May 2010 Archives

Read my colleague Ron Kiener's take on Bingoprof, and weep.

Sure, there have been good homosexual priests, Rev. Kevin J. Sweeney, director of vocations for the Diocese of Brooklyn, allows in today's NYT. But that's not how the church rolls today.

"A priest can only give his life to the church in the sense that a man gives his life to a female spouse. A homosexual man cannot have the same relationship. It's not about condemning anybody. It's about our world view."

In what sense, exactly, does a man who is capable of giving his life to a male spouse fail this test of the analogical imagination? And is it similarly true that a nun can only give her life to Christ in the sense that a woman gives her life to a male spouse--i.e. that a lesbian cannot have the same relationship? Is that also part of the Sweeney world view?

Update: Fr. James Martin gives Sweeney & Co. the business.

Yesterday a bunch of pastors, priests, and rabbis led by the Family Research Council held a press conference in the Capitol at which they begged the Lord to soften the hearts of lawmakers. Didn't happen.  Both the House of Representatives and the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to permit the repeal of Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell.

The burden of the group's complaint was that permitting gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military would undermine the religious liberties of military chaplains--who as members of the officer corps would have to accept, well, the right of gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. The answer to that is: too bad.

Clergy serving in the military do not have the same religious rights as they do in civilian life. They are hired by the government only to provide religious services to military personnel under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. They are there to do their own thing only up to a point. As with Michele Bachmann's abortive effort to get a law passed that would allow military chaplains to close prayers at public events "according to the dictates of the chaplain's own conscience'' (i.e. "in Jesus' name"), the FRC's little protest refuses to recognize that military chaplains must be prepared to serve Caesar as well as God.

Nicolas Kristof takes up cudgels today on behalf of Sister Margaret McBride, the administrator at St. Joseph's hospital in Phoenix who last December was excommunicated by Bishop Thomas Olmstead for agreeing to the termination of a pregnancy in order to save the mother's life. The story, broken by the Arizona Republic this month, already has its own Wikipedia entry, which provides a sufficient guide to the casuistical debate over whether the Bishop had to do what he did.

It's a species of debate familiar in religious traditions with highly articulated systems of law (e.g. Rabbinic Judaism, Shiite Islam). In the Christian world, it's what gave casuistry a bad name. Christianity began as, among other things, a protest against legalism: "...for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." (2 Corinthians 3:6) The justice in not aborting a non-viable fetus and letting the mother of three die is simply lost on most people. In the court of public opinion, Bishop Olmstead cannot win.

One of the little tics that Catholic opponents of same-sex marriage have developed is to refer to it as "marriage." As in this from the USCCB's latest letter to Congress:

The movement to redefine marriage to include two persons of the same sex (a.k.a. same-sex "marriage") has changed the law substantially toward that end, at both the state and federal level, and it has become increasingly clear that laws like ENDA have been instrumental to those changes.

The point would seem to be that because marriage by definition cannot be between persons of the same sex, it is necessary to use quotation marks lest anyone imagine that we are acknowledging that such a thing can or could exist. And, moreover, that since marriage is a sacrament in the Catholic church (this year's very Catechetical Sunday theme), the word itself must be kept free from pollution.

But soft. If all that were the case, why not use the quotation marks when it's a question of, say, polygamous marriage? As in a recent letter from the Maryland Catholic Conference that refers to "same-sex 'marriage' legislation" but then goes on to say:

Thus, prohibiting polygamous marriage, incestuous marriage, and possibly even marriage involving a minor will be considered bigoted and discriminatory. Is this what society wants? Does this elevate the state's moral fiber? Surely not.

Incestuous marriages are more kosher than same-sex marriages? And if the sacramental dimension is so critical, why not make sure to refer to what happens on Protestant altars as "Communion"? Taking such Communion counts for as little by Catholic standards as a same-sex marital ceremony. Yet in making just that point, the Archdiocese of Washington states:

A certain Protestant Communion may have a lovely liturgy but has not confession, or apostolic authority.

