robinson comes along to give the current Geoffrey a little support and companionship, with a goodly bunch of us people-people of God stepping pertly along beside them. Not all hierarchs are neocons. But, then again, neo-conservatism doesn't need many, just a few. That's why they are so terrifying. Those with nothing but a Vox don't stand a chance. Whenever I concoct a "composition of place" – thanks to Ignatian meditation techniques – of Barrack Obama in debate with Douglas Feith, I don't snicker at the godawfulness of it all. I cringe.

Speaking of such "compositions of places," my innocent way of looking at left and right and in between is not, definitely not, the linear way of picturing "L" on one far end and "R" way down at the other end. That's stupid. Adults do that, the easier to get rid of irksome ones by pushing them farther and further away. My "composition" of politicalness in people is a circle, the political leanings being dots on the circumference, where "L" and "R" are never as far apart as in the false, fake linear projection pundits favor. If some think of me as "L", so be it, that's their opinion, but I stand right next to an "R," holding her hand. Touch is the most important of the senses, you know. Easy on a circumference, impossible on a straight line stretching through the universe. Ever stop to think that in outer space, the path is always an orbit. It's only down here on Earth, once known as Gaia -- a personification of Earth actually from Greek mythology -- that we think we think linearly. And that's the bollix.

From today's Truthout:

Make No Mistake: McCain's a Neocon

Sunday 08 June 2008

by: Robert Parry, Consortium News

John McCain may fancy himself a maverick, but according to Robert Parry, he's a Neocon through and through.

Since clinching the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain has sought to hide the forest of his neoconservative alignment with George W. Bush amid the trees of details, such as stressing differences over military tactics used in Iraq.

But the larger reality should be clear: McCain is a hard-line neoconservative who buys into Bush's "preemptive war" theories abroad and his concept of an all-powerful "unitary executive" at home.

From McCain's pre-Iraq invasion speeches to his campaign's recent embrace of Bush's imperial presidency, American voters should realize that if they choose John McCain, they will be locking in at least four more years of war with much of the Islamic world while selling out the Founders' vision of a democratic Republic where no one is above the law.

Take, for instance, an address that McCain gave to the Munich Conference on Security Policy on Feb. 2, 2002. In the speech - with the ambitious title, "From Crisis to Opportunity: American Internationalism and the New Atlantic Order" - the Arizona senator laid out the "full monte" of a neocon agenda.

In those heady days after the U.S. ouster of Afghanistan's Taliban regime, McCain hailed "a new American internationalism" designed "to end safe harbor for terrorists anywhere, to aggressively target rogue regimes that threaten us with weapons of mass destruction, and to consolidate freedom's gains through institutions that reflect our values."

To McCain, this meant that the United States had a fundamental right to invade any country on earth that was viewed as an actual or potential threat, a theory of American exceptionalism to international law that was at the heart of Bush's strategy of "preemptive war."

"Americans believe we have a mandate to defeat and dismantle the global terrorist network that threatens both Europe and America," McCain said. "As our President has said, this network includes not just the terrorists but the states that make possible their continued operation.

"Many of these are rogue regimes that possess or are developing weapons of mass destruction which threaten Europeans and Americans alike. We in America learned the hard way that we can never again wait for our enemies to choose their moment. The initiative is now ours, and we are seizing it."

Neocon Forerunner

McCain even presented himself as a forerunner to Bush's neoconservative policies.

"Several years ago, I and many others argued that the United States, in concert with willing allies, should work to undermine from within and without outlaw regimes that disdain the rules of international conduct and whose internal dysfunction threatened other nations," McCain said.

"Just this week, the American people heard our President articulate a policy to defeat the 'axis of evil' that threatens us with its support for terror and development of weapons of mass destruction," McCain said in reference to Bush's warning to Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

"Dictators that harbor terrorists and build these weapons are now on notice that such behavior is, in itself, a casus belli. Nowhere is such an ultimatum more applicable than in Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

McCain then reprised what turned out to be the bogus case for invading Iraq.

"Almost everyone familiar with Saddam's record of biological weapons development over the past two decades agrees that he surely possesses such weapons. He also possesses vast stocks of chemical weapons and is known to have aggressively pursued, with some success, the development of nuclear weapons," McCain said.

"Terrorist training camps exist on Iraqi soil, and Iraqi officials are known to have had a number of contacts with al-Qaeda. These were probably not courtesy calls," McCain added in the smug, sarcastic tone common to that period.

As it turned out, the "vast stocks" of chemical weapons and the prospect of nuclear weapons were non-existent. The "terrorist training camps" on Iraqi soil were hostile to Hussein's secular regime and were located outside Baghdad's control in areas protected by the U.S.-British-enforced "no-fly zone."

Evidence collected after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 revealed that Saddam Hussein rebuffed overtures from al-Qaeda, which he regarded as an enemy in the Arab world. Those contacts were not even "courtesy calls."

Rush to War

However, in February 2002, McCain was a leading voice in the neocon rush for war in Iraq, as an extension of Bush's "war on terror."

"The next front is apparent, and we should not shirk from acknowledging it," McCain said. "A terrorist resides in Baghdad, with the resources of an entire state at his disposal, flush with cash from illicit oil revenues and proud of a decade-long record of defying the international community's demands that he come clean on his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.

"A day of reckoning is approaching. Not simply for Saddam Hussein, but for all members of the Atlantic community, whose governments face the choice of ending the threat we face every day from this rogue regime or carrying on as if such behavior, in the wake of September 11th, were somehow still tolerable.

"The Afghan campaign set a precedent, and provided a model: the success of air power, combined with Special Operations forces working together with indigenous opposition forces, in waging modern war.

"The next phase of the war on terror can build on this model, but we also must learn from its limitations. More American boots on the ground may be required to prevent the escape of terrorists we target in the future, and we should all be mindful that such a commitment might entail higher casualties than we have suffered in Afghanistan," McCain continued.

"The most compelling defense of war is the moral claim that it allows the victors to define a stronger and more enduring basis for peace. Just as September 11th revolutionized our resolve to defeat our enemies, so has it brought into focus the opportunities we now have to secure and expand freedom."

McCain's full embrace of this neocon global theory - both in its grandiose substance and its grandiloquent rhetoric - marked the over-the-top hubris that contributed to the suppression of any serious pre-Iraq War debate in the United States and then to the ill-considered rush to invade Iraq.

As the war in Iraq turned sour and anti-Americanism swept the Middle East, McCain began criticizing the Bush administration not for its imperial overreach but for not reaching even farther. McCain began advocating a larger U.S. expeditionary force to pacify Iraq, a policy that gave rise to the "surge."

"League of Democracies"

Despite these tactical differences, McCain has shown no sign of rethinking his vision of an alliance of "willing" nations going around the world challenging and replacing disfavored governments. Indeed, he has made this neocon concept a centerpiece of his presidential campaign.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has proposed a "League of Democracies," which would apply economic and military pressure on "rogue states" when the United Nations Security Council refuses to do so.

Though McCain has dressed up his League of Democracies in pretty language about respecting international law and spreading freedom, its essence is to make permanent Bush's "coalition of the willing" concept used in Iraq.

McCain insists his League won't supplant the Security Council, but it would do just that, fulfilling a long-held neocon dream of voiding the international system that U.S. leaders fashioned after World War II to enforce the Nuremberg principle that aggressive war was the "supreme" international crime.

McCain's League would create for the U.S. President a standing organization for engaging in aggressive war against "rogue regimes" whether they are an immediate, potential - or imaginary - threat.

The irony is that when McCain and Bush talk about the danger of "rogue regimes" operating outside international law and threatening other nations, that is exactly what their neocon theories have made the United States: a country that - along with a few allies - becomes a law onto itself.

Similarly, McCain and Bush share the view that the President of the United States should embody and personify these new imperial powers. Just as the U.S. government can act in any way it sees fit under these neocon theories, its Commander in Chief also can do whatever he wants without legal constraints.

That was spelled out by a top McCain adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, declaring in a letter to the right-wing National Review that McCain agreed with Bush's assertion that the President may override laws that he deems an impediment to fighting the "war on terror."

Holtz-Eakin said McCain supports Bush's program of warrantless wiretaps despite the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and a 1978 law requiring the Executive to gain approval from a special court for intelligence-related wiretaps inside the United States.

"Neither the administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and trial lawyers, understand were constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001," Holtz-Eakin wrote in describing McCain's position.

Article II Powers

Holtz-Eakin further cited Article II powers of the Constitution in explaining how McCain would act as President, suggesting that McCain - like Bush - would exercise virtually unlimited executive powers for the duration of the indefinite "war on terror."

McCain also has announced that he would appoint Supreme Court justices like Samuel Alito and John Roberts who - along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas - represent four votes in favor of reinterpreting the Constitution to grant the President the broad powers claimed by Bush and McCain.

If a President McCain gets to replace one of the five other justices with another Alito or Roberts, the new court majority could, in effect, rewrite the rules of the American Republic to declare the imperial presidency "constitutional."

If that happens, the American people would no longer possess "unalienable rights," as promised by the Founders and enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The President would possess what the neocons call "plenary" - or total - power.

That means the President would have the authority to arrest anyone as an "unlawful enemy combatant," deny the person the right to a lawyer or a trial by jury, and subject the individual to any treatment that the President sees fit, from indefinite imprisonment up to torture and death.

This neocon vision also holds that the President - on his own authority - could take the nation to war anywhere in the world for whatever reason.

In essence, the United States would cease to be a democratic Republic with citizens guaranteed fundamental liberties and with an Executive possessing limited authority constrained by the Legislature. All meaningful power would be invested in the President as a modern-day monarch.

John McCain may criticize President Bush on the edges of neoconservative policies, such as failing to prosecute the Iraq War more aggressively, and he may differ with Bush on the efficacy of torture, given McCain's own mistreatment as a Vietnam prisoner of war.

But there should be no doubt that a McCain victory would give the neocons another four-year lease on the White House. And, after those four years, there might be no feasible way back for the great American Republic.

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, "Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush," can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, "Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the

Church And/Or State --- Religion And/Or the Rule of Law

2008-06-09T10:26:00.001-07:00

I think that the issue today for Catholics in America is Church or State, Religion or the Rule of Law. Not Church and State. Not Religion and the Rule of Law. But "or." That pesky word which separates bishops and archbishops and cardinals and surely the present pope and his predecessor from those of their colleagues who speak with "and." Or/ & And/High Priests.

Today,two extremely prominent Catholic lay persons, an Or/College Chaplain Priest, and an Or/High Priest won cherished publicity: www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.communion09jun09,0,7586458.story in The Baltimore Sun.

Don't Play Politics with Communion

By David O'Brien and Lisa Sowle Cahill

June 9, 2008

What do a former legal counsel for Ronald Reagan and a Democratic governor have in common? As you might expect, it's not the same politics. Douglas W. Kmiec, an esteemed constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University, is a pro-life Republican. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is a moderate known for consensus-building. But these prominent Catholics are both the most recent targets of clergy who use Communion as a political weapon and effectively blacklist respected Catholic leaders. It's time for Catholics and all Americans to speak out against this spiritual McCarthyism.

When Mr. Kmiec endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for president, conservative Catholic blogs buzzed with outrage. How could a conservative known for his public opposition to abortion rights support a pro-choice liberal? In a recent Catholic Online column, Mr. Kmiec describes how he was declared "self-ex-communicated" by many fellow Catholics. He writes that at a recent Mass, an angry college chaplain denounced his "Obama heresy" from the pulpit and denied him Communion.

In Kansas City, Kan., Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann has ordered Ms. Sebelius, also an Obama supporter, not to receive Communion after she vetoed abortion legislation riddled with constitutional red flags. The bill in question made it easier for prosecutors to search private medical records, allowed family members to seek court orders to stop abortions and failed to include exceptions to save the life of the mother. Along with many public officials, Ms. Sebelius recognizes the profound moral gravity of abortion. She has supported prudent public policies that have reduced abortions in Kansas by investing in adoption services, prenatal health care and social safety nets for families. But in his diocesan newspaper, the archbishop blasted the governor over her "spiritually lethal" message and her obligation to recognize the "legitimate authority within the Church."

The archbishop has a right and indeed an obligation to speak out against abortion. But he is on dangerous ground telling a democratically elected official - accountable to federal laws and a diverse citizenry - how to govern when it comes to the particulars of specific legislation. The proper application of moral principles in a pluralistic society rarely allows for absolutes.

Using a holy sacrament to punish Catholics has troubling political implications during an election year. St. Louis Archbishop Raymond L. Burke warned Sen. John Kerry - a Catholic whose record reflects his faith's commitment to economic justice, universal health care and concern for the poor - not to receive Communion during the 2004 presidential race because of his support for abortion rights. In a New York Times interview just a month before the election, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver gave signals that Catholics who voted for a pro-choice candidate were cooperating in evil. Mr. Kerry narrowly lost the Catholic vote to President Bush.

Catholics make up a quarter of the American electorate and are swing voters in key battleground states that will play a decisive role in electing our next president. It's essential that these voters recognize Catholicism defies easy partisan labels and is not a single-issue faith.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops warns in an election-year guide that particular issues must not be misused as a way of ignoring "other serious threats to human life and dignity." These threats identified by the bishops include racism, the death penalty, war, torture, lack of health care and an unjust immigration policy. These broad Catholic values challenge Democrats and Republicans alike to put the common good before narrow partisan agendas.

If we remain silent when respected Catholic leaders are publicly attacked and denied Communion, the proper role of faith in our public square is grossly distorted. This election year, let's have a better debate about faith and political responsibility that reclaims the vital role religion has often played in renewing our most cherished democratic values.

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David O'Brien, the Loyola professor of Catholic studies at the College of the Holy Cross, has written books about the history of American Catholicism. Lisa Sowle Cahill is a professor of theology at Boston College and a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. This article is distributed by Religion News Service.

Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun

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The Or/High Priest might well have proclaimed:

"Choose! Me or the Governor of the State of Kansas, whom I publicly condemn for her political maneuvering on abortion, and I order her not to receive Communion."

The Or/Chaplain might well have joined in:

"As priest of this parish I denounce our most honored conservative member, a law professor at Pepperdine, because he likes Obama, and Obama is pro choice. No communion for the evil professor."

These public condemnations are not Christ like, because Jesus' stern criticism was directed at high priests and not at people-people. These Or/High Priests duck accountability, dodge Jesus himself, abandon the kingdom of his father, and condemn people-people for not giving them, them, them, obeisance and obedience. These few and powerful hierarchs claim they speak with infallibility on moral issues like abortion, and they want a Roman Catholic totalitarian government in which they and they alone are executive, legislative and judicial authority. The members of their parish or diocese must obey the pronouncements. Otherwise, no Communion for those who disagree, refuse to accept such authority.

A legal aphorism states that silence may be construed as consent. And consent means acceptance. If we accept the high priest's "or," then either America must be overthrown or Roman Catholicism must be expunged from civilization. That is what "or" means. "Give me liberty or give me death." "My way or the highway." "Love me or I will kill you."

"And" means something else. It means being human together, with others, a community, receiving Communion though sinful, even a sinner, no saint, with freedom of and from religion, to be Buddhist, Catholic, Evangelical, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, or none at all. It means being American, African, European, Asian, also. "And" includes; "or" excludes.

Now, because of the Kansas Governor and the Pepperdine Professor, I think we Catholics in America have come to the point of no return. Be we left, middle or right, we must now stand and declare ourselves. We cannot duck the issue of "and" versus "or" any longer, lest we drown in our own despicable cowardice and schizophrenia. We must declare ourselves now. Quietly. With conviction. Inspired or expired. Choose either - or.

So, choose:

1 -- High Priests who command and condemn.
2 -- Bishops who serve servants of God.

So, choose:

1 -- Knowing the ramifications, the consequences.
2 -- Do not choose blindly, without thought.

So, choose:

1 -- Roman Catholicism, old, very old and hanging in there, onto absolute power, using the New Testament only for quotes, commanding, condemning, excommunicating, denying the sacraments to the people of God.
2 -- Catholicism, whether old or new, and based on Jesus of the New Testament.

So, choose:

1 -- Remaining silent is not a choice.
2 -- Silent ones are unwilling to take sides, afraid to confront a bishop, be he a strong one who withholds Communion, or a weak one who urges us not to rock the boat.

So, choose:

1 -- If the Or/High Priests, then we choose treason eventually and have to overthrow American Democracy.
2 -- If the And/High Priests, we choose the abandonment of Roman Catholicism, which will vanish, consumed by its own lust for power, but we will save our country and our church, our Catholicism. Our God may save us. If our choice is correct.

So, choose:

1 -- The Or/High Priests do not want us to choose, nor to question, just to obey and, "Please, feel free to receive Our Lord in Communion." They do want us to keep the boat steady, don't rock it, obey.
2 -- The And/High Priests do not want us to choose either, because our questions are irksome and expose their hypocrisy in giving obeisance to the institution of Romanism and not to the Catholicism of us. They are more afraid than we are.

So, choose.

1 -- Which do we wish to follow.
2 -- If neither, then drop the charade, the masquerade, and admit that we believe and know there is not much of a church, not much of a country, both peopled with peasants bowed down before their lords.

So, choose:

1 -- Same. More of the same until we die and are judged.
2 -- Change. Renewal of country and church, as we live with integrity, die gratefully, and are judged by a merciful God.

So, choose:

Why do we let some bishops act the way they do, without accountability?

Why do we silently accept intolerance?

Why do we stay silent before injustice?

Why do we let them get away with it?

Why? Oh! God! Why?

Join CTA

2008-06-01T21:52:00.001-07:00

The mail delivered an invitation from Call To Action, CTA, to become a formal member. Strange, for I am not a joiner of acronymic groups. After a bold-faced "I've had enough!" the CTA flyer used just three phrases to describe the Church. They caught my attention, made me listen up, read on.

Intolerance.
Injustice.
Lack of accountability.

I would never belong willingly to any organization that so emblazoned its essence on all its members and commanded those three attributes as requisites for claiming to belong as a member. Of course not. Imagine what my response would be to this invitation: "Say! Hey! You. We're looking for some good and reliable men, practiced in and devoted to intolerance, injustice and lack of accountability. Come, join us and dominate the world."

I may be pig-headed, shallow, ignorant, but I am not intolerant, unjust, unaccountable. Never-the-less, how-some-ever, and-yet-and-yet, I used to fill in the form asking "Religious Preference?" with "Roman Catholic." That did a job on integrity, so much so, that I began to decline to answer, realizing that writing just "Catholic" is a cop-out blazing in shame. Then, I simply left that line blank. As blank as I was without a Church to call Church. I was flushed with anger at high priests who made the Church their own elite club, and confounded with shame for being a Catholic.

I am intolerant of the intolerant.

I seek justice. I chose to become a lawyer, shortly after leaving the Jesuits in 1957. That was my life's work until retirement in 2001.

I am accountable. In retirement, the two portions of my life became one, when the Jesuit years and the lawyer years merged, and I began to study the history and ecclesiology of the Church, in order to stand and speak and write truth to power. Both my Jesuit formation and legal training showed me with simple clarity that the issue for renewal of our Church is power and the abuse of power. From 2002 to date I have been writing on Religion and the Rule of Law, Church and State, the use and the abuse of Power. For that I am accountable.

CTA's invitation is timely. CTA looks more like Church than RCC, without claiming to be a new Church, because it is a part of the Church reaching out to those gasping in a dysfunctional Church. Family just doesn't walk away to found a new family. A friend had helped found Take Back Our Church, TBOC, not too long ago, and I joined. Why not, I thought, link them?

Time to stop fretting in "conjectures of a guilty bystander." Time for integrity, as well as faith, hope and love. Time to be Catholic rather than talk about it, write about it. Time to be active, within a group dedicated to tolerance, justice and accountability.

Today, I join CTA. Its invitation and my response are proof that the Holy Spirit is breathing.

The Need for Greatness That Many of Us Harbor

2008-05-29T15:52:00.001-07:00

When I look on the heroes in my life, what I see is their greatness. We fumble for words to say what it is that lifts them above us: talent, integrity, courage, decency, holiness, a whole bunch of synonyms for being a saint. I think Chip Brown stumbled on it in his article on Tiger Woods in today's New York Times. One word: Greatness.

Check out this week's Play Newsletter:
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/05/29/sports/playemail/index.html. It says:

When Chip Brown went to Florida for two weeks in March for an up-close look at the Tiger Woods phenomenon, he left knowing that Woods, still just 32, was one of the most written-about athletes of all time, the subject of many millions of words, including some 85 books. He also knew Woods tended to avoid saying anything very revealing.

But Brown had been studying Egyptian gods for an article for "National Geographic," and he saw in Woods the same kind of alloy that, in ancient Egypt, reflected greatness back onto an entire civilization. In his cover story for the current issue of PLAY, "It's Good To Be Immortal," Brown chose to focus on the relationship between Tiger Woods and us, and how his greatness as an athletic performer fulfills a need for greatness that many of us harbor.

Scott McClellan may not have greatness, but he is speaking truth to power, about what he did and hated doing, as Press Secretary for The White House. He went along with it, anyway, and now speaks, only to be doomed. I may not follow, but listen to what he has to say.

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson has greatness. He is on a speaking tour in the United States for his book Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus. He, too, speaks truth to power, and is damned. When Catholics hate Catholics, there is no decency, only damnation to hell's fire for eternity. I listen to the Bishop and I follow him, for he is a Christ before the high priests of his own times. That is the "greatness that many of us harbor."

We can measure the impact of these two spokespersons by the quality of those who pounce, too late to silence them, but in time to doom – State; or damn -- Church. Quickly, even immediately, they surge forth to pounce, on anyone who dares besmirch their institution. The State. The Church. They are not nice people. They have no greatness. They do not even harbor it. Actually, they are little people, without greatness: the Libbys, the Cheneys, the Wolfowitzes, the Rumsfelds, the Bushes. No such litany is needed for churchmen. "High priests" will do.

Pouncers have few inklings to acknowledge heroes. They may long for greatness – as in a legacy -- but can never see it in others or in themselves, enwrapped as they are in brillo, rather than awe. Which brings the puzzlement: Why disgust? Rather than awe? Lots of disgust lately, but little awe. Scott McClellan and the bush Bush reaction to his disclosure and exposure. Bishop Geoffrey Robinson and the burning bush reaction from hierarchs who hate each other.

There is a common fugue in the daily flow and earthquakes of news: be it in print or on cable; from quakelake books flooding the market; instant condemnation uttered by puzzled pundits; spokespersons unmuzzled, lunging off leashes; and those knee-jerk rushers to judgment: Whom shall we doom or damn today?"

Makes little difference whether one claims allegiance to State rather than Church, as one well might, for those who pounce out of Church are the most practiced and best skilled at obliteration by destruction. Theirs leaves no spoor. At least the assassins from Church are consistent by condemning their prey to an eternity of hellfire and damnation with "He's a heretic." We don't hear, "He's not the Bishop Geoffrey we thought we knew."

In State's pursuit of those who done it wrong, the justification is the expansion of power, pretty much the same driving force for Church, but not clothed in vestments of religiosity. And so, the news of the moment is that McClellan is leaving the muzzlement of political spokesman, even as his former colleagues enter puzzlement at his behavior, "He's not the Scott we used to know."

