March 2010 Archives

New York has traditionally been a far cry from Philadelphia when it comes to relations between the Catholic Church and the media. In Philly, a line of tough archbishops has a history of squaring off with the local press; a decade ago, investigations into the spending of then Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua resulted in a notable holy war from which neither side emerged unscathed. In the Big Apple, at least since the days of Archbishop "Dagger John" Hughes and Thomas Nast, the history of church-press relations reflects the care and deference with which the Great Powers of an Establishment tend to treat each other.

If the Daily News, whose readership roots are solidly in the Catholic working class, has, in the current era, sometimes seemed like an archdiocesan daily, the New York Times has generally donned kid gloves when dealing with the city's other great purveyor of moral suasion. In the previous phase of the scandal, the Times was late at the party, and far more attentive to clerical misdeeds outside than inside metropolitan New York. And when feathers got ruffled, the owlish Peter Steinfels was always on hand to interpret the two cultures, ecclesiastical and journalistic, to each other.

But the entente cordiale is over. Steinfels hung up his notebook at the beginning of the year, and the new Church Bigs, New York Archbishop Tim Dolan and Brooklyn Archbishop Nick DiMarzio, lack their predecessors' readiness to turn the other cheek, or at least to make their unhappiness known in the suites before they take to the streets. Last November, Dolan--who is closer to the scribblers of the Catholic right than is perhaps prudent--called out the Times for anti-Catholicism in an article that he posted on his blog after the newspaper declined to publish it. He was back on the case yesterday, with a (borrowed) point-by-point rebuttal of Laurie Goodstein's article on a notorious Milwaukee pedophile priest that has drawn some responsible criticism as well as some responsible defense in Catholic quarters.

Meanwhile, DiMarzio used his homily at last night's chrism mass to lambaste the Times as the "enemy" before assuring his audience, "Our emphasis has moved from avoiding scandal to protecting children and so such behavior is immediately publicized, reported to the District Attorney and not kept secret." Good shift in emphasis, bish.

That the campaign against the world's premiere newspaper is being conducted from Rome is clear from a lengthy critique published yesterday by Cardinal William J. Levada, who occupies Pope Benedict's old position as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Inquisition. The reason why, of course, is that it is the pope himself who is under attack. So what's playing out on Gotham's stage has stirred up all the old anxieties about organized American hostility toward "papists." Or as Dolan, a church historian by training, put it:

While the report on the nauseating abuse is bitterly true, the insinuation against Cardinal Ratzinger is not, and gives every indication of being part of a well-oiled campaign against Pope Benedict. 

Ah, yes, those well-oiled minions of the Know-Nothing Party and the American Protective Association.

The episcopal huffing and puffing is unlikely to make much of an impression on the news media, which has bigger worries these days than an assault from bishops anxious to protect a guy who, all but the most entrenched apologists agree, needs to put his house in order fast. It's hard to exempt from the usual slings and arrows of public life clerics who sign manifestos calling for civil disobedience (Dolan) or who electioneer in New York City's political sandbox (DiMarzio). If they can't take a poke from the likes of Maureen Dowd, then maybe they should find another line of work. The real question is whether the people in New York's Catholic pews will, like the flock who heard Urban II at Clermont in 1095, sew crosses on their windbreakers and march off at DiMarzio's command to "besiege" the Times.

Back in 2002, when the Boston Globe began the investigative series that set in motion the crisis that continues to roll through Roman Catholicism, the newspaper's staff fully expected an outcry from a Catholic community long habituated to defending its faith against the outside world. But, to their surprise and Cardinal Bernard Law's dismay, it didn't happen. The notoriously touchy Boston Irish recognized the reporting as legit, and were comfortable enough in their New England skins not to see the paper as an agent of ancient Yankee prejudice. It will be interesting to see if New York's Catholics behave any differently. My guess is that, but for the professional Defenders of the Faith (e.g. Bill Donohue), the trumpeting of Dolan and DiMarzio will largely fall on deaf ears.  

Noodle kugel at the White House seder?

U.S. bishops defend the Pope!

Release Michael Steele from bondage!

Or, as the Texan said, "What other parts of the matzo do y'all eat?

Or call it ecclesiastical leadership versus the defensive crouch. In his Palm Sunday sermon, the Archbishop of Dublin, who has been the true stand-up guy in the Irish scandal, had this to say:

The Church in Dublin is still stung by the horrible abuse which innocent children endured through people who were Christ's ministers and who were called to act in Christ's name. How was it that the innocence of children was not embraced; how did it happen that in our Church the temptation to protect institution was given priority over healing the most innocent and the vulnerable.

Now contrast Martin's simple acknowledgment that the central issue is cover-up with the overwrought refusal of the Archbishop of New York to go there:

The recent tidal wave of headlines about abuse of minors by some few priests, this time in Ireland, Germany, and a re-run of an old story from Wisconsin, has knocked us to our knees once again.

Anytime this horror, vicious sin, and nauseating crime is reported, as it needs to be, victims and their families are wounded again, the vast majority of faithful priests bow their heads in shame anew, and sincere Catholics experience another dose of shock, sorrow, and even anger.

What deepens the sadness now is the unrelenting insinuations against the Holy Father himself, as certain sources seem frenzied to implicate the man who, perhaps more than anyone else has been the leader in purification, reform, and renewal that the Church so needs.

Cover-up? For Dolan, this is only about the physical abuse, the media, the small number of abusing priests, the "re-wounding" of the victims, the unjustified attacks on the pope. As Ross Douthat, no wild-eyed Church-basher, writes in today's NYT.

But the crisis of authority endures. There has been some accountability for the abusers, but not nearly enough for the bishops who enabled them. And now the shadow of past sins threatens to engulf this papacy.

Popes do not resign. But a pope can clean house. And a pope can show contrition, on his own behalf and on behalf of an entire generation of bishops, for what was done and left undone in one of Catholicism's darkest eras.

This is Holy Week, when the first pope, Peter, broke faith with Christ and wept for shame. There is no better time for repentance.

One presumes Archbishop Dolan will have perused these words with his morning coffee. One hopes he takes them to heart.

Far be it from me to suggest that the good folks at Pew are competitive or anything, but I could not help but notice a curious omission in the  just-released report from the Pew Forum on religion in the news in 2009; namely, a certain reticence about the amount of notice garnered by Trinity College's 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS).

