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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One papal hand washes another papal heinie -- and so it goes

Above the fray: The saintly, now sainted, John XXIII
once again provides cover for a darker "promotion."

"[I]t is a bit sad to see Pope Francis, who has been doing wonderful things in his short time at the Vatican, play the old game of self-certification at the top of a saint-making factory. Many hope he will make needed changes in the church. But in promoting John Paul II he is exalting a man who fought every one of those changes."

-- Garry Wills, in a new NYRB blogpost,
"Popes Making Popes Saints"

by Ken

At first the news seemed inscrutable: the new pope shoving Pope John XXIII the final step to sainthood -- and waiving the second-miracle requirement to do so! Don't all those Vatican types hate John XXIII? Even after all the decades that have elapsed since that genuinely saintly John's brief reign was terminated, don't they still get night sweats at the thought of a pope who imagined that the Catholic Church could actually serve the spiritual needs of its worshipers, and believed that that included serving their human needs as well?

But wait, you say. The new pope isn't really a Vatican type.

Maybe so, but all you had to do was read a bit further to smell what was going on. As part of a canonization twofer, who gets zipped along to sainthood in (relatively speaking) the blink of an eye? The hero of modern Vatican fascism, Pope John Paul II. The man who, after Pope Paul VI's unacceptably wishy-woshy efforts to overturn Vatican II, really took in hand the job of dragging the Church back into the Middle Ages.

Of course John Paul II had that veneer of piety and humility, but it was real only in the School of George Costanza, whereby "it's not a lie if you believe it." But the man did more than any other in modern times, and perhaps more than any ever, to sanctify the role of Catholics as pawns of the high and mighty purveyors of authoritarian doctrinal mumbo-jumbo.

For a moment there even I wondered if I was being overly cynical in assuming colossal bad faith on the part of the current Holy Father. And then I saw Garry Wills's new NYRB blogpost, "Popes Making Popes Saints." And Garry has the most straightforward possible reason for believing that John is being used to camouflage nefarious saint-making shenanigans. It's been done before, and by none other than John Paul II himself.

On September 3, 2000, Pope John Paul II beatified Pope Pius IX. (Beatification is the third and penultimate rung on the ladder to sainthood -- it certifies that a genuine miracle was worked through a dead person's intercession, establishes a liturgical feast day for that person, and authorizes church prayer to him or her.) Pius IX was a polarizing figure. He wrested from the Vatican Council a declaration of his own infallibility; he condemned such modern heresies as democratic government; he took a Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, from his family -- on the grounds that Edgardo's Christian nurse had baptized him as an infant, making him belong to the church, not to his infidel parents.

Promoting such a man was a touchy matter for Pope John Paul -- but he helped ease Pius into the ranks of the blessed by simultaneously beatifying the popular Pope John XXIII. Though liberals of all sorts disliked Pius IX, only hardened Curial types and sedevacantists -- "throne-empty" believers, who hold that John XXIII was not a legitimate pope -- hated John for changing the church with the Second Vatican Council. Otherwise, "good Pope John" was loved by most Catholics and many non-Catholics -- Lyndon Johnson gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The mutterings over Pius were practically drowned out by the cheers for John.

"Now," says Garry, "Pope Francis has come up with another ablutionary pairing."

He is canonizing John Paul II in record time (Benedict XVI had already waived the normal five-years-after-death period to allow the beatifying process to begin.) Though John Paul II is not as hotly resented by liberals as Pius IX, he is still subject to deep criticism. He presided over the church during its worldwide pedophile scandal, and he gave the handling of that problem to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faith -- the very man who, succeeding him, would waive the time-lapse needed to begin his predecessor's canonization. (Who can think that a saint in heaven ever protected a predatory priest?) John Paul had treated as "irreversible" his stands on matters such as homosexuality, married priests, and women priests. He is a symbol, for some people, of things that need remedy in the church.

But -- not to worry -- the "good Pope John" is again being pressed into service. He was beatified to take the sting out of Pius IX's promotion. He is now being canonized to make a joint heavenly pair with John Paul II. To rush John XXIII forward, Pope Francis is even waiving the normal requirement of a second miracle for canonization. John XXIII is the feel-good pope in a time of turmoil, even though he is being used to sanction the turmoil caused by John Paul II.

The Vatican no doubt feels that combining a liberal hero with a conservative hero shows how big a tent its sacred baldacchino is; the holy institution transcends earthly politics.

Garry points out that John Paul II "canonized and beatified people by the hundreds (far more than any other pope)."

Each stamp of entry into heaven above authenticates the pope's power of the stamp here below. And each time a pope canonizes a pope he is completing a circuit of reciprocal authentications. Is it surprising that so many popes have been canonized?

This whole sanctification ritual, Garry notes, isn't built into the faith.