Bishop Robinson, on the other hand, is not as slyly dismissed, you see, and must be destroyed, without trace. After all, he is simply asking questions, as he told ABC News, but he must be damned, with no understanding, no forgiveness, no salvation outside the Church, no puzzlement. Not even puzzlement, that snide reaction of Bush people to criticism of their president.

I often think of the truism: What Peter says about Paul says far more about Peter than it does about Paul.

I also often think of Plato and his Republic: Who shall guard the Guardians?

And yesterday, I thought of two men whose birthday it is. My father, whose greatness was born in 1896. And Walker Percy, the novelist who was born in 1916. Percy wrote,

[We] live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Listen then, to Scott McClellan's answers and those who are puzzled by him.

Listen to Bishop Geoffrey Robinson's questions and those who forbid him to ask.

Harbor greatness.

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson and Robert Blair Kaiser

2008-05-26T18:04:00.001-07:00

We think of Ian Fleming as the creator of only James Bond. But he is a great writer and great writers see much more when they look out on our world, work on what they see with creativity, and enthrall the world thus seen with more than just one hero for our times. Fleming is such a great writer, not limited by that one genre for James Bond; there is the other one in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Wikipedia tells us that this book is a children's novel written by Fleming for Caspar, his son. At first, the car named Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is just a sports car, but as the book progresses, the car surprises the family by beginning to exhibit independent actions. After many intriguing adventures, Chitty and the family fly home to England, although Fleming hints that the car has yet more secrets. For more, read the book. Or, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitty_Chitty_Bang_Bang.

Our Robert Blair Kaiser is another great writer, who broke free from the chains of just one genre, moving easily, skillfully, in the fields of ecclesiology , biography, fiction (more real than fact!) -- three books in a row:

A Church In Search of Itself: Benedict XVI and the Battle for the Future
Cardinal Mahony: A Novel
"RFK Must Die!" Chasing the Mystery of the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination

Mahony and Benedict XVI are Church, and Kennedy is State, as in Church and State. Have you heard of Hillary's reference to the assassination of Robert Kennedy? Check out Kaiser's most recent book, an Open Sesame, which unlocks closed doors, so we can see how the inside functions to obfuscate the outside. The way both Church and State can do.

Kaiser's genius – his friends call him Kaiser -- is also shown in his founding an organization for Catholics to take back our Church from the clutching grip of the hierarchy before it becomes lost in cold, dead hands. He calls it Take Back Our Church. In the acronymic way of designating lay groups dedicated to reform and renewal, it became TBOC. You may pronounce that Tee Be Oh! See, in sort of a marching beat akin to "America the Beautiful"-- or Tee Bock, should you mean business in a no-nonsense sort of way and are tired of waiting for bishops to wake up. Run it altogether for the website at: http://www.takebackourchurch.org/

It's kind of tough, if not disheartening, for a layman and his bunch of men and women, known as the Laity – a lousy word for The People of God – to get going and rebuild the glorious Catholic Church, now lying in ruins as the Roman Catholic Church, for the Pope and Curia have more or less stolen it. They kept it locked up in the cellar of the Vatican, by setting up a weird group of guys, all men, all celibate, self-perpetuating by natural selection, the careful kind fostered by all secret societies and cults, as a tight-knit, tiny-tiny bunch of bishops, who control the world. 4,500 or so of them have 1,200,000,000 lay people hopping up and down from full squats to deep kneels to tippy toe longings, by a simple snap of their fingers, the ringed ones holding big sticks that go THUMP! when bashed on the ground. Never stick a foot out when a bishop's going by, and run for cover should it be a cardinal. You can tell the difference by their colored gowns: purple for bishops; scarlet for the birds.

TBOC could use a little help from a bishop or two, to give it some clout, if not a tad of respectability, which might entice more bishops in a row to toddle on over to the people's side of the Church and make meaningful that old advertising slogan of Church qua Church – Instauratio Omnia in Christo – Restore Everything in Christ. TBOC is about instauration, and a bishop could help.

One showed up recently. Where? Not in America where most bishops are toadies, nor Europe where they appear to have given up and are holding on till retirement, but, of all places, Australia. And his name is Geoffrey Robinson, Bishop of Sydney, who retired in order to write Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church. He is currently on tour in America and is being joined by Robert Blair Kaiser, author of Cardinal Mahony: A Novel in which Roger is a good guy, but that's fiction and the fact is that he isn't. Rodger the Dodger has done the implausible in banning Bishop Robinson from appearing in Los Angeles. Can you believe that? A cardinal swats a bishop in public, before the whole world, as if saying, "This is my town, Buddy. No Aussies need apply. I don't like the way you wear your hat."

Ian Fleming and Robert Blair Kaiser had helped me realize that the stature of a writer stands not in one book, and Church can bear more than one adjectival description. I commune in a corrupt Church and hope for a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Church. Cardinals and Bishops are Ordinaries – possessors of absolute power, equals, immune from onslaughts by a co-equal hierarch. They can ban and bar dumpy, grumpy old men like me who are lay – Gawd! I hate that word, and "non-clerical" is worse – but no hierarch can outhierarch another hierarch. Not even the pope.

What is going down – definitely not "on" – in the Roman version of the Catholic Church? A dying grasp on power before it slips from cold, dead hands? Hasn't Roger the Dodger read that magnificent book Kaiser wrote about what he could be, the book which turned the fact of his fiction into the kind of cardinal you'd like to have in for dinner, take to a ball game, call up on your cell phone and ask, "Hey Roj, what's up? Wanna go over and listen to Geoff? He's speaking tonight. The guy's got guts, like you in had in Kaiser's book."

Bishop Robinson's book is getting known. America, our favorite Jesuit periodical – used to be, that is, until Tom Reese got booted by a brand new pope who lives on resentments – had this to say, as quoted by Amazon.com:

"[T]he importance of Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church lies in the fact that a bishop, an ecclesiastical `insider,' has had the courage to challenge the institution of which he was a part and invite serious conversation regarding a broad range of church issues that have too often been declared off-limits by church leadership. If Robinson's book opens the door to more open and responsible theological conversation by members of church leadership regarding the unique demands facing our church today, it will have fulfilled its purpose."

Wonder whether Cardinal Mahony and Bishop Brown, a sycophantic dreamer who loves scarlet, look on Bishop Robinson as a Funny Food Fighter and themselves as Hefty Hostile Hierarchs . . . Ah! What a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Church we cherish.

Bishops come and bishops go,

Clucking cardinals row by row,

Go! Tee Bock! to stop the flow,

Of that black line chained in tow.

"Banned In Boston" was one helluva marketing ploy to sell books and get people to go to movies. "Ban a Bishop" may be the best way TBOC, when the bishop banned is a Geoffrey from Owstrayleea. A bishop from Australia could be a Crocodile Dundee from the Outback and would take no crap from a kangaroo. What an image that is! Cardinal Mahony, the black-haired one, as a jumping 'roo. Fancy how his footwork, long practiced, is now an instinctive habit, keeping him safe from the darts and arrows of outrageous fortune in LA. Ah! Yes, but Geoffrey's on the way. Making the news. People are looking up. Maybe, maybe . . .

Kaiser's the man of the people-people and Robinson's the bishop of the people-people. Mahony's just an ordinary, a typical ordinary Ordinary, a contrary contrarian. And now Kaiser has found the bishop he was hoping for, the first of many to follow. There are a lot of real bishops in our Church. They're just keeping their heads down while riding out the earthquake of John Paul that buried Vatican II and the shocks of the aftermath of Benedict XVI. As those abate, there is a stirring as people come up out of the ruins, looking around for help. Kaiser knows bishops all over our world. There are more than one who, like the Holy Roman Empire in 1519, are waiting for the Martin Luther of our times to fire them up and lead them on out. It won't be easy, but it will be good to restore all things in Christ by unpacking the Church. John Paul II had 28 years to pack it with his kind of bishop, the same way Franklin Delano Roosevelt dreamed of packing the United States Supreme Court. JPII got away with it. FDR got squelched. Bishop Robinson confronts. A few of the old guard try to stop him. But, . . .

There are more Geoffrey Robinsons out there, waiting to jump in. TBOC! TBOC! TBOC!. If Tee Be Oh! Sea is a bit smarmy, patriotic like politicians like it, then go blunt and simple and Australian with Tee Bock.

Two men of God: Robinson and Kaiser. Great writers. Read them.

Kaiser makes Mahony a hero in fiction truer than fact. Read it, yet?
Robinson's got courage in confronting a monolith. Read it, yet?
Kaiser's the man out front in TBOC's website. Read it, yet?
Kaiser just wrote "RFK Must Die!" Read it, yet?

Tolle, lege!

A Tornado In Colorado

2008-05-23T11:45:00.001-07:00

So different looking at a tornado on TV and going out on our deck, here in the northwest corner of Longmont, Colorado, to see one live. It came out of the southwest yesterday, at 50 mph, heading on a path 5 miles away, which spared our apartment complex. It was heading northeast. The black cloud was enormous as it approached. It didn't look like a tornado, but was clearly a menace from edge to edge, wide, huge.

We think tornado as a thin, whirling spout from cloud to ground, reaching down to finger the earth. This monstrous one was a mile to a mile and a half in width, letting us know that we couldn't dodge and weave out of its path, should it come straight at us. And it was just, and always, down on the ground. A hungry, humongous cloud -- no pillar -- it squashed down on earth, until the area it enveloped and smothered was invisible. A big - black - dark cloud.

The immense girth of it was rotating slowly, not in the ferociously fast spinning of a twisting probe for whatever it could touch and obliterate, but a bulk of blob, swallowing, swallowing without a gulp, then spitting out its vomit. It passed on by, implacable, relentless, roaringly sure in its conviction that it could never be stopped, until it chose to stop. Invincible.

A twister on TV is thin in a spin, scooping clean a dirty floor like a darting broom. Yesterday's tornado was the vacuum cleaner of the sky, its intake as wide as the mouth of a great river. It was as if Mother Weather had laid down her high-powered sniper's rifle of a twister, to wield the mushroom cloud of a nuclear weapon, or the pyroclastic flow of a volcano as big as our county. We lost the sun. As we craned our necks around to the northeast –our deck faces south -- the sun returned. The great black cloud was moving on to the north, down low, real low, on Windsor and Fort Collins, heading for Cheyenne.

Kevin and I knew that its path could have been straight at us, rather than keeping a few miles away and slanting off to the northeast. Still, it was no noonday devil's show to gawk at. This was a tornado as big as the sky, and we were in it, not dead center, but off on a radius toward its outer circumference. We didn't have to flee and could stay there, near the outer edge of doom, while it came, bearhugged the land to our east, moved on quickly, relentlessly, consuming whatever was below. And then it was gone.

We knew we were safe as observers outside on the deck, but felt like guilty bystanders. Jean was deeper in it, though, closer to the center, driving the RAV4 on her way home from 3 miles away. We were stationery on the deck, but she was moving on and inside the great black cloud. Golf-ball hail, same size as ping-pong balls, but not as harmless, splattered the hood and roof of her car, as if thousands of AK-47s on full-automatic were spewing rounds of crackling whack after whack after whack. All she could see and hear was swirling, saturated black storm and other lost cars moaning and weaving and avoiding each other in the instinct to survive. She kept on heading for home, hands so tight on the steering wheel, she thought it would snap off before the hail bashed the car into putty. Hail and rain eased. Black lightened, lifted into an oozing grey.

She found the entrance to our complex, and, parking below, she saw a neighbor's car passing by, dented severely from hail that must have been the size of of baseballs and just as hard. A new-car-sticker was still stuck in the left rear window, dealer plates of cardboard were ragged and ripped, and the pitiable car looked as if it were on the way to a junkyard to be crushed for scrap. So did its driver, who must have been out there closer to the center of the storm. As Jean came up the stairs, the sun was allowed to beam, and we began to return to the ordinary comfort and extraordinary adventure of another day on the High Plains, at the edge of the Rockies in Colorado.

Storms come and go. Great storms are embedded in remembery and linger on. The difference in the memories of those storms is that a hurricane terrifies and hangs on for hours, days, but a tornado terrifies and is gone before it comes.

17 years ago, on October 30, 1991, I was in a Nor'easter in Maine, made famous by Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm and the movie of the same name. When we visit Linda, Jean's friend in Gloucester, MA, we go out to eat in the restaurant, where the crew of the swordfish vessel Andrea Gail had their last meal ashore. Before that storm became so famous, it lodged deep in memory, because I was so scared. Our house was just 75 yards from the furious raging of the Atlantic Ocean. The building wracked, its picture window slammed by winds close to 70
mph, which threatened to smash it into fragments. Hoping to escape with our lives, I forced our family into the car and took off for the Hendrys, our in-laws in Freeport, Maine.

That drive was only 30 miles, but it took a long time to get there. My hands ached from the white-knuckled fear that comes from being the only car on the road fleeing for safety in a monster storm. A haunting image remains: a old man in a yellow slicker with a hood, hunkered on an older bicycle, pedaling his way through rain gushing over him like waves crashing down on a king crab fishing boat in Alaskan waters. The bike would slow down almost to a stop, teeter, wobble, then creep ahead, as the old man gave it all he could, from every muscle and fiber and bone and nerve in his body, all as determined as he to survive.

Yesterday's experience of the tornado was measured in minutes, maybe an hour or so, from seeing it way off in the south and watching it leave way off in the north. While it moved at 50 mph, it took a while to make its way from Boulder, through Niwot and head up to Fort Collins and Wyoming, about 60 miles. The Perfect Storm of 1991 lasted for hours, as if it liked us so much it wanted to stay for a couple of days. And did.

Over 50 years ago, I was in a major typhoon in Tokyo, which almost crushed the University. That typhoon in 1955 drove Captain Jack to take his tanker out of Tokyo Bay and head for safety out in the Pacific Ocean. We compared memories one night, after a meeting in Portland, Maine in the 1970s, in one of those moods of reminiscence over stormy events in our lives. Then, there were the earthquakes. In class one day, I shivered in terror, while the students sat calmly and waited patiently for the walls to stop vibrating. In time, calmness came to me also. I was getting to be an old hand.

70 years ago, I sat in our dining room rigid with the stark horror that makes a 9 year old boy freeze, go mute, unable to holler, as the giant elm in our back yard fell towards the dining room window and crashed into our roof. Mom and Dad were rigid in shock. Aunt Anne jumped from her chair, screaming, and crashed to the floor as her false leg broke in two from fright of its own. Little brother Kevin had his back to the window and sat there, wondering why the rest of us were so frantic. That was the evening of September 21^st, when The Great Hurricane of 1938, "The Long Island Express", hit Boston. That was my first memory of storm and destruction. It took Dad and me a week to cut up the elm and repair the roof. Neighbors gave me 10 cents an hour to clean up busted, broken trees from their yards.

Remembering these storms awakens a much more conscious awareness of the disaster of Katrina and the shameful failure, persisting still, of our government to care for its people there. Remembery opens the mind to help it grasp the realization of the earthquakes in Myanmar and China in our here and now. One person died from yesterday's tornado. Hundreds of thousands were killed by typhoons and earthquakes in the Far East. In this month of May, there has been a near-record number of 47 tornados, which have killed close to a hundred people. Colorado is the most recent state to join the long list of states from the Plains to Eastern Georgia being clobbered by severe weather.

As guilty bystanders, we conjecture the toll of natural disasters, but cannot fathom nature's onslaught against our humankind. Without experiences of our own, deposited and locked in memory, we falter in compassion. Back in freshman English at B.C. in 1945, Father Paul McNulty, SJ, asked us what Newman meant in "The Second Spring" by using "realization" and "understanding" as if they were opposites in meaning. Our class fumbled with answers and opinions. Fr. McNulty ended the rambling discussion with, "I understand the meaning of the word 'death.' I realize it when my mother dies."

I understand the meaning of "storms" -- hurricanes, earthquakes, typhoons, tornados. I realize them by being in them in 1938, 1955, 1991, yesterday.

Response to Luke Timothy Johnson’s Review of Garry Wills’ Recent Books

2008-05-22T08:18:00.001-07:00

The current issue of Commonweal gives us "What Wills Misunderstood," a review, at: http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2237

Luke Timothy Johnson ends this review of Garry Wills' three books on what Jesus, Paul and the Gospels meant with this:

To write simply and truly about complex subjects - and the subjects of all three books are extraordinarily complex - one must know enough to cut through the complexity and isolate what is deepest and most important in the subject. In these three books, Wills simply did not know enough to do the job.

May I respectfully borrow such words?

To write a review simply and truly about Garry Wills' work on complex subjects - and the subjects of his three books are extraordinarily complex - one must know enough to cut through the complexity and isolate what is deepest and most important in the subject. In this review, Johnson simply did not know enough to do the job.

Unable myself to orbit in Johnson's outer space of exegesis, I'm not the first to treat him the way he treats Wills. Christopher West wrote a review of Luke Timothy Johnson's critique of Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body (TB) for the Catholic Education Resource Center, at http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/sexuality/se0111.html. Eerily, Christopher wrote this about Luke Timothy:

The first thing I recognized in reading Johnson's article is that he simply hasn't penetrated the Pope's project. For anyone familiar with the content of the TB, Johnson's comments are like a slick stone skipping over the surface of a deep lake but never "sinking in."

Luke Timothy Johnson shows at times, a disturbing use of put-downs of others in similar disciplines, with supercilious downgrading of their well-earned reputations for scholarship. In Garry Wills' case, a lifetime of scholarship, which cannot be denigrated. Superciliousness is often tinged with jealousy, I think so. Maybe envy, perhaps?

Reading a Luke Timothy review – or his often peculiar insights into hermeneutics -- evokes a knee-jerk response to review his review in kind, but that would make me a Luke Timothy rather than an Emanuel Paul, a/k/a E. Paul, and I really don't know enough to put a Johnson down. He is a scholar. I'm just an old, retired lawyer, trying to learn how to write instead of spout. It's enough to remember the old saying: What Peter says about Paul says more about Peter than it does about Paul. In the case at hand, a Timothy and a Garry. The review sure does expose Luke Timothy Johnson, doesn't it? Wills comes out unscathed.

Disclosure, to unleash my antipathy, disguised Johnson-like in a "review" of a review. Like Wills, I'm a former Jesuit. Like him, I went on to another specialty, the law, and practiced how to do it for the next 40 years. Like him, I've been put down many times by those who "simply did not know enough to do the job." And I bounced right back up, laughing all the way at the silliness of a professional pouting like the lonely kid on the playground, who burns as a gifted classmate is installed as King of the Hill. The little boy in the fourth grade is father to the scholar, who claims he's good at explaining complex subjects, but the King is not.

I've read almost every book Garry Wills has written and thank him for helping to save my faith, love and hope for being a Catholic. I have read no books by Luke Timothy Johnson, but have seen articles and snippets of his sniping at others, and have no "Thanks" to say. Garry is my kind of gifted writers who simply do know enough to do the job. And with integrity.

One last pejorative and silly shot at Johnson? Unlike him, I don't use all three of my names, just plain, old, simple E. Paul Kelly, which, on reconsideration, does have a tinge of superciliousness to it, after all. We so like to set ourselves apart from the common herd by little touches of individuality.

The above is "What E. Paul Meant." Not much, I grant you, but it's mine. Simple, too. Not complex at all. Luke Timothy ticked me off the way Garry did him.

People of God and Their Friends

2008-05-19T20:58:00.001-07:00

Emotions roll deep, rippling in joy, even awe, when a good man or a good woman intersects my daily life of books and a computer, thoughts and impenetrable issues so many friends demand be resolved, and I know that there is a God with the people of God. The other emotions, the terrible defeating ones, roil and fester my reaction, as angry, almost as cruel in kind, as those of the despots, who fill me with fear and disgust, be they potentates of state or hierarchs of church.

Feebly, I try to justify my frenzied retort, with the guise of standing to speak truth to power, and my emotional rants rail at those wielding power. No impression is made. They are so far away and they yell, "Dissident." "Terrorist." "Appeaser." Little, if any heed is given to what I say or do or write. Their scorn and force are withering. And yet, every now and then, a good woman or a good man comes into my life, not in a superior way to help me out of the pits, but with decency and kindness and the humility of wanting to be.

There were so many incidents like that in the last ten days, that I have to write this.

On a visit to Taos, NM, Jean and I were amazed by the artists sprucing up galleries, washing windows with squeegees, so pleased to stop and talk with us two, despite the approaching hour of opening their doors to the throngs. One, Ed Sandoval, kept us for an hour, alone in his brilliant studio, while wrapping a $35 print we just had to buy. I asked him how he intended to wrap the large painting just finished.

Ed replied, "The fellow who commissioned it is sending his Lear jet here next week, to fly the painting and me to Florida. He wants me at the unveiling."

Ed spent most of the hour talking with Jean about her painting. And I sat and watched the two of them, strangers when we walked in off the dirt parking lot outside, and now friends, as close together as their heads and hands and his paintings standing easily against the walls of the room. They were interested in each other and in their common bond.

Back home here a few days later, we were invited to a farewell dinner before we cross the country again in a going home to New Hampshire. Clare, a close friend of Jean, when we first lived here ten years ago, promised that Clyde would be there too. In the late 1990s, we were attracted to both of them, and particularly fascinated with Clyde, a tall, handsome retired professor, with a prestigious academic career, and a retirement made possible by the royalties from the text books he had written, so that others could teach. When we left Colorado then, Clyde enthralled us at another farewell dinner, with his first try at walking the 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago in Spain, enlivened with the stories of the many people he had met along the way.

So, I asked where he had been walking since then. His answer covered most of eastern Europe, China, Burma, Australia, on foot, with just a backpack, and alone. He spoke of the people he stayed with, and with my persistent questions – "How do you do it, Clyde?" -- he answered simply, "It's the people. Only way to see a country is to walk with its people."

Clare told us of the help he has given quietly over the years: building houses for poor couples in Thailand, putting youngsters through college in Sri Lanka, giving, giving, giving time and interest and money, followed up with letters and more gifts and letters, long after he left their country. His travels had to be interrupted with serious illnesses of hip replacements, cancer, and long rehab to regain his strength to follow his heart. Last year, with cancer in remission, he had walked El Camino a second time.

"I missed my people," was his simple explanation.

After I praised him for his charity, Clyde smiled that humble wistful one of his, cocked his head, said, "I have money from my books, don't need much to walk around the world, might as well let it do some good."

I wondered whether he was linked to some charity, and he said, "No. I walk alone. The people I meet are poor. And they're good people."

My curiousity on where he was going next was resolved in his telling us it would be in a Buddhist monastery near the Tibetan border. He'd bumped into a monk a year or so ago and helped him out with food and money for transportation back to that monastery. The monk happened to be the Abbot. He invited Clyde to come and stay for a few months next fall, "It's my turn, now." Good dinner. Good people.

Yesterday, Jean and I drove to Estes Park 20 miles away. We live in the Front Range, on the western edge of the High Plains, up against the foothills of the Rockies. Estes Park is a small, touristy town, an entrance into Rocky Mountain National Park. Elk walk the streets, but leave them that particular weekend to the thousands of people who come for the Jazz Festival and to walk the Art Walk. Tired after an hour of plodding along, smiling and gawking, I sat down on a bench in the warming sun, thrilled to be so near the 14-ers, our mountains at 14,000 feet, ogling the people swarming the sidewalks on both sides of the main street, leaning over to pat the occasional dog who thought I had a treat.