Here's the deal. In its survey, Pew differentiates coverage according to types of media, making the observation that religion news tends to generate a lot of buzz in the blogosphere, as per the following graphic:

Popular Religion Topics on Blogs in 2009

Week	Topic*	Percent of Links
Feb. 9-13	Catholic Indulgences (#3 story that week)	7%
Feb. 16-20	Founder of Islamic TV Station Charged with Beheading Wife (#4 story)	8%
Mar. 9-13	Decline of Organized Religion (#1 story)	30%
Mar. 16-20	Culture Wars (#4 story)	5%
Apr. 6-10	Same-Sex Marriage (#1 story)	26%
Apr. 20-24	Same-Sex Marriage (#2 story)	16%
May 4-8	Same-Sex Marriage (#1 story)	14%
May 25-29	Same-Sex Marriage (#1 story)	35%
Jun. 15-19	Same-Sex Marriage (#2 story)	6%
Oct. 26-30	Scientology (#4 story)	11%
Nov. 30-Dec. 4	Swiss Ban on Minarets (#1 story)	17%

Now, while there are significant religious dimensions to the issue of same-sex marriage, it is not a religion story per se, and coverage of it often does not touch on religion. By contrast the entirely religious story that created the biggest buzz was "Decline of Organized Religion," which generated 30 percent of blogospheric traffic during the week of March 9. That, of course, was the story created by the 2008 ARIS. (Actually, ARIS showed not the decline of organized religion as such but the rise in the proportion of Americans who claim to have no religion--i.e. the decline of religious identification, or religion, if you like.)

Of particular note according to Pew (and I concur) is the fact that some stories that register only modestly in the MSM make a big impact in New Media. You would have thought that the prime example of this would be, yes, the ARIS survey, which (according to tracking by Pew's own Project Excellence in Journalism) sent religion to the top of the charts in the blogosphere that week without making the list of the most important stories in the MSM. But no, Pew's case in point was the Catholic indulgences story, which during the week of February 9 was only the third most important story in the blogosphere, garnering a mere seven percent of the links.

The Pew Forum is in the business of doing all kinds of religion surveys, but to date none of them have ever grabbed the amount of attention the 2008 ARIS did. Coincidence? I would not venture to say.

How big a deal is the new tsunami of abuse-and-cover-up charges that is washing over the Catholic Church? In its editorial yesterday, the National Catholic Reporter takes a maximalist position:

We now face the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in church history. How this crisis is handled by Benedict, what he says and does, how he responds and what remedies he seeks, will likely determine the future health of our church for decades, if not centuries, to come.

That seems a bit hyperbolic. Is this a greater crisis than the one Pius IX faced during the Resorgimento? Greater than the Reformation? Greater than the periods of antipopes and the Avignon exile? Still, there's bound to be an impact, and the place to look to suss it out is the U.S., where the American church went through something like what the European church is now facing in 2002 and 2003.

If the American model is a guide, then what won't happen is a more transparent and inclusive institution, with greater leadership roles for women and the laity, and a willingness to open discussion on issues such as clerical celibacy. To look at the leadership of the American church today is to see old-time clericalism in the ascendant, with renewed emphasis on ideological purity and episcopal control. While the American church hasn't shrunk, it appears to be losing its most affluent and educated members, replacing them with immigrants more in need of the church's social services and less likely to challenge for authority.

Of course, there's nothing to say that what has turned into the crisis of the Benedictine papacy won't lead in an entirely different direction. Europe is not America, and in societies where fewer people take the church seriously, church authorities may be more interested in expanding than contracting its popular appeal. Nonetheless, those looking at the crisis as an opportunity for progressive renewal should keep their hopes in tight check.   

In a comment below, Darren Sherkat questions the (moral) legitimacy of those in the evangelical world who have encouraged Tea Party extremism. In that regard, it's worth running down the list of those who have signed on to Sojourners' "Covenant for Civility," a Christian interfaith document designed to tamp down war of words (and worse). The National Association of Evangelicals is well represented, and it's good to note Charles Colson's name and representatives of a host of other evangelical organizations.

But conspicuous by absence is anyone from the Southern Baptist Convention, whose prime spokesman on public policy issues, Richard Land, has been among the most vociferous opponents of HCR. Maybe Tea Party activism is part of the Great Covenant Resurgence.

Recent threats of violence against members of Congress who voted for HCR raise questions about the nature of the protest movement that has inspired them. As it happens, Quinnipiac yesterday released a poll that gives us a portrait of the movement's members.

The Tea Partiers are spread out evenly among those earning less than $250,000 a year, and are a bit more likely to be female than male, older than younger, and lacking than having a college degree. In short, by the standard socioeconomic measures, they are pretty typical "middle class" Americans. What sets them apart from the norm is that they are very white (88 percent) and very Republican (74 percent). Oh yes, and they disproportionately identify themselves as evangelical or born again: Twenty-one percent of born again/evangelicals claim Tea Party status, as opposed to 13 percent of the population at large. Not knowing the exact proportion of evangelicals/born-agains in the sample, I'd guess they make up roughly half the Tea Party movement. Catholics are, as usual, typical of the population as a whole (15 percent Tea Partiers) and Jews, unsurprisingly, are way underrepresented (3 percent).

So this is a movement of neither the haves nor the have-nots, neither the old nor the young, neither the uneducated nor the educated, but of white Republican Christians. While they are, like the organizations of the religious right, formally independent of the GOP, they must be considered as tied to it. One only has to look at the behavior of elected Republican officials over the past year to recognize that. So what, exactly, accounts for the outrage--up to the point of violence? The manifest cause is fear of big government (viz. socialism), laced with opposition to abortion. But there seems to be a deeper, latent sense that they are existentially beset by a threat to their legitimacy as the carriers of American values.

Over at the Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg is right to call attention to what might be called the majoritarian ideology of the Republican Party. Ever since Richard Nixon's Silent Majority, the GOP has managed to convince itself--and, to some extent, the country at large--that it represents the heartland: the solid, white citizens of flyover country who have been mythologized as the real America ever since Jefferson held up yeoman farmers as the key to our new order of things. The culture wars of the past 40 years, played out in partisan terms, have succeeded in locking Republicans into this worldview. (Remember the Moral Majority?)

Update: No surprise, but a new survey by University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker shows that Southerners are 12 percent more likely to be Tea Partiers than inhabitants of other parts of the country.

