April 2010 Archives

The letter sent to President Obama and Secretary of Defense Gates by a group retired chaplains begging for retention of Don't Ask/Don't Tell is not exactly a testament to intellectual honesty. The chaplains--evangelicals and other conservative Protestants--are exercised that if the military "normalizes homosexual behavior" it will impinge upon their own religious liberty. But as they are well aware, clergy don't enjoy the same degree of religious liberty when they're employed by the military as they do as civilians. There are rules limiting proselytizing, for example, and although these have always stuck in the craw of evangelical chaplains anxious to exercise the Great Commission, they have had to abide by them. If they can't, then they can always pursue their calling outside the confines of military service.

Deep into the letter, the signatories do admit that military chaplains only have their jobs by virtue of the need to enable other service personnel to exercise their own right of religious free exercise. The letter goes on to claim that limiting chaplains' religious freedom will limit the free exercise rights of "the men and women in uniform who share their faith and rely on their instruction." Why? Because it says so.

The truth is that by not forbidding it American society "normalizes" what a lot of religious folks consider sinful behavior: divorce, extramarital sex, alcohol consumption, dancing, gambling, abortion. It's simply necessary for Americans to recognize that the norms of civil society are not necessarily the same as the norms of their particular faith. And that goes for the military portion of civil society as well.

It's pretty clear, however, that the chaplains are angling for something other than the retention of Don't Ask/Don't Tell. For decades, evangelicals have resented the limits the military has imposed on their chaplains. (See Anne Loveland's fine 1996 study, American Evangelicals andthe U.S. Military, 1942-1993.) During the recent Bush Administration, the restraints loosened considerably, and (most notoriously at the Air Force Academy) an evangelical regime began to take hold. Under the Obama Administration, however, things have headed back the other way.

What the signatories--many of whom are associated with the International Association of Evangelical Chaplains--really want is congressional legislation giving them a freer hand to do their thing than the current rules permit. That's why they write, at the end of their letter, "At the very least, though, Congress should include comprehensive and robust religious liberty protections in any sort of policy change." I can't wait to see the proposed language.

The recent Gallup survey of partisan congressional preference shows (surprise!) that the electorate remains just about where it's been for a decade when it comes to religious divisions. The more frequent worship attenders are more Republican; the less frequent, more Democratic. The biggest gap is among the Nones--those who say they have no religion--who prefer the Democrats by a 37-point margin, 62 percent to 25 percent. (Catholics skew Republican by 6 points and non-Catholic Christians by 10.) All in all, the God gap remains as robust as ever. 

Over at the blog formerly known as Crunchy Con, Rod Dreher has discovered Mother Noella Marcellino, the famous cheese nun of Regina Laudis Abbey in Bethlehem, CT. Impressed with an account of her rap analogizing cheese maturation to the contemplative life, Dreher asks if there's anywhere he can buy some of the cheese she makes:

Because I'd sure like to support these holy women and their good work. And I'd like to eat some good cheese, too.

As it happens, I was having lunch (yep, including some of that tasty Bethlehem cheese) with Mother Noella last Saturday, and I'm sorry to have to report that there's none for sale. At this point they're making just six cheeses a week, all for the consumption of themselves and their guests. Mother Noella, a microbiologist as well as Abbey choir-mistress, is spending much of her time these days writing articles on artisanal cheese-making in America and the history of cheese itself. She figures it originated with some Bedouin transporting milk across the desert in a dried calf's stomach.

Holy the Benedictine nuns of Regina Laudis no doubt are. They're also 37 of the smartest, hard-working, Ph.D.-carrying, organic-farming, Gregorian-chanting women you're ever likely to meet. Each year, they welcome the students in Trinity's program on Guided Studies in Western Civilization to day of work and (at least vicarious) prayer, beginning with morning Mass and ending with Vespers in their fabulous wooden church. 

For the students, it's an unforgettable opportunity to experience for themselves something of the life of those cloistered medieval people they've studied. (Probably the closest thing to Regina Laudis in the Middle Ages was the community of learned nuns Heloise presided over at the Paraclete.) It's also a reminder of the central place of the vita contemplativa through most of the history of Catholicism. Amidst all the sturm und drang these days over the Church's public actions and responsibilities, it's worth bearing in mind that it was contemplative Mary, not active Martha, whom Jesus praised as having the better part. 

With Greece teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and Portugal, Spain, and Ireland not far behind, we are entitled to pose the question, "Is the Catholic Church too big to fail?"