Jean went off to tour the galleries and meet some artists, as she had in Taos. I was wearing my Oregon football cap, with the big green "O" leaping off the white background and had on a green and yellow Oregon jersey. A couple stopped, drawn by the "Os", opening the conversation with "Go, Ducks." Later another couple joined us, to share their connection with the school. There I sat, charmed by strangers, who had found a friend so far from home. We chatted. They were thrilled that a son of ours was coaching there, and I was thrilled that they were from Eugene, OR, followed the team and roared in tune and cadence with the awesome decibels of 60,000 fans in Autzen Stadium.

There we were, so far from that stadium, drawn by the colors and a letter on a shirt and a hat, in a little town in the Rockies, an old man from NH and Maine buzzing awy with one couple from Oregon, the other from Denver. It was a warming half hour on a warming day, for people normally thousands of miles apart. Each of us made the other's day. As they left to walk on, Jean came back, towing a woman artist with whom she had spent her half hour talking about oils. The sharing went on.

We drove home on Rt. 36, by Longs Peak, which is normally framed by this studio's windows where I write now, realizing that next month the elevation will be about ten feet at the bottom of the Merrimac Valley, looking up at the gentle hill we New Hampshiremen call Mount Uncanoonuk. Well, Mt. Washington, our famous one, a 6-er, is up the Interstate about an hour and a half away.

Sunday, we watched as the priest entered the friendly Lutheran Church, which allows us to share space for our fledgling Ecumenical Catholic Community, the Light of Christ Church, and I goggled.

"She's a woman," I whispered. "She's beautiful, Jean."

Her homily was on St. Augustine's insight about the Trinity, when taught by the little boy with the pail at the beach, busily pouring "the ocean back into the hole." After cautioning the child that his task was impossible, Augustine was struck with the realization that it was also impossible to try to pour Infinity into finite minds. Father Kae, and I quickly corrected myself, Mother Kae was the priest missing from our churches for thousands of years. I had to speak with her after Mass to let her know how miraculous and dizzingly serene it was to see a woman resume the role she had in the infant Church.

Her smile widened with my, "I've read about women priests, digested the reasons pro and con, talked about it, hoped for equality in ministry from our celibate males and knew it was hopeless. You are the first woman priest I've ever seen live. It is so different and yet so right." I blurted out in the tingling emotions of the moment, "May I have your blessing?"

With a simple, unadorned "Yes," she put one hand on my head. It was firm, strong. Her arm around my shoulder was loving. It belonged there. I was blessed. There were tears in my eyes, for I was in a miracle, the same one that had made the early Church possible. Women belonged. We had longed for them for such a long time.

On Monday, the mail brought Weston Jesuit's last issue of Light&Life, before closes its doors in Harvard Square after twenty years and becomes part of the Boston College community. The articles and pictures were from out of my own youth, the years which allowed me to say, "Been there. Done that." But what caught my eye were those little one paragraph notices telling what some alumni had been doing in ministry lately. In this final issue, the editor ran story after story of men and women, equally dedicated to service for others. Three full pages. 48 names. Goodness going all over the world, out of the place I had been for studies over 50 years ago. I thought of classmates from way back then and those who followed after, their reach across the world, the hundreds of men, and now women, too, going forth. I thought of people, rather than dogma, doctrine, discipline and all of that endless debate, argument, apologetics.

Some names were familiar, as old classmates. The current president's family spent each summer in their cottage near our home in Pine Point, ME. Our son had dated his niece. Weston's former president, also a friend, had resigned, a serious illness making it impossible for him to share any longer, after he had masterminded the purchase of Cardinal Law's estate and moved Weston College away from Harvard, closer to B. C. The magazine said that one of his friends had donated $400,000, to be matched by other friends, in setting up "The Manning Fund" for scholarships and eventually a chair in Theology. Weston Jesuit is alive and well and is coming home.

Finally, later on Monday, email brought a fitting conclusion to my reveries of people and events over the recent past. It had a notice from the Provincial of the California Province to answer the Call of Christ. People were stirring in the Church. Hostilities were being placed to one side. Church needs to be a church, an assembly, a gathering, not a boot camp. People and news items and email notices allowed emotions, joyous ones, to pour out in floods from way down deep within. And I saw the people who had been crossing my path for longer than half a century, doing good to others, quietly, without publicity, as a matter of daily fact.

To me, that is Church. People in love with people are drowning out the presidents and the bishops, who speak in stridence, harsh, grating, creaking, loud, shrill, threatening, condemning. A Call is going out. Let the institution keep the qualifier "Roman." Our Church in this 21st century needs no such limitation. It is simply "Catholic." Let us be Church. We, the people of God.

It is good to be here. With Ed and Clyde and Clare. Nice to talk with those Oregonians drawn by an "O", a green one. Wonderful to see and hear Mother Kae, a priest at LOC, whose blessing is one of love, the kind no celibate can give, no matter how close a friend out of my past. The news is beckoning, from Weston Jesuit and the California Province and their people, who have gone forth, quietly, steadily making their immense impact over this country and this world.

All of them lift me up, with my little pail on the beach and a great big ocean in front of me. With friends like them, I need not rise to speak truth to power. Just be myself with our people, able and ready and willing to listen for and answer a Call.

Rome Is Cracking Down

2008-05-15T10:25:00.001-07:00

The Roman Catholic Church has been in the news lately. Four characteristic events:

Bishops are commanding governors and senators not to approach for Communion if their votes and public statements are not in synch with the sex stuff demanded by Rome in its "official teachings."
A retired bishop in Australia is being condemned by fellow bishops for writing a book criticizing Rome's' abuse of power. Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles has denied him permission to speak in that diocese for his intransigence and disregard of "official Catholic teachings."
A Polish pastor is in deep trouble in St. Louis, where the Archbishop wants to discard a contract a predecessor made with the parish. The people and their pastor balk. The Archbishop has disbarred the pastor's canon lawyer and will defrock the pastor.
The Pope visited America and said he was ashamed of the sexual abuse of minors by some clergy, went home to Rome, where he elevated the St. Louis Archbishop to two important positions in the Curia and reaffirmed Pope Paul VI's disastrous encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae, proving "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose -- the more things change, the more they stay the same."

What is happening in the Roman Church today, May 15, 2008? Benedict XVI has been Pope for five years. We had hoped for " la change" but obviously got "la même chose."

Five years ago, Rome was then in the Conclave from which Josef Cardinal Ratzinger of the CDF had emerged as Benedict XVI. At that time, we were worried about skip to main | skip to sidebar the quandary over the transition from an old pope to the election of a new one, and the following piece was written.

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Fantasy

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An Assembly With The First Catholics

On the Beach, Pine Point, Maine

April 18, 2005.

This being the day long awaited, the 18th of April in 2005, I went to the computer early on, for Rome is seven hours ahead of us, and I wanted to make sure all 115 electors cardinal showed up. Started checking Eastern European newspapers, to get ahead of the time differential, and fell asleep.

Got awakened by a voice at 9:30 am, our time here in the coast of Maine, did a rapid computation and figured it was past noon inside the Sistine Chapel. The voice was not so loud, as it was just simply everywhere, like surround sound, outside the house, throughout the first floor, inside my head, feet and ears, and within my soul, deep, not just scratching the surface.

I heard, "Hey, Paul, come on down."

"Who that? Where are you?"

"It's me, Paul. Peter." Interrupting himself, "My Lord, don't those two names together sound like the old days?. We're on the beach. Come on down."

"We?"

"You'll find out when you get here. Come alone. Leave the dogs at home, too."

"OK, OK, coming…." and off I went before checking any paper in Europe or even turning on CNN to see if there were Breaking News or a Flash.

Quickly, I reached the bulkhead, a thick wall of concrete yet no bulwark to hold back the Atlantic once global warming warmed and flowed a new coastline far inland near the Allegheny Mountains. Right below the high tide mark, on the soft sand, there was a large crowd of people, rough-hewn people, men and women alike, in those flowing robes Middle Easterners wear to protect themselves from the sun, wearing sandals instead of shoes, talking with their hands and fingers, as they watched their old-fashioned fishing boats bob up and down in the gentle lap of the tide.

It was a gorgeous morning, all sun, halfway to high noon, a cloud or two in dazzling white way up there and moving on towards the east. The sky's blue was the blue of dreams, the kind you know is going to bathe you, come later, much later on, and in another world, too. I clambered down the short flight of wooden steps onto the sand and let my toes curl into the warmth and began the short walk through the high sea grass on the path left from last summer's tourists by the thousands.

Saint Peter left his group of women and headed toward me, beaming, "Took you long enough. Good thing I didn't say this was urgent."

"Saint Peter. Good to see you. Who are all these people. Must be a hundred of them," was my natural question.

His answer wasn't natural, "I want you to meet Jesus' Apostles and Disciples, Paul. Time we talked Church."

And he began introducing me to one small group of people after another, some my age, a lot much younger, a healthy looking bunch, not one fat one in the crowd. And every single one of them looked me directly in my eyes as they spoke my name. Some held both my hands when they did that. Others just gave a little bow, or a nod of the head. But, it was their eyes which I will never forget.

And a flash of a news story came to me that Pope John Paul II never looked anybody in the eye at all, when he spoke with them, a trait, the reporter commented, that was common among Polish priests. I thought it a lame excuse at the time, and remembered it when these simple, common folk took me in, just as if they had known me all their lives. Come to think of it, they probably did.

When Peter took me to a beautiful woman and introduced her as Mary Magdalen, my knees buckled, and she laughed. Embarrassed, my face flushed as scarlet as a cardinal's robes and I tried a chuckle, but it came out a feeble gurgle. Even so, she took my hand and said, "Come with me, I want you to meet the rest of the Apostles."

I looked back towards Saint Peter, who just smiled and nodded his head, "It's OK, she's one of us, she's an Apostle, always was, you know." So, off I went with Mary Magdalen, and it was not reluctantly either. It was great meeting the Apostles. I knew their names, some better than others – still have to go look some of them up from time to time when I can't get to the full count of Twelve minus one – but putting faces to names was like, like – well there is no like, because even I knew this was another great experience in my life.

Jesus really liked to change names when people changed. Ever notice that? Unlike that Paul,who had been a Saul, I've never been knocked down by a lightning bolt. There I stood, as if it were a common occurrence on Pine Point's beach on a sunny day in April, to chat with a group of friends and talk Church.

A big man thrust his hand towards me, "James of Jerusalem, brother of Jesus. You a Gentile?"

When I told him I was, he asked, "How many of you, now?"

"A lot, really, Sir. Almost one billion plus a million or so. Over the whole world."

All he could say was , "Jeeeeze." I took it as a prayer.

And then, I grabbed his hand tightly, looked him right in the eye as he had into my own, and said thanks this way, "I don't think a Gentile has ever had the chance to thank you, for the way you listened to Peter and Paul in that first council of Jerusalem, gave up your own deep, personal views about a Jewish Assembly, and let them go west, even to Rome. So, we thank you, Saint James, we thank you."

He was embarrassed, then winked at me, drew me closer to his great beard and said, "You had better keep a close eye on that gang of cuckoo birds in that so-called secret Conclave in the Sistine Chapel. They're a bunch of loony tunes, they are. Don't your people realize that the German one, Ratsongster his name? is a Docetist? They taught that Jesus was not human, and we knocked that one down real early in the second century. Means the Church isn't human, too, just as the Ratty one is saying now. Be careful of him."

Before I could agree with him, another hand tugged me away, "I'm Phoebe, and we women want a word with you," she pointed to a large group of women arguing loudly with three men, "The men are Peter, Paul and Thomas, in case you were wondering."

"Phoebe? The deacon in Cenchreae?"

"The same. You know your Epistles of Paul, don't you, Paul. Figures."

"Look, M'am… "

"It's Phoebe, fella, P-h-o-e-b-e, Phoebe."

"Look, Phoebe, before I get thrown into a heated discussion, can you tell me why I'm here. I'm a nobody, just an old guy on the beach."

"Well, don't be so modest. That's what's wrong with you so-called 'people of God', you're all so super, super humble, waiting for the bishop or the pastor to tell you what to do. You people are locked into a mindset of humble obedience. Far deeper and far more difficult to overcome, than the one the bishops are stuck in, arrogant superiority and absolute power. Neither one of you can budge. You spout off a lot, both of you, but your ways are frozen solid. We're here to break that ice-jam."

And off we went to the argument. I could hear Peter before we got halfway, "Apphia, stop interrupting Junia, she's an apostle."

The one called Apphia turned to the little guy beside Peter, a bow-legged, tough-looking rooster, and complained, "Paul, when you sent me that letter to Philemon and called me 'Sister', you weren't putting Junia ahead of me, were you? You even went out of your way to show us that we are all equals, men and women alike. When Chloe's people told you about the rivalries in Corinth. Remember?"

Then Saint Paul spoke, "Then why, Apphia, in the name of Christ are you arguing so, now? Did we not all come here to be an example of the earliest days of our church, for these people of Pine Point? We came to show him how to build Church not keep the arguments going forever."

"I'm sorry, Paul, I just get so tired of that Junia lording it over me because she's an apostle and I'm only a sister," Apphia said softly.

She looked so forlorn, I thought wildly that, as a total stranger, maybe, must maybe I could step into the middle of this one, being from away, as they say in Maine, and gave it a try, "Apphia, my name is Paul, too. By the powers invested in me, I hereby consecrate you Apostle of Pine Point. " I thought she grew about a foot and a half before my very eyes.

She beamed, really beamed, then bowed low with a long curving sweep of her right arm, from shoulder to finger tips, just kissing the one lone shell left by the tide, and said, "Thank you, Paul of Pine Point, I will remember you."

Junia, smiling as well, was no retiring feminine, though, "What powers, Paul, may I ask?"

Liking her hands on hips stance and that smile that promised so much understanding, I dared a step further, "Me own, Apostle Junia, me own. I make them up, as I go along. Quicker and easier than trying to get in touch with the bishop."

And, honest to God, she took a quick step closer, gave me a hug, whispering in my ear, "That's exactly what we all did, to get started. Welcome to the club of Catholics."

For once, I was without words. A stupid grin on my face, and a real bright light shining in my eyes, I let myself be seated by Nympha of Laodicea, who had a church in her own house, and Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth in Thyatira, who listened to and was baptized by Saint Paul, then opened up her home to Paul's friends. They held my hands as they talked on and on about keeping it simple, avoiding conflict with authority figures, doing things by themselves, picking out presbyters to make the bread and wine holy in memory of the Last Supper, as Jesus had told them to do.

What struck me as being so simple, yet to us here in Maine, so difficult, was their quiet trust in the Lord, as each of them set out to do what they thought he would have wanted them to do in setting up a church. As I listened, I felt like Nicodemus who had first gone to Jesus in the night, and then, Apphia, reading my mind? said, "Nicodemus is here today. He' like to meet you later on"

As they went on about how they completely ignored the laws and codes and canons and scriptures and speeches of all the authorities around them, high priests of the Jews, temple hangers-on from the Greek cities and towns, Roman soldiers and their pantheon of gods and laws and laws and laws, I thought long and hard about Nicodemus who had been a Pharisee and a sanhedrist.

Then, he came over, waved on by Apphia, "Just to say 'hello' and pick a bone with you."

Baffled by his sense of familiarity, all I could do was repeat his word, "Bone?"

"Yes. But an old bone for you. You played me in a Passion Play in Dorchester's part of Boston back in the 1940s, and you didn't catch my character at all. In fact, you were lousy." he smiled as he got that one off his chest.

"I remember that!" I exclaimed, jumping to my feet. "That was the night the brace broke on the Sanhedrin's Jury Box, and I was trying to hold it upright with my hands and forgot my lines. They made me a stagehand the next year."

"Well," he said, as he turned to leave, "as Junia says, welcome to the club. Good luck in engaging the future. It's no play, you know. It's for real, this time."

I left the group of women priests and drifted in an out of one small group after the other. It was good to stop and listen to Priscilla and her husband Aquila, from Ephesus, who reminded me of how they listened to the eloquent Apollos of Alexandria, and how he spoke to them of Jesus in such learned and scholarly tones -- he was a noted authority on the scriptures – until they took him off to one side and told him to cool it, keep it simple, and to stop looking for a confrontation. Apollos listened well and did much better when he crossed over to Achaia.

In another group, I listened closely as they shared their stories of doubt and anxiety, even fear of the unknown future, and the great gifts of faith that were granted to all of them. The more stories they told, the more I realized how hard the first few years must have been in those home churches.

My namesake came back and walked with me a while, just the two Pauls. He asked a funny question, "Do you know why our assemblies, churches, were in homes?"

"No, I never really thought about it."

"There weren't any Catholic Church buildings around. Kind of simple isn't it? Plenty of synagogues, but they weren't renting space on the Sabbath. Roman Shrines and Greek Temples were off-limits. We were pretty poor, too. We really didn't get buildings until Emperor Constantine made us his state religion. We got church buildings then and promptly began to lose our Church. From where I look and see, not much Catholic faith in any of the huge, monstrous buildings you have all over the earth. Wonderful looking buildings you can't use, almost like paintings you can't take down off the walls and carry around with you wherever you go." He looked so sad, when he said that.

Trying to cheer him up a little, I said, "Well, from where I look and see, you had real churches in those homes, real servants of the servants of God. You didn't need an ecumenical council to tell you that you were the people of God, and your bishops didn't ignore you and lock you out. You were church."

"That's why we're here, Paul," he said, "to show you the way, because it looks to us that you have all lost the way and you're waiting for high priests to bail you out. First thing we did was get as far away from our high priests as we could and we put together the Four Gospels and some Epistles. Later on they made it into the New Testament. We got by with copies on parchment and we just kept passing them on and on from one small group to another. You can do the same thing, you know, but for goodness sake, you've got to keep it simple."

And we were back with the main group of people. Judging from the sun in the sky, it was some time after the noon hour. I was getting hungry, wondering whether these people ever ate.

Now, I know you won't believe this, but all of a sudden a meal was prepared in front of all of us. Yes! Yes! Loaves of bread and lots of fish. Startled, I looked around to see if Jesus himself was there in the small crowd. Moved beyond any religious feeling I ever felt before, I stammered at Peter, "Did, d - d - did you d - do this?"

"Heavens, Paul, no. Nicodemus sent some boys down to the Clambake for a take-out, and picked up the tab for all of us. We always make sure to invite him along on trips like these."

Then, in the quiet, when they all stopped laughing at my blushing scarlet hue, Peter stood and called for silence, "We are here to share with Paul of Pine Point, a solitary man who has been writing pieces about the terrible disaster of this diocese of Portland, Maine, of its kindly yet monkish old bishop now retired who was mentally and physically unable to rock the boat and had but one dream, to get back into his monastic cell the minute he turned 75. His successor is younger, more vigor, but he spends his time in New Orleans teaching catechism a couple of thousand miles away, and when he's here, just can't be bothered to talk at all with his own people, whom he calls 'clusters.'"

The Doubting Thomas roared, "What the hell's a cluster? That's a new one. Can I hold one in my hand? Touch it with a finger?" And he laughed just as loudly and sat plump down.

I was right next to him, so while Peter droned on, I explained to him Bishop Malone's carving up the great state of Maine into 27 clusters, because of the shortage of priests, and that all it meant was we had to drive further to get to church on Sundays.

St. Thomas grunted, "Silly hierarch, he's arranging things for a bigger disaster. Why doesn't he just go and find some priests? Plenty of married ones all over the place. Look around you here. We had as many women presbyters as men. Frankly, Paul, they were much better. How the devil does arranging parishes into clusters make for more priests? Doesn't make any sense at all, does it? " Thomas was more than a doubter in my eyes, he could see through fallacies better than most lawyers I know.

When Peter finished, he asked me if I had any questions. I said, "Just one. Where'd you get the presbyters?"

"From the people, of course."

"Who ordained them?"

"What's 'ordained' mean? In our times? Or do you mean later, when the Sacraments were put together by a bunch of learned people, like theologians and those Johnny come latelies, the bishops?"

"I mean 'ordained' as in the Sacrament of Holy Orders. Hey, you're Saint Peter, the Rock, the first Pope, you trying to kid with me?" I was flustered and a bit impatient. Being a Catholic in this diocese has a way of getting to you. Frustrating.

"Yes, dear Paul, yes, I was teasing you, hoping you would see your own blindness and sheeplike nature. We ordained our own presbyters just by picking out the best ones, whether men or women, the ones who were obviously people for others and not just for themselves. Why are you always waiting for a bishop to give you people permission to breath? Act! Be! Do! We did."

"Easy enough to say that. You didn't have any bishops anyway. No popes either. You were never ordained at all, were you?"

"No, I was not. So what? Well, Sir, I was crucified, downwards. That make you feel better?" Peter drove home hard lessons. He was, and is, after all a Stone, another translation for the Greek Cephas."

"Sorry, Peter," I apologized and cooled my Irish temper.

He went on, as the leader of fishermen that he was, "You and your friends are hung up on two thousand years of Church History which was based on Roman Law and Greek Philosophy, both of which are so foreign to the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament that most of us here are sorry we went West via Greece and Rome, rather than East through India, South East Asia and the Far East. Those people are more our kind of people than the westerners, especially those Romans, and all the Emperors and Kings and Princes and Dukes that came after them and corrupted our Catholic Church so badly."

"I see that, but what do we do now? We are westerners. And we are waiting for the Cardinals in Conclave to stop their fooling around and get it over with. We need a Pope."

"Do you?" was Thomas' very, very quiet question. "Why? You didn't like the last one very much."

I just stared at him, the doubting one, always I confess, my favorite Apostle. History knocked him around a bit, but he was, and now is, my kind of man. Why, indeed, so much fuss about a single man, a Pope? This Greatest Show on Earth has been going on ever since John Paul II went in for that tracheotomy, and the Conclave has just begun, first ballot up in black smoke. I don't think I'll forget those two lines for a long, long time:

"We need a Pope."

"Do you?"

Then the bandy legged one showed he had to speak, "Paul, I used to write letters, too, but it's personal contact that counts. Why do battle with a bishop day in, day out? You can't win. Neither can he. He's too scared. More scared of Rome than of you. He knows the Roman institution is faltering and may even implode soon. People are leaving the church for other religions. Nobody wants to be a Roman Catholic these days. And all of your bishops are pretty dense human beings, like those Roman jailers who always went by the book, but forgot to lock the window bars, so I escaped in a basket. Escape that bishop. Leave him be. Let the Cardinals put on the gala shows they want. They're just empty processions, meaningless theater."

"It was pretty bad, wasn't it?" I volunteered.

"Bad? It was gross, Paul, a gross insult tossed at the intelligence of this modern world of yours. The Caesars put on better shows in ancient Rome's Coliseum than these birds did in St. Peter's Square. So excessive." He obviously didn't like the obsequies.

"Be your own Catholic," he continued after catching his breath. "Ordain your own priests, if you have to, but tap that pool of married priests and send all those women willing to be for others off to school, then ordain them. By the way, the school for priests shouldn't take more than one year at the most. All that other stuff is the baloney that's been built up over two thousand years of saving everything."

"You know, St. Paul, you never had to put up with a Roman Institutional church. It was easier for you, when you stop and think about it." I was getting bolder.

