The Vatican calls an early end to -- but doesn't abandon -- the old regime's inquisition into American nuns

NYT caption: "Pope Francis met with a delegation from the Leadership Conference of Women Religious at the Vatican on Thursday. Pool photo by L'Osservatore Romano"


"Women are not capable, in the Vatican's mind, of governing others or even themselves. Is it any wonder so many nuns have left the orders or avoided joining them? Who wants to be bullied?"

-- Garry Wills, writing in NYRB in 2012

by Ken

As of now, it looks as if you can choose your spin on the Vatican's sudden wrapping up, two years ahead of schedule, of its inquisition into the bad behavior of American nuns, which most rational observers was the only organized part of the Catholic Church that could be seen pursuing Jesus's mission under the increasingly medieval papacies of Pope Francis's predecessors, the monstrous John Paul II and the even more monstrous Pope Cardinal Ratguts.

It seems clear that the present pope wanted the matter put to rest, and it's perfectly plausible that if the inquisition, pushed elements of the unspeakably vile scum that had accumulated power under the authority of John Paul II and Ratguts, had proceeded to term under the regime of a pope in the same mold -- some of whom, like the unspeakable Cardinal Raymond Burke, have in fact been purged by Pope Francis -- the results would have been worse, that those people would have known how to really put those uppity bitches in their place.

As it is, however, it looks to me as if the reactionaries have gotten an awful lot of what they were crusading for, and the uppity bitches have indeed been put in their place.


HERE'S HOW THE NYT HAPPY-SPINS THE STORY

Laurie Goodstein's report, headlined "Vatican Ends Battle With U.S. Catholic Nuns' Group," sees sweetness and light emanating from Pope Francis's happy-days Vatican.

The Vatican has abruptly ended its takeover of the main leadership group of American nuns two years earlier than expected, allowing Pope Francis to put to rest a confrontation started by his predecessor that created an uproar among American Catholics who had rallied to the sisters’ defense.

Anticipating a visit by Francis to the United States in the fall, the Vatican and the American bishops were eager to resolve an episode that was seen by many Catholics as a vexing and unjust inquisition of the sisters who ran the church’s schools, hospitals and charities.

Under the previous pope, Benedict XVI, the Vatican’s doctrinal office had appointed three bishops in 2012 to overhaul the nuns’ group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, out of concerns that it had hosted speakers and published materials that strayed from Catholic doctrine on such matters as the all-male priesthood, birth control and sexuality, and the centrality of Jesus to the faith.

But Francis has shown in his two-year papacy that he is less interested in having the church police doctrinal boundaries than in demonstrating mercy and love for the poor and vulnerable — the very work that most of the women’s religious orders under investigation have long been engaged in.

Ending the standoff with the nuns is one of several course corrections that Francis has set in motion. He has also worked on reforming the Vatican Curia, the Vatican’s central administration, instituting tighter oversight of Vatican finances, and has created a commission to deal with sexual abuse by clergy members.

He has made no changes in doctrine — on Wednesday, he reiterated the church’s teaching that marriage can be only between a man and a woman — but Catholics worldwide say he has done much to make the church’s tone more welcoming.

On Thursday, that included calling an unexpected meeting with four of the leaders of the Leadership Conference. The four women were photographed in his office and said afterward in a statement that they were “deeply heartened” by Francis’ “expression of appreciation” for the lives and ministry of Catholic sisters.

“He met with them himself for almost an hour, and that’s an extravagant amount of papal time,” said Eileen Burke-Sullivan, a theologian and consultant for women’s religious orders and vice provost for mission and ministry at Creighton University, a Jesuit school in Omaha. “It’s about as close to an apology, I would think, as the Catholic Church is officially going to render.”

Francis has never talked explicitly in public about the imbroglio with American nuns. But he has spoken about creating “broader opportunities” for women in the church, and the value of nuns and priests in religious orders. He is a member of the Jesuit order.
A clear signal that the Vatican under Francis was taking a more conciliatory approach to American sisters came in December with the announcement of the conclusion of another, separate investigation of American women’s orders, which was known as an apostolic visitation. That process involved sending questionnaires to 350 religious communities and teams of “visitors” to 90 of them, asking about everything from their prayer practices to living arrangements.

Both of these investigations of American women’s religious orders began at the urging of American and some foreign prelates who accused the sisters of disobeying the bishops and departing from Catholic doctrine. It set off protests by Catholic laypeople across the country, who signed petitions and sent letters to the Vatican in defense of the sisters. . . .

BUT USA TODAY SAYS "THE HONEYMOON MAY BE OVER"

Cathy Lynn Grossman's report, headlined "Pope Francis to keep Vatican reins tight on U.S. nuns," begins:

The honeymoon between progressive Catholics in the USA and Pope Francis -- cheered for his humble ways and dedication to the poor -- may have ended Monday when he "reaffirmed" last year's stinging rebuke of most U.S. nuns.

Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group of religious order leaders who represent 57,000 American nuns and sisters, were told Pope Francis supports the Vatican takeover of the LCWR initiated by Pope Benedict XVI last year.

A controversial report issued last spring by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) ripped into the sisters for allegedly spending more energy on social justice causes than on promoting church doctrine and for espousing "radical feminism."

In June, Archbishop James Peter Sartain, archbishop of Seattle, and two other bishops were assigned to revamp the group's structure and programming. Although the sisters called the original CDF report a "scandal" based on "misconceptions," their members voted in August to prayerfully participate in the Vatican-run governing structure while maintaining what they called "mission integrity."

Monday, the nuns' top leaders and Sartain met with Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Muller, head of the CDF, in Rome. Muller told them that while the pope "expressed his gratitude" for their contributions to "schools, hospitals, and institutions of support for the poor," Francis also "reaffirmed" the Vatican takeover.

Muller told the sisters their job is to promote "cooperation" with local bishops and bishops' conferences, according to Religion News Service.

After Monday's meeting, the LCWR issued a statement calling their conversation "open and frank." . . .

WOULDN'T IT BE NICE TO KNOW WHICH IT IS?

Because this is one of the eye-poppingest smackdowns of the Ratguts regime. I wrote a couple of posts about it in May 2012 (most recently this one), heavily under the influence of a remarkable New York Review of Books blogpost by Garry Wills, later published in the NYRB of June 7, 2012, "Bullying the Nuns," which I had reposted here, in which, as I wrote, Wills "stood up for American nuns under attack by the Vatican (its dirty work done by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' designated pit bull, Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain)."

The Wills piece, I recalled, began:

The Vatican has issued a harsh statement claiming that American nuns do not follow their bishops' thinking. That statement is profoundly true. Thank God, they don't. Nuns have always had a different set of priorities from that of bishops. The bishops are interested in power. The nuns are interested in the powerless. Nuns have preserved Gospel values while bishops have been perverting them. The priests drive their own new cars, while nuns ride the bus (always in pairs). The priests specialize in arrogance, the nuns in humility.

As I wrote, "I reread the piece when I plucked the [June 7 NYRB] out of the mailbox, and it seems to me if anything more remarkable than it did orignally, and as always with Garry Wills, it defies -- no, positively mocks at -- the impulse to compress. It includes, among many other things, a stunning tribute to his seventh-grade teacher -- 'Sister John Joseph when I met her, but she recovered her real name after the [Second Vatican] Council, and as Anne O’Connor congratulated me on anything I wrote,' having 'kept in touch with me for all the years until her death in 1996."

If, as it appears, the Vatican has knuckled under to the troglodytes, and returned to the John Paul II-Ratguts attitude toward women, "Them Bitches Be Hos," it might help them begin to develop a glimmering of the appropriate sense of shame to reread Wills's tribute to his old teacher.

Anne O'Connor was just the kind of nun the Vatican is now intent on punishing. She had been a social worker before she became a nun, work that she loved and went back to several times as a Dominican. She was quick to shed the old habit (which was designed to disguise the fact that there was a woman somewhere in that voluminous disguising of hair, breasts, and hips), and quick to take back her own name. After she took on several high offices in her order, she became the mother provincial of the California branch of the Dominican order during the 1960s, coping with the changes of that volatile era on her college campuses.

Now the Vatican says that nuns are too interested in "the social Gospel" (which is the Gospel), when they should be more interested in Gospel teachings about abortion and contraception (which do not exist). Nuns were quick to respond to the AIDS crisis, and to the spiritual needs of gay people-- which earned them an earlier rebuke from Rome. They were active in the civil rights movement. They ran soup kitchens.

"This," I wrote, "is vintage Garry Wills, reminding us seemingly offhandedly that what the bishops are denouncing as 'the social Gospel' is in fact the Gospel, whereas the things that now obsess the Church fathers and their bully-bishops, like abortion and contraception, have never had any place in the actual Gospel." Small wonder, then, that the Vatican, as Wills wrote --

stripped the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing most American nuns, of its powers of self-government, maintaining that its members have made statements that "disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals." Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle has taken control of the Conference, writing new laws for it, supplanting its leadership, and banning "political" activity (which is what Rome calls social work). Women are not capable, in the Vatican's mind, of governing others or even themselves. Is it any wonder so many nuns have left the orders or avoided joining them? Who wants to be bullied?