As tends to be the case for actors of comparable girth in the financial sector, the answer would seem to be, "Yes, probably." But given the performance by those in charge over the past several months, you never know. Take, for instance, the following comment by Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the course of a mild inquisition by the News Hour's Margaret Warner yesterday:

WARNER: So you don't think it's appropriate that people hold the church to a higher standard? There is more focus on the church?

LEVADA: That's a fair question. I think we should hold ourselves to a higher standard in the sense that priests are given a long period of training selection. It's a selective choice, this is not something that one would have expected that a bishop or anybody in the church, parents, none of us would have expected this, but I think the causes we will see go back to changes in society that the church and priests were not prepared for, particularly changes involving how to be a celibate person in a time of the sexual revolution, that's one of the causes I'd say.

Huh? The church is to be held to a higher standard because priests get more training? Except that until recently the church was unprepared and so priests didn't get more training? This is the best the Vatican's top official for abuse cases can manage?

Fr. James Martin, S.J. has been been hither and yon urging that what's been missing in the Catholic hierarchy's response to the current abuse crisis has been penance, as in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. As warrant for his position, he cites the pope's recent suggestion that some penance might be in order at this time. But so far as Martin is concerned, what's needed is not generalized penance for the entire Church, as called for by the bishops of England and Wales a few days ago. The laity should not do atonement for the sins of the fathers.

What would the clerical penance look like? Martin mentions real work for the poor such as service in a soup kitchen, but begs off the job of serving as episcopal confessor. David Gibson pronounces himself baffled. How about letting history be the guide?

The Early Church organized penitents into four groups, the members of which were permitted varying degrees of participation in worship services. Those guilty of the most serious sins--mortal ones--were not permitted to enter the church. Called flentes (weepers) or hybernantes (those out in the cold), they stood outside, sometimes arrayed in sackcloth and ashes, and begged the prayers of the faithful as they went in. This was the most public penance imaginable, and surely public penance is what's required in the present case.

Imagine the pope pronouncing a Sunday of Clerical Penance, on which all bishops and priests would put on sackcloth and ashes and stand outside Catholic churches around the world asking for parishioners' prayers and begging their forgiveness. The effect would, I predict, be stunning.

Today, National Security Adviser Jim Jones apologized for telling a Jewish joke that some in attendance at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found offensive. He allowed as how it had been "inappropriate." What was it? As originally reported by the Forward's Nathan Guttman, the joke went like this:

A Taliban militant gets lost and is wandering around the desert looking for water. He finally arrives at a store run by a Jew and asks for water. The Jewish vendor tells him he doesn't have any water but can gladly sell him a tie. The Taliban, the jokes goes on, begins to curse and yell at the Jewish storeowner. The Jew, unmoved, offers the rude militant an idea: Beyond the hill, there is a restaurant; they can sell you water. The Taliban keeps cursing and finally leaves toward the hill. An hour later he's back at the tie store. He walks in and tells the merchant: "Your brother tells me I need a tie to get into the restaurant."

I think Ben Smith is right to call this "in the tradition of Jewish jokes usually told by Jews." Why? Not because it has to do with sharp dealing--with "jewing" someone down. Gentiles tell that kind of joke. This joke relies on the Jewish storekeeper knowing that his brother obliges customers to wear ties to his high-class joint. It has to do with social status, not money.

I first became aware of this delicate distinction in Jewish joke-telling in a comparable context. Back in 1987, I happened to be following the then would-be Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis on a fundraising swing through Texas--at a time when the only news such a swing could make was the response of the candidate to the events of the day. And that day in Houston, the event was President Reagan's (abortive) nomination of one Douglas Ginsburg to the U.S. Supreme Court. At the press availability, Dukakis, asked whether he knew the nominee (who had spend time in Massachusetts), mumbled something and then said no, he didn't.

Afterwards, a staffer came up to the handful of traveling press and, with the kind of excitement one reserves for a rare event, asked whether we'd heard the governor's "joke." No, we replied. Well, he said, listen to the tape. And sure enough, there on the tape were the words, "The only Ginsburg I know runs a deli in Brookline." This was hardly a joke, but it did provoke an intense discussion among us scribblers as to whether Dukakis had made some kind of an anti-Semitic crack.