You figure that writing "A certain Protestant 'Communion' may have..." would have been recognized as bad manners, a gratuitous slap at one's separated brethren. Same-sex "marriage"--now recognized as legitimate marriage by some of those same brethren, to say nothing of certain civil jurisdictions--not so much.

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that you were a municipal court judge in a small town, and someone sued the, oh, Baptist church you belonged to for monetary damages. You'd recuse yourself from hearing the case, wouldn't you?

Well, the Obama Administration has now filed a brief in Doe v. Holy See, an Oregon case that seeks to sue the Vatican for its role in the sexual abuse crisis. Both the Federal District and Appeals courts have said the case can go forward; the administration's brief asks that the case be sent back to the Appeals Court for a rehearing. There's a very good chance that the Supreme Court will either do that or hear the case itself.

It's hard to imagine that the Catholic justices--who now constitute two-thirds of the court's membership--would recuse themselves in Holy See. But I can't clearly see why they shouldn't. It's their church, right? If they did, that would leave it to three Jewish justices (assuming Elena Kagan is confirmed) to decide. Yikes.

Yesterday, WaPo's Michelle Boorstein drew back the veil on the Democratic Party's much vaunted commitment to religious outreach and revealed, whoops, that the Democratic National Committee has no vestments. Howard Dean donned them, not only to considerable fanfare but also, in important races around the country, to considerable effect. You'd have thought that Tim Kaine, the Catholic ex-governor of Virginia, would possess at least as well developed a sense of the importance of connecting to voters by religion as Dean, a pretty secular guy from Vermont (currently the least religiously affiliated state in the nation). But no, that's not how they roll at Kaine's DNC. What gives?

Take a close look at these graphs:

When Obama took office, he made a point of expanding the faith office established by President George W. Bush, which includes branches in a dozen federal agencies and a core staff that communicates with faith leaders about policy issues. The office's director, Joshua DuBois, declined to comment on Democratic political outreach but said the White House is in frequent contact with faith leaders, a key way to stay connected to religious voters.

Kaine, who chairs the DNC, and other party leaders say the decrease in paid faith staff reflects a change in how the party does outreach -- not a shift away from religious voters. The party, at the behest of the White House, has reshaped how it reaches out to all constituency groups and has opted to expand its network of grass-roots volunteers and shrink its national staff of organizers who were in the past broken down by race and religion.

So the DNC's reorganization took place on orders from the White House. And the twenty-something director of the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships says he's on the case, keeping the Administration  connected to religious voters by chatting up their clerical superiors. What it very much looks like is that DuBois, who unlike his predecessors in the previous dispensation has been anointed Minister Plenipotentiary for All Things Religious, has aggregated to himself responsibility for the religious politics too. That, after all, was his job during the campaign.

Perhaps he's forgotten about Tempting Faith, the "inside story of political seduction" by David Kuo, who did three years as number two in the original faith-based office. Kuo's account of the corruption of the office by electoral politics became one of the chapters in the Decline and Fall of the Bush Administration. Prudence alone would suggest that "staying connected to religious voters" shouldn't be part of DuBois' current job self-description.

But propriety aside, the idea that you reach out to members of faith communities through their leaders is, to put it charitably, somewhat anachronistic. Most of those folks don't look in that direction for instructions on how to vote. The way to reach them is via digital database targeting--by race, religion, and everything else as well. Wasn't it in that department that the Obama campaign blew everyone else out of the water? An undifferentiated network of grassroots volunteers? What are they thinking?

Take a look at John Allen's recent recapitulation of the Vatican's response in O'Bryan vs. the Holy See, the Kentucky case in which the plaintiff is seeking to prove that American bishops are employees of Rome, and were following Vatican orders in covering up cases of sexual misconduct by priests. And that therefore the Vatican is liable.

Like more of Allen's recent work that one likes to say, it represents subtle apologetics for the Roman point of view. This is not only because he says what the Vatican is saying without putting the plaintiff's side on display. It's also because the account comes wrapped in an argument that the claims of the lawsuit actually work to undermine the ability of Rome to deal with the current crisis. In a nutshell, Allen contends that 1) if bishops are deemed mere agents of Rome, it will prove harder to sue then; and 2) reformers want (or should want) Rome to clean up the mess, and and push in the direction of episcopal autonomy will make that harder.