I hope American Catholics, and American Catholic women in particular, are paying close attention.

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A conspicuous target of ex-Pope Cardinal Ratguts says, "It's fun to be Catholic again"

"It is clear to [Father Tom] Reese," writes Sally Quinn, "that Francis would not have been Benedict's choice to succeed him."


"I was running a journal of opinion and they only wanted one opinion. They wanted an echo chamber of what was coming out of the Vatican."

-- Father Tom Reese, quoted by Sally Quinn

by Ken

"I've got a very good feeling about this new Catholic Pope Francis I," Howie wrote on Saturday ("What Does Santorum Think Of The Pope Now?"), "and have since the day he was chosen to replace the Nazi Pope someone seems to have made resign."

When it comes to stuff like popes -- stuff that normally comes in various sizes and shapes but in only one flavor -- I'm more of a wait-and-see guy. I look at it this way: Nobody accused the College of Cardinals of being a conclave of MENSA guys, but they know which side their communion wafers are buttered on, and they certainly didn't intend to elect a Pope David Souter.

Well, Sally Quinn has found a fellow who's a pretty close observer of both tone and subtance as it comes out of the Vatican, and he doesn't have any doubt at all that this pope has already brought about an enormous, almost unimaginable change in the way the Church does its business. His name is Tom Reese, and he's a priest, who not that long ago was editor of a Jesuit magazine called America, until he ran afoul of none other than still-Cardinal Ratguts when he was still the previous monster-pope's right-hand hatchet man on matters of doctrine, meaning he was his point man in the all remaining elements of human decency from their Church. So successful was Ratguts at this purge of principle from the cult that he was promoted to succeed his master as monster-pope.

The crucial bullet point is in Sally's lead: ""Five years ago, I would have been afraid of saying anything like what the pope said in his [recent] interview. I'm ecstatic. I haven't been this hopeful about the church in decades." As she puts it a few grafs down, "It is clear to Reese that Francis would not have been Benedict's choice to succeed him."

I'm going to try to encourage you to read the whole piece, because I think you're going to enjoy making Father Tom's acquaintance. As was so often the case during the reign of terror of the monster-popes, the people the Church hierarchy should have been most proud of, should have made its public face to the Catholic and non-Catholic world, instead found themselves at the Monster-Pope Enemies List.

Pope Francis and the church's new attitude

Friday, September 27

"Five years ago, I would have been afraid of saying anything like what the pope said in his [recent] interview," says the Rev. Tom Reese. "I'm ecstatic. I haven't been this hopeful about the church in decades."

Father Reese had good reason to be afraid. One of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's last acts before becoming Pope Benedict XVI was to fire Reese, who was then editor in chief of the Jesuit magazine "America," which published the Pope Francis interview last week. Ratzinger fired Reese while Pope John Paul II was dying in 2005. It wasn't the editorials in "America" that riled Ratzinger. "I never had an editorial about abortion, women priests or gay marriage," he says. "That would have been touching the third rail. It was mostly a dialogue."

How things have changed. As it turns out, Reese was ahead of his time, espousing for years the views that Francis espouses. And he paid the price for it. Put another way, it is clear to Reese that Francis would not have been Benedict's choice to succeed him.

According to Reese, the Vatican had indicated its displeasure at "America" for five years before Reese was fired. They accused him of being anti-hierarchical. But the "high point of my career," Reese said, were two articles he published by Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican official in charge of ecumenics. Kasper challenged Ratzinger on church theology. Reese submitted the galleys to Ratzinger, who wrote a response. "That was the kind of communication I wanted to have in the magazine," he says. Big mistake, it turns out. Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the watchdog of the Vatican.  Word came from Rome: "Reese has got to go," he says. "I was running a journal of opinion and they only wanted one opinion. They wanted an echo chamber of what was coming out of the Vatican."

Once fired, Reese went to the Woodstock Theological Center, which closed in June. He is now on sabbatical before returning in January to a job with the National Catholic Reporter. The church won't be able to fire him this time. It's an independent publication, unlike "America."

 "Francis is saying, ‘Get out in the streets and do something. You'll make mistakes. That's fine,' " says Reese. "Staying in the sacristy is killing the church. We need to get out to the people, not wait for them to come to us." He says the most important challenge is "how to preach the gospel in a way that is understandable and attractive. . . . We need to take the best thinking of our generation and explain Christianity to our generation. That will take hard work and [require] experimentation. In the last three decades the church has been unable to have these discussions. Now we'll be able to."

Reese says, "I'm very optimistic. Already I've seen tremendous change in the attitude and the culture of the church. This church sees leadership as service. They don't want bishops to think they are princes," Reese says. "We've been burying the lead. The important thing is compassion for others, concern for the poor, the simplicity of the church."  What people don't need, he says, "is leading with rules and regulations, admonitions and finger wagging." Francis is "not afraid of change, and discussion. He has respect for the history and the tradition of the church. But instead of seeing the past as some idealized state we must return to, we learn from that and now we move into the future. It's a journey of faith."

Today Reese thinks that "we're going back to where we were after the Second Vatican Council, before things closed down. Things got more open to discussion and debate." Now he says there is hope for reform.

"Pope Francis has even said we don't have an adequate theology of women," Reese says.

"Today I don't think there would be a problem with an editorial calling for optional celibacy," he says. Before Francis became pope he wrote a book called "On Heaven and Earth," says Reese, in which he talked about "celibacy being a law, not a matter of faith, that could change." For instance, Reese says now that he would feel "much freer to write or talk about supporting optional celibacy."

"It's fun to be a religion reporter again. For a while it felt like being on the crime beat. It's fun to be Catholic again."

#

For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

For the new pope, tell your cardinal to vote for Chuck Lorre (pass it on!)

Chuck 'n' Charlie: Not to worry -- given the current state of relations between them, it seems highly unlikely that Charlie would be popping in at the Vatican (with or without "goddesses") to visit Pope Chuck.

"[D]on't get me started on the demographic potential of a TV show entitled 'Pope Chuck, P.I.' (Kiss the ring, or get punched by it!)"

- from Chuck Lorre's vanity card (#409) proposing
himself as an "outside the box" candidate for pope

by Ken

I was turning over ideas to maybe kick off a weekly series of musings on TV tonight when I got derailed.

As to the TV musings, I haven't done much writing about TV lately, I think because I've been feeling less and less confident that what I'm looking at (let alone looking for) has any relevance to anybody else. I'm not sure why I should be the only person in the world who seems to pay attention to this factor, but it's made it tough.

But for tonight I had this idea of writing about the purge I just did on my DVR "Series Manager," finally freeing myself from shows I've stopped watching anyway and finally got tired of deleting every week. (It can be really tough with the cable shows, because if you delete one "scheduled recording," the device will attempt -- helpfully, it thinks -- to substitute another showing of the same damned episode, and will keep doing it as long as there are other showings to schedule-and-delete.) So I wouldn't be so much "reviewing" these shows as explaining the decision to sever those DVR ties.

Meanwhile, while I was turning these ideas over, I was watching this week's Big Bang Theory, reflecting that you could take any two minutes at random from the show's entire run to date and that would represent a vastly greater achievement in terms of creativity, character insight, human empathy, intellectual seriousness, and entertainment value than the entire bloated corpus of these HBO and Showtime shows I've finally flushed. And then came the vanity card came on, and I realized I had to stop the presses, or whatever the blog equivalent of stopping the presses is, to spread the word about this bold proposal from the show's runner.

I myself have made my own suggestion for a new pope: one of those pesky nuns who have been causing such agita to outgoing Pope Cardinal Ratguts and the rest of his cadre of deviant sociopathic Church overlords. Of course I have no standing in matters papal, but surely it has occurred to you faithful Catholics that neither do you! You're just going to let the old cardinals bicker and come up with some other repellent scumbag and you can all pretend that this dingbat too is infallible.

(I was delighted, by the way, to see that my idea of one of those pesky nuns for pope also occurred to E. J. Dionne Jr. Sorry I can't find a link, but that piece seemed to me at the time to disappear when E.J.'s studiously fair-minded appraisal of Ratguts appeared.)

Anyway, I think it's time for you Catholics to start kicking up a fuss to make sure your cardinal knows that you're an interested party. (That's assuming you have a cardinal. As I understand it, you aren't automatically entitled to one. You get a bishop and very likely arching over him an archbishop, you lucky devils, but only the pope can determine if and when your archbishop is entitled to a cardinal's beanie. You folks in the L.A. area, for example, are still having to make do with just an archbishop. He will no doubt be elevated by the next pope, since it's unimaginable that L.A. won't have a cardinal. But for now, remember that you still have a conclave-eligible cardinal in the person of your former "ecclesiastical prince," that douchebag Mahony. So e-mail him; I'm sure he'll be interested in your views, just as he always was.)