Evidently, Bart Stupak doesn't feel the bishops aren't showing him as much love as they should:

I should be smarter than to have imagined that Netanyahu would recognize that his playbook was, like, so last week. No, after the Secretary of State tells AIPAC that new construction in East Jerusalem harms the peace process, he shows up and plays the "Jerusalem is not a settlement" card. And after private meetings with Clinton and Biden, he jacks up all the pro-Israel enthusiasm he can  in Congress. Then it's on to the White House for several hours of no-photo op meetings with the President and staff, where he is no doubt read the riot act.

The Administration knows that the Bibi of today is not the Bibi of yesterday. Then he was a tough guy. Now he's a bag of hot air, bouncing back and forth between the right-wingers in his government who only want to weaken him and the imperatives of looking after his country's interests. The Administration also knows that most Israelis regard Obama as "fair" and over 40 percent support a construction freeze in East Jerusalem until there's a peace deal. Though it likes to pretend otherwise, AIPAC knows that too. Notwithstanding the love-in, so do the Democrats in Congress. The Obama Administration has decided to give Bibi the slow squeeze. And by now he knows it.

Yesterday Thomas Reese, S.J., sometime editor of America, gave the Catholic bishops some unsolicited advice on how they should respond to passage of the health care bill that they opposed. Today they issued their response--and it tracks the advice pretty well.

Reese urged them to praise the good things in the bill, and they do. He said they should express hope for the effectiveness of the restrictions on abortion funding negotiated by Rep. Bart Stupak and his fellow pro-life Catholics, and they nod in that direction. He also said they could make clear that they'll be monitoring the situation, and they do that too. They even follow his prescription to acknowledge that their disagreement with the Stupak group has to do with prudential judgment about legislative language rather than pro-life principle--but you have to read the relevant paragraph really closely to understand that:

As bishops, we wish to recognize the principled actions of the pro-life Members of Congress from both parties, in the House and the Senate, who have worked courageously to create legislation that respects the principles outlined above. They have often been vilified and have worked against great odds.

This must be taken to include Stupak & Co. They were harshly criticized by the pro-HCR forces, and the bishops are saying that they acted out of principle, and on behalf of their principles. With the vilification now coming from the other side, the bishops must be understood as standing up for them. It would have been nice if they had they taken their stand more forthrightly.

It would also have been nice if they hadn't felt compelled to reiterate their deceptive claim that the new statute departs from existing principle in the way it enables some women to obtain abortions. As they know full well, Medicaid engages in "funding and facilitating plans that cover abortion" by providing health coverage for poor people--insofar as states can (and many do) supplement it by providing abortion coverage. The new statute merely permits subsidized individuals to do with their own money what states do with theirs, in a program that the bishops support.

But all in all, it's a pretty good statement, especially if you compare it to the feverish denunciation of Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput. What really gets to Chaput is the determination of some groups of his co-religionists to support HCR in the name of their faith, thereby "undercutting the leadership and witness of their own bishops." These he calls "self-described 'Catholic' groups." (By him, a group of nuns that dares to disagree with the bishops is not Catholic but "Catholic.")

To its credit, the USCCB does not make the claim that its members possess "special charism when it comes to interpreting legislative language or guessing how the courts will interpret it." As Tom Reese put it.

So the Lynchburg (no pun intended) Tea Party (LTP) has invited its members to show up at Rep. Tom Perriello's home to share their feelings about his vote in favor of HCR. Given the readiness of some Tea Partiers to shout "Nigger" at black members of Congress and "Faggot" at gay ones--to say nothing of Rep. Neugebauer's "babykiller" denunciation of Rep. Stupak--would anyone be surprised if Perriello were to find a cross burning on his lawn? Assuming LTP can find the right address, that is.

Update: OK, no cross. Just a severed gas line. At his brother's.

Hillary Clinton went unto AIPAC and said:

New construction in East Jerusalem or the West Bank undermines mutual trust and endangers the proximity talks that are the first step toward the full negotiations that both sides want and need. It exposes daylight between Israel and the United States that others in the region could hope to exploit. And it undermines America's unique ability to play a role - an essential role, I might add -- in the peace process. Our credibility in this process depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don't agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally.

Wonder of wonders, this was greeted with "light applause," according to the Forward. Not that the AIPACniks were backing a freeze on settlements, as Code Pink hoaxed. But for all the kissy face in the rest of Clinton's remarks, the squeeze is on and they know they've got to grin and bear it.

AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr says he wants differences between the U.S. and Israel handled behind closed doors, and that's where Netanyahu will be induced to promise no settlement expansion as a good will gesture to get the proximity talks back on track--be it at his tete-a-tete with Clinton at the State Department this afternoon or when he dines with VP Biden at Blair House this evening.

I'm betting he'll break the news when he addresses AIPAC tonight--thereby insuring sweetness and light when he meets with President Obama at the White House tomorrow. It's HCR signing day, and at this juncture in history, you trifle with POTUS at your peril.

Update: I lose my bet.  

Over at Politics Daily, David Gibson has an excellent analysis of how the Catholic bishops managed both to win the anti-abortion battle and be on the losing side of the health care war. There will no doubt be some smoke emanating from USCCB quarters about how they had to stand on principle--including the principle of including undocumented immigrants. The bottom line is that, when push came to shove, they pushed for the bill to go down to defeat, and got shoved out of the way.

I don't doubt that some bishops are secretly happy that things turned out as they did, and presumably Cardinal George, the head of the conference, will quickly try to pivot toward immigration reform. But having lost on health care, they've showed that their bark is worse than their bite. Had they embraced the Stupak compromise at the critical hour, they'd be the mastiffs in the room, not the poodles.

What will the USCCB say about the Stupak deal? I would like to think that the bishops will give some support to the pro-life Democratic members of Congress who carried so much water for them.

Update: I guess not.

I'd give the letter a B-, and as a card-carrying member of the professoriat, admit I am sometimes guilty of grade inflation. On the plus side, the pope not only acknowledges blame up to and including the bishops, but also attributes at least some of the problem to a "misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal, resulting in failure to apply existing canonical penalties and to safeguard the dignity of every person." In Ireland and around the world, the canonical doctrine of scandal has been used again and again by church authorities to rationalize covering up cases of sexual abuse. For Benedict to signal that the doctrine has been a problem is an important step. [Update: For example, do a word search for "scandal" in this dossier from the case of Milwaukee priest Lawrence C. Murphy.]