He ignored me and kept right on going strong. "Build a church. We did. Ignore or laugh at all that cockamamie stuff that comes out of Rome. They're so cocky and so hopeless. About the only thing they're good at is putting on those extravaganzas for the entertainment of the world. You don't need all their disciplines and theologies and writings and speeches. My goodness they're bossier than all the Roman Emperors we used to know put together. Actually, Paul, all you really need is the New Testament. That's all. It's all in there. Take it from one who wrote some of it."

I was dumbfounded. It hit me like a thunderbolt. I, the lawyer, who never let the other lawyer set up the playing field to take my issues away from me, not even once in 40 years, had rolled right over and played humble, obedient, layman to the bishop and spoke to him in his own language with his own words and his own years of theological studies. I bought book after book on ecclesiology, alternate dispute resolution, mediation, negotiation, theology, Christology, screamed at JPII and his Curia, wrote thousands of words, and stood still, locked in my own boots welded in my own past, unable to move.

I prided myself for thinking outside the box and knew now that I had never left the box. I was constantly thinking Rome and Hierarchy and Dogma and Disciplines. I was not thinking Church, Assembly, A Gathering of Two or More in My Name. I was not thinking People of God. And I had to find somebody to blame, so I was blaming my local bishop, abusing and deviant priests, neo-cons, the CDF, the Curia, the Holy See, the Pope, the College of Cardinals, and all the Bishops of the world. Everybody except myself. And they all played me for the utter fool that I am and toyed with me on their custom playing field with their theologies and canons and ecclesial way of doing things.

Then, the Pope died. And I fell into the dream of maybe, maybe, maybe, the next one will be like us, will listen to us, will turn things around, will help us build church in the 21st century, once again putting all my hopes in one solitary man in Rome.

I looked at the hundred or so people, all very quietly looking at me, with smiles of understanding as they saw enlightenment flow from them into me. I took the book of the New Testament from Saint Peter's hands, stood, and joined them in the Our Father. I wanted to, and did, hold hands with St. Thomas and with Apphia. St. Paul grinned and patted me on the back, "Keep writing, friend, somebody's reading the stuff."

St. Peter had to give me his bear hug, before he stepped into the Atlantic and gave his boat a mighty shove, then hopped in. At least he didn't try to show off and walk on water.

Then, I watched the rest of them get back in their boats and head out to open water, where they slowly began to disappear. I prayed that they were heading to the Conclave for a meeting as solid and as hopeful as the one with me, or maybe to another group of people who wanted to be people of God, but were stuck in a soundless duel with a tough bishop.

As I went back up through the high grass, I knew what I wanted to say at the VOTF meeting where I'd been asked to speak, come next Tuesday, on engaging the future of the Catholic Church in the 21st century.

Who knows, we might even have a new Pope by then. Perhaps, that will make a difference, and then again, it may not. Who knows? We are the people of God and we have work to do.

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Neural Buddhism, Newcomer to Postmodernism

2008-05-14T05:59:00.001-07:00

For those curious about God and us:

Fr. Don Rickard, M.Div., M.A.,our pastor at Light of Christ Ecumenical Catholic Community here in Longmont, Colorado, wrote his thesis on Postmodernism. He shared some of his research in a chitchat not too long ago, gave me a long, scholarly article by one of the prominent scholars, read and reread and saved. Google then led me to more sources for "Postmodernism" as a quietly current way of talking about God and us. I don't know much about it yet, am leery about writing anything theological – no qualifications -- and hesitate to pontificate on and on. If anyone reading this is up on it or knows the way around the labyrinth of today's theological progress, i.e. religion and culture, being fully human, fully alive in 2008, want to share?

Roger Haight's The Future of Christology, his sequel to Jesus Symbol of God – dissed notificatiionally by the usual ripe and ready Ratzinger wrath, mentions it passim, especially at pages 127-130. His Index suggests checking on "globalism." Is that the same as "global warming?" Could be that merely the letters "g-l-o-b-a-l" is what throws discussion into a tizzy, as usual, between Left and Right? A person's politics decides once again what to pursue, in what to believe?

Why would Catholicism's traditionalists so proud of the meaning of "catholic" as "one" and "universal" -- i.e. global? – hunker down in the bunker and holler? About the weather? As vociferously as they do about the biology of sex and the subservience of humanity before lords on high, to say nothing about life itself. I sometimes get the foolish notion that those who refuse to leave the past hate being human so much they want to die and go to heaven right away. I mean – fundamentally -- the Jesus they claim as role model took off after the resurrection and went back to heaven. Incarnation was just a TDY for him, they say. The quicker it's over, the better.

Postmodernism suggests that the best is yet to come. Stick around.

America had an article last September, "What Are Theologians Saying About Christology? http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=10190. Commonweal Blog had,. I guess a post postmodernism one, today, May 13, 2008, at http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/. I think it's OK to set it out here:

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/

The Neural Buddhists

May 13, 2008, 11:22 pm

Posted by J. Peter Nixon

David Brooks has a fascinating (but I think ultimately flawed) column in, yes, the New York Times talking about the potential impact of neuroscience on religion. He argues that neuroscience will prove as challenging to 21^st religion as evolutionary biology did to 19^th and 20^th century religion:

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It's going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

I have not read any of the writers Brooks lists, but my initial response is that these are not new issues for Christian theology. The idea that religious doctrines are symbolic expressions of human religious experience has a very long pedigree. The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher
was writing in the early 19^th century that religion was rooted in a feeling of "absolute dependence" and this grounding of theology in anthropology later became central to the theological project of liberal Protestantism.

In Catholic theology, this approach was given its most systematic expression by the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner in the second half of the 20^th century. Very simply stated (which is a dangerous thing to do with Rahner), he argued that Christianity was the answer to questions posed by the transcendental dimension of human experience. Confronted with the essential mystery of our existence—and in particular the mystery of death—we long for an "absolute savior" who we recognize in the person of Jesus Christ.

This approach to theology is less popular than it once was. Post-modern thinkers have raised skeptical questions about the universality of "human religious experience," and that skepticism has influenced theology. There is increased interest in the particularity of religious traditions. This has manifested itself in a variety of ways, such as the increased popularity of Karl Barth among Protestant theologians and the recognition of the limitations of Rahner's ideas about "anonymous Christianity" in the context of interreligious dialogue. Christians and Buddhists do not simply symbolically express a similar reality in different ways. They really do experience reality in different ways because of the particularity of their traditions. In his 1984 book The Nature of Doctrine, George Lindbeck suggested that theology was poised to move in a "post-liberal" direction.

Brooks' argument suggests that neuroscience will allow us to see religious traditions as simply diverse expressions of the same underlying brain chemistry. I must say I'm skeptical. Just because the same portion of the brain lights up when a Buddhist is meditating or a Christian is praying does not mean that the two are having the same experience. Human experience is always mediated through language and culture. It is always particular. That some anthropological constants exist I do not doubt, but those constants "underdetermine" human culture. All known cultures, for example, have incest taboos, but they differ on what degree of kinship constitutes incest.

Thus the question is not primarily whether the religious traditions of the world reflect the brain but what they do with the brain. What kind of human culture is made possible by particular religious traditions? To what extent do those cultures fully actualize the potentialities latent in what Christians (and not only Christians) call "creation?" How does grace build on nature?

That is not a question that neuroscience—or any science—can ultimately answer. It requires a leap of faith. It requires a leap of faith to believe that this oddly organized collection of cells and chemicals is a being of incomparable dignity and transcendent destiny. It requires a leap of faith to believe that the fullest expression of the human is found not in the lives of John Galt or the New Soviet Man but in an obscure Palestinian Jew who gave his life "as a ransom for many."

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All the above convinces this poor old mind that we really don't know as much as we think we know. Our fascination with being human and a longing both our faith and our knowledge tells us is more, much, much more, has barely begun. For those of us who realize that there are few answers – and surely a pluralism of paths – we honor the questions. And keep asking them. Not that we're searching, searching qua pilgrims. We're just curious about ourselves and the higher power we christen with so many different names, God being the popular one, whether one, triune, or infinite. We do get curiouser when pushing 80, too.

Dicastery Deans, Like Leopards, Don’t Change Their Spots

2008-05-14T05:41:00.001-07:00

By the way, in little bleeps of newscasts daily, have we noticed that our tip-toe-through-the-tulips Papa is regressing to his deanship of a certain dicastery? Actually, he never left the CDF, while trying on the wardrobes in papal closets. Especially of late, though, and oh! so quietly, in his selections of cardinalabile of a righteous persuasion like Raymond Burke of St. Louis, the persecutor of Poles and disbarrer of canon lawyers, the reiteration of Paul VI's advice to the marrieds, personal embarrassment over sexual scandals of a sacerdotal kind from a minority hushed and coddled by hierarchs, but none over costumes of the "best and the brightest" in Christendom, himself. Guess he wouldn't sort of go for postmodernism, would he? I kind of liked that fuzzy white stuff under the Arabian rug red stuff over his shoulders. What do you call them? Shawls? Dainty shoulder pads? Fuzzy wuzzies?

Reminded me of Nan, the pretty girl on the vegetable counter at the Uphams Corner Market in Dorchester, Massachusetts. I worked the fish counter on Fridays, filleting mackerel and forking gurry, meats on Saturdays, chopping pork chops, trimming roasts, and peeking over at vegetables a lot all weekend long. Took me six weeks to get up the nerve to ask her to our high school prom. She wore one of those fuzzy white shoulder things over her gown. Hers shed. All over my rented tux. And I was embarrassed at 16. But, I never yanked her license to be, nor lectured her about contraception, either. No teenagers of our time were banned from receiving Communion, like governors and senators are today, because of biology or sex stuff or hanging out with Moonies and Tibetan monks.

Ah! We were innocent then, an innocence hierarchs know nothing about. In the outer reaches of the atmosphere wherein they all breathe and move and have their oligarchical beings, bedecked with gowns from dark and middle ages of another era, befingered with rings gleaming their immense wealth even in the flickering light of candles, bechested, too, with golden chains and crosses, behatted with funny looking headpieces never doffed, befooted on designer shoes trembling up on tiptoe to add cubits to their littleness, in order to look around and check their own fabricated stature against the status and ranking of other prelates, always alone with just each other hanging in there, they are an embarrassment to earthlings. I really think that they have no concept at all about what a human being is. Or is meant to be. The glitter sets them apart as another species of beings.

Now, while we welcome Neural Buddhism as a newcomer to our postmodernity, we should be cautious and remember to begin with the Sutras. In the Buddha's case, none were written down until a few hundred years after his death, much more prolifically than our own meager scriptures. Easterners are swarming in volumes and volumes of scriptures, compared to our own little New Testament, swelled some if one adds in the Old one. Toss in the Qur'an, too, and Middle Eastern holy writ still lags far behind Far Eastern.

Which brings up another rankling question: How come we have no scriptures being written today and have to spend so much time studying those written down thousands of years ago? After, of course, a hundred years or more of oral tradition handed down from grandparents to parents, mother to daughter, father to son, lover to lover, friend to friend. Scriptures are always written in languages whose nuances we have trouble figuring out, so much so that we're not sure that the people of those times even understood what was being read to them. We kind of get mixed up between exegesis and hermeneutics.

No Buddhas around now? Would God dare try incarnation again? On the grounds that we really missed it the first time around and could benefit from a second try? In one of those postmodern daring and courageous thoughts, could we logically, rationally, faith-fully turn that whole descent from heaven around the other way and explore our life now, in 2008 and the years yet to come, the way Jesus showed us back then in the first century? Suppose we started talking and writing that we are called to Indivination, taking on godness, as God took on humanity in the Incarnation.

Why not? Everyone could try that: Left, Right, Middle, Inside, Outside. St. Paul subtly told us: "I live now, yet not I. Christ truly lives in me. -Iam vivo, sed non ego. Vivit vero in me Christus." And yet, were we to talk like that, write like that, -- God forbid! act like that -- someone is sure to go looking for our heads, if not our licenses to be and to think and to share. That someone is usually a Dean of a Dicastery, a Hierarch, a Pope, or one of their clones. Banned and barred is the excommunication of today, a bit less torturous and tortuous than the stake and fire of holy inquisitions.

Despite the news of papal primacy, still going on strong in its third millennium, some of us think it's OK now to share as well as pay, think as well as pray, dare as well as obey. It is good to be fully human, fully alive, friends with God. Reach out to a hierarch and invite him to come along.

Fr. Tom Doyle Reviews a Book On Pope John Paul II

2008-05-11T08:36:00.001-07:00

Father Tom Doyle's review of a book on the papacy of Pope John Paul II was rejected by an "independent" Catholic publication, because "it was thought to be 'biased.'" It has been put up on the Internet at: http://reform-network.net/?p=1657

For those of us working and praying for reform and renewal of our Church, any criticism of ours towards the papacy, hierarchy, and political/governmental structure of the Church is deemed "biased" and, accordingly, dismissed. We use pop phrases occasionally to protest such infantile treatment by the oligarchy, when we let it be known that we are aware of the Curia's fundamental opinion of us as "The Laity , Those Who Pay, Pray and Obey." When they added, "Sit Up! Listen Up! Shut Up!" I replied, "Won't."

Most likely, any characterization of me before The Boston Globe unmasked the scandal which made public the greatest crisis the Roman Catholic Church has ever experienced – Martin Luther's Reformation was just the introduction – would have been, "Him? Oh! he's just one of those lapsed Catholics, whining." I was trying to be "spiritual" and definitely not "religious." Church attendance was sporadic. The news gave me the "excuse" I was looking for to leave the Church, which had, over my lifetime to that point, slowly become opposed to everything my heart was telling me about being "fully human, fully alive."But I couldn't do it.

The voice within kept saying, oh! so quietly, "You're into your 70s now. With your background, you could help a little." I floundered without foundering, looked in on the Alphabet Soup of The People of God: ARCC, CTA, VOTF, SNAP, TBOC. Got banned and barred from parish property, when using one of those acronyms, by an "old-fashioned" Bishop. Tried to go it alone. They were all good, but were not churches. I realized I could do little or nothing on my own, alone, just me, reaching out with a computer. I desperately needed a community in which to love and be loved, an assembly, a church. The RCC wouldn't let me back in, even though I entitled myself as "A Lapsed Agnostic" rather than "A Lapsed Catholic On the Way Back In."

Jean and I found a Church here in Longmont, CO -- gracefully? -- which allowed us to be who we are. And we knew we were home, no longer merely "spiritual" but also "religious." The religion was, and is, Catholicism. The only difference: the politics is different. I am no longer ashamed to answer the question, "Your Religion?" with hesitation, "Um, well, ah, Catholic." To the next, "Practicing Catholic?" I usually stumbled, "Well, um, Huh?" Now, it's, "We go to The Light of Christ Church, an Ecumenical Catholic Community." Interrogators are nonplussed.

The lawyer in me back in 2002 saw that the issue was not sex or abuse of children, not dogma or discipline, not catechism or apologetics, not even theology, but POWER. It was so at the beginning. It has always been so. It was so in 2002. It is so now. The issue is POWER, the absolute kind, which has nothing to do with religion, with spirituality, with Jesus. It is simply and horribly a predominant characteristic of being human – POLITICS. Those in power, of course, whether in State or Church, insist they are there only to serve, because they are the self-appointed elite, the hierarchy of Plato's Philosopher King and His Guardians, the hierarchy of Papal Primacy and Its Curia. It is never just one person. It is always the privileged few. The Oligarchy.

My feelings about John Paul II, from the very day he was elected in 1978, was that he was "on stage" so much of the time that the "real JP" could never be seen. He was a caricature in his own mind, and the papacy was his sandbox. He was not evil as bawdy popes might have been, with children and grandchildren robed as Cardinals. As power-lusting ones were in dividing up the world between Portugal and Spain by drawing a line on a map. As warlike ones who pumped up Crusades or stooped to slaughter those, like me, who asked questions and protested their abuse of power. But, John Paul II had the POWER and he abused it. And the Church is now falling apart from its own self-abuse, resumed by him, continued by Pope Benedict XVI.

Father Tom Doyle, a priest, canon lawyer, man I respect and admire and follow ever since January, 2002, has written a good, solid review of a book criticizing Karol Józef Wojtyla as a man and as a hierarch and as a pope. His review is worth reading with as open a mind as can be mustered up for the encounter. The review is at http://reform-network.net/?p=1657.

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The following is the review and comments, from: Voice from the Desert, May 11, 2008, http://reform-network.net/?p=1657

Top of Form

Tom Doyle Reviews Book on John Paul II and His Papacy

I received the following book review from Tom Doyle today, 5.10.2008, via email.

Tom asked to me to include the following note with the review:

I was asked to review "The Power and the Glory" by David Yallop for a prominent independent Catholic publication. After completing a requested revision and shortening of the review, I heard nothing for weeks. Upon inquiry I was advised that it had been rejected because it was thought to be "biased." The review may well be biased but then most book reviews are. On the other hand this is a review of a book that is critical of the papacy of Pope John Paul II. The review is not critical of the criticism but is a positive assessment of a book that should be an integral part of any history of the Church under the late pope. TPD

* * *

THE POWER AND THE GLORY" INSIDE THE DARK HEART OF JOHN PAUL II's VATICAN

By David Yallop

New York, Carroll and Graf, Publishers, 2007

530 pages

Reviewed by Thomas Doyle, O.P., J.C.D.

"Few papacies have inspired so many myths as the reign of Pope John Paul II." The Power and the Glory, p. 152.

After reading the first chapter of this momentous, and at times shocking book, one is led to the conclusion that not only few papacies, but few popes have been surrounded by as much myth and misconception as Karol Wojtyla, priest, bishop, cardinal, pope, and in the minds and emotions of many, saint. Wojtyla's life and 26 year papacy had already prompted devoted followers to begin calling him John Paul the Great within the first year after his death.

Even John Paul's most ardent supporters, including those clamoring for his fast-track canonization, would have to agree that his life and reign as pope were not without significant controversy. In spite of the massive superhuman aura surrounding him, critical studies of his papacy and his theology have come forth from reputed scholars. Nothing however, comes close to the detailed and critical examination that David Yallop concluded and which resulted in this book. The author's widely acknowledged investigative skills are at their best in his fearless quest to discover the real Karl Wojtyla and the unvarnished truth about the Vatican that he shaped and dominated as Pope John Paul II. Yallop devoted eight years to research, interviewing knowledgeable sources and probing deeply into the reality of the man and the papacy that dominated the Catholic Church for a quarter century.

This book will shock and enrage the ardent supporters of the late pope yet one must honestly ask if the adulation and emotional attachment is actually for the carefully crafted larger than life image as opposed to the man himself. David Yallop's detailed study of just about every aspect of John Paul II's personal and public life leave no other conclusion than that the adoring faithful were really enamored of an image and not reality.

Even those who have been highly critical of the late Pope's reign, characterized by some as "autocratic," and of his apparent efforts to redefine the memory and spirit of Vatican Council II will be uncomfortably surprised at Yallop's well researched and solidly supported de-mythologization of Karol Wojtyla's early years in Poland, first under Nazi and later under Communist occupation. He first flattens the notion, no doubt created by Vatican spin meisters, that young Karol was an active participant in Polish partisan activities to protect Jews from the Nazis. No such thing according to Yallop's research. Instead, the future pope "actively attempted to persuade others to abandon violent resistance and trust in the power of prayer." (P. 239). Even more shocking are the results of the author's interviews with several Jewish authorities who said straight out that there are no records of Wojtyla doing anything to protect or save Jews during World War II.

Although it is widely believed that Pope John Paul II was the single most important force in the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is no lack of serious foreign policy experts, historians and political scholars who would dispute such a claim. Yallop's chapter 3, A Very Polish Revolution puts the pope's role in a much dimmer light, portraying him as highly cautious and retreating to reliance on prayer rather than decisive action. If one takes this rendition of the late pope's non-role in the demolition of Communism and mixes it with his tacit approval of military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile and El Salvador as well as his negative reaction to liberation theology, one can only wonder at the veracity of the claims that this man was a world class human rights advocate.

Other reviewers of this book claim that the most "explosive" chapters present the author's exhaustive research into the complex Vatican financial scandals and the papal and Vatican response to the clergy sexual abuse revelations that began in the U.S. and quickly became an international reality. Although the two prominent financial sagas, the so-called Banco Ambrosiano debacle that began in the 70's and featured Roberto Calvi and Archbishop Paul Marcinkas as leading players, and the Martin Frankel insurance fraud of the 90's, are complex and difficult for the average person to follow, Yallop lays both out in clear and logical terms. The theme throughout, which puts the pope in the middle of it all, is that money has a powerful way of blurring the line between integrity and greed for the denizens of the Vatican.

While I admit to being perplexed by some of the complex details of the Vatican's financial wheeling and dealing, the clergy sexual abuse phenomenon is something I am only too well aware of in painful detail. People have reacted to the clergy abuse scandal, now in its third decade, with wonder, anger, rage, shock and disbelief. A constant question has been why has the Pope done nothing to stop it? The question is certainly valid given the harsh reality that Pope John Paul II knew in detail about what was happening in the United States from the outset of the first revelations in 1984 and 1985. For eight years after the first explosion in 1984, the Pope said nothing. Then in 1993 he issued the first of 12 public statements, all of which said about the same thing. His theme was that clergy abuse was evil, the priests who did it were sinners, the poor bishops who had to put up with it were suffering and the victims needed prayer. The papal master spin doctor, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, stated in 1994 that this was primarily an American problem and then parroted the papal line that western secularism, materialism and sensationalism had a lot to do with exaggerating the problem. Within a year the Irish government fell because its leader had been implicated in the obstruction of justice in the notorious Brendan Smyth affair. But much more explosive was the exposure of Hans Hermann Groer, the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, as a sexual abuser turned prince of the church, in mid 1995. This man had been appointed from nowhere by John Paul II in 1986, according to some, largely because of his promotion of Marian devotion. The pope not only did nothing when the scandal first broke, but, according to Yallop's research, was outraged at the Austrian bishops for failing to keep the lid on the terrible publicity. In spite of it all the proof was conclusive and Groer was not only forced to resign but ordered not to perform any public functions as a cardinal or bishop.

Yallop's chapter Beyond Belief, is a highly detailed and fact-intense short history of the clerical sex abuse problem and how it was handled during the reign of John Paul II. The stories of clergy abuse and hierarchical cover-up abound so it is not necessary to repeat them here. Suffice it to say that Yallop's rendition of the multi-faceted and totally tragic sex abuse saga is not only factually correct but his reasons as to why the pope remained impotent are on target. He best sums it up with a short sentence on the papal silence: "He brought with him… to the Vatican
practices that he had embraced throughout his life as a priest. They included an intense pathological hatred of any revelation that indicated the Catholic Church was not a perfect institution… All dissent must be kept behind closed doors, whether of church politics, scandalous behavior or criminal activity." (P. 314). The clergy sex abuse scandal contains ample doses of all three and the late pope appears to have sacrificed open advocacy for living children in favor of tacit protection of a non-living structure. He never publicly apologized to the countless victims and he consistently refused to ever meet with them. Perhaps the most egregious of his responses to the scandal was the much-publicized short-circuiting of the canonical process investigating accusations made against the celebrated founder and superior general of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel-Degollado. That disastrous intervention plus the rehabilitation of Bernard Law by making him Archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica convinced abuse victims that the pope cared little for them and much for the Church's hierarchical aristocracy. Yallop's description of the facts confirms this conviction.