Now Chuck L may indeed be an, um, unexpected candidate for Bishop of Rome. But I can pretty well guarantee you that he's a better prospect than any of the slugs who'll be handicapped as potential candidates between now and the day the white smoke blows.

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #409

I'm a big believer in the old maxim, "If you don't ask, you don't get." With that in mind, I'd like to throw caution to the wind and ask the Vatican's College of Cardinals to consider me for the job opening that recently became available. Now, before you say anything, let me be the first to point out the many reasons "why not." I'm Jewish. I've never understood the hoopla over the Old Testament, with all the smiting and begetting. I'm a twice- divorced sitcom writer with a shady past. And perhaps most importantly, I look silly in a hat. No argument, the cons are plentiful. But let's take a moment to examine the pros. First, I am completely untouched by the abuse scandal that is currently engulfing the church. I can stand on the balcony that overlooks St. Peter's Square and say to the adoring masses, with a straight, albeit Semitic face, "Folks, I've never even met an altar boy." With me as your pontiff you buy yourself some serious deniability. Next, believe it or not, I happen to be a very spiritually inclined guy. I would love a job where my primary thrust was encouraging prayer, meditation and acts of loving kindness. (Although in the interest of full disclosure, we would have to negotiate some common sense middle ground for any other thrusting I might want to do. It'd be a shame to waste adoring masses as long as they consist entirely of consenting adults.) And finally, there's the issue of my name. How can a billion true believers not smile and breathe a sigh of relief when the white smoke coming from the chimney is to announce the investiture of Pope Chuck? Cardinals, I want to assure you that while my papacy is a little "outside the box," you can rest assured that I would passionately carry the good word to all the poor and the downtrodden, beginning with a holy visit to Saint-Tropez, or maybe the Bahamas or Turks & Caicos. And just think of the marketing opportunities! How is "Pope Chuck" not the name of the next Adam Sandler movie? What's to stop me from busting a move on the balcony and starting a dance craze called "Pope Chuckin'"? And don't get me started on the demographic potential of a TV show entitled "Pope Chuck, P.I." (Kiss the ring, or get punched by it!) Yes, this transition represents an incredible opportunity for the church to be reborn. And at the end of the day, isn't that the name of the game?

Are you going to tell me Chuck L wouldn't look better than Pope Cardinal Ratguts in this new-style pope hat? I'm not saying he'd look great in this monstrosity, but he could hardly help looking better, no?

#

The pope: Th-th-that's all, folks!

"My mother -- she had a lovely Quebec name, Lucienne -- was the sort of faithful Catholic who believed history was destined to leave us in a good place. So she was not the sort to close herself off to what she could learn from what was going on around her. . . .

"Because of her and my dad, I always bridle when people declare themselves 'self-made.' Such people may exist (socially if not biologically), but I’m skeptical and would never make that claim for myself. We can never pretend that we were wise enough to have chosen great parents."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column
"Nothing self-made about me"

by Ken

Howie told me this morning I could have the pope -- if I want him. I had to think about that, mostly to see if I could think of anything or anyone I might want less. I could probably make a list of those, but it would run to things like especially painful incurable ailments, far-right-wing politicos, and many vegetables (I could list them individually, but they pretty much know who they are).

So no, I don't want Pope Cardinal Ratguts, but maybe we ought to dispose of him now. In which connection I might say that the one thing I don't wish him is what he may have to endure between now and the end -- according to some reports, the very thing he witnessed and is determined not to repeat in the slow, agonized leave-taking of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II. Of course there's nothing he can do, at least nothing that his Church allows, to circumvent such physical horrors as fate may have in store for him; his concern, if genuine, is presumably to protect the papacy from that slow withering.

Then again, we can't casually dismiss the suspicions being voiced in some quarters as to the extent of His Holiness's present infirmity, that it may be a convenient cover for a discreet slipping away a step ahead of the scandal sheriff, possibly in the form of radioactive fallout from the graphic revelations of the pedophile-protection racket of former Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony. Does anyone really think the incriminating evidence isn't going to implicate the man who was directly overseeing him, Defender of the Faith Cardinal Ratguts?

At the same time, we have accounts of people who claim to have had recent personal contact with Pope Cardinal Ratguts and insist he's so fragile, he can't be touched. Well, in the absence of actual information, there's not much to speculate about.

Nor does there seem to me much to speculate about in the selection of a successor. Not the identity per se, or even whether he will be -- gasp! -- a non-European, or even -- gasper! -- a person of color. This is unknown to me, though I imagine large numbers of the cardinals, especially the Italians, would have cows at either outcome. (Not to mention the supposedly increasingly out-of-control Curia, said to have become even more unmanageable under their present supreme manager.) No, I'm merely going out on a limb to venture that the new pope will be a monster.

How could he not be? It's what his electors want. His predecessor will have been a monster, and his predecessor was a monster, though an infinitely more craftily concealed one. It seems safe to predict that the cardinals will be more careful about their new public face than they were the last time they had to pick a new infallible one. (And, bearing in mind that His Holiness has indicated that he will not participate in the proceedings -- after all, for some 600 years now new popes have been chosen with the old ones in the ground, -- the aforementioned Cardinal Mahony, who as a retired cardinal has voting privileges, has said that he will indeed participate.)

But that's just the public face. Talk that an American might be in the running for the succession focuses now -- now, that is, that Cardinal Mahony is no longer talked about as pope material -- on New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan, and from the Church's standpoint it's a shame that really there's no possibility of an American succession. A shame for them because Cardinal Dolan, while just as committed to the Church's implacable authoritarianism, repression, and bigotry, is as masterful at the PR game as Ratguts is catastrophically bad. And for all the ferocity of the hierarchy's intramural politics, if they do in fact turn to their one major contemporary growth area, the Third World, they will likely come up with one of their most intransigent ideologues.

If the Church had any interest in its future as a viability earthly organization, its elders would look in another direction altogether. I'm not sure that anyone else will see the connection, but I found myself connecting to a column just published by one of its most honorable parishioners, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. It's a column about his mother, triggered by the circumstance that Friday would have been her 100th birthday. Even by E.J.'s standards it's a beautiful piece of writing, and I hope you'll read the whole thing.

She died in 1995, and my sister and I have spoken often about the extraordinary social changes she came to terms with and was part of. . . . In retrospect, I have been struck by how sensible my mom was through the social chaos, even though those were especially jarring times in our household. . .

As if 1968 wasn't a turbulent enough year, for the Dionnes it meant the sudden death of E.J. Jr.'s father, days before the election.

Family values defined her.

But as the first member of her family to go to college -- and at a time when few women got the chance -- she had an instinctive understanding of what feminism was about. She did not like the Vietnam War, so she sympathized with protests against it, though the movement's most radical elements didn't speak to her. She still honored my dad's Army service in World War II. As I have written before, she was an early supporter of the gay rights cause, partly because her dear godson was gay and she could not abide bigotry against him, one of the most openhearted people she knew.

And she was squarely against government cutbacks when it came to schools or libraries. When federal funds were slashed in the early 1980s, she helped save the storefront branch library she presided over in my hometown of Fall River, Mass. She didn't really need the job -- she worked full time until she was 75 for very little, considering what she gave up in Social Security benefits. But she knew the literary haven she ran on Pleasant Street was the place where many low-income children first came in contact with books. One of the joys of her life was to foster love affairs between kids and reading.

In pieces E.J. has written about his father (to which he provides a link), a dentist with a passionate interest in politics and government, he makes clear that his father was a deep-rooted conservative, though father and son came together politically over opposition to the Vietnam War.

My mom was no reflexive liberal. She started out a conservative and still held to most of her old-fashioned values even as her political views moved leftward. She was a public-employee union member but got impatient when the union blocked reforms she thought would improve services. (She complained to the union business agent about this.)

And she was very old school on matters of personal responsibility -- in education, marriage, parenting, friendship and civic duty. When she died at age 82, she was serving on the board of our local community college. She loved the place for the opportunities it gave students from modest backgrounds who were willing to work hard.

NO, I'M NOT NOMINATING MRS. DIONNE
FOR POPE. (BUT -- )

Obviously! I mean, she's dead. But if the Church really wishes to live long and prosper, it needs to acknowledge and build on the values of the people who show it in the best light, as a force for morality and humanity. It occurs to me that one thing the Church elders could do is to pick a woman as pope.

And not some Maggie Thatcher-type man-thuggerish-type female. No, I'm thinking more along the lines of those American nuns that Pope Cardinal Ratguts has devoted so much of his presumably waning papal energies to beating up on. Those nuns are about the last surviving vestige of the official Church that stands up for the dignity of humanity. How about installing a group of them as co-popes?


E.J. HAS A DIFFERENT TAKE ON POPE CARDINAL RATGUTS

"Pope Benedict’s legacy is one of paradox" is the title of his retrospective.