Likewise, there is a willingness to admit that it was not just certain bad actors but the church itself, at least conceived institutionally, that let people down:

 
Those of you who were abused in residential institutions must have felt that there was no escape from your sufferings. It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church. In her name, I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel...

So Benedict goes beyond the bad-apple theory of the crisis. At the same time, he casts some blame on secular society and even on Vatican II, for supposedly weakening the norms that supposedly prevented such abuse back in the good old days. I'd like to see some real evidence of this. The absence of major pedophile scandals before Vatican II may have less to do with better behavior than with a stricter code of silence.

Be that as it may, the big question prior to the letter's release was how Benedict would handle the bishops. Some of his language is sufficiently stern:  

It cannot be denied that some of you and your predecessors failed, at times grievously, to apply the long-established norms of canon law to the crime of child abuse. Serious mistakes were made in responding to allegations. I recognize how difficult it was to grasp the extent and complexity of the problem, to obtain reliable information and to make the right decisions in the light of conflicting expert advice. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that grave errors of judgement were made and failures of leadership occurred...

Only decisive action carried out with complete honesty and transparency will restore the respect and good will of the Irish people towards the Church to which we have consecrated our lives. This must arise, first and foremost, from your own self-examination, inner purification and spiritual renewal.

However, the pope gives not the slightest hint that there will be any punishment for the bishops who have been shown, in great detail, to have been derelict. To the contrary, he says he is "confident" that, based on what they've told him, "the bishops will now be in a stronger position to carry forward the work of repairing past injustices and confronting the broader issues associated with the abuse of minors in a way consonant with the demands of justice and the teachings of the Gospel."

It remains to be seen, of course, whether the Apostolic Visitation to certain dioceses, seminaries, and religious congregations (orders) will provide the kind of information that results in papal deeds that live up to papal words. But Benedict finds himself in a dicier position than he was when he set out to write this letter back in December. The flood of revelations of abuse and cover-up from all over continental Europe is now lapping at his own slippers. He has met the enemy and it is him. 

In its editorial endorsement of the Senate's health care reform bill, the National Catholic Reporter takes the USCCB to task for buying into the idea that, because the bill doesn't specifically forbid the community health care centers to be funded from performing abortions, it would therefore fund abortions.

...the bishops have to be clear that some of their talking points might lead honest observers to question their competence -- or worse. In the past week or so, much has been made of the bill's provision of $7 billion dollars to community health centers. The National Right to Life Committee chimed in that this money could go to pay for abortions at clinics run by Planned Parenthood. Back to Logic 101: All Planned Parenthood clinics may be clinics, but not all health care clinics are Planned Parenthood clinics. The community health centers in question do not, never have, and have no intention of performing abortions, and they are prohibited by statute from doing so. This is a red herring and it was profoundly disappointing to see the USCCB Web site give credence to it.

Bottom line: The current legislation is not "pro-abortion," and there is no, repeat no, federal funding of abortion in the bill.

More charitably, Tom Reese, S.J. portrays the bishops as fearing that "courts might force [the centers] to perform abortions." Which courts? Does anyone seriously think that the Supreme Court is about to declare unconstitutional a statute prohibiting certain clinics from performing abortions?

Far be it from me to accuse anyone of bad faith, but the community health care center argument looks like one of those horribles lawyers use when they are piling up arguments on behalf of a client. No one doubts that in this particular case the National Right to Life Committee is representing the Republican Party. The question is why the USCCB, which insists that it supports health care reform as enthusiastically as ever, is doing the same.

Charles Krauthammer thinks Obama is anti-Israel. Israelis disagree. Poor neocons.

John Allen has constructed a case that upon becoming pope, Benedict XVI had a species of conversion experience regarding sexual abuse by priests. Prior to that he "seemed just another Roman cardinal in denial." Or perhaps, just another sometime archbishop who swept charges under the rug. But all this changed when he assumed Peter's chair.

There is some considerable evidence for this, and Allen does a good job laying it out. But at the end of piece, the apologia pro vita pontificis comes to an end with a warning shot across the bow:

From the beginning, the "sex abuse crisis" has actually been an interlocking set of two problems: the abuse committed by some priests, and the administrative failures of some bishops who should have known better to deal with the problem.

In general, the impact of Benedict's "conversion" has been felt mostly on that first level -- the determination to punish abusers, to adopt stringent policies governing future cases, to reach out to victims and to apologize for the suffering they've endured. So far, Benedict has not adopted any new accountability mechanisms for bishops. Aside from a few instances such as Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, few bishops have been asked, or instructed, to resign.

Aye, there's the rub: Zero tolerance for priests; maximum tolerance for bishops. Certainly, as In All Things' Austin Invereigh pointed out last month ("The Irish Bishops Don't Get It"), the misbehaving Irish bishops came away from their confab with Benedict happy as clams--all except Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, who does get it, and who was so disgusted that he left town before the press conference.

As new pedophile scandals erupt worldwide (the latest in Brazil), tomorrow Benedict will sign his long-awaited Pastoral Letter to the Church in Ireland. "My hope, he said, "is that it will help in the process of repentance, healing and renewal." Not if it lets the bishops off the hook it won't.

Hear them roar.

The leaders of 60 orders of nuns have sent a letter to all members of Congress urging support of the Senate health care bill. Here's the punchline:

Congress must act. We are asking every member of our community to contact their congressional representatives this week. In this Lenten time, we have launched nationwide prayer vigils for health care reform. We are praying for those who currently lack health care. We are praying for the nearly 45,000 who will lose their lives this year if Congress fails to act. We are also praying for you and your fellow Members of Congress as you complete your work in the coming days. For us, this health care reform is a faith mandate for life and dignity of all of our people.

With respect to abortion, the letter says:

And despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions. It will uphold longstanding conscience protections and it will make historic new investments - $250 million - in support of pregnant women. This is the REAL pro-life stance, and we as Catholics are all for it.

Take that, USCCB! Oh, yes, and the horse you rode in on, Archbishop Chaput! The latter, scourge of same-sex couples who would send their children to parochial schools, is in the public prints excoriating those, like the Catholic Hospital Association and Catholics United, who have dared endorse the Senate bill under the banner of Catholicism:

"Groups, trade associations and publications describing themselves as 'Catholic' or 'prolife' that endorse the Senate version -- whatever their intentions -- are doing a serious disservice to the nation and to the Church," he said.