The Power and the Glory is a book that had to be written, not to support the mythological anti-papal or anti-Catholic forces, but because the Church and contemporary culture sorely need a reality check on the hagiographic forces that have gone out of control and threaten to seriously distort a vitally important chapter of modern-day history. This book had to be written for the good of the Church as well. John Paul II was well on the way to becoming a cult figure….far removed not only from historical reality but from the role of pope as pastoral father and not supreme emperor. His memory and the good he did is much better served if remembered as it actually was and not through the lens of myth. "His obituaries abound with myths, fantasies and dis-information" says Yallop. "The cult of personality which John Paul so reveled in focuses precisely on the man but at great cost to the faith."

This book is about much more than Pope John Paul II. It is about the grave scandals that have been so much a part of the contemporary Church. It is about the thinly veiled political aspect of the Church that has confused earthly power with the propagation of the Word. It is about the actions, inactions and questionable responses of the late pope and the Vatican bureaucracy he created to these scandals and to the socio-cultural forces at work in the modern world. Finally, it is about a model of "Church" that has grown increasingly at odds with the vision of Vatican II or perhaps worse, it is about a model of "Church" that has always been there, yet reduced in recent times to lurking in the shadows, waiting to be once more empowered.

We have seen in the era of John Paul II a dramatic rise in the power, influence and presence of the papacy, a rise described by its followers as a one approaching the peak of perfection of what papacy and Church ought to be. Yet with this rise, propelled by John Paul, there came the need to deny, cover or convert anything that threatened his image of the Church as perfect society. David Yallop may not have helped John Paul II's cause for canonization, whether or not such a step is even relevant in today's world. But he surely has helped the People of God by reminding us that the center and focus can never be on any leader no matter how fascinating, dramatic or colorful. It must always be grounded in the Church as People of God and not as Kingdom of the Few.

+++++

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3 Responses to "Tom Doyle Reviews Book on John Paul II and His Papacy"

William Cleary Says:
May 11, 2008 at 1:09 am

The Doyle review of David Yallop's new book is a lightsome breakthrough for serious religious people. Finally there is an informed book on John Paul II, and it will help us to place him properly in the history of religion: a man who seriously crippled the Church and misguided millions into superstition, sexism, and a cult of his shallow egocentric personality.
Carolyn Disco Says:
May 11, 2008 at 2:00 am

It is more than disappointing that an independent Catholic publication declined to run this review (and we all suspect which one). Tom Doyle as always has written perceptively, and certainly with the expertise to do so.
I recall a PBS documentary on JPII that also noted the pope did nothing to help the Jews. If memory serves, the film reported the pope indicating that himself.
And the notion of the church as a perfect society was reflected in JPII's various apologies, conditional in nature: any deficiencies were the fault of certain of the church's sons and daughters, never the church per se.
David Gibson noted in his book, "The Coming Catholic Church," that such "distancing language can appear so couched and diplomatic that it fuels the very resentments it was designed to assuage." p 117
There was a fascinating Australian radio broadcast right after JPII died of an interview with Peter Hebblethwaite, noted Vatican expert, before Hebblethwaite himself died in 1994. The interview on The Religion Report was done with the stipulation it not be aired until after JPII's died.
William Johnson, another historian, was also questioned on the same program. His analysis of the pope's style of governance is incredible reading.
I highly recommend the full interviews as a corollary to Tom's review, and still available at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/stories/s1333976.htm .
Excerpt:
Stephen Crittenden: You say that there's actually a disconnect between the Pope's collective achievement and what you call a blind spot that this Pope had at a personal level, and you talk about acts of personal cruelty.
William Johnston: Well I call it a blind spot; I think that's a kind way, it may have been deliberate. The example I was told from an eye witness when the American bishops had one of their joint visits to the Pope in the early '90s, he greeted each of them individually as they stood in a circle.
Stephen Crittenden: By name?
William Johnston: By name, he knew their names, their diocese and something about them. He went around the circle and charmed all of them. There was one man he wished to punish and each of the three times he came to that man, he was overheard to lean into him and say, 'And what's your name? What's your diocese?' He did that three times. Now that kind of humiliation among one's peers smacks of Soviet governmental technique, and I think it was obviously deliberate, it's cruel, it's even vindictive and it's now coming to light.
Another one that I find troubling is there are 4,000 bishops, 3,000 have been appointed by the recent pontiff, and when one thinks that many of those 3,000 appointees involved passing over highly able priests who in the normal run of things would have become bishop. So I like to think that probably 2,500 more than capable potential bishops, who did not get the nod.
Stephen Crittenden: In other words there's been a kind of cruelty to talented people who've been passed over.
William Johnston: Exactly. They've been excluded, they're not acknowledged, we don't know who they are, we can just imagine they're there. Their careers have been blighted, if you will, and I regard that as a mistreatment as well as a dreadful personnel policy, it's not the way to run an organisation.
Stephen Crittenden: And not blighted because of disloyalty, a lot of people have kind of put their heads down and remained silent and put up with it.
William Johnston: But you see, that again is the Eastern European technique, where, as Peter Hebblethwaite put it, you humiliate a few stars as a warning to the others, and the others then withdraw their dissent and go private. It's a technique of achieving conformity by punishing only a few exemplary figures. It works extremely well, and I would suggest the Pope saw how well it worked in Poland, and he just borrowed the technique and used it in his organisation, because it's an effective technique.
———
Peter Hebblethwaite: … But that you see, became one of the great theories that was used to justify the pontificate, which was that Paul VI in his charming simplicity and goodness was altogether too weak, and irresolute, and he didn't knock down his theologians. 'Now we're going to do the job properly and you'll see how it should be done', with the consequences that we know.
Very early on in the pontificate, somebody said something that was absolutely prophetic, that four theologians would be chosen for the axe, as it were, each in a different field and each representing a different interest. One on Christology, Doctrine of Christ, it was Edward Schillebeeckx , the Flemish Dominican; in Ecclesiology, Doctrine of the Church, it was Hans Küng, in Germany. Liberation theology was Leonardo Boff, a Franciscan from Brazil and then the fourth was Charles Curran as a moral theologian in the United States, who lost his licence to teach. So these were kind of symbolic errors as it were, or even that was the most interesting thing, that errors were not found in these people, or not necessarily found, they were condemned for their opinions, and that was something new in the church, you shouldn't condemn people for their opinions. You can condemn them for their errors if you demonstrate they have perpetrated errors.
Stephen Crittenden: The late Peter Hebblethwaite.
Edward Hartmann Says:
May 11, 2008 at 11:27 am

This church is still in crisis. The last thing we need is another Pope cannonized. So may I suggest the following to the Princes as they sit around after dinner with a glass of scotch at the Vatican. How about searching for a married couple to cannonize, perhaps a couple that actually slept in the same bed and (God forbid) enjoyed God's gift of sexual intimacy. Imagine what an impact this would have on our church. But I forgot that the elephant is still in the room.

A Papal Visit to America

2008-04-26T21:49:00.001-07:00

This current backwash on Pope Benedict XVI's few days in America keeps urging me to throw out my own prejudices against the man, as I did against his predecessor, whose sandbox was the papacy. But I demurred on the realization that my opinion is a simple dislike of both of them, as well as of so many in the long line of 280 or so since St. Peter died. McBrien's History of the Popes is well thumbed, a bit tattered, as is O'Malley's The First Jesuits. When those two are side by side with MacCulloch's The Reformation, I see. And what I see is history. For us alive today, we are making more history for the future, not only in the popes given us by Conclaves, but also presidents by what is sometimes referred to as the vote of the people, except that is not necessarily so. I often wonder why so many reformers insist on we the people electing bishops and popes, when we take a gander at what we have elected in our own beloved America for presidents: Bush, Nixon, Coolidge. Like popes, only a few of our presidents stand out enough to make us proud and grateful that we have the vote.

Cynics say that we get what we deserve. High-minded, impartial, intelligent ones – like us? – have always preceded us and made popes and presidents for good or for bad. Those skilled in politics have usually gotten their own elevated to kingships of sorts and dynasties have ruled, for good or for worse. Where in between those two we are right now is answered by those who like Pope Benedict XVI, and liking him, approve of how he comports himself, as well as by those who do not like him. Same for Nixon and more likely than not for Bush with a W. Used to be the same for Reagan, but apparently he wore well after he died and we forget his bad days. Poor Jimmy Carter has regressed from commanding submarines to peanut farming and is now being called a "bigot." Were Lincoln alive, he'd probably be shot again, as was Kennedy, both brothers, and their friend Martin Luther King. So, we should be careful in talking about those we like and those we dislike.

Then again, I wonder whether it is Ratzinger a/k/a Benedict we like or dislike, or is it the papacy itself, regardless of the man who is dressed in white?

For those who like history, scan McBrien's History of the Popes; there weren't too many outstanding ones and precious few good ones, according to him. If loyalty is your thing, along with a partiality for Jesuit scholarship, read John O'Malley, The First Jesuits, Chapter 8, "The Jesuits and the Church at Large," beginning at page 284, The first two sections of that chapter are "Bishops and Theologians," and "The Papacy and the Popes." St. Ignatius and his young companions had a very tough time with some hierarchs. Paul III gave the Jesuits their charter in 1540. Julius III gave them the German College in Rome, later the "Greg."The good Pope Marcellus" lasted just 21 days, a brief but welcomed interlude in the early struggles just to stay alive. And then came the bugaboo of them all, Gian Pietro Carafa, who hated St. Ignatius and all he stood for, and compounded that hatred as Paul IV. He was so well known for nepotism and harshness that he was despised in Rome.

So, the Jesuits rode it out, kept their heads down, rallied friendly hierarchs around themselves, and waited for Pius IV and Pius V, who pushed through the Council of Trent. The 16^th century ended with four popes taking the papal throne in an astoundingly short period of 16 months, and the Jesuits were still alive and well when the 17^th century began.

The 16^th was a tough century in which to found a new exempt order of men, which now faces another uncertain future, it being hard to determine whether Ratzinger/Benedict XVI will be ruthless, as usual, or smiling all the while.

There's an awful lot of politics in the Roman Catholic Church and an awful lot of it is dirty, down and dirty, somehow unbecoming an institution claiming to be a Church, "one, holy, Catholic and apostolic."

Too often I see the Church in the New Testament, not among Jesus and his apostle and disciples, but entrenched in the Pharisees and Sanhedrin, the High Priests of the 1^st century, so like unto so many of our own hierarchs of this third millennium.

Read the Sermon on the Mount and take a look at Rome. Power corrupts, as the saying goes . . .

The People and The Pope, More of the Same

2008-04-17T10:38:00.001-07:00

Diarmaid MacCullock, professor of the history of the Church at Oxford, acknowledged as a scholar world-wide, wrote The Reformation: A History, in 2003. Lured by the enthusiasm of the reviewers, I bought it then and am now up to page174 of 792. I'm beginning to imagine I'll say what Father "Stately" Gately, SJ, who had come to Shadowbrook to die, said to the Rector, Father Bill Finneran, SJ, who had given him a two volume history of Ireland to read, "Gee, Bill, thanks, but I don't think I'll have time to finish it."

In The Reformation, early on, MacCullock says that Luther was inspired, not by the antics in Rome, but by St. Augustine's theories of orginal sin, his forlorn and bleak nature of man, his blessing on "just wars" and his rigid theology of church, even though all of that was writ a thousand years before Luther nailed his own 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517. The more I read after MacCullock proposed the relationship to St. Augustine, the more I came to imagine that the same Augustinian stuff is going on strong today. As a novice in ecclesiology and church history, I am quick to jump to opinions in tune with the tumbling emotions within me when I think Rome, Curia, Popes, Cardinals and read Thomas Reese's recent six proposals for the reform of the Vatican. The feeling is that the history of the Church and of Christianity is the history of the mother of all brainwashing, par excellence, by those who could read pagan philosophers and use their thoughts and words to teach the Gospel story told so simply by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and the others.

My own Catholicism right now, the mental stuff of it, feels like a faithless, hopeless, loveless confusion of intellectualities, stuffeed with the big names: Clement, Origen, Chrysostom, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, without too many really big ones after that Thirteenth Century, at least until an Augustinian monk Martin Luther lit the match on the tinder box of western Christianity. That Catholicism gets a life with Thomas Reese, SJ, and Roger Haight, SJ, and Jacques Dupuis, SJ, and Karl Rahner, SJ, along with so many others of our own times, that I begin to think that all we are doing in our 3^rd millennium is repeating what has been going on since St. John finished the Fourth Gospel.

More of the same, over and over, with the instigation of the Reformation of the 16^th century itself being attributed to the ideas and thoughts of Augustine of Hippo of the 5^th century. We are still debating today what they were debating from the beginning, each one insisting that his or her ideas are those of Jesus Messiah. He was crucified for his ideas and words. A lot of those who claimed to explain him were crucified, too, or burned at the stake, by the high priests of their times. And so it goes on and on and on. If today, I were to say I can explain Jesus Messiah, I had first better make sure I please Rome's High Priests. Wonder how long Garry Wills will last without an excommunication of sorts, after his trilogy: What Jesus Meant; What Paul Meant; What the Gospels Meant. Tom Reese, too, kicked off the Jesuit magazine America by an angry Cardinal Ratzinger as soon as he became Pope Benedict X VI.

As for Thomas Reese's six proposals for reform, my impetuous and unlearned suggestion would be to abolish the College of Cardinals first, then elect Bishops locally, and set up some kind of governance wherein there are checks and balances on power, its use and abuse. To do that, we need Thomas Reeses, people who know what they are doing and are not just reacting emotionally to the brainwashing of two millennia, some of which cleared the mind, a lot of which drowned it. Like Father Reese, I am pretty sure it will never happen. Not even Luther or Calvin or Zwingli or Henry VIII succeeded. Proof? Cable TV these days has been taken over by the Pope, who was once called a Rotweiler, an Enforcer, an implacable, etc., etc., etc. He is a powerful man, regardless of his track record in the abuse of power, or maybe precisely because of it. My biased personal opinion is that a good lot of us are not paying him much attention, nor giving him heed.

AN OLD ENGLISH COMP 101 TEACHER GRADES CARDINAL JOSEPH RATZINGER’S LETTER TO THE BISHOPS ON THE COLLABORATION OF MEN AND WOMEN IN THE CHURCH AND IN THE WORLD

2008-04-15T13:12:00.001-07:00

Written back on August 2, 2004

I. INTRODUCTION

There is in the current domain now a Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World. First dated May 31, 2004, it was released through Vatican Information Services two months later on July 31, 2004, over the signatures of two principals of the most important Dicastery of the Roman Curia, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF): Joseph Card. Ratzinger, Prefect, and Archbishop Angelo Amato, SDB, Secretary. Pope John Paul II approved the document and ordered its publication.

The term Collaboration comes from the New Catholic Catechism, 378 which reads in full:
"The sign of man's familiarity with God is that God places him in the garden (cf.Gen 2:8). There he lives 'to till it and keep it' Work is not yet a burden, (Gen 2:15; cf. 3:17-19) but rather the collaboration of man and woman with God in perfecting the visible creation."

The Index to the Catechism shows 9 more uses of collaboration, all of which are irrelevant as they deal with man's collaboration with God and not with women. One of those sections, however, offered the grace to submit this criticism of the Letter. Number 2238 - The Duties of Citizens states:

Their loyal collaboration includes the right, and at times the duty, to voice their just criticisms of that which seems harmful to the dignity of persons and to the good of the community."

I respectfully submit, as a lay person, that the letter is harmful to the dignity of persons and to the good of the community. It is, further, an embarrassment for the Roman Catholic Church and must be withdrawn, with appropriate apologies immediately.

II. USE OF THE TERM COLLABORATION

The term, although the very title of the document, is used but three times, never defined, never applied, never explained. There is no development of the history of other attempts at collaboration, whether men and women do collaborate or having attempted to do, have discarded it, Without a definition, we are left without any understanding of what the cardinal and the CDF is talking about. Is Rome proposing courtship, marriage, polygamy, monogamy, patriarchy, matriarchy, free sex, prostitution, homosexuality in order to understand heterosexuality, heterosexuality in order to understand homosexuality, biological determinism, or solitary enjoyment of one's own body via self-induced orgasmic events and the teaching of the same to others of the opposite sex? What is the CDF writing about?

Here the three references, each one qualified by "the differences between men and women."

Second paragraph: "After a brief presentation and critical evaluation of some current conceptions of human nature, this document will offer reflections – inspired by the doctrinal elements of the biblical vision of the human person that are indispensable for safeguarding his or her identity – on some of the essentials of a correct understanding of active collaboration, in recognition of the difference between men and women in the Church and in the world.

Par. 4: "4.In the face of these currents of thought, the Church, enlightened by faith in Jesus Christ, speaks instead of active collaboration between the sexes precisely in the recognition of the difference between man and woman,"

Near Par. 13: "Placed within Christ's Paschal mystery, they no longer see their difference as a source of discord to be overcome by denial or eradication, but rather as the possibility for collaboration, to be cultivated with mutual respect for their difference."

Fine, for Cardinal Ratzinger, but what is this difference which has him so apoplectic that he spends years writing and issuing a letter to all the bishops in the world? What does he mean by collaboration? In what does he want men and women to collaborate? Is such collaboration really from "recent times"; "certain currents of thought which are often at variance with the authentic advancement of women"; "some current conceptions of human nature?"

These are, as the reader will easily recognize, the very three phrases with which he belabored us in the opening of that long letter. What are they? Who are they? Where are they? When are they? Why are they? Nameless, unknown, yet recent and current, the cardinal says? Truly? Does that make them so? Even if he is the Prefect of the mightiest Congregation in the Curia, the CDF? When he speaks, do not nations tremble, all bishops bow, the pope himself applauds?

Pardon his reverence, but he is bombasting nothing, absolutely nothing, just pompous empty words. The visible head on earth of a Vox et praeterea nihil – A voice and besides that, nothing."

Let me remind him also, as the Cardinal Prefect that he is, that collaboration is undoubtedly the poorest possible word he could have used for the relationship between men and women. We men and women among the people of God do happen to like and love each other, the Cardinal's warped view of us notwithstanding. The last time the term collaboration was prominent was at the end of WW II when the Free French rounded up the collaborateurs who had been so helpful to the Nazis during the occupation of France.

III THE QUESTION

Unless I misread the letter entirely, it has something to do with feminism, at least in the tendencies – the cardinal's word – of accentuating differences and reaching for power, or of minimizing them and seeking equality between homo- and hetero- as prefixes for sexuality, or as he put it polymorphous sexuality. By which he is taken to mean the exclusion of bestiality, sadism, masochism, and sexual abuse of minors by clergy? If polymorphous, why get so upset? These are merely tendencies. They may not even be real.

The American Heritage Dictionary says that polymorphous means the occurrence of different forms, stages, or types in individual organisms or in organisms of the same species, independent of sexual variations. If we were to stick with definitions we understand, the cardinal's terms are as meaningless as his title on collaboration, leading to the same conclusion: he just does not know what he is talking about, does he?

Proof of this lacuna in his thinking is the heading of this second section of his letter -- I. The Question. I've read that section 25 times now and haven't yet found The Question. Does he have one? Where is it? Here is what I came up with from topic sentences in each paragraph.

New approaches to women's issues. First tendency is subordination.

Second tendency is to deny differences.

Human attempt to be freed from one's biological conditioning.

Patriarchal conception of God nourished by an essentially male-dominated culture.

In the face of these currents of thought, the Church speaks instead of active collaboration between the sexes precisely in the recognition of the difference between man and woman.

To understand better the basis, meaning and consequences of this response turn briefly to Sacred Scriptures.

As the six paragraphs in the section, where is the question? What are the new approaches to women's issues? Any examples, names, places, leaders, authors? What did he mean by attempts to be freed of biological conditioning? Castration? By currents of thought is he actually saying feminism? If so, why not say it – F-E-M-I-N-I-S-M?

There is a long and readily accessible article in the Harper Collins Encyclopedia of Catechism, which talks clearly about Mary Wollstonecraft's book on A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792, and notes The First Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Not quite current, or recent, but classic nonetheless. Did the cardinal know from his office at the CDF inside the Vatican that Feminism is perhaps the most important movement in the world today, bar none, and ranges over every human activity, including churches? Just read this quote from Harper Collins at p. 523:

Feminism may be liberal, radical, romantic, or socialist. Liberal feminism emphasizes legal and political equality for women; radical feminism analyzes patriarchal structures for the purpose of liberating women from them. Romantic feminism aspires to bring so-called feminine values to bear on the public order, while socialist feminism focuses on the sexual division of labor, production, and reproduction and the connection between class, race and gender in oppressive systems.

If this is what the cardinal is attacking, why not be clear about it. Which type of feminism? All of them? Just the Radical ones? If not, is he really attacking women in general? For the last time, with some exasperation, I ask, WHAT IS THE QUESTION?

IV. THE BIBLICAL VERSION OF THE HUMAN PERSON

With all due respect to myself, there is no intention of trying to discuss Scripture with the cardinal. He is the Cardinal Prefect of the CDF. I'm an old layman, but I studied Classical and Koine Greek from the age of 10 to 25, and am now refurbishing it to read the NT in its original language. What I read doesn't talk to me the way it does to the CDF. My dictionaries apparently do not agree with theirs. The cardinal and I could spar a little for a while, but he would succeed in the last round with a knockout blow, were I to last that long.

In his section on Basic Elements of the Biblical Vision of the Human Person there were citations to the OT 20 times, and to the NT just 5. They were what any lay person would expect just from being in Church on Sundays, and a lot of them were general references to the ecclesiological theory of the Church being the bride of Christ. Most of the man/woman cites were the few from the Creation story in Genesis: 8 of them. That's all. I imagined that some young student was given the job to come up with cites, as young lawyers are when the senior partner wants a law memo salted and peppered with legal references. Whoever did it, ran terms like woman, bride, virgin, man, and started at two minutes before closing time, printing out the egregiously few grains he came up with. Then, the cardinal signed it. Just for fun and by contrast, I ran Biblical Nature of Man and Woman in Google and got 314,000 hits in 0.41 seconds. Women in the Bible, got 4,200,000 hits in 0.17 seconds. For Women in the Church the number of hits was astonishing at 7,000,000 in just 0.68 seconds.

So, let me just say that the research assistants who were to find relevant scriptural references for the salt and pepper in the letter, left out a lot of important ones. If they had gone to Google, they would have come up with more than just the standard old stuff out of Genesis, with a couple of smatterings from the rest of the OT and the NT under whatever term they used to find citations. Looks like they mixed up sex with ecclesiology, too, paying more attention to the Church being the bride of Christ, rather than to the Collaboration of Men and Women in the World and in the Church – which is after all the title of the letter and the topic they are supposed to be developing in this teaching of the Magisterium to all the Bishops in the world. Right? Could the cardinal have fallen asleep and forgot what he was doing when he awoke, even over the years this document was in the drafting stages?

I just can't resist this assessment, as a former teacher of freshmen English Composition at Sophia University, Tokyo. This letter is the worst piece of amateurish writing I have seen in a long time. It deserves an F and its author would most likely have flunked the course.