Liberal Catholics (myself included) thus greeted Benedict's election as pope in 2005 with a certain alarm. In the end, Benedict was somewhat less conservative than liberals feared -- and somewhat less conservative than conservatives hoped. His most important encyclicals were decidedly progressive on economic matters, and he put far more emphasis on God's love than on His judgment.

The paradoxes of Benedict -- and perhaps of Catholicism itself -- were visible in two statements he made last Christmas. Progressives could only welcome an op-ed piece he wrote for the Financial Times on Dec. 19 in which he declared that "Christians fight poverty out of a recognition of the supreme dignity of every human being, created in God's image and destined for eternal life."

He added: "They work for more equitable sharing of the earth's resources out of a belief that -- as stewards of God's creation -- we have a duty to care for the weakest and most vulnerable. Christians oppose greed and exploitation . . . . The belief in the transcendent destiny of every human being gives urgency to the task of promoting peace and justice for all."

Yet he followed this with a Christmas message denouncing gay marriage, declaring that that gays and lesbians were turning their backs on the "essence of the human creature" and denying "their nature. . . .

Yeah, well, I'll still go with "monster."

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The Pope vs Paul Ryan

Ryan has long tried to fashion himself an image for Wisconsin voters as a sturdy conservative Catholic. He's certainly been fanatically anti-Choice but Pope Benedict's New Year mass shows the basic divergence between the Catholicism of Ryan's anti-Choice/anti-gay zealotry and the Catholicism of one of the most conservative Popes in the last century. Ryan may try to pass himself off as a loyal son of the Catholic Church but he has always picked and chosen which parts of Catholicism he embraces and which parts he discards. And his stronger loyalty to Ayn Rand's reactionary social theology is what brings up Ryan's latest problem with actual Catholicism-- the kind Jesus Christ preached, not the kind crooked hucksters like Grover Norquist, Joe Pitts and Richard Land preach.

No doubt the Pope had right-wing politicians like Ryan in mind when he talked about "hotbeds of tension and conflict caused by growing instances of inequality between rich and poor" and when he denounced "the prevalence of a selfish and individualistic mindset which also finds expression in an unregulated capitalism, various forms of terrorism and criminality." That pretty much sums up the Paul Ryan wing of the Republican Party.

Even a Pope as conservative in the extreme as Benedict has been mortified with the excesses of the kind of unrestrained, unregulated greed-obsessed capitalism promoted by Ryan and his extremist colleagues. He's been calling for a new economic model and the kinds of ethical regulations for markets Ryan and the GOP oppose with all their "souls," saying the global financial crisis was proof that capitalism does not protect society's weakest members.

The Ryan wing of the congressional party led the fight against the Grand Bargain-- although in the end Ryan, a Wall Street shill at his core, voted YES with Boehner and against Cantor and McCarthy. And this was a Grand Bargain their own propaganda agents, like Charles Krauthammer, called a "complete surrender" and a victory for the Democrats (if not for the middle class, for Inside the Beltway Democratic careerists and their own agenda, which included-- in the Grand Bargain-- outrageous subsidies for favorite corporate entities from NASCAR, the railroad industry, the film industry, the oil industry and, of course, Goldman Sachs).

How San Francisco Archbishop-to-be Sal could make honest thugs of his fellow Catholic cultists

It's only fair to ask, if married people can't produce an offspring within a reasonable period, why should they be allowed to continue perpetrating this fraud?

by Ken

Friday night I made what I like to think was a startling suggestion in passing along news of the latest gift from the Vatican to its U.S. worshippers, the appointment of rising-star thug= Bishop Salvatore Cordileone to be the new archbishop of San Francisco, the immediate superior of the bishops of Oakland, San Jose, Santa Rosa, Stockton, Sacramento, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Reno and Salt Lake City.

Let's not kid ourselves about who their real boss is. As with the whole of the Catholic priesthood, it's the circle of mental defectives and moral deviants surrounding Pope Cardinal Ratguts. As Ratty nears the end of his reign of horror, he can look back with pride on the purge of the priesthood he carried out, first as the right-hand enforcer of his superthug predecessor, the sainted Pope John Paul II, and then as master in his own right. They made it a priority to rid their clergy of men who had it in their head that their calling had to do with helping people live better and more fulfilling lives -- the sort of thing that Jesus would have recognized as "Christian," which has become a hanging offense in the New Medieval Church.

But the proposition I advanced had to do with a mission the newly crowned Archbishop Sal could have, to lift the Church out of the muck of dishonesty it's in.

NO, I HAVEN'T GONE TOTALLY NUTS. I DON'T SEE THE
ARCHBISHOP SUDDENLY "DOING THE RIGHT THING"

I suggested that Bishop Sal's elevation, rather than being greeted as yet another blow for sociopathic authoritarianism by that master sociopath Pope Ratty,t could be viewed as an opportunity for the Church finally to throw off its deep encrustation of lies and admit a measure of truth to its program. How? Glad you asked. As I wrote:

By inaugurating a thoroughgoing purge of the rolls of Catholic marrieds along the lines set out in his declaration of marital principle above: voiding the marriages of all non-procreating Catholic couples and at the same time committing the Catholic political machine to automatic denial of the legal right to marriage, and of course to any and all legal benefits that marriage may confer, for all couples who violate their legal obligation to procreate.

As this would require a certain amount of redirection of official Catholic activity -- not a change in actual policy (it's merely a technical clarification, after all, to eliminate the glaring dishonesty of its present activity) but an unquestioned change in execution of that policy -- that I want to reserve a fuller discussion of it to tomorrow.

WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO BISHOP SAL'S WORDS

Our crucial text here was quoted in Chris Geidner's BuzzFeed report, "The New Archbishop Of San Francisco Gave 'Tremendous Help' To Prop 8 Supporters." As Chris wrote, in an interview with the Catholic News Agency earlier this month, Cordileone said there could only be "one definition of marriage."

The bishop explained that this issue is of crucial importance because “we cannot have two different definitions of marriage simultaneously in the country.”

“Only one definition of marriage can stand,” he said. “This is not expanding the right of marriage. It’s changing the definition, or taking away something is essential to marriage – that it’s the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of the binding of the two and the procreation and education of the next generation of offspring.”

Now prominent Catholics say stuff like this all the time. I think for once we need to pay close attention. What is this one-and-only definition of marriage?

"the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of the binding of the two and the procreation and education of the next generation of offspring"

This is so clear that we can only regret that the Church has been so namby-pamby about enforcing its only acceptable definition of marriage.

"The binding of the two" can only be a bit of description, not part of the definition, because after all any two people, irrespective of gender, could be "bound." So who are these two people who are to be bound? Two people who are responsible for "the procreation and education of the next generation of offspring." And even a moment's reflection will show that the crucial component here is procreation. After all, the responsibility for the education of the next generation of offspring could be undertaken by people of any gender. Anyone who believes that two men or two women can't do this just as effectively as a man and a woman is on the face of it a moron, and too stupid to be worth paying the tiniest speck of attention to, beyond trying to help the poor soul to a mental-health facility that might be able to provide compassionate help.

Of course that isn't the Church position, which is that two men or two women aren't competent to raise a child. And so for once I think it's time for the Church to stop lying or obfuscating: The crucial element is procreation. By simple reading of Bishop Sal's words, it's clear that procreation is the necessary element, and the absence of procreation is a dealbreaker for marriage.

IT'S TIME FOR THE CHURCH FATHERS TO COME
OUT OF THE CLOSET, AS IT WERE, AND ADMIT --

that they've been fudging, pulling their punches, on the subject of marriage. The reality is that for the True Medieval Church, any marriage that doesn't include procreation is in reality fraudulent. It's time for the fathers to come clean, and rid its marriage rolls of the perpetrators of those frauds.

As a practical consequence, it hardly need be said, since the Church never questions that it has authority over the legal as well as religious status of those of its worshippers who choose to take on the sacrament of marriage, it will naturally execute its responsibilities to correct the error with regard to the legal marital status of its new un-marrieds. And that means that authorities at the local, state, and federal levels will need to be informed clearly that so-and-so and such-and-such not only are no longer married but in fact never were.

The consequences could be severe. At least I hope they would be. Surely there should be all sorts of civil and possibly criminal infractions to be explored for the period that the persons in question were claiming -- erroneously, it now turns out -- to have been married. And I'm sure the Church fathers will pursue these matters as zealously as they have pursued the prevention of marriage for categories of people they chose to bar from it.

TRICKY QUESTION: HOW LONG A GRACE PERIOD
SHOULD THE PROVISIONALLY MARRIED BE ALLOWED?

You want to be fair. After all, it's not as if the human biological instrument functions with machinelike provision. My first thought was, perhaps, two years and, if you can't get the job done, yer out!!! I think perhaps two years offers a plausible compromise between making sure people are serious about marriage and allowing for life's vicissitudes and whatever.