On the contrary, I argued, it was just the kind of comment that Jews make about Jews. There's Ginsburg the judge and Ginsburg the deli owner. It's was a status crack--perhaps even a touch self-deprecating. Someone, I think, did include Dukakis' remark in the story he filed, but if it made it into print, it caused not a ripple of controversy. Too obscure, and Dukakis--married to a Jew and living in heavily Jewish Brookline--was the least probable anti-Semite in Massachusetts.

So was Gen. Jones remark inappropriate? Nah.

Today, Ross Douthat bewails the decline of civilization as manifested by Comedy Central's censorship of South Park's recent representation of Muhammad. On the one hand, Douthat laments the kowtowing of the network before the implied threat of a marginal Islamist website. On the other, he laments that, these days, only Islam seems off-limits to sacrilegious satire.

Across 14 on-air years, there's no icon "South Park" hasn't trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn't mined. In a less jaded era, its creators would have been the rightful heirs of Oscar Wilde or Lenny Bruce -- taking frequent risks to fillet the culture's sacred cows. In ours, though, even Parker's and Stone's wildest outrages often just blur into the scenery...

Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.

This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that "bravely" trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

But anyone who thinks South Park is about trashing our own values and traditions hasn't been paying attention. Just an inch or so beneath the scatological surface, the show is little more than a typical Western religious exercise in criticizing hypocrisy, sanctimony, and false prophecy. As a contributor (OK, my son Abe) put it in a perspicacious article in Religion in the News a few years ago:
 

Yet as sacrilegious as South Park can be, it is something else to accuse the show of being anti-religious.Although eccentric faiths like Scientology are called into question, the central tenets of mainstream Christianity and Judaism remain unchallenged. What draws most of the show's assaults is the abuse or trivialization of religion.

Like The Simpsons even if lots edgier, South Park promotes the values and traditions of its culture. If it didn't, it wouldn't be so popular.

Update: For a Catholic case in point, see this discussion by Regina Nigro over at In All Things.

He didn't make it there during the presidential campaign, so Barack Obama stopped off to pay his respects to the aged evangelist on his circuitous way to deliver a eulogy for those 29 dead coal miners in Beckley, West Virginia. The question is whether the president was ambushed by Billy's son Franklin, who turned up for the tête-à-tête.

Last week, the Army dumped Graham junior from its National Day of Prayer service at the Pentagon next Thursday  after a protest by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The NDP was established by Congress after Graham senior called for one in an address on the Capitol steps in 1952. You think the NDP contretemps came up at the Obama-Graham summit? You think the president would have preferred not to have Franklin on hand? I say yes, and yes.

Update: Yep:

Franklin Graham said he and Obama spoke briefly about the Pentagon spat, with the younger Graham saying that activists with an agenda were trying to pull all religion out of the military.

"I wanted to make him aware of that," Franklin Graham said. "He said he would look into it."

Franklin Graham also said he thanked the president for his decision to have the government appeal a federal judge's ruling that the National Day of Prayer was unconstitutional. Obama has said he plans to issue a proclamation again this year.

Sometimes you've got to hand it to the Vatican. Here's what its spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said in Rome yesterday:

This is the age of truth, transparency and credibility. Secrecy and discretion, even in their positive aspects, are not values cultivated in contemporary society. We must be in a position to have nothing to hide.

Think about that for a second. According to Lombardi, the Vatican has not been about truth, has not been transparent, has not been credible. Rooting in a prior age, it has been been about secrecy and discretion--i.e. protecting the Church from Scandal. To become true, transparent, and credible, it needs to imbibe the spirit of the present day. Wow.

No, Virginia, I'm afraid the National Day of Prayer ain't constitutional, at least if you take the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence at all seriously. Last week's decision by U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Crabb in Freedom from Religion Foundation v. Obama is one of those clear, reasonable, precedent-based judicial exercises that drives experienced church-state separationists nuts.

The decision is not short, but its argument is simple. The National Day of Prayer was established by act of Congress in 1952 to encourage Americans to engage in religious activity. As such, it promotes and endorses religion. The Constitution's ban on laws "respecting an Establishment of religion" has long been held by the Supreme Court to bar acts of Congress that endorse religion without serving some overriding secular purpose. Ergo, the law establishing the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional.

And yet, should the Supreme Court sustain the decision, all hell could break loose--in the form of a constitutional amendment to alter the Establishment Clause. Do experienced church-state separationists want to go there? Of course not. And so, as they did in the late, unlamented Pledge of Allegiance case, the progressives on the Supreme Court can be expected to find some way to avoid letting Judge Crabb's well-founded decision stand. In so finding, they will have the support of the Obama Justice Department, which yesterday announced that it would be appealing. It would be fun to have Con Law prof Obama, as the named defendant, do the oral argument himself. (After all, Michael Newdow represented himself in the Pledge case.) I'm not holding my breath.
 