This is not like the early church's prayers with and for and to the dead -- voiced long before there was a pope to certify what prayer was or was not allowed. The idea that all believers, alive and dead, are members of the mystical body of Christ was given expression around the burial place of martyrs. Chesterton called tradition "a democracy of the dead" -- by which ancestors still vote with us. That was the Christian community's sense of a continuing oneness in all its members. Instead of that, we now have a cumbrous, officially monitored, and extremely expensive way of getting a person declared a saint who can be prayed to at Mass.

And the nasty secret about the canonization process is that it's good for business.

Religious orders, like popes, have a pecuniary advantage in getting their founders made saints -- as Opus Dei's founder, Josemaria Escriva, was canonized by John Paul II. A religious order can mobilize great resources -- for canvassing, certifying, lobbying in Rome -- from its houses, members, and benefactors. The expense of time, energy, and cash is well worth it if the founder is canonized. The founder-saint's feast day, sites or shrines, and relics -- all of these promote the order, its works, its recruiting of new members, and further fund-raising.

There is a kind of sad humor in the effort some good-hearted people are making to promote the canonization of the social activist, pacifist, and founder of The Catholic Worker Dorothy Day, using methods of subsidized glorification that mock her own values and concerns. In the same way, it is a bit sad to see Pope Francis, who has been doing wonderful things in his short time at the Vatican, play the old game of self-certification at the top of a saint-making factory. Many hope he will make needed changes in the church. But in promoting John Paul II he is exalting a man who fought every one of those changes.

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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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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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Michele Bachmann Knows She Deserves God's Wrath

I was hoping-- when I saw her in the video below-- that Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was finally going to confess she had gotten drunk at a congressional St. Patrick's Day party a couple years ago, puked in the lady's room and then snuck out without cleaning up, only to then cower in fear that her crazy colleague from southern Ohio, Mean Jean Schmidt, had slipped in the vomit and ruined her dress. But no, it was just about persuading God to help Republicans keep people from getting healthcare.

I spent nearly the whole day yesterday, starting at 8:30 AM, in the Vatican. It was wonderfully uplifting. I've been there several times before, but never with an art historian nor with any kind of a guide. This time my docent, Sarah, took me through the vast art collection-- or at least a part of it; it would take weeks to see it all-- and helped me understand that most of the popes had more to do with commissioning and collecting art-- and in the Baroque Period, primarily as propaganda-- than they did with anything remotely spiritual or even "religious." Glorifying their noble families' names-- it wasn't until 1978, with the election of John Paul I as the 263rd pope, that a man not of aristocratic family ascended to the papacy; he was murdered after 33 days-- was the name of the game for many; temporal power was what it was about for even more.

Sarah went to Catholic school when she was a girl, which, I assume is where she lost her religion and became, I'm guessing, an atheist. She was happy to repeat all the phony baloney Vatican propaganda as we traipsed through the museums, the Sistene Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica, assuring me, when I pressed her, that none of it was remotely true. But the art was so inspiring and... divine. Look at that wonderful Pietà by the then 23 year old unknown Michelangelo above! It's breathtaking. (If you can't make it to Rome, there are authorized duplicates at the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows in Poznań, St. John's Cathedral in Bundang, Korea, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasília, Brazil, St. Mary's Parish, Spring Lake, MI, St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney, Cathedral of Our Lady of Refuge in Matamoros, Mexico, the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis and at St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie in Yonkers, New York.)

Somehow I doubt many people look at this sublime work, or the authorized copies, and think about how healthcare for American families must be derailed by God's intervention. But then I've never met deranged religious fanatics like Jim DeMint (an admitted member of the DC-based religio-fascist cult called The Family), Sam Brownback and Michele Bachmann. The Founding Fathers had, though, which is why they took such pains to erect a wall between Church and State, a wall these fanatics are determined to tear down. They very much want religion-- particularly their inauthentic religion to have a hand, to put it mildly, in public policy so it can be used the way authoritarians have used religious hocus pocus since the beginning of history. Sometimes we lose track of how much less bad Democrats like Obama, Ben Nelson and even Rahm Emanuel are than Republicans. Now, please, watch Rachel Maddow put this all in context while I go tour the fabulous Colosseum, a place where a wall between church and state was never contemplated.




UPDATE: When Shit Don't Stink

Sarah didn't bother to walk over herself but she encouraged me to take a peek at the glassed-in open casket of Pope John XXIII who died in 1963. Popes are usually buried downstairs but this one is supposed to be an example of incorruptibility so he's hanging out upstairs where he's hard to miss (under the wax that encloses his body). It's macabre. Yogandanda, who's at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, was certified incorruptible before he was embalmed in 1952. Anyway, the current head of the Church announced today that he's movin' two other popes, John Paul II and Pius XII-- but not John XXIII-- along the road to sainthood. Like the current head of Catholics, Inc., the non-incorruptible Pius XII, was a detestable Nazi stooge. By pairing the loathed Nazi pope with the loved JP II, Benedict probably hoped there wouldn't be as much of a stink. Next stop for these two is beatification.