Naturally it's possible to imagine a more severe position. Howie, for example, says his position would be nine months -- "and not a day more." And it's hard to argue that the Church has an obligation to be more lenient on this crucial issue of doctrine. After all, the current Vatican cabal has never been noted for being wishy-woshy in matters of doctrine.

The lucky thing is that the Church has the perfect arbiter, having the good fortune to have on its payroll an infallible pope! Which is just what you want in a situation like this. Otherwise there might be endless debates about this issue of the grace-period term. With an infallible pope, however, what he says goes! And if he gets it wrong, well, hey, he's not going to live that much longer. Maybe the next guy will be more correctly infallible. (This is why it's so important to choose a pope with care.)

BUT WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE WHO FOR WHATEVER
REASON, LIKE HEALTH OR AGE, CAN'T PROCREATE?

As Jesus used to say in such cases, "Tough noogies." This is marriage we're talking about, after all. There's no room for sloppy sentimentality.

AND WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE WHO DON'T
WANT TO PROCREATE?

There are, by the way, Catholics who sincerely don't wish to procreate. I don't mean just people who want to control when and how often they procreate, who are already on shaky ground. No, not shaky, impossible -- after all, the official cult policy is that any interference with procreation except by the rhythm method is absolutely, no-exceptions forbidden. Use any other method of birth control and you're headed straight for Hell. What can one say, then, about people Cathollics who simply don't want to have children? It's the Church's problem, of course, so it's merely my sideline opinion that any self-respecting Catholic cultmaster would want to see such people hunted like vermin and at the very least excommunicated, possibly executed.

But one thing is unequivocally clear: Anyone who doesn't intend to procreate can't be allowed to marry, and any such marriages that have somehow slipped through the organization's quality controls have to be voided ASAP and exposed to all concerned, including the proper authorities as the deliberate fraud it was.

WE KNOW THIS IS WHAT THE CHURCH FATHERS ALWAYS
MEANT -- NOW'S THEIR CHANCE TO BE TRUTHFUL ABOUT IT

It will be good for their souls, and for the souls of the suckers people whose lives are dictated by their crackpot whims. As for the possibility of overreach, while it's true that the Church has taken unto itself the right to rule on the qualifications for marriage of all citizens, not just Catholics, the reality is that the new Church position on the enforcement of marriage can only be applied to Catholics.

And those Catholics will know in their hearts who they're in bondage to.

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Hey, crackpot zealot Archbishop-to-be Sal, you could be just the guy to lead the Church out of its cesspool of lying doody-sackery

The Vatican Friday announced that Bishop Salvatore Cordileone would become the Archbishop of San Francisco, a massive archdiocese that includes the bishops of Oakland, San Jose, Santa Rosa, Stockton, Sacramento, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Reno and Salt Lake City.

Normally such announcements are relatively non-newsworthy outside the Catholic community. But Bishop Cordileone is different: During his tenure as Bishop of Oakland and in his time before that as an auxiliary bishop in San Diego, Cordileone has risen to become one of the key figures in the Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage not only California but beyond the state’s borders.

-- from Chris Geidner's BuzzFeed report, "The New Archbishop Of San Francisco Gave 'Tremendous Help' To Prop 8 Supporters"

by Ken

Comes the (hardly shocking) news that the Vatican is rewarding yet another of its prized authoritarian zealots, Oakland's "Bishop Sal," with the powerful archbishopric see of San Francisco, which as our colleague Chris Geidner notes includes the bishopric sees of Oakland, San Jose, Santa Rosa, Stockton, Sacramento, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Reno, and Salt Lake City, a vast swath of Catholic terra.

There's no reason why the Nazipope and his loyal henchnazis should even blanch lightly at Bishop Sal's background. American Catholics, however, might want to take note of this latest proud instance of Rome grinding its heel in any vestige of opposition to its reign of ideological terror -- in case they missed Pope Cardinal Ratguts's recent blitzkrieg against the American nuns, one of the last remaining vestiges of Catholic offficialdom which professes and practices actual moral principles.

You see, as Chris Geidner notes, Bishop Sal's signal accomplishment and credential is his apparently crucial role in engineering the passage of California's Proposition 8, the Church's successful crusade to strip same-sex couples in that state of the legal -- not religious, but legal -- right to marry.

Here's more of Chris Geidner's report:

In an interview with the Catholic News Agency earlier this month, Cordileone said there could only be "one definition of marriage":

The bishop explained that this issue is of crucial importance because “we cannot have two different definitions of marriage simultaneously in the country.”

“Only one definition of marriage can stand,” he said. “This is not expanding the right of marriage. It’s changing the definition, or taking away something is essential to marriage – that it’s the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of the binding of the two and the procreation and education of the next generation of offspring.”

For a video of Cordileone talking at length about this issue, see this video at the Marriage Matters To Kids website. He also, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, is the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage.

Here's Cordileone speaking at the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Religious Freedom Confererence on May 24 of this year:



But it is Cordileone's history supporting Proposition 8 — which has been struck down by two courts as unconstitutional since its 2008 passage and could be headed to the Supreme Court in the coming year — that has gotten the most attention. As Chris Thompson put it in a 2009 article in the East Bay Express, "Father Sal," as he is known, also is "The Father of Proposition 8." From Thompson's story:

What almost no one knows is that without Bishop Sal, gay men and lesbians would almost surely still be able to get married today. As an auxiliary bishop in San Diego, Cordileone played an indispensable role in conceiving, funding, organizing, and ultimately winning the campaign to pass Proposition 8. It was Bishop Sal and a small group of Catholic leaders who decided that they had to amend the state constitution. It was Bishop Sal who found the first major donor and flushed the fledgling campaign with cash. It was Bishop Sal who personally brought in the organization that took the lead on the petition drive. And it was Bishop Sal who coordinated the Catholic effort with evangelical churches around the state. Bishop Sal even helped craft the campaign's rhetorical strategy, sitting in on focus groups to hone the message of Proposition 8.

In the case against Proposition 8 brought by the American Foundation for Equal Rights, that story was shown to have a basis in fact. In an email from the Ron Prentice, the chairman of the group that advanced the proposition, that was produced as part of the evidence in the case, a summary of efforts of the supporters of the proposition included this:

Never in California history has an initiative qualified without the help of paid signature gathering. This is where the cooperation of Bishop Cordileone and the San Diego Catholic community offered tremendous help. The bishop sought the help of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), led by Maggie Gallagher, herself a Catholic, with a national reputation for her research and writing on marriage. Gallagher and NOM's executive director, Brian Brown, assisted the bishop in articulating the critical need for a constitutional marriage amendment to hundreds of donors and the national office of the Knights of Columbus, ultimately amounting to more than $900,000 in gifts directed to signature gathering.

In another email from Prentice, read into a deposition of one of AFER's witnesses, the head of the Proposition 8 campaign gave more details about the signature gathering effort:

The total projected cost for the qualification effort has been set at 1.5 million. Thus far, 1.25 million has been raised and spent. The monies have come from four primary sources thus far: The Catholic community of San Diego, due to the involvement of Auxillary Bishop Cordileone, Fieldstead & Company, who pledged 50 cents for each dollar raised in January for the effort, Focus on the Family, and small gifts from direct mail efforts by ProtectMarriage.com.

Cordileone formally will be installed to his new post at an October mass, according to a church spokesman.

HOW (ARCH)BISHOP SAL COULD LEAD THE CHURCH
OUT OF ITS CESSPOOL OF LYING DOODY-SACKERY

At first one might merely say, "Well, that son of a bitch Pope Cardinal Ratguts has done it again! Found just the right guy to solidify the slimification of the U.S. hierarchy. But I'm going to argue that the appointment of Bishop Sal to the San Francisco job in fact offers him and his Church an opportunity to make honest whoring sociopaths of themselves instead of the pathologically lying scum they've become.

How? By inaugurating a thoroughgoing purge of the rolls of Catholic marrieds along the lines set out in his declaration of marital principle above: voiding the marriages of all non-procreating Catholic couples and at the same time committing the Catholic political machine to automatic denial of the legal right to marriage, and of course to any and all legal benefits that marriage may confer, for all couples who violate their legal obligation to procreate.

As this would require a certain amount of redirection of official Catholic activity -- not a change in actual policy (it's merely a technical clarification, after all, to eliminate the glaring dishonesty of its present activity) but an unquestioned change in execution of that policy -- that I want to reserve a fuller discussion of it to tomorrow.

#

Great idea, cue cards in church! Now Catholics won't even have to memorize their rote responses!

Probably it won't be these exact cue cards that'll be used in Catholic churches, but it's nice to see clergyfolk adapting to the times.


"Priests have been discussing the changes in homilies, in notices in parish bulletins, and in workshops and webinars. Many clergy plan to use poster-sized laminated cue cards for parishioners as the new text is introduced."

-- from "American Catholics Prep for New Mass
Translation," by Rachel Zoll, on HuffPost Religion

by Ken

When I saw this tease on AOL yesterday, I couldn't resist.