I'm not sure that's actually the case. Indeed, I've argued the opposite. But as Allen correctly notes, the Vatican's filing includes some of the strongest language on the independence of bishops that Rome has put its imprimatur on in a long time:

• The College of Bishops plays a "vital governance role" in the church.
• The episcopacy itself is of divine origin, and bishops are successors to the apostles in their own right.
• To say that the pope has "full" power is not to say his authority is unlimited. In fact, popes are bound by church dogma, tradition, Scripture, and the principles of communion, collegiality and subsidiarity.
• The Second Vatican Council (1962-65), in its document Lumen Gentium, explicitly taught that bishops are not "to be regarded as vicars of the Roman Pontiff."
• Canon law repeatedly recognizes the power of the bishop to govern the affairs of the local church, from finances and the assignment of personnel to opening and closing parishes and supervising priests.

So let the Vatican prevail in court. Let the bishops be responsible for their own ecclesiastical affairs, including stripping pedophile priests of their office, as successors to the apostles should be able to. Let them be responsible to the civil authorities. And let the chips fall where they may,

Daniel Schultz, Streetprophets' quondam Pastordan now blogging under his own name at Religion Dispatches, makes a strong if slightly musty case against the "common ground" initiatives embraced by a number of centrist religious operations to garner support for Obamaite domestic policy over the past year. It's slightly musty because, in the current Tea Party moment, we haven't heard much of late about commongroundism.

Schultz's case in point is abortion and, as usual, his principal bête noire is Jim Wallis, who was rather more disposed to blame those on the left for refusing to compromise than those on the right. Any fair reading of health care reform, however, shows that when push came to shove, it was the other way around. Most importantly, it became clear that the pro-life forces were unprepared to compromise because they wanted health care reform to fail--that is, for them abortion was, at the end of the day, a pretext.

No doubt the most hard-faced pro-lifers will argue that the best thing for the cause is to get the GOP back in power by whatever means necessary--and that would include rejecting even the whole loaf on abortion in Obamacare. But for that very reason, it's incumbent on the commongroundniks to face up to what happened, and to own up the limits of their philosophy. They will say, no doubt, that the common ground strategy must go forward, just on those issues where common ground is possible--immigration, climate change, financial reform. Fair enough, but abortion was always the big enchilada, and on abortion, the thing didn't work.

Seeking to calm the waters roiled by the decision of the pastor of St. Paul's in Hingham to bar the son of a lesbian couple from the parish school, Cardinal Sean O'Malley has spread his unction in all directions: on Fr. James Rafferty ("one of our finest pastors"); on archdiocesan education secreatry Mary Grassa O'Neill, who promised to find another Catholic school for the child ("respectful of all the people involved in this matter...showed leadership"); and even on the Archdiocese of Denver (a.k.a. Charles Chaput), which "has formulated a policy that calls into question the appropriateness of admitting the children of same-sex couples."

Whether it is appropriate or not is the question that O'Malley says will be answered in Boston after due consideration.

In all of our decision making, our first concern is the welfare of the children involved. With that in mind, the essence of what we are looking at is the question of how do we make Catholic schools available to children who come from diverse, often unconventional households, while ensuring the moral theology and teachings of the Church are not compromised? It is true that we welcome people from all walks of life. But we recognize that, regardless of the circumstances involved, we maintain our responsibility to teach the truths of our faith, including those concerning sexual morality and marriage. We need to present the Church's teachings courageously and yet in a way that is compassionate and persuasive.

OK, then. Cardinal Sean is an irenic soul in a church that is a little short on irenicism these days, and so it's more than tempting to give him time and the benefit of the doubt, as do James Martin, S.J. and David Gibson.

But it's also pretty easy to hide behind the claim of concern for the welfare of the child. In Denver, for example, the little girls who were denied admission to the parish school were not barred from the parish CCD classes--whose whole purpose is to lay down doctrine. It's hard to avoid concluding that the object of that Chaputian regime is not to protect same-sex couples' children from the harshness of doctrinal censure but to ensure that their family situation does not come to be regarded as acceptable by the rest of the school community.