Chaput accused these groups of "undermining the witness of the Catholic community; and ensuring the failure of genuine, ethical health-care reform."

"By their public actions, they create confusion at exactly the moment Catholics need to think clearly about the remaining issues in the health-care debate. They also provide the illusion of moral cover for an unethical piece of legislation," he added.

If there's ever been such a division over an issue of public policy within the Catholic church in America, I can't think of it.

Is it possible that one Catholic bishop has the guts to come out for HCR? Cf. this.

I've caught a moderate degree of flak from a few Mormons who believe I've misrepresented the position of their church regarding social justice. To restate my argument, it was that 1) the Mosaic Law, as enunciated in the Holiness Code of Leviticus, holds that the poor are to be provided for as a matter of public law, not individual charity; and 2) that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which saw itself as restoring both ancient Israel and the early Church, incorporated this aspect of the Mosaic Law into its own public law in the nineteenth century.

The late Dean May, an eminent Mormon historian, laid out the course of Mormon social welfare policy 20 years ago in a fine article: "Body and Soul: The Record of Mormon Religious Philanthropy," Church History, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Sep., 1988), pp. 322-336. Beginning with the Book of Mormon (4 Nephi 3), the LDS Church was imbued with the teaching that care of the poor was a collective responsibility. As May makes clear, this was from the outset a teaching focused not on all the poor but on the Mormon community itself. To that extent, Mormons were under less of an obligation to care for the stranger among them than were the ancient Israelites. But it was equally the case that, as members of the Church, they were obligated to provide for the poor, whether enthusiastically or begrudgingly. By my lights, that's a corporate commitment to social justice.

It is hard to imagine anyone who could be unmoved by the interview given to NCR's Thomas Fox yesterday by the two lesbian partners who have been told by the archdiocese of Denver that their two daughters can no longer attend a parish school. While it's not for me to say whether they are "good Catholics," they are without question devoted to their faith, eager for their daughters to be brought up in it, and anything but interested in making a public statement about the Church's stand on same-sex relationships.

What's clear from their account is that the school itself had no problem with their family, and that that probably went for the parish priest who oversees it as well. The problem had to do with the regime of Archbishop Charles Chaput. My guess is that someone in the parish let the archdiocese know that there was a lesbian couple in Boulder whose kids were attending Sacred Heart of Jesus elementary school, and the hammer came down.

Over at In All Things, Michael O'Loughlin is quite right to connect this story to a new policy of Catholic Charities in Washington requiring new employees to sign a statement to promise they will not "violate the principles or tenets" of the Church. Then there's the ongoing if stuttering effort to investigate women religious. Hammers are coming down all over.

For those who like such things, I'd recommend curling up on a rainy day with the Ninth Circuit's 2-1 decision in Newdow v. Rio Linda Union School District, which reverses a district court ruling that having public school children recite the Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase "under God" violates the First Amendment's prohibition of religious establishments. Writing for the majority, Judge Carlos T. Bea spends 57 pages doing an astonishing series of legal back flips to show that the phrase is all about patriotism and the Founders and limited government, as opposed to having a religious purpose. Whereupon Judge Stephen Reinhardt spends 136 pages giving the performance an F, with extreme prejudice.

What happens next, according to the Los Angeles Times, is an effort to get an en banc hearing from the entire Ninth Circuit and, failing that, an appeal to the Supreme Court. Whether the justices will go for it is an interesting question. They took Michael Newdow's first Pledge case, and then decided to punt rather than decide it on the merits--asserting that Newdow lacked standing to bring the case. That was back in June of 2004, and it certainly looked like a majority of the justices just didn't want to infect the election campaign with a huge symbolic "under God" fracas.

The real problem here is that it's very hard to make a case that having government officials (i.e. public school teachers) lead students every morning in a patriotic exercise that invokes God does not amount to a religious exercise--especially when you look at the legislative history of the insertion of the phrase into the Pledge in 1954. Yet the last thing sensible people should want is a Grand Public Cause resulting in a constitutional amendment establishing "under God" and who knows what else as religious exceptions to the First Amendment.

The Pledge is one long declarative sentence, the first half of which is inarguable ("I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America; and to the Republic for which it stands"); the second half, wishful or perhaps prayerful ("one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all"). Probably the best thing to pray for is that the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court decline to hear the case.

Expanding health coverage reduces abortions. That's what T.R. Reid argues in today's WaPo, and it's a powerful argument. Look at our peer countries in the developed world. All have universal health coverage and most include abortion in that coverage and all have lower rates of abortion than we do. Why? On the front end, women have access to contraceptive services; on the back end, they know there will be health coverage for them and their babies if they carry to term. So, says Reid:

For various reasons, then, expanding health-care coverage reduces the rate of abortion. All the other industrialized democracies figured that out years ago. The failure to recognize this plain statistical truth may explain why American churches have played such a small role in our national debate on health care. Searching for ways to limit abortions, our faith leaders have managed to overlook a proven approach that's on offer now: expanding health-care coverage.

The only thing wrong with that paragraph is that it assumes that the pro-life faith leaders he's talking about are focused on reducing the number of abortions. That's the same mistake, I'm afraid, that the Obamaite "common ground" folks also make. But what's become clear over the past year is that the pro-lifers who oppose HCR not merely as a pretext are concerned with principle and personal purity, not abortion reduction. That is to say, they want to push the principle of "no public funding for abortions" as far as they can because 1) it helps establish the idea that abortion is disapproved of by the government; and 2) it permits them to believe that none of "their" taxpayer dollars are going to pay for abortions.

They will no doubt claim that if their efforts bear fruit in the long run, abortion will be banned and the abortion rate will go down big time. In fact, however, there is little correlation between abortion rates and the legal status of abortion. The strong correlation is between abortion legality and abortion safety. Where abortion is legal, abortions are safe; where it's not, women die. What's important to recognize is that that's a price a lot of hard-line pro-lifers are prepared to pay.