Getty Images

Big Change Coming to Catholic Mass

For decades, when priests offer the blessing 'Lord be with you,' the response has been, 'And also with you.' Now, that's about to change.

What new response will be as of Nov. 27

I just had to click through to find out the answer. Probably you already know. Hey, why don't we find out, with a ---

DWT POP QUIZ
Are you ready for the new English version of the Mass?

TODAY'S QUESTION: Which of the following is the correct new response to the priest's "Lord be with you"?

(a) "Or without you."
(b) "And a top o' the mornin' to you too!"
(c) "Who loves ya, baby?"
(d) "So's your old man."
(e) "Where's the beef?"
(f) "Double, double, toil and trouble."
(g) "Maybe yes, maybe no. Who wants to know?"
(h) "And with your spirit."
(i) "Have a nice day."
(j) "Half-and-half, three sugars, and maybe you have a nice French cruller to go with it?"

THE ANSWER, I'm disappointed to have to report, is (h) "And with your spirit." To which, really, the obvious reply is, "And with my spirit what?" At which point I fear we're only a rejoinder or two away from "Who's on first?" Which would undoubtedly make for a more entertaining service, but possibly a theologically inauthentic one.


IT'S ALL THAT WACKO POPE JOHN XXIII'S FAULT

What we're dealing with here sounds something like a last gasp of the reforms instituted by the Vatican in the wake of the (briefly) pathbreaking Second Vatican Council, presided over by the accidental revolutionary, Pope John XXIII, whose efforts to lift the Church out of the spiritual darkness have been pushed back against ever more strongly by his increasingly rotten successors. (Yes, including -- perhaps especially -- the monstrously revered John Paul II, who had the soul of a Stalinist.)

One reform that most of us thought had long since been accomplished was permitting celebration of Mass in vernacular languages. However, it turns out that the English-language version that has been in use since 1973 was only a stopgap. Rachel Zoll explains:

Bishops in English-speaking countries created the International Commission on English in the Liturgy to undertake the translation. The panel produced a missal by 1973, but that version was considered temporary until better texts could be completed. As the commission worked to make the Mass more familiar in idiomatic English, some of the language strayed from the Latin. Also in some cases, the commission sought to use language that would be gender neutral.

The work took a new direction in 2001, when the Vatican office in charge of worship issued the directive Liturgiam Authenticam, or Authentic Liturgy, which required translations closer to the Latin. The Vatican also appointed another committee, Vox Clara, or Clear Voice, to oversee the English translation, drawing complaints from some clergy and liturgists that the Vatican was controlling what should be a more consultative process. (Cardinal George Pell, the Sydney, Australia, archbishop and chairman of Vox Clara, has called the complaints baseless and ideologically driven.)

Of course I don't know enough about it to speak to Cardinal Pell's intentions. The timing of that "new direction in 2001" sure stinks, though -- the year before Cardinal Joseph Ratguts (the future Pope Cardinal Ratguts), the increasingly fragile John Paul II's longtime trusted doctrinal whip-cracker, became Dean of the College of Cardinals, a significant step toward consolidating his chokehold on the papal succession, which came to pass in 2005. Besides, what's more characteristic of diehard ideologues than complaining that their enemies are "ideologically driven"?

The new English-language missal goes into official use on November 27, the first Sunday of Advent, and --

The biggest challenge will be for priests, who must learn intricate new speaking parts -- often late in their years of service to the church. At an Archdiocese of Newark training at St. Peter the Apostle Church in River Edge, many clergy had just received a final published copy of the Missal, a thick hardcover bound in red, accompanied by an equally dense study guide. Earlier drafts had been available for orientation sessions that have been ongoing for months nationwide.

Many clergy are upset by the new language, calling it awkward and hard to understand. The Rev. Tom Iwanowski, pastor of St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church in Oradell and New Milford, N.J., turned to the section of the new missal that calls funeral rites, "the fraternal offices of burial."

"How can I say those words? It doesn't make sense," said Iwanowski, who has been a priest for 36 years. "It separates religion from real life."

In the new translation, in the Nicene Creed, the phrase "one in Being with the Father," will change to "consubstantial with the Father." When a priest prays over the Holy Communion bread and wine, he will ask God for blessings "by sending down your spirit upon them like the dewfall."

There are rumblings of discontent, and not just among parishioners who grumble, as Mark J. Sullivan, music director of the Catholic Community church in Pleasanton, CA, puts it: "I've got everything memorized. Why are you messing with it?"

The Rev. Anthony Ruff, a Benedictine monk and theology professor at St. John's University in Minnesota, said he was removed last year as head of the music panel of the international translating commission because of criticisms he posted on his blog. In an open letter to U.S. bishops published in the Jesuit magazine America, Ruff cancelled his plans to speak on the text to diocesan priests because, "I cannot promote the new missal translation with integrity."

On the other hand, one Jeffrey Tucker,

a lay musician at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church in Auburn, Ala., . . . said he found the new missal "extraordinary." The text and music are truly integrated for the first time since the changes from the Second Vatican Council, Tucker said. He has been introducing the new text to lay people and church leaders in recent months, and has found the reaction to mostly be, "Oh, wow.'"

"The language is more accurate, but that is the most boring thing you can say about it. The more important thing about the language is that it's beautiful," said Tucker who is managing editor of Sacred Music, the journal of the Church Music Association of America. "Hardly anything ever good comes out of a committee. This time it did."

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Can't stand to hear one more word about tensions over the debt-ceiling crisis? Well, how 'bout that Tweeting Pope?

Middle-Man and the Debt Ceiling Debacle

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

by Ken

Well, Tom, that's pretty much where I am on the Events of the Day. Sick to death, tired of it all, and . . . and . . .

Does anyone else think back in stray moments to Inauguration Day 2009, and remember what it felt like, after the grueling and terrifying years of the Bush regime, to feel hope? And then feel some combination of cheated, stupid, and desperate over the pass we've come to?

Hope? Is it possible to have any hope now except that What Happens Next may not be as hideous as it shows every sign of being? With the only thing standing between us and the ghastliest imaginable outcome being Middle-Man, who we now know is much more a part of the problem than any conceivable part of any solution.

Intending no disrespect to the truly inspiring work of the "It Gets Better" campaign aimed at communicating to besieged younger LGBT folk that their lives can yet take meaningful, satisfying shape, despite the evidence to the contrary in their daily lives, I find myself in daily "It Gets Worse" mode when it comes to the news of the day. A moment ago I took a peek at the NYT afternoon update and found these as the top items:

Cost-Cutters, Except When the Spending Is Back Home
By RON NIXON
House Republicans who rode a wave of voter discontent into office last year may be pushing for spending cuts, but they're also quietly funneling millions of federal dollars back home.

Bipartisan Plan for Budget Deal Buoys President
By JACKIE CALMES and JENNIFER STEINHAUER
A group of senators made a new push to win backing for an ambitious deficit-reduction proposal that includes new revenues and deep spending cuts.
THE CAUCUS: How the Gang of Six Revived the Grand Deal

I hope I don't have to tell you that I didn't read either story. I've read them, in one form or another, way too often. (And I certainly wasn't going to waste precious NYT "clicks" on them.)

So let me instead offer you two bits of actual reading, one apt to make you still angrier (yes though, it doesn't seem possible, let alone fair, it really is possible to feel angrier), the other likely to make you feel just a bit giddy.


APART FROM THIS PHONE-HACKING OUTRAGE,
EVERYTHING AT NEWS CORP IS A-OK, RIGHT?

I know we've covered this ground before, what with my misguided sense that while of course criminal behavior by a major "news" organization is important, that's kind of the least of what's wrong with News Corp, or maybe it's most important as an inevitable outgrowth of the company's deeply corrupt and corrupting propaganda mission ("Postscript on the problem with "news" coverage Murdoch-style: Joyce Purnick recalls the New York Post takeover").

AlterNet's Sarah Seltzer reports on an AP report by Raphael G. Satter, "With Brooks arrested, tabloid insiders open up":

Misogyny, Made-Up Facts and More: Working in a News Corp Newsroom

The AP has an explosive little story based on interviews with disgruntled former News Corp employees of British tabloids who are opening up to the press now that their former boss, Rebekah Brooks, has resigned and faces a criminal probe for the phone hacking scandals that have horrified and enthralled the world.

The scandal itself has certainly made the daily life of a News Corp employee at the News of the World and The Sun an object of curiosity. The ruthlessness and top-down authority of the newsrooms--as described by these former staffers--is remarkable, including the strange story of a reporter forced to wear a Harry Potter costume who was chastised for forgoing said mandatory outfit -- even on September 11th.

Misogyny and fact-fudging were also part of the routine, these former employees claim. . . .