If the first concern is the welfare of the child, as O'Malley suggests, how about a policy that lets the "unconventional" parents decide what's in the child's best interest? And by the way, what is so difficult about ensuring that the church's moral theology is not compromised? Children of divorced parents have been attending Catholic schools lo these many years. What do the schools teach about Catholic views of divorce? That it's allowed in civil society but not by the church? Would it be so difficult for those gifted with an analogical imagination to apply this teaching to same-sex marriage?

"The Church is like a snapping turtle. It's long-lived, slow to change, more dangerous than it looks, and it has an awful time getting up off its back."
                                    Lillian Young, Trinity College '13

Not only is Rand Paul's victory a wake-up call for the national GOP establishment but it should also be one for those who imagine that the Tea Party movement is somehow unfriendly territory for the religious right. Other than Paul himself, the big winner was Dr. James Dobson, who weighed in with a video endorsement that seems to have driven the last nail into the coffin of Paul's Mitch McConnell-anointed opponent. Therein, Dobson slams "senior members of the GOP" for lying to him about Paul's positions and chalks it up to Paul's credit that he "identifies with the Tea Party movement."

Diane Ravitch on why she flipped and started loving public schools again:

Was there a moment where you first thought: "Uh-oh"?

There were a number of moments, really, scenes of doubt. But one of them came about because of research I'd been asked to do about higher-education standards in Pakistan. What I discovered was that higher education wasn't the issue. The issue was that they have virtually no public-education system. So that gave me pause, because here I was running with people that were saying that public education is the problem.

Do you think there was something about looking at familiar issues in a foreign context that freed you up to see things differently?

Maybe. You know, here is a country that has a completely inadequate public-school system: So many of the kids that do go to school are in madrasas, and girls are not going to school at all. It made me think about the origins of American public education. I'd written about the history of the New York public schools and read lots of other histories of schooling, and it used to be that there was this hodgepodge of options--private tutors and church schools and so forth. Those who had some resources could take care of their kids, and those who had none--well, their kids didn't get an education. So there was something that resonated for me. The more we turn kids over to the private sector and erode public education, the more we're going back to pre-public-school times, and those were not good times for education in this nation.

Yesterday, Fr. James Martin, S.J. reviewed the situation at St. Paul's parish in Hingham, and what he had to say will only confirm the views of my conservative commentators that it's the Jesuits who are leading the church down the primrose path to progressive perdition. Martin not only takes the part of Cardinal O'Malley and the rest of Boston's Catholic establishment in rejecting the Chaputian doctrine of keeping the children of same-sex couples out of Catholic schools. He also gives the ecclesiastical powers-that-be a couple of liberal shoves.

First, he notes the "oddity" of the fact that the archdiocese didn't just go ahead and tell the parish to admit the child. What's a hierarchical church for, if not to enunciate policy for the troops? But with the cardinal out of town, it seems that the idea was to take a little time to wheel the policy into place. The fact that there hasn't been a peep out of the parish or its pastor suggests that they're waiting for the hammer to drop. We should see soon enough.

Martin then proceeds to note another oddity: Pope Benedict's "oddly discordant" association of abortion and same-sex marriage as "some of today's most insidious and dangerous threats," in comments he made at Fatima last week.

The equation of abortion, something that clearly is about a threat to life, with same-sex marriage, which no matter how you look at it, does not mean that anyone is going to die, is bizarre. A good friend of mine, who is gay, recently resigned from a position at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, where he said, with great dismay, that "abortionsamesexmarriage" had become one polysyllabic word among some of his bosses.

Why has same-sex marriage been equated with abortion?  Are they really equivalent "threats" to life?  If you're looking for a life issue with stakes as high as abortion, why not something that actually threatens life?  Like war?  Or the death penalty?  Or the kind of poverty and destitution that lead to death?  Why aren't "abortion and war" the most "insidious and dangerous" threats to the common good?  Or "war and the death penalty"?  Or "war and poverty?"  The great danger is that this increasingly popular equation will seem to many as having less to do with moral equivalency and more to do with a simple dislike, or even a hatred, of gays and lesbians.