At the end of the day, then, the National Day of Prayer will survive, along with the other modest (if dubiously constitutional) religious establishments that encrust the U.S. polity. It's the American Civil Religion, Virginia, and yes, it exists, for better or worse. To make it better, Obama regularly tips his hat to Americans of no faith. He also declined last year to engage in any of the National Day of Prayer's public festivities, managed as they are by the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a pedal-to-the-metal evangelical outfit run by James Dobson's wife Shirley--and which naturally has now mounted a campaign to Save the Day.

Meanwhile, the Army has disinvited from its National Day of Prayer Pentagon prayer service Franklin Graham, son of the Day's progenitor and a guy who once called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion." Can you imagine inviting to a federally sponsored religious event (oops, there's that pesky Establishment Clause again) a preacher who once called, say, Judaism an evil and wicked religion? Enough said. The point is that if you're going to do civil religion, you need to do it as civilly and inclusively as possible. And if that irks the NDP Task Force, so much the better.

Anyone who paid the least attention to the 2002-03 chapter of the running (25 years and counting) Catholic sexual abuse crisis knows that the easy part for the Church's powers-that-be was the "protect the kids from now on" part. The hard part was calling to account the parties responsible for what actually upset people the most: the cover-up. Because, of course, those parties were, well, the powers-that-be. The hard part began and ended with the fly-away to Rome of Boston Cardinal Bernard Law.

In the current chapter, "Bringing It Home to Rome," we're still pretty much at the easy part. New norms have been promulgated explicitly requiring cases of abuse to be reported to the civil authorities (wow). Apologies for abuse have been made, and there's been a papal meet-and-greet with a few victims. Yes, an Irish bishop or two has had his resignation accepted, and there may be more to come. And today comes word that a prominent German bishop has offered to resign. But accountability at the top has not exactly taken hold.

The more typical response has been the circling of the prelatial wagons, with the pope sending out the likes of Cardinal Sodano to defend his honor, while thanking a luncheon gathering of red hats for their support. For sure, that "wounded and sinner" church is out there in the world, not here in Vatican City.

Yesterday, however, the traditionalist Paulus Institute announced that it had withdrawn its invitation to Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos to celebrate a big Latin mass at the Basilica in Washington Saturday. Castrillón Hoyos became persona non grata last week after it was revealed that he had written a letter congratulating a French bishop for going to jail rather than turn in one of his priests charged with sexual abuse.

What the Curial Elite have to learn is that with the exception of condottieri like the Catholic League's Bill Donohue, even the most ultramontane layfolk choke at having to defend abuse enablers in high places. Unfortunately, the Curial Elite are slow learners. 

If you think the pope's got problems, consider the Archbishop of Canterbury. As pictured by Jane Kramer in the current New Yorker, Rowan Williams is a very smart, eirenic soul with a job that only a Machiavelli would have a chance of carrying off.

As the worldwide Anglican Communion continues its civil war over homosexuality, the Church of England finds itself in no better shape. Possessed since the age of Trollope of evangelical and Anglo-Catholic wings, it now lacks enough of a faithful body in the center to keep the creature intact. And, to torture the metaphor further, the Anglo-Catholics are threatening to flap off to Rome should the church go ahead and sanction women bishops, leaving the evangelicals--aka happy clappies--as the only source of motion. (If it weren't for the current Catholic crisis, the process would probably be a lot further along.)

"We mean to hold our own," Churchill told the House of Commons after British troops turned back Rommel at the battle of El Alamein. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." In due course, of course, that's just what Churchill presided over. Even if Rowan Williams manages to eke out a victory, any victory, it's increasingly evident that he's become the ABC in order to preside over the liquidation of the Anglican Communion--and perhaps the C of E itself.

On its website, the Diocese of Greensburg, Pa. is currently promoting foryourvocations.org, a USCCB website to be launched on the World Day of Prayer for Vocations this Sunday. The diocese will not, however, be praying for vocations to the Sisters of St. Joseph of Baden. Once a major supplier of teachers and health care workers in Catholic schools and hospitals in the Pittsburgh area, the order is down to about 230 mostly elderly nuns plus a single would-be postulant. It's planning a little outreach to see if there are young women interested in signing on, and would like some help with publicity from local dioceses.