Last week's statement critical of the proposed anti-homosexuality law by the Inter-Religious Council of Uganda (IRCU) certainly suggests that. It's signed by the leaders of the country's Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, and Seventh-Day Adventist churches, as well as by its Muslim Mufti, and published in New Vision, the state-owned and largest circulation daily. As Box Turtle Bulletin's Jim Burroway points out, the statement is itself plenty homophobic. But given the record of silence and worse from Uganda's religious leadership on the bill, this has to be taken not only as a good sign but also as an indication that the fix is in. We'll see, but don't say I didn't tell you so.

Under withering fire from numerous corners of the religious blogosphere, Glenn Beck first doubled down on his animadversions against religious bodies that place "social justice" on their escutcheons, then walked himself back a bit (relevant clips here). What emerges is the Beckian doctrine that religious injunctions to care for the poor and do other socially just things are fine so long as they are understood as being about you. Which is to say, individuals can do all those things enjoined in, for example, Isaiah 58 for their own spiritual benefit ("the Lord will guide you always"), but are not to use such injunctions to advocate for government social welfare programs.

To give the devil his due, Beck is here taking one side in an old debate: "Do we help our neighbor for the neighbor's sake or for our own?" Twelfth-century monks and regular canons wasted a lot of parchment debating this issue, with the monks taking the Beckian position and the canons arguing the opposite. Be that as it may, it's worth considering what those parts of Scripture that enunciate laws for society (i.e. not the Gospels) have to say. Here I'd point to the laws on gleaning laid down in the so-called Holiness Code of Leviticus (so beloved of American conservatives for its apparent condemnation of homosexual acts):

^19:10 Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God.
 ^23:22 When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God.

Now, under that distinctive Israelite species of polity that Josephus called theocracy, this is not voluntary charity undertaken for your own spiritual benefit. It is mandated welfare--social justice of just the sort that Beck despises. Not to belabor the point, but the Judeo-Christian tradition from which Beck's Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints springs expects the poor to be provided for as a matter of public law. And indeed, in the days when the LDS Church ran its corner of North America as a theocracy, that's just what it did.

The Irish bishops come to town and are sent away assured that nothing serious is going to happen to them. Pedophile scandals proceed to break out on the Continent, centering on Germany. The pontiff's brother, Georg Ratzinger, does a Sgt. Schultz, saying he knew nothing about allegations of abuse at the schools affiliated with his elite choir. Osservatore Romano says all this wouldn't have happened if there were more women in positions of ecclesiastical authority. Cardinal Schönborn almost says this wouldn't have happened if it weren't for priestly celibacy. The Vatican's chief exorcist says the Vatican is possessed by the Devil.

So are the wheels coming off the pope-mobile? That's pretty much Rocco's take. To be sure, by medieval standards, it may not seem like much. No one's elected an anti-pope or forced the Curia to pack up and move to Avignon. But think of the lurches from insulting the Muslims at Regensburg to freaking out the Jews over the Tridentine Mass and the canonization of Pius XII to dissing the Anglicans with Anglicanorum coetibus to appalling just about everybody by cozying up to the Lefebvrists.

It's getting hard not to see the Benedictine papacy as a comedy of errors. Or maybe, a tragedy.

..then how to understand those who insist it is?

Over at Politics Daily, David Gibson walks carefully through the allegations, with the help of Washington and Lee law professor Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, an ardent pro-lifer who's an expert on abortion and health care.

"The bottom line is that health care reform is pro-life," Jost said. "We're going to save an awful lot of lives with this bill ... I identify as a Christian, strongly, and I identify as someone who believes in the sacredness of life. I just think this is a pro-life bill. I'm really discouraged that people not only don't want it but also are spreading erroneous information about it. Because I don't think that's something that Christians should do."

What gives? In Gibson's view, "Those who have laid down a marker against the Senate bill have a lot invested in seeing it fail, or having it changed, if only to save face given all they have invested in portraying the bill as 'pro-abortion.'"

But not only to save face. The issue has also served opponents of health care reform as a useful pretext. Consider, for example Thomas Peters' March 1 post on the American Principles Project Blog entitled, "Abortion funding issue still last best hope for halting health care legislation passage." Such people will not permit themselves to admit that a bill is not pro-abortion simply because to do so would advance the cause of reform. The question comes down to which opponents fall into that camp.

Today, 25 pro-life Catholic theologians and evangelical leaders issued a letter (complete with point-by-point analysis) urging members of Congress not to let misleading information about the Senate bill's abortion stance keep them from voting for reform. It's time to separate the sheep from the goats.

Big time. In Hustler.

Some conservative paladins of Religious Freedom have gotten their knickers in a twist because they have discerned a new propensity on the part of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to use the expression "freedom of worship" rather than "freedom of religion" in major public addresses at home and abroad. A couple of weeks ago Ashley Samuelson sounded the alarm over on On the Square, crediting Georgetown's Tom Farr with having first smelled out the rhetorical rat. Now, at Georgtown/On Faith, Farr offers his own extended say: "Obama sidelining religious freedom?"

The burden of the critique is that freedom of religion covers a lot more things than freedom of worship, including the right to wear certain things in public and say certain things in public. So evidently Obama and Clinton are truckling to those who would restrict the ability of certain people to, oh, evangelize.

But, soft. Freedom of worship happens to be one of the famous four "essential human freedoms" enunciated by FDR in his 1941 State of the Union Address. As FDR put it then: 

The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world.

(Then come freedom from want and freedom from fear.)

Here's the relevant quote from Obama's November 15 speech in Beijing--one of the prime examples of his alleged demarche from support for religious freedom:

We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation, but we also don't believe that the principles that we stand for are unique to our nation. These freedoms of expression and worship--of access to information and political participation--we believe are universal rights. They should be available to all people, including ethnic and religious minorities, whether they are in the United States, China, or any nation.

In paraphrasing FDR, Obama hardly seems to have been pulling back from a commitment to religious freedom. After all, he's also insisting on free expression, and that includes freedom to wear distinctive religious garments in public and to speak religiously in public, including on behalf of your own faith.

It's significant the Samuelson, in a litany of charges against restrictors of religious freedom at home and abroad, fails to mention the Supreme Court's 1990 Smith decision, wherein Justice Scalia succeeded in rounding up a 5-vote majority for the most stunning slap-down of free-exercise rights since the religion clauses were incorporated into federal jurisprudence in the middle of the 20th century. That tells you that what's blowing in the wind is ideological smoke.

And the the Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships completed their report and saw that it was good and presented it to the president. So what comes next?