I beg to differ--slightly, on the last point. I don't think this is so much about hatred of gays and lesbians as fighting a culture war in which abortion and homosexuality have come to seen by religious conservatives of many stripes as the twin pillars of a morally bankrupt secular world. Within Catholicism, the anti-abortion position has carried the day, making homosexuality the fulcrum, the casus belli, between conservative culture warriors and consistent-ethic-of-life progressives. That the issue is all tangled up with the sexual abuse crisis only increases the temperature.  

Update: A different view--on the pope.

In its latest poll on abortion, Gallup headlines its conclusion that the "new normal" is that more Americans are pro-life than pro-choice. This is the second poll that confirms the reversal of pro-life and pro-choice positions that Gallup first revealed a year ago. In fact, the current preference, by two percentage points, is not statistically significant. The new normal is actually that Americans are equally divided between pro-life and pro-choice.

That's exactly where we were a decade ago. In the interim, pro-life trended down and up; pro-choice, up and down. One way of interpreting the data is as a countervailing process whereby pro-choice identification increases when the GOP is in power, pro-life when it's the Democrats. During the Democratic ascendancy of the past few years, the shift has occurred entirely among Republicans and those Independents who lean Republican. This helps explain why a libertarian like Rand Paul has evolved into a pro-lifer in running for the GOP senatorial nomination in Kentucky. (Meanwhile, the percentage of pro-life Democrats has modestly declined.)

In spite of the modest pro-life shift of the past few years, Gallup notes with some puzzlement that attitudes on the morality of abortion are "unchanged." Actually, over the past year the gap between Americans who think abortion is morally wrong and morally acceptable has shrunk, from 20 percentage points (56-36) to 12 percentage points (50-38). The current numbers are exactly average for the past decade. Bottom line: Since the dawn of the millennium, Americans' views of abortion have not changed in the aggregate, but they have become more divided along party lines.

What a difference a diocese makes!

Two months ago, two girls were booted out of a Catholic school in Boulder, Co. because their parents are lesbian partners. There hadn't been any problem, it seemed, until that fact came to the attention of headquarters--the Denver archdiocese over which Charles Chaput presides.

Two days ago, the AP reported that a small parochial school in the diocese of Boston, St. Paul Elementary School in Hingham, had withdrawn its acceptance of an 8-year-old boy upon discovering that his two parents are lesbians. This was a local decision, made without the knowledge of headquarters--the Boston archdiocese presided over by Sean O'Malley.

With Cardinal O'Malley accompanying the pope on pilgrimage in Fatima, the archdiocesan spokesman quickly informed the media that the archdiocese had no policy of excluding children of same-sex couples from its schools. Then the superintendent of schools announced that the archdiocese would find another church school for the boy to attend, and that a policy on the children of same-sex couples would be developed "to eliminate any misunderstandings in the future.'' (Catholics United spent yesterday collecting 2,500 signatures urging that the policy be one of allowing all children to have access to a Catholic education.)

Meanwhile, two local organizations that raise scholarship money for Catholic schools announced their opposition to discrimination in admissions. The Catholic Schools Foundation, leading provider of aid to needy students in Greater Boston, sent out a letter saying it would not provide scholarships to children attending schools that discriminated. That was "at odds with our values as a foundation, the intentions of our donors, and ultimately Gospel teaching,"

After the Denver decision, Archbishop Chaput took to the pages of his diocesan newspaper to justify his policy of exclusion. It was, he claimed, necessary for the proper communication of Catholic doctrine as well as in the interest of the child for parents to be with the program. So why is it OK for Catholic schools to admit children of, say, divorced parents but not children of same-sex ones?

Many of our schools also accept students of other faiths and no faith, and from single parent and divorced parent families.  These students are always welcome so long as their parents support the Catholic mission of the school and do not offer a serious counter-witness to that mission in their actions.

Chaput's point, I suppose, is that same-sex couples, by their very existence, offer a "serious counter-witness" in a way that divorced parents don't.