It is poorly conceived, illogically laid out, purports to be feinting at a "straw woman", who is so "strawy" that she can't even be seen, and in the final analysis is all stressed out on sin and sex. The most laughable idiocy in the whole thing is that the heavenly reward is going to be celibacy for all, leading me to imagine the look on the cardinal's face when St. Peter welcomes him and introduces him to the woman who is to be his wife for eternity: Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Ratzinger. an eternal collaboration.

V. THE IMPORTANCE OF FEMININE VALUES IN THE LIFE OF SOCIETY

This is a very important part of the Letter, insofar as it manifests what the CDF and Cardinal Ratzinger see when they behold women in our society in this third millennium, not only here in America, but in Europe and throughout the world, in all those places where the Catholic Church has a presence. As in other sections of the letter, the quickest and simplest way to approach such profound insights is to line up the topic sentences of the eight paragraphs constituting the section.

Women in society have a "capacity for the other".

Women's physical capacity is to give life in motherhood.

Virginity refutes any attempt to enclose women in a mere biological destiny.

The role of women in all aspects of family and social life involving human relationships and caring for others is irreplaceable.

The interrelationship between the two activities of family and work has characteristics different from those in the case of men.

Femininity is more than a simple attribute of the female sex. It designates the fundamental human capacity to live for the other and because of the other. And, we concede, so do men.

The role of women within society is understood and desired as a humanization accomplished through those values. And also for men.

The defense and promotion of equal dignity and common personal values must be harmonized with attentive recognition of the difference and reciprocity between the sexes where this is relevant to the realization of one's humanity, whether male or female.

What I get in this section is living for the other because of the other, at first for women only, then by an aside, for men also, to show "attentive recognition of the difference and reciprocity of the sexes."

What I do not see is conflict, enmity, opposition, struggle, nor do I see collaboration to overcome them. I also do not see why it took years to draft this part. It looks real nice and is, I assume, the way that most happy and contented people are living their lives these days, together. But, what is the point? Where are we going in the letter? Does its author know? Why does it need a letter to all the bishops?

VI. THE IMPORTANCE OF FEMININE VALUES IN THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH

After seeing the heading, I wasn't looking for anything vapid or cloying, but that is what I saw and got. There were six paragraphs in this section, kind of sweet and nice, but not anything novel, new, or even important for the collaboration of men and women in society, that is to say in their homes, where they shop, the places of work, vacations that are too short. The topic sentences of the paragraphs sum up the section, but leave one wondering why it took years to write it. Topic sentences in a row, with running comments in brackets below:

Woman as a "sign" is more than ever central and fruitful.
1. [And so she always has been, my cardinal.}

The existence of Mary is an invitation to the Church to root her very being.
1. [But, of course: beginning with her Fiat and lasting to her standing at the foot of the Cross.]

It is from Mary that the Church always learns the intimacy of Christ.
1. [Not only the Mother of God, but also Mary of Magdala and Christ's other women friends]

To look at Mary and imitate her does not mean, however, that the Church should adopt a passivity inspired by an outdated conception of femininity.
1. [The cardinal is correct in leaving Total Woman" as a caricature of the past, one created by men.]

The reference to Mary, with her dispositions of listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting, places the Church in continuity with the spiritual history of Israel. In Jesus and through him, these attributes become the vocation of every baptized Christian.
1. [These 6 dispositions -- 1.listening, 2. welcoming, 3. humility, 4. faithfulness, 5. praise and 6. waiting – all seem, however, to clothe the woman in the cardinal's imagination, and while nice qualities, do not comprise a full description of the women of our times. Taken alone, all 6 together, are a Ratzinger reverie. A lot of guys I know have all six qualities, too.]

The reservation of priestly ordination solely to men does not hamper in any way women's access to the heart of Christian life.
1. [Of course it hampers women. It is rank discrimination born out of hatred for woman. Celibate cardinals and the popes slithering from their circle, in abject, craven fear of women, ignore and deny the Word of God that we are all made in the image and likeness of God.]

Typical churchese from those who think they are church. So-so, but cloying. Women are good. They should be like Mary, the Mother of God, to be seen and not heard. Refusing them the priesthood is fine, the men who run the Church say, for women can love the bridegroom of the Church, making some of us men feel a little out of place in such an analogy.

Before I get to the Conclusion, has anyone noticed that there is almost nothing so far devoted to men? No discussion of their role in society or in the church. Nothing about their basic qualities. Precious little as to whether they even have a biblical nature or not. Sort of quirky male pride in noting that Jesus came as a male, forgetting that he is, so far, the only male every conceived in the union of a virgin girl with the Holy Spirit. None of us males can make, dare make, such a claim, meaning that Jesus is not so much male as he is unique among all human beings.

And if it is taken one step further, since we are all created in the image and likeness of God, there really is no distinction between us, men and women, and since Jesus is God, we, men and women, are created in his image. Why, then cannot women, created in the image of God and like unto Jesus, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, be priests as well as men?

This is, after all, a response to a letter indicating that there is something amiss or awry in our world and church concerning the Collaboration of Men and Women. Almost Cardinal Ratzinger's entire letter is about women, with precious little comment about men. Why?

VII. CONCLUSION

Forgive me, my friends, for being so consistent, but once again, I must resort to the topic sentence routine. It is the only way in which we can see the inanity of this letter which purports to be an urgent and world-shaking statement of Catholic teaching due to recent events. It was years in the drafting and writing. It comes from the CDF, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led by the most powerful cardinal of all cardinals, Joseph Ratzinger, and commanded to be published by our elderly pope, John Paul II. The conclusion is not a conclusion to the letter; it does not conclude. It makes no reference to any part of the letter at all. It is a few paragraphs of spiritual sounding phrases, tossed together like a salad, light and frothy and holy, as if it were being offered to third graders at a mid-afternoon recess.

Like the rest of this confounding letter, I have read the Conclusion 25 times now. Here is what I think the Cardinal is saying to all the Bishops in the whole wide world as the new way for the collaboration of men and women in the world and in the church.

Jesus makes all things new and is triumphant over sin.

Thus, man's relationship with woman is transformed in converting to God who loved us so he gave us his Son.

We must humbly pray to the Blessed Virgin who showed us how to love.

The Church knows the power of sin can almost lead to despair but the power of forgiveness leads to peace, because "God is love."

The Pope has read this document and approves of it.

And that, my friends, is it. If you can garner anything from it, you are better than I. I struggled with this letter for three full days, trying to find out

What is he saying?
Why did he say it?
What does it mean.

I came up with answers for each of those three questions:

Nothing.
I don't know.
Nothing.

Besides, if you look at the topic sentences in 1-5 again, I think you'll agree that the bishops of the world already knew that.

What did Cardinal Ratzinger write that I failed to mention? Check out the 20 footnotes: 19 references are to letters written by John Paul II. Of the rest, 2 are from the CDF, and 1 each from 3 Saints. Not one Academic paper is cited. No scholarly articles are mentioned. Obviously, no research at all was conducted.

What did Cardinal Ratzinger leave out? Everything that a competent scholar and teacher would have included on such an important document from such an important source. There is absolutely no mention of one, single woman theologian or scholar, not one. He made no contact with scientists, theologians, doctors, academic deans, professors emeriti, learned scholars, government experts, authors, poets, ordinary men and ordinary women. He examined no sources in Philosophy, Theology, Sociology, Psychiatry, Family Studies, Women's' Studies, Men's Studies, Anthropology, Fertility, the History of Civilization. There is no treatment of Inalienable Rights of the Dignity of the Human Person, be she Female or he Male; Common Courtesy; Decency; Respect; Love.

The recommendation is to withdraw it from publication as soon as possible with an abject apology that it was probably lost with the composition notebook of a high school sophomore and got found in a bundle at the Vatican Press printing house. Then, the CDF should retain a woman theologian or woman scholar from another discipline to help them open their eyes and see what is directly in front of them: the people of God. Some of us are men. The rest are women. We are equals. We love each other and share with each other. A lot. Each of us is very comfortable with Jesus as Our Lord, as He is with us. We are real people, gentlemen, real people. We are the Church. We are the People of God.

The cardinal and his CDF should be told, simply, directly, that this letter of theirs is the poorest piece of writing a lot of us have ever seen. We are quite worried about the CDF and its other activities. For a Church beset from within by the sexual abuse of minors by clergy, the criminal conduct of bishops and other hierarchs, the filing of bankruptcies, the grip of litigation, both civil and criminal; the stonewalling silence of Ordinaries to the people in their dioceses; sexcapades in their seminaries and rectories and convents and monasteries all over the world; the competition among bishops to see who can exclude more from the Eucharist; the drill instructor commands that lay ministers sign documents of Agreements or resign; this letter on collaboration by men and women is an abomination.

The letter is harmful to the dignity of persons and to the good of the community.

The grade for the letter is F.

-end-

Vox et Praeterea Nihil – A Voice and Besides That Nothing

2008-04-14T11:07:00.001-07:00

It is obvious, to me anyway, that I am not competent to judge anyone running for public office on his/her character, antecedents, race, color, creed, friends, or how the ladder was climbed, any more than those who have written about those factors. Like my friends, I listen to my gut when it gurgles, and have a hard time changing initial impressions, those first ones that are more often than not lasting. In my lifetime of work, I found it relatively easy to speak during depositions or in a courtroom, be it a jury or non-jury trial, or on the appellate level, when and if prepared. Once the bathtub of my mind was filled with the case and its issues, the words came. I had prepared yellow pads with notes, but almost never referred to them while clambering to my feet.

In later life, when writing became the way for me to communicate --- no live audiences around in the apartment and the soap boxes were gone from the public parks --- the same thing happened: words came, if and when I was prepared, and came better, if and when they were edited, rewritten, rewritten, honed, deleted, toned down, practices absent from the oral life led before retirement. Often, I was not prepared but yacked on anyway, and in writing, often did I send out what had been written as quickly as the thoughts tumbled out, even without a spell-check. On those many occasions, it was evident to me that I was: Vox et praeterea nihil ---A voice and besides that nothing.

As a lawyer, it was so easy for me to find our antecedents in the ancient Sophists, the speakers, the advocates for whomever: a mind quick enough to grasp the issues and a tongue glib enough to spill out the solution favored by the client, regardless of which solution was favored. A lawyer friend of mine was accosted by the Chief Justice during an appellate argument, "Brother, you said just the opposite last week in another case. Which one do you wish us to follow?" My friend answered, "I am an advocate. For clients. You are judges. It's up to you to decide." I think that later he said, "You win one, you lose one."

To me, about myself, when aware of the flow of words, I could always sense whether it was Prepared advocate or Vox et praeterea nihil. The former was OK, sometimes with an authentic ring of sincerity and earnestness mingling with the timbre of the voice. The latter was glib, shallow, gilt, based often on what I had assumed the audience wished to hear, and just as often sickening to the speaker, me. Knowing my own vox et praeterea nihil so well, I always found it relatively easy to spot its tone and the rush of its words in another. Gilt is not gold. Glib is not pondered. Shallow has no depth.

I see and hear that in and from Barack Obama, my gut tells me so. And lately I have begun to hear the gurgle groan into a growl when he shows an adept ability to attack opponents, whether ad mulierem for the other gender
or ad hominem for an older man. His honed skills show by simultaneously denying that personal attacks are being simultaneously uttered, because vox et praeterea nihil often requires two tongues for double-speak, three for innuendo, and four to keep up the impression of being on the high road, above us all.

As of now, our choices for President are three. In the fall, there will be but two. Next January, the horror of the Fall and Decline of the United States of America may be arrested, even reversed, depending on the Vox and our gut's reaction to it.

Culling . . .

2008-03-23T06:25:00.001-07:00

Buffalo Dusk
by Carl Sandburg

The buffalos are gone.

And those who saw the buffalos are gone.

Those who saw the buffalos by thousands and

    how they pawed the prairie sod into dust

    with their hoofs, their great heads down

    pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,

Those who saw the buffalos are gone.

And the buffalos are gone.

+++++

Carl Sandburg Reading Buffalo Dusk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTA5

+++++

And yet and yet:

The New York Sunday Times
March 23, 2008

Anger Over Culling of Yellowstone's Bison

By JIM ROBBINS

GARDINER, Mont. — This was not the Yellowstone National Park that tourists see.

At first light on Tuesday, at the end of a closed road, past a boneyard of junk cars, trailers and old cabins, more than 60 of the park's wild bison were being loaded on a semi-trailer to be shipped to a slaughterhouse.

With heavy snow still covering the park's vast grasslands, hundreds of bison have been leaving Yellowstone in search of food at lower elevations. A record number of the migrating animals — 1,195, or about a quarter of the park's population — have been killed by hunters or rounded up and sent to slaughterhouses by park employees. The bison are being killed because they have ventured outside the park into Montana and some might carry a disease called brucellosis, which can be passed along to cattle.

The large-scale culling, which is expected to continue through April, has outraged groups working to preserve the park's bison herds, considered by scientists to be the largest genetically pure population in the country. It has also led to an angry exchange between Montana state officials and the federal government over a stalled agreement to create a haven for the bison that has not received the needed federal financing.

"When they leave the park they have nowhere to go," said Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a Democrat. "This agreement would have given them a place to go."

Al Nash, a spokesman for Yellowstone National Park, said park employees tried to haze the bison into returning to the park but often met with limited success. Last week, two employees on horseback drove a large herd across a snow-flecked mountain from the north entrance back into the park.

"They come right back out again," Mr. Schweitzer said. "They just rebel. What would you do if you were a starving buffalo?"

The culling of bison at Yellowstone, while legal, has been a briar patch of controversy for more than two decades. In 1996, the count reached a peak — until this year — when 1,084 animals were killed.

In 2000, the State of Montana, the National Park Service, the United States Forest Service and the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, which oversees disease issues for the Department of Agriculture, signed an agreement to manage the population. It had two main objectives: to stop the spread of brucellosis, which can also be transmitted from elk, and to allow some bison to leave Yellowstone unmolested.

Conservationists, Montana state officials and other critics say the first part of the agreement has been honored, but the second part has been ignored by the federal government.

"The public should be outraged," said Amy McNamara, national parks program director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in Bozeman, Mont., which has worked to allow bison to leave the park. "An American icon is being taken to slaughter."

Ms. McNamara added, "By next week they'll be in somebody's freezer."

Federal officials say the money needed to make the agreement work — to obtain land along the Yellowstone River that would allow the bison to cross from the park to a publicly owned forest north of the park — has not been allocated by Congress.

Bruce Knight, under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs for the Department of Agriculture, said his department did not manage land or pay for the acquisition of habitat. "I've never received a directed appropriation for that," Mr. Knight said.

At issue is a corridor of land on the Royal Teton Ranch, owned by a religious group called the Church Universal and Triumphant. Last fall, a final stumbling block was removed when church leaders agreed to move their cattle off 2,500 acres of the land so the bison could cross to the forest, about 10,000 acres farther downstream. Any movement from there is blocked by a narrow canyon and the river.

With the cattle removed from the land, there would be no risk of transmission of brucellosis from infected bison. The plan would allow 25 bison who had tested negative for exposure to the disease to be allowed out of the park. If that went well, 50 or more would be allowed to leave, and so on.

The State of Montana and conservationists committed to raising $1.3 million toward the $3 million or so it would cost to lease the church group's land for 30 years. They expected the federal government, through the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, to provide the balance.

Mr. Schweitzer blamed Representative Denny Rehberg, Republican of Montana, for leading the opposition last summer to a $1.5-million Congressional appropriation that would have fulfilled the federal obligation. "He killed it," Mr. Schweitzer said.

A spokesman for Mr. Rehberg, Bridger Pierce, said Mr. Rehberg wanted the spread of brucellosis dealt with inside the park before any bison were allowed to migrate outside.

The standoff has been made all the worse by the detection last year of brucellosis in several cattle elsewhere in Montana. Though experts believe the disease was transmitted by elk, not bison, the case has stirred passions among ranchers. Brucellosis is a bacterial infection that can cause spontaneous abortion in cattle, and when detected, requires that the cattle be destroyed.

If another incidence of brucellosis appears in Montana, the state would lose its brucellosis-free status, which would mean each cow exported would need to be tested, an expensive proposition for ranchers. Wyoming and Idaho only recently regained their status as brucellosis free after cases were detected in those states in 2004 and 2005.

"Our interest is having a brucellosis-free United States," said Mr. Knight, the agriculture official. "The sole remaining reservoir is in the Greater Yellowstone. That makes it an exceptionally high priority for us."

Mr. Knight says the best solution would be a vaccine for bison, which he said could be a year away. Park officials, however, say it is not known when a vaccine, which they are researching, will be available.

In the meantime, conservationists and researchers who care about the bison worry that serious damage is being inflicted on the population here.

In the last few years biologists have discovered that Yellowstone's bison are one of only two genetically pure herds owned by the federal government.

James Derr, a professor of genetics at Texas A&M who is studying the Yellowstone bison, said he feared that some behaviors or traits, including the propensity to migrate, could be lost with the killed bison. “The great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and daughter often travel together,” he said. Killing them “is like going to a family reunion and killing off all of the Smiths. You are affecting the genetic architecture of the herd.”

In the next few weeks, so-called green-up — when the snow melts and new grass sprouts — is expected to begin in the park. At that time, some captured bison being held at a facility here who test negative for exposure to brucellosis will be released and allowed to head back into the park. Those that test positive, however, will be slaughtered.

“It’s a very difficult thing,” said Mr. Nash, the park spokesman, as he watched park employees load the bison for slaughter on Tuesday. “They do the job they have to do, but that doesn’t mean they enjoy doing it.”

The Priest and The Archbishop

2008-03-13T00:10:00.001-07:00

Reverend Marek Bogusław Bozek is the pastor of St. Stanislaus Church in St. Louis, MO. He is being persecuted by the powerful Archbishop Raymond Burke, who has accused, tried and adjudged him guilty of nine canonical delicts. One would have been enough, but overkill is rarely eschewed by those who claim absolute power. Father Bozek is a Polish priest, like Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko, 1947 – 1984, put to death by the Polish Secret Police for speaking out against communism and supporting Solidarity. He is featured in Daniel Berrigan's awe-some book on the Church, The Bride: Images of the Church. Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2000. (pages 123 – 125)

The icons were drawn by William Hart McNichols. Text and poetry by Daniel. Each image this poet and this artist drew about Fr. Popieluszko may readily and easily be drawn about Fr. Bozek.

Of Fr. Popieluszko, McNichols had this to say: "This icon of Holy Martyr Jerzy Popieluszko was created with the hope and prayer that Father Jerzy will be a patron and intercessor for all diocesan priests throughout the world, especially those who suffer and stand with the outcast and the persecuted."

Dan Berrigan had this to say:

The young priest, a look of sadness,
inwardness,
substance, soul.

His garb Polish-traditional,
cassock, stole, rosary in hand,
accouterments
long out of mind,
the image redolent of silence's
deep well.

A moment,
and his voice breaks in a tidal wave,
rock-ribbed conviction, passion.
"To serve God is to seek a way
to human hearts"
And large-handedly, his
seeks your hand.

Malevolence
festers, a bomb aimed, explodes;
but
"Fear only betrayal
for a few silver pieces of meaningless peace."

Not an inch given,
no bending to the will
of martinets, overlords, all-out liars
defaming, cowing a people.

The end.

    Volcanic days and nights;
a brutal, inept, bloody , misadventure;
        murder.
    This troublemaking priest
once for all, done with.

Fools, every one.
Never, not to be done with,
no blow sufficing, no mortal strike
but crowns him, immortal.

Jerzy, people's martyr.
Alleluia.

Strange Country We Live In . . .

2008-03-12T14:39:00.001-07:00

Strange country we live in. . .

A few days ago, a columnist, Clive Crook I think, but I didn't save the reference, wrote of the Bush administration that several pundits are referring to it as a "reign of terror . . . "

Yesterday, the Cominch of the Middle East, an Admiral, resigned because he disagrees with the president's policies there. A lot of us fear that Bush/Cheney are planning to leave office with a shock and awe preemptive strike on Iran in the waning days of their own "reign of terror . . ."

Yesterday, Diane Lopez-Hughes was released after serving 45 days for her witness against the SOA/WHINSEC, the school for educating hit men in a "reign of terror . . . "

Strange country we live in. . .

This day, the Governor of New York resigned, not so much for foolin' around, as for prosecuting those who also fooled around, while granting immunity for his own penis penchants. Mumbling prosecutors stumble over immediate decisions whether to prosecute him for being a John.

This day's news proclaims that Barack Obama is black and resents Geraldine Ferraro for calling him black, while she is outraged that the media is outraged at her for saying so. Hillary Rodham Clinton is female, but nobody seems to notice that, because she is white? The whole sordid business, by professionals, is called a campaign for public office, the one called "the presidency," so as to extricate us in 2009 from the "reign of terror . . ." starting, as they say, on the "First Day" at "3:00, AM."

Strange country we live in . . .

A couple of months ago, January 28^th, John Dear, SJ, was sentenced for sitting too long in an elevator in a federal building, by a Magistrate Judge, who called Dean from the safety of the bench a "renegade priest," "a coward" and "no Gandhi." Thus, freedom of speech in the land of the free and the brave.

Strange country we live in.

Diane Lopez-Hughes said on her day of sentencing, also January 28^th:

"As the daughter of a Guatemalan father, I am a member of an extended family that has experienced both sides of the conflict in that tortured country. In the late nineteenth century my grandfather was a general in the Guatemalan army. His mother was an indigenous woman. So my relatives have included those who have been repressed and those who have directly participated in the repression. And my own government trains Guatemalan soldiers in techniques that support the repression, disappearance and murder of their own citizens and those who would help them in their quest for a better life and just treatment. And I believe that the attitude that allows this practice is also responsible for our domestic and foreign policy that disrespects individuals and promotes injustice."

Strange country we live in. . . Makes one wonder when our own "reign of terror . . ." will end. Or will it? Just by voting?

God As Friend

2008-03-09T19:00:00.000-07:00

[Thoughts on a new book by William A. Barry, SJ. A Friendship like No Other: Experiencing God's Amazing Embrace.Chicago: Loyola Press, 2008, 203 pp. Paperback, $14.95. Not reviewed is a second edition of a prior work , now published simultaneously as a companion book: God's Passionate Desire. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2008, 130 pp. Paperback, $14.95.]

William A. Barry, SJ, is a veteran spiritual director who is currently serving as tertian director for the New England Province of the Society of Jesus. He has taught at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology and Boston College.

A Friendship like No Other: Experiencing God's Amazing Embrace is the latest in his many books on spirituality and prayer. It presents a radical idea: God wants to be our friend. Not many Christians would be so daring. To them God is remote, buried in the theology of scholars or the crossword puzzles of catechisms with questions and answers dutifully to be memorized. Few of us would dare say, "God is my friend." Whether casual, close or best.

Barry, well known and respected the world over for his skill in the spiritual direction of others, has lived daily what he preaches, teaches, writes and counsels. In referring to the encouragement given by three of his fellow Jesuits, he wrote they "embody what all Jesuits are asked to be for one another: 'friends in the Lord.'" With a lifetime of experience like this, he asks, not that we be like Jesuits, just that we know we are friends with God.