So what's the problem? Last month, the sisters' leadership team had the temerity to join the leaders of several dozen other orders of women religious in signing a statement supporting passage of the Senate's health care reform bill--and thereby, in the view  of the bishop of Greenburg, Lawrence E. Brandt, "publicly repudiated the USCCB's concerns, which were based on Catholic doctrinal and moral teachings for which the bishops are responsible." Actually, the letter did did not repudiate the USCCB's concerns. It made the prudential judgment that the proposed law would not do what the bishops claimed it would--e.g. allow federal funding of elective abortions. Nor was that an unreasonable position, as Nicholas Carfardi makes clear in an article in America arguing that the bishops' claims were based on a politically distorted interpretation of the bill.

But for bishops like Brandt, the issue is not whether reasonable pro-life Catholics might differ in their understanding of a complicated piece of legislation. Rather, it's whether, once the episcopate has rendered an opinion, other Catholic institutions can beg to differ. The answer, evidently, is no: Episcopus locutus, causa finita. Not that all bishops are going in for the kind of petty revenge inflicted by Brandt on the Baden sisters. Far from it. But the kind of papal authoritarianism that has gathered strength in recent decades does seem to be spreading through the episcopal ranks: Every bishop a pope in his own diocese.

Under the circumstances,Hans Küng's call for bishops to push for a new Church council to address the current crisis makes you wonder. On the one hand, self-respecting bishops would probably like to be able to push back against pope and curia every now and then. On the other, as Vatican II showed, once the bell starts tolling for cooperation, collaboration, and partnership in the Church, it tolls for bishops as well as popes.

And I've discovered that a volcano in Iceland has been blown up as part of a plot by Xenu to keep European thetans from ever getting clear. Because Europe has been so hostile to Scientology that even the thetans are bad. Can this be true? Have I been dreaming? Have got to catch up... 

Until next Tuesday. Hoping for sun.

The estimable Rick Hertzberg leads the current New Yorker with a well-wrought essay on the current Catholic crisis. The kicker packs a wallop:

The Jewish Week's James Besser draws a good bead on the latest Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion by the American Jewish Committee. All I'd add is that it's hard to conclude that it means very much when 55 percent approve of the Obama administration's handling of U.S.-Israel relations and 57 percent approve of the Netanyahu government's handling of Israel-U.S. relations. And when 25 percent think that anti-Semitism is a "very serious problem" in the United States and 66 percent think it is a "somewhat of a problem."

NCR's John Allen is promoting speculation that Pope Benedict will appoint a special commissioner to take charge of the Legionaries of Christ, the ultra-conservative order founded by the late ultra-disgraced Marcial Maciel Degollado. This would be a via media between a "certificate of good conduct" and termination with extreme prejudice--the two extreme options for wrapping up the Vatican's post-Maciel investigation.

As it waits for its fate to be decided, the order, having closed Southern Catholic College last week, has now put its Connecticut headquarters up for sale. I'd say it is expecting to be in receivership and is anxious to put its house in order as it sees fit.

It is interesting that the Vatican's forthcoming norms on sex abuse, to be incumbent on the Church worldwide, will have no statute of limitations, but that the dioceses of Connecticut are hard at work opposing new legislation that would remove the statute of limitations on civil suits in sex abuse cases. How come? As Jesus once said, "Show me the money."

Over at In All Things, Sean Michael Winters makes a valiant effort to defend the Vatican's handling of the case of Oakland priest Stephen Kiesle but, I'm afraid, comes up short. The media, including present company, have not jumped to unwarranted conclusions about the behavior of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and its leader, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, by failing to read documents from the case carefully and misunderstanding the context. This is not an example of "frustratingly poor coverage." (Proceed to the jump.)

There were Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, at the head of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference straw poll, with 24 percent each, trailed by Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at 18 percent. And where was Mike Huckabee, sometime favorite of Southern Republicans? Down with the also-rans at 4 percent, just a point ahead of Tim Pawlenty and Mike Pence, and two points ahead of Rick Santorum.

I get it that such polls measure mostly the strength of would-be candidates' organizations, but it's still curious that Huckabee should fare so poorly. Or maybe not. The conservative elites who show up for such events didn't like or trust Huckabee first time around, and evidently they still don't. But then there's the grass roots...