It will be interesting to read what O'Malley has to say on the matter after he gets back from Fatima--stay tuned to Cardinal Seán's Blog. And while we're waiting, we may ponder his emergence as the closest thing to a paladin progressive Catholicism has in the American hierarchy today.

Finally it is becoming clear that the big stumbling block to dealing with the abuse crisis is the Roman Curia itself. In America, the way forward is being led by America, which in an editorial this week identifies the curia as "at the center of the present crisis" and calls for a renewal of the church along the lines prescribed by the Second Vatican Council. Even more pointedly, over at the magazine's blog, managing editor James Martin yesterday not only named names (including the pope's) but also argued that while sexual abuse itself may have been no more prevalent in the church than in other segments of society charged with the care of the young, institutional protection of abusers has been far worse.

Historically, the remedy for curialism has been, as America suggests, conciliarism--the use of councils of bishops to undertake a more collegial--if not democratic--approach to church governance. And even if the conciliar approach is not in the offing, there's no question that the strongest counterweight to curial command and control is a strong episcopacy out in the field.

So what do we have in America? A lot of time-servers, a few loud ultra-Roman conservatives, and a small number of progressives who keep their own counsel. In Europe, by contrast, prominent episcopal voices for reform are beginning to be heard. Most significantly, there's the Bohemian aristocrat, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, who has not only taken direct aim at curial Pooh-Bah Angelo Sodano but also made so bold as to open discussion of clerical celibacy and same-sex relationships. He has now been joined by another Austrian bishop, who is openly advocating making celibacy voluntary for priests.

Meanwhile, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, who showed his unhappiness with the pope's gentle encounter with the Irish bishops in March by departing before the press conference, continues to speak his mind--most recently in an extraordinary speech on the future of the church in Ireland. The following passage from it deserves a careful reading.

Why am I discouraged? The most obvious reason is the drip-by-drip never-ending revelation about child sexual abuse and the disastrous way it was handled. There are still strong forces which would prefer that the truth did not emerge. The truth will make us free, even when that truth is uncomfortable. There are signs of subconscious denial on the part of many about the extent of the abuse which occurred within the Church of Jesus Christ in Ireland and how it was covered up. There are other signs of rejection of a sense of responsibility for what had happened. There are worrying signs that despite solid regulations and norms these are not being followed with the rigour required.

It's hard not to suspect that among the "strong forces" he has in mind are curial ones.

A half century ago, some of the strongest episcopal voices for reform a la Vatican II were American. This time around, it's not clear there will be any.

...of using abortion to oppose health care reform. There's really no other way to read his essay in the new Newsweek. The relevant paragraphs pick up the story on the eve of passage of the Senate bill:

On that Sunday, seven or eight of us pro-lifers sat with silver urns of coffee, yellow legal pads, and red pens in a discreet room away from the White House, hammering out the language. We also put in a final call to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which had been among my strongest supporters during the fall.

I was disappointed by what I heard. No, no, no, no, they said. We need statutory law. But an executive order can have the full force of law, I said. Lincoln used one to free the slaves. George W. Bush used one to block stem-cell research using human embryos. And President Obama assures me that this is "ironclad." Besides, I said, it's time to negotiate or lose our chance to shape the bill. Help me with it? No, they said. Won't you at least look at it? No.

That call changed my relationship with the pro-life movement. In the 18 years I've been in Congress, pro-life Democrats like me have delivered, working out compromises that protect human life. Now we had the most important piece of legislation for our movement yet--with pregnancy prevention, prenatal and postnatal care, and care for kids--and we couldn't get support.

In the past few weeks, I've received so many death threats that I was advised to get a security escort around Washington. My wife, Laurie, has had to unplug our home phone to avoid drunken messages from people screaming, swearing, and generally acting profane--usually around the time the bars in their states close. We've had to endure TV, radio, and bus-stop ads. One day I got 1,500 faxes, all hate mail.

Ultimately, what stings the most isn't the hatred. (After all, people hate cops, lawyers, and politicians, and I've been all three.) It's that people tried to use abortion as a tool to stop health-care reform, even after protections were added.