And... the healthcare reform bill, now mutated into an unrecognizable form as one conservative lackey after another threw a tantrum and was placated, looks like it has the requisite 60 votes to overcome the GOP filibuster. Nelson feels the ability for backward, racist states to opt out of abortion coverage for poor women is good enough for him.

So you see, the Vatican isn't anti-Semitic! Some of its best friends, maybe -- but no, that's a misunderstanding too. If you took offense, sorry!

Stop the presses! It appears, from the testimony of no less than Pope Cardinal Ratguts himself, that at some point inside the Vatican, um, er, mistakes were made.

"I can truthfully say that I regret having made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them."

-- un-excommunicated Bishop Richard Williamson, in a Feb. 26 "apology" for his holocaust-denying remarks on Swedish TV in January, several days before his un-excommunication

by Ken

In my house, growing up, the standard way of expressing disagreement with a public figure's politics was to call him/her "a miserable anti-Semite." Needless to say, the range of offenses that qualified a person for the charge was exceedingly broad, not to mention hair-triggered. With the passage of time I came to disagree with many of the imputations, though not necessarily aloud. On the charge of "miserable anti-Semitism," my mother was pretty much judge and jury.

Well, my mother seems pretty much past that now. When I speak to her on the phone, I think she knows who I am, but not much more. So let me say it for her: Pope Cardinal Ratguts I is a miserable anti-Semite.

I was just reading on the NYT website where His Holiness "has written an unusually personal letter to bishops worldwide," scheduled for release today, "explaining why he revoked the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop and admitting mistakes in how the Vatican handled the case."

These are the four bishops, you'll recall, who were excommunicated by that flaming liberal, Pope John Paul II. I devoured Rachel Donadio's account, in feverish expectation of hearing the current pope's explanation of the Vatican's mistakes in handling the case.

However, as far as I can tell, the mistake consisted of not handling the flow of information better -- notably the embarrassing circumstance by which one of the "traditionalist" bishops (members of the Society of St. Pius X, founded in 1970 to wipe out the liberalizing "reforms" that had crept into the Church), including a Swedish TV interview this past January, several days before the scheduled un-excommunication, in which former Bishop Richard Williamson (according to a useful NYT online account updated to February 27) "denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and the scope of the Holocaust."

As best I can tell, what Pope Cardinal Ratguts regrets is the unfortunate coincidence in the timing -- that and the regrettable circumstance that, thanks to modern technology (i.e., YouTube), the bishop's indiscreet remarks quickly lit up the Internet.

Well, there seems to be one other thing that PCR regrets: the failure of those damn hot-headed Jews -- unlike the friendly ones who by contrast have been so understanding and supportive in this trying affair -- to understand that the excommunication and the un-excommunication were merely fairly trivial matters of doctrinal technicalities. The four bishops, you see, had been ordained without the blessing of the pope, in whom they don't believe, of course. Well, that was a big fat "oops!" as far as the Vatican is concerned. (Apparently. It was enough to send John Paul II into an excommunicating hissy fit, throwing around nasty words like "schism.")

Now, you see, the Schismatic Four haven't been un-excommunicated because of their views about the Holocaust. Oh, no no no no! As Ms. Donaudio put it:

In passages from the pope’s letter posted Wednesday on the blog of a veteran Vatican reporter, Andrea Tornielli, Benedict said he considered revoking the excommunication “a modest act of mercy” toward the bishops, whose ordinations were “valid but illicit.”

“Instead,” Mr. Tornielli quotes the letter saying, “it suddenly appeared something completely different: as the denial of reconciliation between Christians and Jews.”

You see, then, it was all a misunderstanding. Nothing to do with the holocaust to begin with! And really, the pope apparently believes, there are Catholics who should have known better. And those trouble-making Jews, what, really, is such a philo-Semitic pope to do about them?

By the way, the above-quoted "apology" issued by Bishop Williamson on February 26 was, according to the NYT account, judged by the Vatican "not sufficient to restore him to full communion with the church." Even though it included this heartfelt addendum: "To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologize."

Bishop Williamson holocaust-denying on Swedish TV in January -- he later apologized "to all souls that took honest scandal" from what he said. So that's OK, right?

Perhaps this small matter will be cleared up with the release of this virtually unprecedented letter of the pope's, deigning to explain his, er, "thinking." But on the whole I think we've got the basic points down:

* Um, mistakes were, you know, made.

* If anyone was offended, well, the bishops are real, real sorry.

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