The latest revelation of Benedict XVI's handling of abuse cases prior to becoming pope shows, simply, that he was an integral part of the ecclesiastical regime that served the Church so badly. As archbishop of Munich and Freising he presided over the return of a pedophile priest to pastoral work in 1980. Then, in November of 1981, Pope John Paul II named him prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), in which capacity he became responsible for the case of a notorious pedophile priest from diocese of Oakland, California named Stephen Kiesle.

In 1978, Kiesle had, with no shortage of media coverage, been pleaded guilty to tying up and molesting two young boys, for which he was given three years' probation and suspended from priestly duties. The diocese was now seeking to get the CDF to laicize him. Why the CDF had charge of the case rather than the Congregation for the Clergy is not clear, but it's evident that the CDF was slow-walking the case. Despite the fact that Kiesle had been convicted, on November 17, 1981, it asked the Diocese for more information, and--in an edgy Latin sentence--toldthe Bishop of Oakland that he should "not disdain" to transmit his promise that laicizing Kiesle could be accomplished "without fear of scandal." On February 1, 1982, Bishop John Cummins wrote to the prefect and future pope, Joseph Ratzinger, saying that scandal was more likely if Kiesle were not removed from the priesthood than if he was. One can only imagine Cummins' annoyance. (See documents here.)

Despite this, the CDF took its own sweet time. Finally in September of 1985, Bishop Cummins, having received no answer to repeated inquiries, got papal nuncio Pio Laghi into the act, asking him to forward an inquiry about the case to Ratzinger. And lo and behold, on November 6, the cardinal wrote to the bishop saying that more time was needed (text after jump). It's a very bad letter--one that offers all kinds of reasons for not doing the thing that needed to be done. It took two more years for Kiesle to be defrocked. That he was a really bad actor was known, and is demonstrated by his subsequent criminal behavior.

No doubt, Benedict's defenders will insist that that was then, this is now. They will point out that Benedict came to see the light--understanding that the Vatican could no longer treat these cases the way it had been treating them, and taking steps to establish a new regime. And that, moreover, even as we speak, the Vatican is about to promulgate and make incumbent on bishops conferences throughout the world a set of "zero tolerance" norms ensuring that cases of abuse are handled openly and efficiently, and referred to the secular authorities. And all that seems to be pretty much on point.

But there's no getting around the fact that before he was part of the solution, Pope Benedict was part of the problem. At this point, it is bootless for the Vatican and its apologists to pretend otherwise.

Hope springing eternal, Dan Nejfelt over at Bold Faith Type calls attention to some mild criticism of the Tea Party movement (for racist jibes at members of Congress) from Rev. Harry Jackson and a tougher rebuke (for mindless anti-government populism) from Chuck Colson--as indicative of a certain ambivalence towards the movement on the part of the religious right. Well, maybe.

As Nejfelt points out, both men are associated with the Manhattan Declaration (Colson helped write it). That manifesto of contemporary religious rightism announces the signers' intention to refuse to obey such laws relating to abortion, gay rights, and religious liberty as they consider unjust. Not to put too fine a point on it, but when you've issued a call to resist the government, you shouldn't be surprised when others act accordingly.

So how to solve the clericalism/curialism problem bedeviling Rome? More women!

A month ago, the pope's own daily published an article by Lucetta Scaraffia arguing that "una maggiore presenza femminile" would have "ripped the veil of masculine omertà that has covered with silence the denunciation of misdeeds." Yep. And last week, Lisa Miller's cover story in Newsweek, "A Woman's Place Is in the Church," advocated breaking up "the all-male club" that runs the Church on the grounds that "insular groups of men often do bad things."

I'm down with that. So here's a modest proposal. Pope Benedict should name a bunch of women as cardinals. Cardinals don't have to be priests. Originally--as in up to the middle of the eleventh century--they were just the folks who happened to be in charge of running things in Rome's churches. And make no mistake about it. There are plenty of women running things in Catholic churches all around the world. Bear in mind that cardinals don't have to be priests. (The earliest group included deacons.) The point is that there's no theological justification for restricting the job to men. If Benedict wants to rescue his papacy and establish his place in pontifical history, it's definitely the way to go.

This is, I hasten to say, not an original idea with me. A few years ago, the Jesuit father who directs German language programming for Vatican radio looked forward to the day when half the cardinals who chose the next pope would be women. Now that would seriously shake up the old boys' club. Picture the bishops and monsignori and papabili having to kowtow to le cardinale. Of course, it might also lead to, shh!, female and non-celibate priests. Put women in positions of authority and you never know WTF will happen.