No doubt the USCCB will vigorously deny that it dug in its heels on abortion as a way to stop the bill. No, no, no, no, they will say. We have always been strong supporters of health care reform. But I'm strongly inclined to believe that when push came to shove, the folks at the other end of the line, led by Richard Doerflinger, associate director for Policy Development at the Secretariat for Pro-Life,  Activities, were doing just that.

During her confirmation hearings to be solicitor general last year, Elena Kagan was asked by Arlen Specter to discuss a memo she wrote while clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1988. 

Senator, thank you for raising that memo. I first looked at that memo, thought about that memo, for the first time in 20 years, I suppose, just a couple of days ago when it was included on a blog post. And I looked at it and I thought, ''That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.''

[Laughter.]

So what was so dumb? The memo concerned the case of Bowen v. Kendrick, in which a federal district court had found that the Adolescent Family Life Act, which authorized Federal funds for religious organizations designed to discourage teen pregnancy and provide care to pregnant teens, violated the First Amendment's ban on religious establishments. What Kagan had written was this:

I think the [district court] got the case right. The funding here is to be used to support projects to discourage adolescent pregnancy and to provide care for pregnant adolescents. It would be difficult for any religious organization to participate in such projects without injecting some kind of religious teaching. The government is of course right that religious organizations are different and that these differences are sometimes relevant for the purposes of government funding. The government, for example, may give educational subsidies to religious universities, but not to parochial schools. But when the government funding is to be used for projects so close to the central concerns of religion, all religious organizations should be off limits.

Now in fact, this was precisely in line with the dissent written by Justice Blackmun and signed by Justices Brennan, Marshall, and Stevens (the man Kagan hopes to replace) in the 5-4 decision. They were not exactly a dumb bunch, and here are some bits of their opinion:

The AFLA, unlike any statute this Court has upheld, pays for teachers and counselors, employed by and subject to the direction of religious authorities, to educate impressionable young minds on issues of religious moment. Time and again we have recognized the difficulties inherent in asking even the best-intentioned individuals in such positions to make "a total separation between secular teaching and religious doctrine." Lemon v. Kurtzman 403 U.S. at 619...

There is a very real and important difference between running a soup kitchen or a hospital, and counseling pregnant teenagers on how to make the difficult decisions facing them. The risk of advancing religion at public expense, and of creating an appearance that the government is endorsing the medium and the message, is much greater when the religious organization is directly engaged in pedagogy, with the express intent of shaping belief and changing behavior, and where it is neutrally dispensing medication, food, or shelter.

This view lost out to a Rehnquist-led majority that was in the process of making the Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence far more accommodating to religion. For Kagan to treat her own expression of it as a species of juvenile dopiness was a little, shall we say, disingenuous.

As it happened, Sen. Sessions picked up on the remark and, in a written follow-up, asked Kagan to explain her current view of the memo in particular and the Establishment Clause in general. Her response was that she now agreed with the Bowen Court:

As that Court recognized, the use of a grant in a particular way by a particular religious organization might constitute a violation of the Establishment Clause--for example, if the organization used the grant to fund what the court called "specifically religious activity." But I think it incorrect (or, as I more colorfully said at the hearing, "the dumbest thing I ever heard") essentially to presume that a religious organization will use a grant of this kind in an impermissible manner.

It is perhaps the case that Kagan has changed her mind, in line with the Court's new accommodating stance. Or it's possible that, in the manner of the administration she now serves, she simply wanted to avoid disturbing religious conservatives with the kind of church-state separationism that was mainstream judicial opinion a generation ago. Either way, she ought to be asked at her confirmation hearings just how dumb she now thinks that separationism was. [Ha ha.]

Winging his way to Portugal, the pope showed his Augustinian colors and embraced a view of the church as beset with sin and a penitential approach to the abuse crisis:

In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the pope or the church don't come just from outside the church. The suffering of the church also comes from within the church, because sin exists in the church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way. The greatest persecution of the church doesn't come from enemies on the outside, but is born in sin within the church. The church thus has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the necessity of justice. Forgiveness does not exclude justice. We have to re-learn the essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues. That's how we respond, and we can be realistic in expecting that evil will always launch attacks from within and from outside, but the forces of good are also always present, and finally the Lord is stronger than evil.