The recommendations range across a wide range of government departments, and include both highly specific programmatic suggestions and airy hopes for good things. The Council members, who will be going their separate ways with the appointment of a new Council, can use their inside contacts and bully pulpits to urge the administration to follow what recommendations they hold most dear.

But for those of us concerned about of Office's aboriginal business of facilitating faith-based social service provision, the focus remains on the need to amend President Bush's December 2002 executive order, "Equal Protection of the Laws for Faith-Based and Community Organizations." The report includes a host of recommendations, most of them unanimous and a couple not, that would go a long way towards remedying the constitutional shortcomings of the Bush approach. It shouldn't be too hard for the White House counsel's office and the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to whip these into an amended executive order.

Of course, the torturous hiring issue, which the Advisory Council was specifically ordered to take off its plate, remains to be decided. Sooner or later, the lawyers are going to have to belly up to that one. The sooner the better.

What to make of the decision in the Land of Chaput, aka the Archdiocese of Denver, to boot a preschooler out of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School in Boulder for having two mommies?

The archdiocese says it must do so because it "would be a cause of confusion for the student in that what they are being taught in school conflicts with what they experience in the home." The parish priest in charge of the school is a bit more forthcoming:

If a child of gay parents comes to our school, and we teach that gay marriage is against the will of God, then the child will think that we are saying their parents are bad. We don't want to put any child in that tough position--nor do we want to put the parents, or the teachers, at odds with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

How exactly would the parents or teachers be put at odds with church teachings? What Fr. Bill Breslin knows is that having little Kevin in school will mean that parents and teachers (and he himself) will be loath to engage in the kind of denunciation of same-sex relationships that Archbishop Chaput specializes in. And there would be those pesky field trips and parent conferences and sleep-overs etc., all creating the impression that Kevin's family is pretty darn normal. No, the real danger contemplated here is not that the child might be upset but that the presence of the child would upset the church's teaching authority. It would be an Occasion of Scandal.

Of course, Catholic schools are not unfamiliar with problems involving families who violate the principle invoked by the archdiocese to exclude this child; namely: "Parents living in open discord with Catholic teaching in areas of faith and morals unfortunately choose by their actions to disqualify their children from enrollment." Allowing as how the parish and archdiocese are "within their rights" not to admit children from families who are in such violation, America's James Martin rhetorically inquires:

So do the same rules apply to a child of parents who [are] in similar discord? That is, the child of a single, divorced parent? To a child of divorced and remarried parents? To a child of a single, unmarried mother? To a child of a parent who commits adultery? To a child of a parent who uses birth control?  To a child of a parent who steals from his company? To a child of a parent who fails to forgive his neighbor? To a child of a parent who fails to care for the poor? To a child of any parent who sins? They too would be in "open discord."

The answer to all of the above is, Martin implies, of course not. But the difference is that in all the above cases, the parent in question would be likely to admit that the violation in question was a bad, or at least regrettable, thing. Members of same-sex relationships, not so much. Therein lies the real discord.

The Motion Picture Academy may have sent Avatar down in flames, but my guess is that it's not going to quiet the ideological squabbling over the movie. This blog doesn't get a lot of comments, but there have been more, over a longer period, on my little post on Avatar's Christian theme than on any other post I've written. The smartest thing I've seen on the movie is Daniel Mendelsohn's piece, "The Wizard," in the current New York Review. Mendelsohn loves the aesthetics, but is pretty dyspeptic about the message. For him, the movie represents the ultimate realization of James Cameron's perpetual theme of looking for escape from the merely human.

Heretofore, the escape has always been via technology, and Mendelsohn tries to make out a case that the Na'vi, notwithstanding their appearance of tribal primitiveness, are actually technological wonders. That, it seems to me, misses the point. What Avatar demonstrates is the triumph of natural technology, so to speak, over the hardware that has beguiled Cameron in his earlier films. What the movie offers is spiritual transcendence--for the Sullied Jake, for Grace Augustine, for the bemused 3-D audiences...for flawed humanity. Whether you think this is a deep message or a shallow and derivative one, Christian idealism or manipulative Hollywood paganism, it has shown an impressive ability to get under peoples' skin.

On Friday, a second former official of Catholic Charities in Washington wrote a letter denouncing the agency's decision to stop offering insurance policies that cover its employees' spouses. Last week, meanwhile, over on In All Things, James Martin served up a link to then-Archbishop of San Francisco William Levada's letter justifying his 1997 policy that succeeded in 1) keeping spousal coverage; conforming to San Francisco's then new law requiring agencies doing business with the city to extend the same benefits to domestic partners as it did to spouses; and avoiding church approval of same-sex partnerships. The letter came in response to criticism from Michael Uhlmann of the Ethics and Public Policy Institute, and is must reading for anyone interested in the latest chapter in this saga.

Here's the crux of Levada's argument for extending health benefits to one other adult legally domiciled with a Catholic Charities employee:

Uhlmann appears to think that no benefits should be offered to live-in lovers. But surely he needs to rethink such a position. Is it really a matter for an employer to exclude a person from benefits on the basis of activities that are sinful? Even prostitutes, alcoholics, embezzlers -- I won't rehearse the whole catalogue -- need health insurance. The problem arises when we are asked to single out and recognize a category based on such activity as part of our employee benefits. This is what our agreement with the city of San Francisco has changed, and in a way that broadens the scope of health benefits for uninsured children, elderly persons, and so many others whose lack of health insurance is genuinely a national scandal.

I understand that in Washington, Archbishop Wuerl has claimed that the stakes are higher now than they were then in San Francisco, that no one then was talking about same-sex marriage. But in fact Levada does mention same-sex marriage in his letter; it was then on the table in Hawaii.

Levada is hardly a nobody. He now serves as prefect for the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith--which, like, oversees all church doctrine. Does he continue to uphold the policy he promulgated in San Francisco? Is any other bishop prepared to stand up for it? This looks like one more example of how much weaker the advocates of comprehensive health care have become within the hierarchy.