Retractatio and clarificatio: My former colleague, the distinguished church historian Sr. Patricia Byrne, has kindly pointed out to me that, according to current canon law, cardinals do too have to be priests; and that if a non-bishop is named, he needs to be promoted asap; and that those who are to be cardinals are referred to, in Latin, as viri not homines, which is to say, male persons (relevant texts after the jump). That said, no one claims that the cardinalate was created other than by human beings to do the work of the Church. Canon law, of course, is always subject to change. Thanks, Pat.

Lest anyone think there isn't a curia problem, check out the first installment of Jason Berry's new investigation into the Legion of Christ, the hyper-conservative priestly order created by Arch-hypocrite Marcial Maciel Delgollado. It's the month of decision for the $25-billion operation, what with the special five-bishop commission of inquiry set to report to the Vatican secretary of state at the end of the month.

Down in Dawsonville, Georgia, meanwhile, Southern Catholic College, which the Legion acquired last summer for cash on the barrel head, closed its doors today, according to my sources. The faculty were told that they would receive one more monthly paycheck and that would be it. You've got to think that the Legionaries are trimming sail as they await the gathering storm. You've got to figure what with all the new sexual abuse cases emerging across Europe, that 25 billion could sure come in handy.

Update: The Catholic News Agency has the story.

Barack Obama's remarks at yesterday's Easter Prayer Breakfast at the White House represent an extraordinary expression of religious faith by a sitting president speaking on the record. So far as I know, no recent president--including evangelicals Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush--ever addressed an audience in the White House as "brothers and sisters in Christ," and went on to speak of grace and redemption "by faith in Jesus Christ." Indeed, I'd be interested in learning whether any president in history was ever moved to give such testimony while in office.

In part, Obama only did what African-American church folk do when they talk about their religion in public. Complex as his religious background is, his Christian witness was formed in the black church. But one can't overlook the possibility that the president was impelled by the persistent conviction of a significant number of Americans that he is not really a Christian at all. This issue was addressed by one of the attendees, Houston megachurch pastor and presidential spiritual adviser Kirbyjon Caldwell, speaking to RNS's Daniel Burke:

For those who are wondering or have doubts about whether he is authentically Christian, I think today's message puts all doubts to rest...Never in modern history has a president said: "I am a Christian," and others said, "No, you're not,"

As the birthers have proved, doubts about Obama are not so easy to put to rest. In the meantime, presidential religion marches on.

As interested parties conjure with the current Catholic crisis, the prevailing diagnosis in progressive circles is that the guilty party is clericalism--the culture and ideology of the celibate male priestly class that treats the Church as its own property and protects its prerogatives by all means necessary. And thus the solution lies in an enhanced role for the laity.

Far be it from me to defend clericalism as such, but the diagnosis elides the role of curialism--the increased centralization of ecclesiastical control in the Roman curia that has occurred over the past 30 years. To be sure, the monarchical impulse in the papacy has been around for a long time--since the 12th century, to be exact. It was then that the papacy, having failed to establish itself as the sovereign of Western Christendom, began subordinating the Church to its sole authority, from the resolution of legal disputes to the making of saints to (ultimately) the appointment of bishops.

Over the centuries, the principal counter-force to papal monarchy has been conciliarism, by means of which other prelates might, from time to time, join together to set the Catholic agenda. The Church's last conciliar moment was, of course, Vatican II, but with the accession of John Paul II, monarchy was back in the saddle. One has only to observe bishops leaping to defend Benedict like worker bees protecting their queen to realize how far things have come. Once the pope's colleagues, bishops and archbishops have been transformed into curial minions.

Much has been made of the fact that in 2001 Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, brought all abuse cases under the purview of his Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Critics have argued that this was done to assure greater secrecy; defenders, in order to assure swifter and surer justice. Either way, in a billion-member church with hundreds of thousands of priests, there is something bizarre about having to depend on a single office in Vatican City to permanently remove an offender from the priesthood. Is it any wonder that cases take a long time to resolve?

Would a less centralized Catholic Church have done a better job of stopping abuse and disciplining the abusers? We cannot know for sure. But I would expect better of a hierarchy more embedded in, and beholden to its local spiritual and secular community. What if Bernard Law had to live out his days in disgrace in Boston rather than as archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and titular Cardinal Priest of Santa Susanna, the American Catholic church in Rome?