"In this book, I will confront another daunting question: what does God want in creating us? My stand is that what God wants is friendship." [p. xiv]

This work is not a theoretical foray into the high scholarship of contemplation, that peculiar province of those saints who were mystical, and whom we deem so far beyond us that we keep them at arm's length and admire. It is written in a language we all know and understand, the words we use with our own friends, with whom we live and move and have our daily being. Barry shows us how to take down our saints from their stone pedestals and experience what they did all their lives, the friendship of and with God. Like Dan Berrigan when he wrote, "Lord, send us mystics with hands."

There are three parts to this book: "Experiencing God's Desire for Friendship; Understanding Ourselves and God; Experiencing God." The keen eye of the knowing pray-er will notice the magic word "experience" immediately and nod assent, for it is in our own personal experience where Barry urges us to sit and be still and know that he is God. Not knowledge, nor theory, not even the inspiring words of others, but simply for us, for real, for "a friendship like no other."

Part One – Experiencing God's Desire for Friendship -- makes a startling suggestion: substitute "like" for "love". It's easier to swallow, because it's not so heavy. We just don't say to a neighbor's wife, "I love you," and hope we can get away with it, when what we meant was, "You're a nice neighbor. I like you." Try: "God likes me, and I like him, too." Somehow it means more than the duty-laden, almost forbidding if not foreboding, "Thou shalt love God with all your heart, etc." Then Barry gives us a short biblical tour of God's friendship with his people, in which he uncovers banter between God and Abraham and Sarah that I never saw there before. Friends do that.

Jesuit that he be, he then opens up the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in a new way, as "a developing pattern of friendship with God" and not a technique for making or manual of directing retreats. Again, hitherto unseen by me, despite many retreats including that first and only Long Retreat. This book is so new, so different, so real, so alive with meaning, because it is so filled with common sense and talks to us about friendship, in the simple way we share with our friends.

Spiritual Director that he be, he takes the time to offer practical tips from the years of his own experience in helping others, to overcome their fear – or even dislike - of God, and get to like him a little bit, then more, and want him as friend. There are more exercises offered, particularly when he warns us not to be so harsh on ourselves for our shortcomings especially in the way we may have treated some of our friends. These practical exercises keep this as a book on friendship and not a treatise on religiosity or churchism.

This part ends with getting to know God deeper, becoming a friend with Jesus and his community around us, with the help of people like P.D. James, the novelist, N.T. Wright, an Anglican bishop, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and J.R.R. Tolkien, who gave us The Lord of the Rings. The most poignant part of this section is this:

"I was deeply moved during a province retreat when Kenneth Hughes, SJ, one of the retreat leaders, had us imagine someone meeting Jesus after death. The person says to Jesus," I wish I had known you better in life. Jesus replies, "I wish I had known you better." Imagining that scene was life-changing for me." [p. 70]

Part Two – Understanding ourselves and God -- dissolves the bugaboos of our insignificance and unworthiness, dismisses the Me-Stuff of self-sanctification, and uproots the way we use names and nicknames, in coming to understand ourselves. Barry then gives God the same treatment, in showing us that God is vulnerable as we are vulnerable, and brings up this unusual question.

"We feel compassion for our friends and are moved to take risks to help them. But have you ever felt compassion for God? Perhaps the reason we don't often do so is that we do not sense the mutuality in our friendship with God." [p. ]

To understand God, insofar as we can, we need Barry's help in handling God's remoteness, anger and justice, our excuse, perhaps, of not seeing that God "abases self in order to win us over to friendship." Friends need to understand friends as only friends can.

Part Three -- Experiencing God -- opens with the unusual suggestion that prayer is not the only place in which we experience God and calls on us to pay attention to other places, especially "thin places."

"The Irish speak of 'thin places,' where the border between heaven and earth, sacred and secular, seems especially porous and God is believed to 'leak through' more easily. Because I believe that God can 'leak through' anywhere, I prefer to say that in such places people find the presence of God more easily. Where are the thin places in your life? What makes a place thin?" [p. 163]

And then he surprises us by offering scripture as a thin place; liturgy, too; married and family life as well; and nature. That last thin place with help from the poet Mary Oliver. And, or but, there are unlikely thin places: Dachau, a nursing home, a difficult ministry, Golgotha "the unlikeliest thin place in all of history . . . "

"God, who invites us to friendship, is present and active everywhere. As the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, 'The world is charged with the grandeur of God.' Every place on this earth can be a thin place. All that is required to experience God is our openness to God's presence." [p. 176]

Good. But how do we know we are "experiencing" God? For Jesuits the thin place for this answer is St. Ignatius' discernment of spirits. Barry gives us a short review of some of its rules, while describing them, with great insight and humor, as only a friendly friend can.

"Ignatius began to learn how to discern the spirits through paying attention to his feelings while daydreaming. God and the evil spirit, Ignatius came to believe, were working in his daydreams to different ends. This story should remove some of the mystery associated with the term discernment of spirits." [p. 179]

This small book, truly a thin place, ends with the profound simplicity with which it was written:

"God wants friendship with you and with me and with all our brothers and sisters in the world. Let's take the offer, shall we? Bless you all."[p. 194]

There are five short pages of notes at the end of the book. Do not miss them. Short, sweet and to the point, as the saying goes, these few notes show how Barry opened up the world of friendship to explore. Each reader can do the same, with the help of this friendly book.

My father loved to tell the story of the learned Jesuit, degreed as no other, fond of his flowing cape as ineffable as his words, who conducted a St. Francis Xavier Novena in our parish so long, long ago. At the close of each evening's session, the Jesuit prayed quietly at the rear of the church, noticing a gentle, elderly woman halfway down the aisle, also praying quietly. After several evenings of waiting long for her to leave, he dared ask, "And why do you stay so long afterwards, my dear?"

"To pray," was her simple answer.

"Really, and how is that you pray?" asked the gifted theologian of so many years of study and scholarship in matters spiritual.

"Oh! I just sits here and looks at Him. And He sits up there and looks at me."

Barry has the same emoluments as the preacher of long ago, the same two initials after his name, "SJ", but he identifies much more easily and friendly with the gentle woman, who loves to sit with her friend, long after others have gone home, and is thus able to speak to us in the same words she uses and understands. Friends talk to each other that way. That's the way friendship is. It is not an idea but a relationship, a bond between two persons, in such a simple way that neither one is one.

I met Bill Barry the day he entered the Jesuit Novitiate at Shadowbrook, another thin place, on August 14, 1950, the day our friendship began.

20,049

2008-03-07T04:18:00.001-08:00

The number of days to March 7, 2008, since these words were first spoken . . .

Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed.
The world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children...
This is not a way of life at all,
in any true sense.
Under the cloud of threatening war,
it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower
April 16, 1953

Illegal and Legal Immigrants – Any Difference?

2008-03-03T22:39:00.001-08:00

The tangled issue of "illegal immigrants" is easily put to one side by a Yankee, raised in Massachusetts, worked in New Hampshire, summered and retired in Maine. My childhood and teenage years were spent in Boston, where as "modern" as 1945, our senior prom at a pretty nice Boston hotel banned any black persons in our class. We switched hotels, because Bart Branch was our basketball captain. Black was the only off-white color noticeable around town. Greeks were a bit swarthy. Italians had that Latin look. The French had cigarettes in the corners of their mouths all the time, the smoke masking the pale – oh! so pale coloring of those near the Seine. As for the British, they wore spats and carried umbrellas. Their white was a haughty one. In the working years, both NH and ME had tiny, tiny populations of off-white coloring. We were Anglo-Saxon-Franco-Germanic-other European Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Agnostics, Atheists and some descendants of the original Yankees, a/k/a Puritans, whom we had elevated to a kind of superclass royalty off The Mayflower, even though they were perhaps the most intolerant Americans our country has yet endured.

But, but, but, we were all, almost all, white. Tons of us were the first born of immigrants – both Mom and Dad came from Prince Edward Island, Canada, just an overnight trainride away, no long boat trip across the Atlantic Ocean. I remember both parents studying for their citizenship exams. And then, they were able to say, "Civis Americanus sum," borrowed with adjustments from Saint Paul himself. No immigrant he, just a wandering apostle, a roaming Catholic. Actually, surrounded by five immigrant Canadian aunts, a couple of uncles and a bunch of Roman Catholic cousins, we thought we were much more American than them high falutin' Mayflowerites and the Silk Stocking Yankee crowd up on Beacon Hill. We were Irish, too, fundamentally so, and that brings up a completely different sort of intolerance and clannishness, doesn't it. Once banned and barred from jobs in Boston, the Irish had overcome. By the time I was 5 years old,we not only ran the town, police, fire, mail, schoolteachers, priests, bishops, cardinals, etc., we owned it. Era? 1930s, 1940s.

Then at 25, I went off to Tokyo. Not a member of an occupation army, but worse, a Jesuit infiltrator, I knew what it was to be an immigrant, albeit legal, an easily spotted one, who stood out in any crowd with my blue eyes, white skin, awkward posture and attitude, all of which proclaimed loudly that I was no native, probably an American. A fellow on the train saw me reading La Bible de Jérusalem, and asked, "Furansujin, desu ka? – You French?" I almost said, "Oui," but stupidly it came out,"Si," and he turned away. We "gaijins – foreigners" got pushed off sidewalks, were shoved out of crowded trains, knew little of the famed Japanese courtesy, until we learned it was reserved for those they knew personally. No stranger need apply.

I got a small taste of what current "illegal immigrants" go through in the America of postmodern times. When I spoke Japanese to a ruffian, politely but firmly telling him to back off, my voice and accent was that of a Japanese college student – the men in the dorms taught me how to street talk like one of them – and suddenly, there was much deep bowing, many expressions of regret and apology and a kind of coronation ceremony when the bad guy announced to all, "He's a sensei – honored professor." It was almost, but not quite, as if he had said Americanishly, 'It's OK. He's one of us." So easy to get along, fit right in, if you know the words, no matter the color of your skin and eyes. No fakery involved either.

The ire seen in newspapers, heard on Cable TV, seems to be based on color, any color off-white, be it black, tan, coffee, oriental yellow (their white) and is directed mainly southwards, but oddly not eastwards to Spain, whence those immigrants' immigrant forebears came from. When I hear "illegal immigrants," I know they are talking about Mexicans, Columbians, Puerto Ricans (they American citizens?) any kind of South Americans. Europeans aren't a source of "illegal immigrants," nor is Ireland, Russia, China, India, Japan (we're a bit ashamed of the imprisonment of Japanese American citizens after Pearl Harbor was bombed by their relatives.) The Irish, a little over a century after being treated like trash, now furnish some leaders to those patriotic red, white and blue Americans smoting the "illegals," the postmodern trash. We always have to have some group to beat up on, don't we? To blame for our bad luck in life, usually a foreign group that consensus agrees is beneath us, not worthy to tie our sandal straps.

Kind of funny, too, that we treat Native Americans, copper-skinned, as real Americans, autochthonously so to speak, not just as one of us, but as a kind of royal ancestor who saved the land for us. Which we promptly took away without asking politely first. To hide our shame, we gave them poor land, called it "Reservation" and herded them inside to stay out of sight, out of mind. They knew they were"legal" though and were and are patient, so patient, that we are beginning to look on them as ancestors, forebears, seeing something definite in their culture that is American, far more authentic than our own potpourri slatherings on from all the countries of Europe and Asia. Africa doesn't count, you know. On the grey scale, they're way out on the far end of black, and somehow that just isn't another hue of white or off-white. Besides, Civil Rights is being won by them, slowly, but being won.

Well, Mom and Dad were immigrants. White ones. May have been "illegal" for all I know. But got sworn in and were able to vote. Most of the parents on our street were immigrants, too. We were a happy crowd. And now, our children aren't so happy and are yelling a lot about drivers' licenses, language spoken as a native tongue, taking menial jobs, making sure we keep America "free and legal" while assuring there are enough "illegal immigrants" to wait on us, do our housekeeping, run errands, clean up the streets, pick up the garbage and then go back where they came from, provided they send their children here to take their places.

But then again, and again, I'm a Yankee from Maine, where I couldn't tell a Mexican from a native, and always kept my own head down, lest I heard a real Yankee say, "Him, that porky guy, he's from away." I'm not a resident of Los Angeles, or Taos, NM, or even a small town in Arizona, where vigilantish saviors of democracy want a few hundred miles of fencing erected real soon. Thinking of my own ancestors, I wonder why the drumbeat for the fence is not so loud between us and Canada. Maybe, because it would be a much longer one, about 3000 miles from the Pacific to the Atlantic, not just a wittle one from Baja California to the Gulf of Mexico. Cost a few billion. And Canadians are the same color as us, blend in easily, never look "illegal."

Thus, no reason for me to pop off here on this issue. Not much to say or recommend, except a few little things about the Statue of Liberty. I'm kinda close to immigrants in my own family, and was one myself for three years in Japan. Being from the Northeast, I've never had much trouble with other immigrants, and here in Colorado, I'm beginning to notice some antipathy towards people who speak Mexican-Spanish and wear baggy clothes.

If the ruckus continues, I think we should take down the Statue of Liberty, disassemble it carefully, because it was a thoughtful gift, and put it in storage or give it back to France. What is remarkably noteworthy is that the lady's face was originally a copper hue, almost the same color as the skin of those sneaking in from south of the border. Over the years, her face and hands have taken on a patina, as only copper can do, so she is now green. Wonder how we'd react to green illegal immigrants. Could spot them more quickly, I suppose. Anyone know her name? Lazarus gave her one in the poem below, Mother of Exiles. Kind of sad, isn't it?

At the very least, before we build those fences, we should have the integrity to go inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and melt down that bronze plaque inscribed with the poem "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus. It's a brazen lie now, like so much else of America, which seems to be imitating the empire of ancient Rome in a slow but steady fall and decline. Some of us wonder whatever happened to our Church. Have we ever asked, Whatever happened to our country?

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The Suscipe Prayer of Saint Ignatius

2008-03-02T10:30:00.000-08:00

Saint Ignatius wrote this prayer to be experienced in the Fourth Week of the The Spiritual Exercises during the Contemplation to Obtain Love.

Original

Suscipe, Domine, universam meam libertatem.
Accipe memoriam, intellectum, atque voluntatem omnem.
Quidquid habeo vel possideo mihi largitus es;
id tibi totum restituo, ac tuae prorsus voluntati trado gubernandum.
Amorem tui solum cum gratia tua mihi dones,
et dives sum satis, nec aliud quidquam ultra posco.

Literal translation

Take, Lord, my entire liberty.
Receive all my memory, intellect and will.
Whatever I have or possess you have given me;
I give it all back to you, and hand it over to be directed wholly by your will.
Give me only your love along with your grace,
and I am rich enough, nor do I ask for anything more.

Anthony Mottola's Translation

Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding, and my entire will,
all that i have and possess.
Thou hast given all to me, to Thee, O Lord, I return it.
All is Thine; dispose of it according to Thy will.
Give me Thy love and Thy grace, for this is enough for me.

Modern Translation
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.
You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace.
That is enough for me.

My Laptop Crashed

2008-03-01T22:00:00.000-08:00

It happened to me. First time, too. The laptop crashed. Badly. After frustrating difficulties in upgrading an application, I asked for help, was directed to Microsoft itself, and began a telephone step-by-step dialogue with one of its geeks from India. Our conversation began a week ago last Thursday at 9:20 AM, and was recessed at 5:30 PM, to be resumed the following day. At recess, the monitor screen was black, unvarying, endless black like that of the holes in the universe, and as implacable as well.

The next day's walk-through was conducted by a geekess from India, whose staying power was nugatory when compared with her predecessor. Within two minutes, she advised, "Ve vill now format dee harddrive. I vill bring up a DOS prompt, and you . . ."

"Pardon me, Ma'am, my solo practice since 1992 and written words and phrases since 2002 are on that hard drive," I murmured, adding, "You see?" Intuiting she did not, could not, we parted politely. And then, early that Friday morning, I began to tremble.

The laptop is an HP Pavilion, purchased last June from Circuit City, in South Portland, ME, with their Advantage Protection Plan, fortunately. To make sure of backups, I joined it to an HP Expansion Base, which has a drawer available for an external hard drive, soon filled with an HP 300GB naked beauty. The total blackness of the laptop's screen convinced me that the backups were as inaccessible as My Documents,1992-2008.

To restore the laptop to its pristine glory, HP's Restore Disc, plus the two it commanded me to create, begin by wiping the hard drive clean, and only then reinstall the applications it supplied last June. Wiping clean includes the remorseless destruction of documents and data and their remnants. Before daring that stroke on my own, without superior help, the little voice asked, "What if the backups in the Expansion Base drawer are corrupted?

The tremors, subsiding some from the initial onslaught, renewed with vigor and force, almost reminiscent on a personal basis of that shock and awe we read about but never feel. Could I have lost everything I did since going solo in 1992 and responding to Robert Blaire Kaiser's invitation in 2002, to join his group and write? Gone, all gone?

And that's when I saw The Suscipe Prayer, affixed to the laminated wood block our son Steve made for me in 1973. The English version starts off: "Take and receive, Lord, all my liberty . . ." I gulped. The wise-guy's initial retort was going to be "You know I didn't mean it," followed by a quivering "Did you have to take me at my word? It's just a prayer, you know, " and ending with a resentment, "You could have waited a year or two, maybe."

Although convinced my work was gone, irretrievably, I grunted, lugged the old Desktop out of the closet, dusted it down, cleaned it up, and plugged it in. There would be no data on it, I knew, because all that stuff was transferred to the laptop last June and then deleted. At least, I thought, as the monitor flickered into life, I can begin again. There is still some time left. Perhaps?

During the ensuing week, meditation was a bit deeper, lingered longer on Suscipe, Domine – Take, Lord, to me the quintessential Jesuit prayer. Realization came that I'd gotten a glimpse of its depth, when LordLord did not accept what had been offered. He simply took my hard drive. Could have been the devil who kept screaming in the black hole of my despair, that it could be restored, though wiped clean of everything created on it, were I a good boy.

It took a day over a week to demand, not summon, courage to reappear. I was tired of fiddling with the Desktop installation, sensed over and over anger dispelling hope -- that's why they call it "Re-sentment", not just plain, old anger, but the over-and-over-and-over variety that makes peace impossible. Emotions teetered, when I remembered the fun of the last six years and bemoaned the loss of a machine far more sophisticated than a pencil hovering above a blank sheet of paper.

So, today, I bagged the laptop, gathered all Restore discs, photocopied last June's receipts of purchase, stuck the Expansion Base under the free arm and drove with Jean to Fort Collins, CO, where there was a friendly Circuit City Store we often went to, when we lived and worked here ten years ago.

The technician, uncannily able to see the tears behind my calm, brave smile, checked out my records for the Protection Plan, opened the cover on the laptop, functioning on battery alone, and clicked on >START<, evoking a DOS prompt, to which he entered the command "explore." After a long roll-down of DOS gobbleydook, he said, "It's not as serious as you think. I'll try first to extract everything from the hard drive in the Expansion Base, save it to our master computer in the back room, and then restore the laptop. Thanks for coming into Circuit City."

On the way home with Jean, I heard her say, "You're a changed man. You look different."

When we pray Suscipe, Domine, are we holding onto a backup? Just in case? If so, shouldn't we make sure that the backup is completely external to the entire system it is backing up and not an integral part of it in an attached device. The backup must be reachable, obviously.

The crashing of a laptop and the need for the restoration of its hard drive is but a gentle reminder that when we utter "Suscipe, Domine," and click on >ENTER<, it goes out instantly to a listening Dominus. There is no backup.

What if, what if Dominus took us at our word?

What if, what if he responded: Amorem tui solum – only your love?

What if, what if we meant: nec aliud quidquam ultra posco – nor do I ask for anything more?

Need for Signatures on a Letter to the Pope About His Visiting President Bush

2008-02-22T20:41:00.001-08:00

Pope Benedict may visit Presdient Bush during a coming visit to America. Friends have proposed a letter to the Pope and are asking us to sign it. The original message is set forth here just as received. If interested, please email: stephenkobasa@gmail.com

Thank you,
Paul Kelly

----- Original Message -----

From:
Stephen Kobasa
2/16/2008 2:01:20 PM
Invitation to sign a letter to the Pope

In advance of Pope Benedict's scheduled April visit to the United States, the letter below is being circulated for signatures. If you would like your name added, please send it to me in the form that you would like it to appear. Include whatever other forms of identification you deem appropriate, e.g., organization, vocation, position. Also feel free to circulate it to others who might be interested with the instruction to reply to me at stephen.kobasa@gmail.com by March 16.
in peace,
Stephen

To His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI

Most Holy Father:

In your own words, "today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a 'just war'."

Yet, during your upcoming visit to the United States, you are planning to meet with President George W. Bush, whose empty justifications for the violence in Iraq lead to increasing numbers of dead, injured and displaced people. Iraqi civilians still endure the "continual slaughter" which you described in your 2007 Easter Sunday address.

Shortly before the U.S. invaded Iraq, you rightly declared that "there were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war." You've also called attention to the terrible new technologies which cause indiscriminate destruction. Five years later, how much more reason you have to call for an immediate end to this war, and to refuse to meet with the President of the United States until that is accomplished.

If you kneel in grief and outrage before the cross of the tortured Christ, can you offer your blessing to a head of government who excuses the most terrible abuses of human minds and bodies as "legal"?

If you meet with him you must, then meet as a prophet should - issuing a warning and an invitation to repentance. Courtesy cannot be used as an evasion of our biblical faith. Ezekiel was repeatedly reminded of his responsibility to admonish those doing evil if he desired to escape sharing in the responsibility for their sins. Shouldn't any of us who recognize the horror of what is happening in Iraq be condemned if we are silent?

You are scheduled to be in Washington, D.C. on the anniversary of your birth. We feel sure that you will be thinking of the countless children of Iraq who never reached their fifth birthday. In 2005 alone, 122,000 Iraqi children under age five died. There are many, both within the Church and outside of it, who long for your voice to speak for those innocent dead and - face to face with those whose policies denied all respect for their lives - demand that the killing stop.

We are, in faithful hope,
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, Archdiocese of Detroit
Kathy Boylan, Dorothy Day Catholic Worker
Stephen Vincent Kobasa
Kathy Kelly
Marie Dennis, Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns
Barbara B. Broderick
E. Paul Kelly

Church Self-Policing

2008-02-21T20:37:00.001-08:00

A Sister's Opinion

In an email to members, CTA-NE reported that Sister Maureen Paul Turlish, Victims' Advocate of New Castle, Delaware, disagrees with Andrew Greeley's recommendation for self-policing by priests. She wrote to The Chicago Sun Times, stating simply that "Priests Can't Self-Police." At: http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/letters/799511,CST-EDT-vox18.article. Sister Turlish ended her comments with:

The bottom line here is that no institution can or should be trusted to police itself. The responsibility to protect the common good belongs to the state.

My Opinion

Relying on my experiences when a lawyer, I remonstrated with Sister Turlish, showing that professional associations do police themselves. Many lawyers have been disbarred and doctors have lost their licenses to practice, because of the work of self-policing committees. My opinion was that professional associations must self-police and should not leave it up to law enforcement agencies and the courts.