Read it and weep. Or --


BUT THEN, ON THE LIGHTER SIDE, PAUL RUDNICK
GOES KIND OF NUTS OVER THE TWEETING POPE

In a "Shouts and Murmurs" piece in the July 25 New Yorker, "The Pope's Tweets," Paul gets crazy over an AP report of the 84-year-old Pope Cardinal Ratguts' giddy entry into the world of Twitter. My first thought for a post was just to copy all 21 of his imaginary tweets, but I decided that no, that would be wrong. So I decided to limit myself arbitrarily to the first five. When the dust settled, I found I'd reached a bipartisan compromise: nine.

Sometimes, when I'm all alone, I like to put on my cassock and spin around really fast and pretend I'm a tepee.

During a papal audience, I put folks at ease by asking, "Are you gay?" Then I say, "Kidding!" Then I go, "No, seriously, are you gay?"

It's hard to tell all the cardinals apart, so sometimes I put different dinosaur stickers on their backs.

This is so embarrassing, but whenever I see Orthodox Jews I always think they're waiters.

If people ask, "Why does God allow war and evil?," I ask, "Why do the high-school students on 'Glee' look forty?"

When I stand on my balcony and wave to the faithful and millions more via satellite, I think, Kate Middleton must hate me!

If someone questions papal infallibility, I reply, "I know one thing for sure: you shouldn't be wearing horizontal stripes."

When I ponder why I was elected Pope over so many others, I wonder if it's just a popularity contest. Then I think, Gosh, I hope so.

Proof of God's existence: St. Patrick's is right next to Saks.

Now are you going to tell me you don't want to read the rest?

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Do all the American Krap Kristians share Pope Cardinal Ratguts's bedrock immorality?

Sure, he always looks like he's dressed to party, in outfits like his pretty white dresses and chic little hats, but make no mistake, Pope Cardinal Ratguts is a ruthless enforcer of his primitive authoritarian ideology. Worse, he establishes himself by his own words and deeds as a profoundly and institutionally immoral savage.

"In August, 1984 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stated that liberation theology has a major flaw in that it attempts to apply Christ's teaching on the sermon on the mount regarding the poor to present social situations. Ratzinger believes that Christ's teaching on the poor means that we will be judged when we die, and at the final judgment, with particular attention to how we personally have treated the poor."

-- from the Wikipedia article on liberation theology

by Ken

A listserv colleague, one of the smartest people I know, was providing suggestions for countering the inevitable right-wing appeal to "morality" as a reason for allowing the wealthy elites to stomp the "undeserving" poor into the dust. Right-wingers not only believe that people who find themselves in need of life help are in that situation because of their own failing, but are apt to couch that belief in religious terms -- that it's God's will and doing, so that stomping on the poor is really doing the Lord's work.

No amount of reasoning, my colleague argued, will touch people who think they have God on their side, which is why she gathered a list of citations from that proto-socialist Jesus. I think we're all familiar with the desperate right-wing efforts of late to concoct a "macho Jesus" who magically believes all the anti-human proposition of the Crackpot Right, but as all those people who brandish their bibles like weapons would know if they ever actually read what's inside, Jesus would have been shocked and horrified by everything, all the predation, hatred, and bigotry they fetishize in his name. Jesus, of course, was a people kind of guy, and the god he fronted for was a people kind of god.

And then she wrote something that really warmed my heart:

"There's a reason liberation theology got squashed down so very, very hard. It was both a coherent and popular argument against the characterization of deity, the ultimate implied moral authority, as a bitter sadist."

The liberation theology movement was the last time the Catholic Church found itself on the side of ordinary people, and even that was an accident, a product of the new spirit of humanity breathed into it by the accidental pope, John XXIII, who was expected to twiddle his thumbs in the short time he had left to live, at which point the cardinals hoped they might be better able to reach agreement on a "serious" candidate. Instead that amazing man -- probably the last truly decent person to rise into the uppermost ranks of the Church -- aligned the institution with the needs and hopes of all its faithful.

Oh, old Pope Paul VI tried to get the toothpaste of liberation theology back in the tube, but he was way too wishy-woshy to do the job that the "sainted" John Paul II would roll up his sleeves and take on with such fanatical zeal. And he would no doubt have been thrilled to know that his tiara would be passed on to a man of whose ruthlessness and savagery and worship of the powerful he had made such generous use in his own papacy.

And Pope Cardinal Ratguts has done nothing to disappoint. Even with the forced diversion of having to deal with the monumental mess of the Church's wretched history of institutionally coddling and even encouraging the pedophile priests (an effort that Ratguts had largely overseen while still a cardinal, in his role as John Paul's designated keeper of the faith), he has been a resolute force for the subjugation of normal human aspirations with the yoke of uncompromising doctrinal orthodoxy, ensuring that there's a Rich Folks' Catholic Church and an Everyone Else's.

And so a surprising amount of common ground has been found between the Church and the non-Catholic Krap Kristian sects that have spread like cancer in this country.

"Pro-life" they call themselves, based solely on the difficult question of abortion, being themselves way too whacked-out to appreciate the difficulty of the question, while remaining resolutely pro-death on all manner of issues that aren't difficult. Even savage old Pope John Paul, after all, took his opposition to the death penalty as seriously as his opposition to abortion -- at least rhetorically. (The hierarchy over which he maintained such tight control seemed always to be on 24/7 guard when it came to standing up to blasphemy on abortion and creepily silent on . . . that other matter.)

And where Jesus seems to have had nothing at all to say on the subject of homosexuality, at least nothing preserved among his teachings or anywhere else in the New Testament, the self-appointed guardians of "morality" of both the Mother Church and the United Krap Kristians ride that famous single citation in Leviticus -- buried among a host of other (sensibly unenforced and indeed unmentioned) prohibitions, of which they appear to be utterly ignorant -- as an excuse to throw the full weight of their orthodoxy at it, pretending as usual to do so in the name of Jesus.

They don't know anything important about Jesus's life, work, beliefs, or teachings, and they're defiantly, militantly proud of their ignorance. They hate Jesus with every fiber of their malignant -- or merely plug-ignorant -- carcasses.

I've mentioned a number of times that, for all the evil that has been done, and all the important work in need of doing that has been left undone, by these Jesus-hating "Christians," there are also a lot of people I've known or known about who have been inspired by their faith to attempt to do those good works. The single most important example in the Catholic realm was the liberation theology movement, spearheaded by all those humane activist priests who believed their calling required them to devote their energies to improving the conditions of the downtrodden among their worshippers. Their actions made, as my colleague put it, "a coherent and popular argument against the characterization of deity, the ultimate implied moral authority, as a bitter sadist." And it was only natural that liberation theology "got squashed down so very, very hard." (I love that phrase!)

And then I stumbled across the pre-papal Cardinal Ratguts's principled position on the subject, that -- as the Wikipedia writer puts it -- "Christ's teaching on the poor means that we will be judged when we die, and at the final judgment, with particular attention to how we personally have treated the poor," and has no bearing on how people lead their lives in the here-and-now? It's just a hurdle to overcome at judgment time!

It occurred to me suddenly that I hadn't felt it necessary to spell out the connection, in my Sunday Classics piece ("Verdi blows the lid off the whole Krap Kristian hypocrisy") focusing on the agonizing unawareness of sinful unworthiness expressed by the mezzo-soprano in the "Liber scriptus" and by the tenor in the "Ingemisco" of the Day of Wrath depicted in Verdi's Requiem. It seemed grotesquely obvious, too much so to even warrant mention, that the only point of such depictions is as a cautionary lesson to influence real-world, real-life behavior.

I hadn't counted, though, on the depth of the ruthless savagery and total immorality of the man who considers himself personally charged with enforcing the morality of his subjects -- who not only doesn't see the connection but insists that there isn't one. In a reasonable, principled world, an argument like this would have caused Cardinal Ratguts to be carted off to the nearest loony bin, or at least voted off the island. Instead his career as a pitiless enforcer of primitive orthodoxy continued to flourish until his fellow cardinals seized the opportunity to promote him to the top job.

What a bunch!

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Before he was pope, Pope Cardinal Ratguts had all the authority he needed to stop priestly sex abuse -- if he'd wanted to

The downside of being pope: When Pope Cardinal Ratguts went in that hat shop, presumably accompanied by a few flunky bishops and monsignors, and decided to try on the red cowboy hat, there was nobody there to say, "No, Holy Father, unless you're planning to work up an act playing the guitar and singing faith-themed Roy Rogers and Gene Autry songs, I don't think it's you."

“Why did the Vatican end up so far behind the bishops out on the front line, who with all their faults, did change -- they did develop? Why was the Vatican so many years behind?”

-- Australian bishop emeritus Geoffrey Robinson, quoted

by the NYT's Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger
in "Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal"

by Ken

If there was ever any question about the answer to Bishop Robinson's question, every time anyone delves into the history of the Catholic sex-abuse scandal it becomes clearer that the reason the princesses of the Church didn't do nothin' 'bout it is 'cause they didn't wanna -- and they didn't hafta.