Update: NYT's Rachel Donadio is sort of on the case this morning--but she casts the situation as a management problem; i.e. an antiquated Vatican bureaucracy now headed by a second-rate administrator. Here's the kicker:

Both critics and supporters are waiting to see how -- or if -- the Vatican's slow gears engage. Observers say there is a growing awareness inside the Vatican that the number of cases made public is certain to multiply -- even in its own once untouchable backyard, Italy.

The prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal William J. Levada, acknowledged last week that his office devoted a third of its time to handling abuses cases and that it would probably need to expand its staff as new cases arrived.

Few personnel and bureaucratic decisions have had so much riding on them -- the legacy of Benedict's papacy high on the list.

So the legacy of the leader of the world's largest religious body depends on a bunch of bureaucrats at headquarters handling sexual malfeasance cases committed under the authority of hundreds of religious leaders who themselves are understood to hold office in direct succession to the Apostles. What's wrong with this picture?

The most famous American anti-Catholic cartoon is Thomas Nast's 1871 "The American River Ganges," showing a squadron of crocodilic prelates from Rome attacking a group of children standing on the shore with their fort, a public school, flying the Stars and Stripes upside down in surrender.

Today, thanks to Fr. Cantalamessa's analogizing of current criticism of the Church to anti-Semitism, Wapo's brilliant animated cartoonist Ann Telnaes has created the most biting graphical comment on Catholic hierarchs and children in the American media since "American Ganges." I can't embed it here--suffice to say that it employs the Nazi practice of tattooing i.d. numbers on the arms of concentration camp prisoners to devastating effect.

Nast's cartoon was a good deal less than fair--it had to do with the hierarchy's new (1870) commitment to create a parochial school system in the face of the ingrained Protestant biases of American public education. Telnaes' cartoon is...well, you be the judge.

While all the attention has been focused on the ill-advised association of current criticism of the pope with anti-Semitism in Fr.Cantalamessa's Good Friday homily, it is another Holy Week allocution by a leading Vatican figure that ought to worry anyone who does not wish Roman Catholicism ill. That was the unprecedented speech by the dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano, prior to Pope Benedict's Easter address.

Former Vatican secretary of state and the power behind the throne in John Paul II's waning years, Sodano was a pal of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, uncle of real estate wheeler-dealer Andrea Sodano, and--very much to the point at the present moment--known as the key Vatican defender of the Church's most exalted sex abusers: Marcial Maciel Delgollado (founder of the Legionaries of Christ) and Cardinal Hans Hermann Wilhelm Groër, the archbishop of Vienna.

For Sodano to get up before the Easter throng at St. Peter's and publicly applaud those Catholics who "do not let themselves be influenced by the gossip" is not merely a species of obscenity. It suggests that he may have moved into a central role as Consigliere for the Defense. And that bodes ill indeed.

Commonweal's judicious editorial on the Catholic crisis, including a swipe at the NYT and a sharp reminder for Benedict's apologists.

My colleague Ron Kiener's remorseless flaying of anti-Israel propagandist Norman Finklestein and his promoters.

Michael Barkun's assessment of the anti-Rapturist Hutaree and its antecedents.

Forging ahead, NYT tells the story of the victim who brought to light the case of the German priest who was transferred, not punished, on Josef Ratzinger's watch as archbishop of Munich. Meanwhile, the hot line set up by the Church in Germany for victims of sexual abuse to call for counseling was inundated: On its first day, 4,459 called and 162 were counseled.

I guess an uncanonized dead pope is preferable to an undead live one. So Benedict XVI's pal, Cardinal Schoenborn of Vienna, throws John Paul II under the bus for lack of sex abuse vigilance. Not a good week altogether for JPII, what with signs that one of his miracles didn't happen and official admission from the Legionaries of Christ that founder and j-pauline fave Marcial Maciel Degollado was a really bad actor.

Meanwhile, Laurie Goodstein does a follow on the Murphy case, scoring a few points for her much-criticized earlier story. Michael Sean Winters makes one correction to his critique, but is otherwise unimpressed. James Martin, S.J. says that the media, warts and all, should not be blamed, slapping Brooklyn Bishop Nicolas DeMarzio upside the head (though not by name) for calling the New York Times "the enemy" and urging mass attenders to cancel their subscriptions.

Grab a pew, this one's got legs.

So it was the Muslim head of the local chapter of the Michigan Militia who turned in the Hutaree Christians.