The Professor's Opinion

Professor Marci Hamilton, Visiting Professor at Princeton University, is the author of "How to Solve the Appalling Problem of Child Sex Abuse: Why Catholic Priest Andrew Greeley Is Very Wrong to Suggest Church Self-Policing Is the Answer." At: http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hamilton/20080221.html. She agrees with Sister Turlis.

Read Them And Think

Please listen to Sister Turlish and Professor Hamilton. Then, put Fr. Greeley and myself off to one side, on what has become the critical issue for the Roman Catholic Church: the inability of hierarchs to do much of anything helpful in bringing predator priests to justice, or in caring for helpless victims. This is a matter of justice. And there can be no justice without accountability.

The Professor's One Change In Public Policy

Professor Marci Hamilton is the best scholar and writer we have on matters of church and state, religion and the rule of law. Her most recent work is God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law
(Cambridge University Press 2005) and her next will be published this spring, Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge 2008). In her response to Fr. Greeley, Professor Hamilton writes:

Who cares what the Church has to say about child abuse, anyway? You don't see the hierarchy taking any steps to ensure that all children are protected or floating new ideas about how to transform all of society to make this a better place for children. The focus remains where Greeley's is - inside the institution. This navel-gazing is a distraction from the pressing need to protect all children now.

Even if the Church were to take care of every one of its victims perfectly (which will never happen), and were to never permit another child to be abused (ditto), it would have taken care of only a small percentage of the total number of children abused in this country. And even if it screened perfectly every priest on its doorstep, the problem transcends the Church.

Many more children are abused within the home, and plenty are abused in the schools. The breaking news is that there is a growing national grassroots movement for all victims of child sex abuse.

As I've written in previous columns such as this one,* and as I explain in my forthcoming book, Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children, there is one change in public policy that will do more to protect children from future abuse and to bring justice to the millions currently suffering outside locked courthouse doors than any other: the simple fix of eliminating the statutes of limitations for child sex abuse.

The Church hierarchy is implacably opposed to such reform. Let me repeat myself - who cares?

*The Philadelphia Grand Jury's Report on Clergy Child Sex Abuse in the City's Archdiocese: A Lesson for All States," September 22, 2005, at: http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hamilton/20050922.html

The Last Six Years

It has been six years since The Boston Globe first exposed the horror of sexual abuse of children by clergy. Six long years of listening to the Episcopal Chant of Sacred Silence, as bishops refused to acknowledge accountability, focusing solely on the institution, heedless of great millstones, repeating three Ds of Dogma, Doctrine, Discipline. Alone, celibately so, in basilicas and chanceries, they wilfully chose to be separate and apart from the people of God, whom they were ordained to serve as the servants of the servants of God.

The people of the Church have sadly grown accustomed to her face in the daily news, gathered each day by Kathy Shaw in the AbuseTracker at http://www.bishop-accountability.org. Although shocked at first by the Church in court as a litigant, we have fallen into a soporific state over the misuse of our legal system by lawyers defending the Roman Catholic Church. The children, now growing or growing up, suffer still. The Church qua Institution continues as if nothing but a mild disturbance had taken place. While the Church struggles futilely to lift victory out of the black hole of defeat, its way of proceeding is to issue new edicts, exclude anyone who disagrees, or even asks a question, and crack down on dissenters. Hierarchs just do not realize that we have lost respect for their authority.

The Church is no longer as sacramental as it used to be in our youth, some 60 or 70 years ago. It has begun withholding the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. The Sacrament of Reconciliation seems long ago and far away, almost as if it were old-fashioned and out of date. Bishops in hiding rarely come out for Confirmation. Holy Orders, reserved exclusively for male celibates, is denied to women.

Our Church is closing down, clustering parishes, selling off real estate, filing for bankruptcies, hanging around courthouses as parties defendant, and watching the median age of its priests climb higher without enough seminarians to lower that number. The Church has even gone so far as to insult other religions and their churches as neither true nor holy. Its attention is focused on the city-state of the Vatican, where museums glorify a past of Dark and Middle Ages long gone into ancient history. Those who govern cannot come out of that past and are unable to live in the present to make way for any future yet to come.

The fall and decline of Rome and its Catholicism is like the collapse of a once bright and giant star into a white dwarf, after a long life of billions of years. The process is faster than the speed of light, as the dying star vanishes into a black hole. It is happening so rapidly in our own short lifetime, that it cannot be due to the uncovering of the sexual abuse scandal alone. The Church is dying from within due to the abuse of power, absolute power corrupting absolutely. It is as difficult to curb such power, as it is to reverse the plunge of the white dwarf towards the black hole, from which no light can ever glow.

Just One Change for Justice

Some thinkers try to toss off the sexual abuse of minors, whether by clergy or lay from any religion or institution, as merely an aberrant way of life for a very few. Not so. Not so. Those who harm little ones are monsters committing monstrous crimes against humanity. What they have done is not merely an issue for theological disputations of doctrine and dogma or the laying down of stricter discipline. Nor is our demand for accountability just a topic for discussion among reformers seeking change.

We seek justice, but not just as a rebellion against two thousand years of dictatorial governance of an institution claiming to be a Church. We know that the process of justice can begin with one simple change, as Professor Hamilton says: the abolition of statutes of limitations which bar accountability. With justice comes the healing of those abused and also a change in governance, so the institution can once again be Church. The Holy Spirit has the power to resurrect a star from a black hole by granting it light strong enough to overcome astronomical gravitational forces. She can do the same for hierarchs in the black hole of absolute power. We share in such power as the people of God. Those responsible must be held accountable. Those wounded will be healed. The Church can be Church again.

Professor Hamilton, aware that the core issue is that of absolute power, asks, "Who cares what the Church has to say about child abuse, anyway?" In the poem that gives this blog its title, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "Crying What I do is me: for that I came." And then, "I say more: the just man justices. "

After standing to speak truth to power, we will not fall back into our old, familiar posture of silent submission. We are taking take back our Church. Giving heed to professor and poet, we step forward from speaking truth to power to doing what must be done.

Let the statutes of limitations be repealed.
Let there be accountability.
Let there be healing for victims and for Church.

We do not care what the Church has to say about child abuse, anyway, crying What we do is us: for that we came. We say more: the just man justices.

Heroes and Posters

2008-02-19T11:26:00.001-08:00

On February 15, 2008, WorldNetDaily published an article with this headline and sub:
Che Guevara flag featured in Obama campaign office
Candidate attracts 'people who think mass murderers are romantic revolutionaries'

FOXNEWS picked it up and the political tirades of the 1960s were reborn, until today, when all the news blurt that Fidel Castro has resigned. And so, we are all drawn back some 50 years to another time, another hatred that still sets us apart. We wonder what difference time makes, after all, in dividing people into victors and losers, each side claiming heroes of their own, of course and regardless. And yet and yet. Nevertheless.

The whole aura of heroes has been gilded and muddled since man first began to fight man. We think of Alexander the Great as an early western hero, but those he defeated in the Middle East suffer still. Genghis Khan scared the stuff of our European forebears, but might rank even, or a close second, with Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin as a hero to his people. Audie Murphy won fame and got in the movies. Good, clean American kid who stood up to them Nazis. And we raved over Doolittle's raid on Tokyo, until some of us were sent in the 1950s to teach in Japan and heard a different story.

El Che Guevara is to many, Americans as well as Cubans, a legitimate hero. Check him out in Wikipedia, which ends with this, "Time Magazine in 1999 named Ernesto "Che" Guevara one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century under the heading of 'heroes and icons.' " If Che Guevara is to be deemed unworthy of being called "hero,"whether then or now, does that make a "hero" out of Cuba's dictator General Fulgencio Batista, whom he and Fidel overthrew?

Who are our heroes now? Yesterday, we celebrated Presidents' Day, a lumping of birthdays into one, and heard much good stuff about George Washington - February 22 - and Abraham Lincoln – February 12. Even Jesuits have their own heroes: Pedro Arrupe, and an old soldier, name of Inigo of Loyola. We look up to heroes as lords, for they are not just ordinary men and women. When it comes to designating heroes and keeping their mementoes on our walls, though, not all would agree. Just as the Lord said about those trying to enter the kingdom by calling him "Lord, Lord."

When I stopped to think about heroes, a memory popped up of a feisty session years ago at our dinner table with our four sons of elementary school age. We were talking about courage and bravery and heroes, prompted by some news item in the paper. It might even have been El Che's capture and summary execution in 1967 in Bolivia, with the support of the CIA and U.S. Special Forces. To keep these thoughts balanced and fend off the expected flaming charge, "Kelly, you damned bleeding liberal," our youngest son later joined Special Forces and served for years in their Reserves. Keith, second son, ended that hot and heavy dinner talk, when he got exasperated about the people being picked out as heroes and blurted out, "Who's the bravest man who ever lived?" The rest of us tossed out some names of favorites. With the wisdom of the young, Keith said, "Nope. The bravest man who ever lived was the first man who dared to milk a cow."

As for "mass murderers as romantic revolutionaries," I think of the Nazi's Blitzkrieg, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, -- the four centuries of The Crusades, too -- and then I think of the pattern bombing of Germany, and my life in Tokyo for three years, where I saw the rebuilt residential sections of the city, which had been encircled with incendiary bombs to burn completely into the center of the circle and vanish, and stared up at the big buildings downtown, spared to save them for the occupation forces. I sat several times on the floor of our scholastic's rec room at the feet of Fr. Pedro Arrupe, listening to him share what happened that day in Hiroshima, when he heard the sound of a mushroom cloud and rode his bicycle straight into town to help whoever survived the madness of such easy slaughter. At Sophia Univerty's faculty residence, I lived with young German Jesuits who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge. I marvelled at the tales of older European Jesuits, how they shovelled off incendiary bombs from B-29s, to save the university.

In the current years of the Bush Administration, I have often gone down in deep moments of utter frustration and near despair. Even now, I think of our President and Vice President calling their preemptive strike in the Middle East a "Just War."My poor rational mind is befuddled whether the phrase, "The war on terror," is but an oxymoron, with meaning. And that, of course, is an oxymoron itself, isn't it? Once I took the phrase, "It all depends on whose ox is being gored," and changed it to: "It all depends on whose gore is being oxed." We are the same. And yet we differ. We have our own heroes, some mass murderers, some romantic revolutionaries.

And El Che is long dead, but his posters still hang on walls.

HEROES AND POSTERS

We adore our heroes 'n have to say

That it's OK to fume or foam,

Or put up a poster, say of Che,

High on the wall in a room at home.

But first we remove the faded ones

Of long ago, like John Paul Jones,

Even those of the Napoleons,

To get rid of history's famous clones.

In order to fight in modern times,

We have to be politically correct.

Else our wars are filled with crimes,

Our righteous causes must be wrecked.

Unless we stand tall on the left,

We can't beat neocons from the right,

For the center is usually bereft

Of heroes with any will to fight.

We take care then of whom we choose

To follow in our life's pursuit,

For those out there with different views

Will claim we are simply not astute.

That's why we forget the heroes of yore,

Revolutionaries just don't survive,

Replaced by those who won the war.

Not even El Che could stay alive.

Voices! Stand! Speak Truth To Power!

2008-02-19T10:17:00.001-08:00

My voice,

Inside walls of stone, broke,

Fell apart, dropped down

Unheard. My dog and

I vaulted the wall, its grove,

Unlike stones, alive and green,

Waving in synchronicity blessed

By wind's wafting. Unnerved,

It was always so.

I spoke

Again, and again my voice

Whisked away to leaves and limbs,

Wisps floating down to barren

Ground. My little dog sensed

Fear in belly, agony of heart,

My very soul lapsing under

Strain of needing to be

Heard. And yet unnerved,

It has always been so.

A friend

Joined step and voice,

Making us two, till more came.

Then more. Hundreds and

Thousands and thousands,

More than thousands on town

Greens, nation's Mall, old

Village squares across the

Global world of voices,

Where all of us stood hushed

As one, as if waiting for the cue.

We raised

Our joined, single voice

In thunder clap after clap,

Booming and rolling on and again,

Reverberating in discharge, as

Only lightning-struck thunder can.

Voices of the world in unison

Smashed stone walls, blew

Down trees, down deep at

Roots. We sensed, animals and

People alike, we had at

last been heard. Nerved,

It had never been so.

Silence splashed

Like rain, washed down on all

Our voices. All the world of us.

We stood together across our

Greens and squares and groves,

Along our stone walls, stood

Still together, waiting, praying,

Waiting.

A voice whined,

The lie in the tin of the voice thin,

Tilted to the side like its head,

Tiny, jerked by shrugs of shoulders,

All performed on cue,

Haltingly, hauntingly.

"I won't be budged.

I am the decision maker.

Just give war a chance.

Let it be so.

Let The Surge be so."

Our voices,

Turbid yet not willing

To let it be so, yelled

Out for the flash and roar

Of lightnings and thunders,

From out that turgid silence,

Undaunted, one lone Voice asked,

"But what about the blunders?"

The Vice's voice

Prompting loud from out of sight,

Behind the tinny one.

And yet, and yet from on high,

It spat from mouth's twisted sneer,

"Hogwash!

Let there be War."

He Speaks and Speaks and Speaks

2008-02-18T13:27:00.001-08:00

Mister Bush beams a familiar voice on daily news,
Stumping in halls owned by crowds that ooze
Applause each time he sounds "Stay the course."
Brainwashed as they are without remorse,
Eager to cheer for swagger and bravado
By a little man from the past's grey shadow.

Jurors are instructed to sift the credibility
Of witnesses by using their own ability
To size up the huckster and the fraud,
By the way they talk and the way they plod.
The norm is Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
False in one thing, false in everything, Mister Bush.

Only you are our White House resident,
Commander-in-chief and president,
Leader of all, decider of deciders, too,
Uniter not divider, ringmaster of the zoo
Of Washington, DC, once the proud capitol
Of a revered country, now doomed to fall.

Speak your rambling rant, embellish the lies,
Schoolboy grin hovering under hooded eyes,
Pile it on, false on true, loud and clear,
Make sure you get the country's ear
And mind and heart and soul as well.
Then, send more soldiers to Mideast hell.

The Sentencing of Fr. John Dear, SJ

2008-02-17T21:12:00.001-08:00

Professional decorum requires that lawyers begin with "May it please the Court", then respect the office of the person in a black robe sitting on high with "Your Honor." Those two phrases come rippling off a lawyer's tongue habitually from daily practice. That demeanor is so much a part of the very being of one who represents clients in a court of law that nobody ever questions their meaning or the sincerity of their utterance.

It is difficult to abide by that courtesy when considering United States Magistrate Judge Don J. Svet of the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico, who sentenced Fr. John Dear, SJ, on January 24, 2008, for a misdemeanor infraction of a federal rule concerning moving around in a federal building.

Fr. Dear and eight others wanted to deliver a letter to Senator Domenici (R-NM)about the war in Iraq, but were prevented from doing so by employees in the federal building in Albuquerque. They occupied the elevator for several hours and were arrested for violating signs and instructions regarding getting around the building. They earned the descriptive group name of "The Elevator Nine."

While the infraction took place in the summer of 2006, the trial was not held until September of 2007, and Fr. Dear's sentencing was delayed until January of 2008. The case, from beginning to end was assigned to the Honorable Don J. Svet, whose sentence of Fr. Dear was for 40 hours of community service and $510 in fines and fees.

Comments by the Magistrate Judge

The Albuquerque Tribune reported on January 24, 2008:

Dear's attorney, Penni Adrian, had asked the court for mercy, saying Dear had a "lifelong commitment to peace and human decency." His action that day was "but a legal misstep," she said.

Adrian also said she received word Wednesday that Dear had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Gandhi Peace Award.

But Dear asked for no mercy, using his time before the court to condemn the Iraq war.

"This war is unjust, morally sinful and just downright impractical," he said.

Dear added that he had contemplated the words of Mohandas Gandhi, who Dear said advocated to reject a court's sanctions if the cause was just.

"I want to take my case to a higher court, to a higher judge — the God of peace," Dear said before uttering a prayer.

But Svet would have none of it, calling Dear a "renegade priest," "a coward" and "no Gandhi."

"Mr. Dear, you frankly are a phony," Svet said. "You preach nonviolence but you are the same man who took a hammer and a can of paint against a U.S. aircraft."

Those in the crowded courtroom, filled mostly with members of Dear's Pax Christi peace group, gasped and shook their heads at the judge's comments.

[http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2008/jan/24/protester-priest-sentenced-and-fined/]

A Respectful Request to the Magistrate Judge

Unable to shuck off professional habits as a lawyer and an officer of the Court, I begin: May it please the Court," but Judge Svet's insults of Fr. Dear are not impartial, judicious, nor are they befitting the dignity of the very Court in which they were spoken. Fr. Dear was addressed as "Mr. Dear," by a Magistrate Judge who would quickly find any person in contempt of Court were he himself addressed as "Mr. Svet."

I wish to disclose that I am a former Jesuit of the New England Province, 1949 -- 1957, as well as a retired attorney from New Hampshire, Bar # 1341, 1960 -- 2000. In both of those capacities, I respectfully ask Magistrate Judge Svet,

"Your Honor, please review your remarks in a judicial manner, even to the point of pretending that they had been spoken by somebody else. After such a review, you may wish to call to mind the 12^th Century challenge of St. Bernard of Clairvaux to Peter Abelard on some public statements the latter had made, 'Amend them. Defend them. Or deny that they are yours.' "

Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Nomination of Fr. Dear for the Nobel Peace Prize

For some assistance in his review and reconsideration of Fr. Dear's good standing as a Jesuit priest and his reputation as a dedicated worker for peace, my simple offer is Archbishop Desmond Tutu's opinion of Fr. Dear. On January 31, 2008., the Archbishop wrote:

http://paceebene.org/nvns/nonviolence-news-archive

Jan 31, 2008

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

In support of The Reverend Father John Dear, S.J.:

Nobel Peace Prize 2008

Dr Leo Rebello, World Peace Envoy from Bombay, India and Dr Charles Mercieca, President of International Association of Educators for World Peace, USA have nominated the Reverend Father John Dear, SJ for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. I commend Father Dear to you and support his nomination.

Fr John Dear is a Jesuit priest who has been in the forefront of the religious peace movement in the United States. He is the embodiment of a peacemaker. He has led by example through his actions and in his writings and in numerous sermons, speeches and demonstrations. He believes that peace is not something static, but rather to make peace is to be engaged, mind, body and spirit. His teaching is to love yourself, to love your neighbor, your enemy, and to love the world and to understand the profound responsibility in doing all of these.

He is a man who has the courage of his convictions and who speaks out and acts against war, the manufacture of weapons and any situation where a human being might be at risk through violence. Fr John Dear has studied and follows the teachings of non-violence as espoused by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., he serves the homeless and the marginalized and sees each person as being of infinite worth. I would hope that were he to receive this honor his teachings and activities might become more widely accepted and adopted. The world would undoubtedly become a better and more peaceful place if this were to happen.

For evil to prevail requires only that good people sit on the sidelines and do nothing. Fr John Dear is compelling all of us to stand up and take responsibility for the suffering of humanity so often caused through selfishness and greed. I hope you will consider his nomination favorably.

God bless you,
Archbishop Desmond Tutu

The Sentencing of a Jesuit Priest in Germany 63 Years Ago

Another federal judge in another country in another time sentenced another Jesuit priest to death by hanging for high treason as a dissenter. The Jesuit was Fr. Alfred Delp, SJ. The Judge was Roland Freisler, president of the People's Court of the Third Reich. This is not a comparison of Nazi courts with our federal courts. Please center on the dialogue between Judge and Jesuit. The following is taken from Fr. Delp's biography by Mary Francis Coady, With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany, 2003, Chicago, Loyola Press, p. 160:

To Fr. Delp's claim that he was absent from a certain meeting,

. . . this fact was thrown at him as a "typically Jesuitical" action: "By that very absence you show yourself that you knew exactly that high treason was afoot and that you would have liked to keep the tonsured little head, the consecrated holy man, out of it. Meanwhile he may have gone to church to pray that the conspiracy should succeed in a way pleasing to God.". . .

Freisler: "You miserable creep, you clerical nobody – who dares to want the life of our beloved Fuehrer taken . . . a rat – that should be stamped on and crushed. . . . Now tell us, what brought you as a priest to abandon the pulpit and get mixed up in German politics . . . Come on, answer!"

Delp: "I can preach forever, and with whatever skill I have I can work with people and keep setting them straight. But as long as people have to live in a way that is inhuman and lacking in dignity, that's as long as the average person will succumb to circumstances and will neither pray nor think. A fundamental change in the conditions of life is needed. . . . "

Freisler: "Do you mean that the state has to be changed so that you can begin to change conditions that keep people away from the Church?"

Delp: "Yes, that's what I mean. . . . "

Fr. Delp was hanged at Plōtzenee prison on February 2, 1945

Judges and Magistrate Judges

In New Hampshire lawyers were privileged to appear before Chief Justice Frank Kenison of the state Supreme Court, Justice Hugh Bownes of the state Superior Court, the U.S. District Court and the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and Justice David Souter of the state Superior Court, the Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court. Calling each one of them "Your Honor" was the use of the term to its maximum extent of dignity and respect. The standards of these three jurists, whether as trial Judges or appellate Justices, are indeed extremely high. Magistrate Judge Svet's are not.

It is difficult to complain about a Magistrate Judge's demeanor in sentencing a defendant, convicted of the charges alleged. Human nature being what it is, few lawyers are discouraged about our judicial system when a trial judge vents his or her personal displeasure while sentencing a vicious murderer, rapist, child abuser, or anyone else convicted of a major crime. Many lawyers and most of the public, however, would lose both faith in our legal system and respect for any judge who insults a defendant for sitting in an elevator against the rules of the building.

The language used by Magistrate Judge Svet during sentencing did not demean Fr. Dear. It did destroy the Magistrate Judge's judicial integrity and dissed the dignity of the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico. While not a Federal Judge appointed for life by the President of the United States with the advice and consent of the senate, a Magistrate Judge is nevertheless a judicial officer and is held to the same high standards expected of any Judge.

The Federal Magistrate Judges Association states at: http://www.fedjudge.org/index.asp:

A United States Magistrate Judge is a federal trial judge appointed to serve in a United States district court for a term of eight years. He or she is appointed by the life-tenured federal judges of a district court, District Judges, who supervise the activities of the Magistrate Judges by assigning civil cases for jury or non-jury trial upon consent of the parties and for pre-trial matters. Similarly criminal cases are assigned to Magistrate Judges on the consent of the parties, except for the trial of felony cases.

Should anyone wish to inquire further about the conduct of Magistrate Judge Don J. Svet during the sentencing of Fr. John Dear, SJ, contact may probably be made with either the Chief Judge or the Chief Magistrate Judge in New Mexico.

The Honorable Martha Vázquez
Chief United States District Judge

United States District Court
Santiago E. Campos Courthouse
106 South Federal Place, Second Floor
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501

Chambers' Phone: (505) 988-6330
Chambers' Fax: (505) 988-6332
Chambers' Email: VazquezChambers@nmcourt.fed.us

The Honorable Lorenzo F. Garcia
Chief United States Magistrate Judge

United States District Court
333 Lomas Blvd. N.W., Ste 680
Albuquerque New Mexico 87102

Chambers' Phone: (505) 348-2320
Chambers' Fax: (505) 348-2324

-end-