Howie has done such a diligent job covering developments in the ongoing Vatican sex-scandal cover-up (see, most recently, "The Pope Is In SHOCK That Belgians Aren't Paying Due Deference To Priestly Child Rapists") that I've felt little need to chime in. However, the kinds of "revelations" in the lengthy Goodstein-Halbfinger NYT piece are so rich in irony and predictability that I can't resist.

I don't mean to denigrate the piece, which looks to be a solid and welcome bit of reporting, the kind of thing the NYT is one of the few papers that has the resources to produce. But really, it's hardly possible to imagine any response but laughter, unless it's yawning, upon being told that, contrary to Pope Cardinal Ratguts' "reputation as the Vatican insider who most clearly recognized the threat the spreading sexual abuse scandals posed to the Roman Catholic Church," he was to all intents and purposes, if not the mastermind, then at least the enforcer of the cover-up:

[T]he future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.

Gasp! Who'd-a thunk it?

One simple but pungent discovery the NYT reporters made is that what the Vatican claims as a major turning point in its protracted (mis)handling of the sex-abuse problem, "the decision in 2001 to give the office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger the authority to cut through a morass of bureaucracy and handle abuse cases directly," was a sham.

[C]hurch documents and interviews with canon lawyers and bishops cast that 2001 decision and the future pope’s track record in a new and less flattering light.

The Vatican took action only after bishops from English-speaking nations became so concerned about resistance from top church officials that the Vatican convened a secret meeting to hear their complaints -- an extraordinary example of prelates from across the globe collectively pressing their superiors for reform, and one that had not previously been revealed.

And the policy that resulted from that meeting, in contrast to the way it has been described by the Vatican, was not a sharp break with past practices. It was mainly a belated reaffirmation of longstanding church procedures that at least one bishop attending the meeting argued had been ignored for too long, according to church documents and interviews.

The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm. But for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere. [Emphasis added.]

It's one of the fascinations of the scandal that it broke first in the English-speaking countries. I'm sure somebody can explain the "cultural differences" that account for this. But one thing that surely never figured into it was that the abuse was confined to these countries, though of course the princesses of the Church liked to pretend that such was the case. Now that Old World priests are catching up, not in committing abuse but in having their indiscretions made public, the official response is, as Ralph Kramden might have put it: "Hummina-hummina-hummina."

And as the NYT duo's reporting underlines, the Vatican's response has always been to muddle, obscure, and obfuscate. It turns out that from the start of the scandal there were bishops "who sought to penalize and dismiss abusive priests," but they couldn't do it on their own. "Dismissing a priest is not like disbarring a lawyer or stripping a doctor of his medical license. In Catholic theology, ordaining a priest creates an indelible mark; to return him to the lay state required the approval of the pope."

Bishops had a variety of disciplinary tools at their disposal -- including the power to remove accused priests from contact with children and to suspend them from ministry altogether -- that they could use without the Vatican’s direct approval.

Some used this authority to sideline abusive priests, minimizing the damage inflicted on their victims. Other bishops clearly made things worse, by shuffling abusers from one assignment to the next, never telling parishioners or reporting priests to the police.

But as court cases, financial settlements and media coverage mounted, many prelates looked to the Vatican for leadership and clarity on how to prosecute abusers under canon law and when to bring cases to the attention of the civil authorities. In the worst cases, involving serial offenders who denied culpability and resisted discipline, some bishops sought the Vatican’s guidance on how to dismiss them from the priesthood.

Those bishops -- you know, the ones who actually assumed some responsibility for doing their job, not to mention for protecting their parishioners -- got as little help as the princesses could possibly get away with giving, or maybe less. One nifty trick: The Vatican made sure there were enough overlapping jurisdictions ("besides Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, bishops were sending off their files on abuse cases to the Congregations for the Clergy, for Bishops, for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and for the Evangelization of Peoples -- plus the Vatican’s Secretariat of State; its appeals court, the Apostolic Signatura; and the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts") to create maximum confusion. The NYT duo also points out that the "new Code of Canon Law issued in 1983 only muddled things further, among other things by setting a five-year statute of limitations within which abuse cases could be prosecuted." Way to go, abuse ferret-outers!

Why? Well, here's one answer. See if you can spot the magic words.

During this period, the three dozen staff members working for Cardinal Ratzinger at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith were busy pursuing other problems. These included examining supernatural phenomena, like apparitions of the Virgin Mary, so that hoaxes did not “corrupt the faith,” according to the Rev. Brian Mulcahy, a former member of the staff. Other sections weighed requests by divorced Catholics to remarry and vetted the applications of former priests who wanted to be reinstated.

The heart of the office, though, was its doctrinal section. Cardinal Ratzinger, a German theologian appointed prefect of the congregation in 1981, aimed his renowned intellectual firepower at what he saw as “a fundamental threat to the faith of the church” — the liberation theology movement sweeping across Latin America.

That's right, ladies and germs, if you said "liberation theology," you're a winner!

As Father [Gilbert] Gauthé [the honorary godfather of the priest abuse scandal, having in 1984 acknowledged molesting 37 minors] was being prosecuted in Louisiana, Cardinal Ratzinger was publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed, which the cardinal saw as a Marxist-inspired distortion of church doctrine. Later, he also reined in a Dutch theologian who thought lay people should be able to perform priestly functions, and an American who taught that Catholics could dissent from church teachings about abortion, birth control, divorce and homosexuality.

Different Focus for Cardinal

Cardinal Ratzinger also focused on reining in national bishops’ conferences, several of which, independent of Rome, had begun confronting the sexual abuse crisis and devising policies to address it in their countries. He declared that such conferences had “no theological basis” and “do not belong to the structure of the church.” Individual bishops, he reaffirmed, reigned supreme in their dioceses and reported only to the authority of the pope in Rome.

[Don't you just love that part about individual bishops reigning supreme in their dioceses? Not only does this negate the hated bishops' conferences, but it is, I believe, what's known in technical terms as a "papal get-out-of-jail-free card." See, it's not our fault; it's those damned bishops' fault! Individual bishops, it would be more accurate to say, are free to run their dioceses exactly as they see fit as long as how they see fit is exactly how their Vatican masters wish.]

I was going to take out that typographical slug "Different Focus for Cardinal," which after all isn't really part of the text. But then I got to thinking, "'Different Focus for Cardinal" is absolutely the point!

And not just for the cardinal. By all accounts nobody lost more sleep over the heresy of liberation theology and all those other blasphemies being practiced by, in particular, New World churchmen than Cardinal Ratguts' master, that sleazy son of a bitch, His Eminence himself, the sainted Pope John Paul II.

Which already suggests how the scandal came to light first in the English-speaking world. This tends to be the part of the Catholic world where doubts about the divinity of the Vatican princesses have gained the most traction. And (again by all accounts), the overriding goal of John Paul II's papacy was to eradicate all that blasphemy, to return the Church to a state of unitary and unquestioned "truth": what the pope says.

This of course is the way any authoritarian government or large bureacracy can be expected to react. And that, I think, is a major reason why the Vatican's astonishing bungling of the scandal holds such fascination for the non-Catholic world: It's a sort of cartoon version of the way pretty much all persons in authority seem instinctively to want to function. They're attacking the church was the sainted sleaze-pope's response, and his sleaze-successor was only recently caught saying -- in the 21st century, some three decades into the scandal! -- the same damned thing.

Of course there's another reason why the non-Catholic world is riveted by the scandal. It is, after all, about priests for Christ's sake sexually abusing minors, while the people in charge fucking look the other way. Naturally this has a lot of Catholics pretty riled up too.

Which is a point Howie has been making in his coverage of the unholy mess. If you look at the history of priest-parishioner relationships, it's hard not to conclude that the Vatican princesses have effectively written those young Catholics off as "booty" for priests whose livelihood depends on the hierarchy. Despite the Church's legendary wealth (such a jarring contrast to the poverty of its worshippers in so many parts of the world), its field workers are compensated on a shoestring budget. And remember that the job description, increasingly improbably in this day and age, includes the appearance of celibacy. Somewhere along the line the deal apparently came to include, implicitly, all the Catholic boy-ass you can grab. Now there's a perk you truly can't put a price on.

You wonder if princesses of the rigidly authoritarian mindset of this pope and his predecessor, so desperately concerned with shoring up the unquestioned authority of the Church hierarchy, notably the highest reaches of that hierarchy, are capable of understanding how much damage they're doing to that authority among the Catholic laity by telling the faithful, in effect, that their children's bodies -- and the psyches that are mauled with them -- are fair game for predation by their Church's hired help.

If you want a good laugh, let's conclude with the NYT reporters' conclusion:

Today, a debate is roiling the Vatican, pitting those who see the American zero-tolerance norms as problematic because they lack due process for accused priests, against those who want to change canon law to make it easier to penalize and dismiss priests.

Where Benedict lies on this spectrum, even after nearly three decades of handling abuse cases, is still an open question.

Oh, he's such a darned stickler for due process, that Pope Cardinal Ratguts!

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