In his letter asking the board of Catholic Charities in Washington to reconsider the archdiocese's new policy withdrawing health coverage from spouses, former chief operating officer Tim Sawina mentions that Georgetown University "found a better way." Here's the Georgetown policy:

Spouse/Legally Domiciled Adult (LDA)

For medical, dental and vision coverage only, instead of covering a spouse, you may cover another qualified adult member of your household. A qualified adult member of your household is a LDA if he/she is an individual over age 18 who has for at least 6 months lived in the same principal residence as you, remains a member of your household throughout the coverage period, and who:

-EITHER has a close personal relationship with you (not a casual roommate or tenant), shares basic living expenses and is financially interdependent with you, is neither legally married to anyone else nor legally related to you by blood in any way that would prohibit marriage, and is neither receiving benefits from an employer nor eligible for any group coverage.

-OR your blood relative who meets the definition of your tax dependent as defined by Section 152 of the Internal Revenue Code during the coverage period and is neither receiving benefits from an employer nor eligible for any other group coverage.

By allowing employees to designate one other qualified adult living in their household for coverage, Georgetown can avoid recognizing same-sex marriage while providing coverage to those who are legally recognized as spouses under D.C. law. What the Archdiocese of Washington needs to explain is why, in order to be able to provide the health coverage the church recognizes as a basic human right, such an approach is unacceptable.

P.S. I'm willing to bet a nickel that archdioceses in other same-sex marriage jurisdictions have quietly taken the Georgetown approach, which seems to have been pioneered in San Francisco.

Reconsideration: It's been suggested to me that the Georgetown language covering non-spousal LDAs (same-sex or otherwise) would, under the new D.C. law, not be necessary to cover same-sex spouses. Which leads me to wonder whether the university, in order not to seem to be recognizing same-sex marriage, will feel obliged to adjust its language in some way--perhaps by removing references to spouses altogether.

A new Pew survey shows the proportion of Americans who think there's enough news coverage of a particular subject area versus the proportion who think there's not enough. As in 87%-6% for sport; 59%-34 percent for U.S. domestic policy; and 51%-44% for religion and spirituality. Other than revealing that people feel saturated by sports (and to a somewhat lesser extent business coverage), I'm not sure what to make of this--especially regarding religion. (Pew emphasizes the sizable number of "not enoughs."

There's a whole lot less conventional religion coverage than there was a decade ago, simply because 90 percentage of it used to come from newspapers, and newspaper staffs--especially in specialty areas--have been radically reduced over the past few years. Maybe people are getting their religion news from elsewhere. Maybe they don't want all that much of it. Or maybe, this is one of those surveys that asks people for answers to questions they've never thought about, And so in most cases, the answers mean very little.

Second thought: How come, by the way, people weren't asked any "too much coverage" questions? What if, say, 20 percent thought there was too much coverage of religion? Oops.

Same-sex marriages are taking place in the nation's capital, but the controversy over the Catholic church's reaction to that development has not quieted down. Comes today a biting letter to the directors of Catholic Charities in DC from Tim Sawina, until last year the organization's chief operating office, It rips the Washington Archdiocese's decision to stop offering coverage to spouses of employees, lest this somehow lend the sanction of the church to same-sex marriage. (Update: WaPo story here.) Meanwhile, on the archdiocesan website, Msgr. Charles Pope assails changes to traditional marital rules (i.e. traditional Catholic marital rules), and advances the suggestion that the church should reserve for itself the term Holy Matrimony, to distinguish it from the unholy matrimony being perpetrated by secular society these days.

In such matters, medievalist that I sometimes am, I turn to good old Hugh of St. Victor, regular canon and theologian of the 12th century, who wrote the first summa in the scholastic tradition, the De Sacramentis. In Hugh's view, the sacrament of marriage--then a new thing under the Catholic sun--is partly carnal, partly spiritual. In its carnal form, it stands for the relationship of Christ and the church, which is pretty good--but not as good as in its spiritual form, where it stands for the relationship of God and the soul. Or, as Hugh puts it:

The office of marriage indeed is a sacrament of society, which is in the flesh between Christ and the Church...to which sacrament woman cannot attain with whom carnal commerce is known not to have taken place. Yet she can attain to another sacrament, not great in Christ and the Church but greater in God and in the soul. Why? If that which is in the flesh is great, is not this much greater which is in the spirit?

Hugh was a good old Augustinian, and had little regard for things of the flesh. For him, marriage didn't have to be fleshly to be marriage. He believed that the essence of Holy Matrimony was not coitus but the loving association of the partners. Such a theology opens the door to, yes, a recognition of same-sex marriage. (Pace, Msgr. Pope.)

Today's conservative Catholic celebrants of marriage (e.g. Robby George), get almost pornographic in their enthusiasm for the carnal--in a way that would have shocked the Augustines and Hughs of the Catholic past. Ironically, the good old Catholic tradition was, in its hostility to the carnal, more open theologically to same-sex unions than what passes for traditional today.

...and Immanent Frame has published a bunch of bloggy reax to its study of the religious blogosphere--including from your correspondent here. Enjoy, and I'll try to be back on the case tomorrow.

Five weeks ago, the good Jesuits at America caught a little right-wing Catholic flak for giving their Campion Award for achievement in letters to the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. After all, Williams presides over the church under whose auspices Edmund Campion was drawn and quartered in 1581.

Campion was a leading Oxford don who welcomed Queen Elizabeth to the university in 1569 and impressed her in a public debate. Shortly thereafter he found he couldn't stick with the Church of England, left Oxford and after becoming reconciled to Rome joined the Jesuits. He undertook a secret mission to England in 1580 during which he wrote his "Decem Rationes" against the Anglican Church, 400 copies of which were placed on the benches of St Mary's, Oxford, formally known as the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. This enraged the local establishment, and the hunt for Campion was on in earnest.

I'm happy to report that St Mary's now commemmorates Campion and 21 other men of his era with a plaque that reads at the top:

REMEMBER THE MARTYRS OF THE REFORMATION

BOTH CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT WHO LIVED IN OXFORDSHIRE

TAUGHT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD OR WERE BROUGHT HERE

FOR EXECUTION

So chill, Catholic right wingers.

 

 

So Catholic Charities in Washington will express church disapproval of same-sex marriage by doing away with insurance coverage for any and all kinds of spouses. This, WaPo reports, is different from the approach in San Francisco, where the archdiocese expanded the definition of domestic partner to include a sibling or a parent or whomever in the household. Why didn't Washington go that route? No indication in the story. And what about the policies in jurisdictions that actually permit same-sex marriage? What does Catholic Charities do in Boston and Hartford and Burlington and Concord and Des Moines?