A cynic might say that Benedict is now fixing to throw Sodano under the bus, say 100 mea culpas, and move on. Let's hope there's more to it than that. Including, perhaps, a suggestion that the Ambassador to the U.S. take the above words to heart.

It is a rare thing when one Catholic cardinal publicly attacks another. The most famous example occurred in the middle of the 11th century, when Humbert of Silva Candida bitterly criticized Peter Damian for claiming that bishops who had purchased their offices were still valid bishops. The saintly (later sainted) Damian was one of the circle of papal reformers who strongly opposed simony, but he was unwilling to evoke the chaos that would have ensued if half the bishops in Europe (and all the priests they had ordained) had been kicked out of their jobs. Humbert was the kind of intellectual radical whose unwillingness to compromise helped bring about Rome's permanent split with Eastern Orthodoxy.

Now comes Christoph Schönborn, the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, accusing  Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals and former Vatican secretary of state, of having blocked the Vatican's inquiry into sex abuse allegations against the late, disgraced cardinal of Vienna, Hans Hermann Groer. Schönborn also said that Sodano had done "massive harm" to victims of sex abuse on Easter Sunday when he waved away criticism of the church's handling of sex abuse as "idle gossip." Declared Schönborn, a sometime protege of Benedict XVI: "The days of cover up are over."

While Sodano--also protector of the late, disgraced Legionaries of Christ founder Marcial Maciel Degollado--could never be confused with Peter Damian (and Schönborn seems a far cry from Humbert), there's certain parallel with the earlier strife, which help set the terms for the papacy's massive effort to reform the medieval church. The question now is what the papacy will do to reform its own ways and means.

In the 1050s, it was Humbert's ideas that prevailed with the pope. A millennium later, will Schönborn's?

Michael Sean Winters reports on how those attending the NCR's Washington Briefing yesterday received Sister Carol Keehan, CEO and President of the Catholic Health Association:

The room rose as one. The applause was loud, not to say raucous, and it was sustained.

That applause came from somewhere deep in the consciousness of the assembled Catholics, all of whom share a commitment to the Church's social justice traditions and teaching. It came from the years of frustration as successive presidents failed to find the political calculus needed to enact universal health coverage. It came, most especially, from the recognition that we almost encountered another chapter in that catalogue of frustration. But, at the last minute, Sister Carol, with that counter-cultural combination of a wealth of knowledge and experience and the unique authenticity of one who has chosen poverty, provided the moral push that pushed health care reform across the finish line.

But was it loud enough for the bishops to hear?

Utah Sen. Bob Bennett, now fighting for his political life at the state GOP convention, is Mormon aristocracy--a grandson of Heber J. Grant, seventh president of the LDS Church. If he survives to fight another day--i.e. as one of two contestants in the upcoming primary--will it be because the Church has stuck in its oar? Another Mormon aristocrat, Mitt Romney, is introducing him to the convention today. When push comes to shove, will DNA Mormons stand up for one of their own, against Gentile assaults from the likes of the Club for Growth?

Update: Guess not.

I'm as ready as any red-blooded ex-journalist to wax hysterical about a good sex-cum-hypocrisy story, and the case of Dr. George Rekers is hard to beat. A leading family values crusader, co-founder of the Family Research Council, expert witness against permitting homosexuals to adopt--he is discovered to have traveled around Europe with a male prostitute he found on rentboy.com carrying his bags. It just doesn't get any better. Cruise the web and you'll find it's the hottest story of the moment, from the blogs on up to the national nets.

So all the more reason to appreciate the measured assessment of Warren Throckmorton, the psychology professor at Grove City College who exemplifies the determination of a committed evangelical to see homosexuality as the empirical evidence shows it to be, and not as the ideologues of his faith would like.

Over on First Thoughts, Joseph Bottum takes another swipe at the New York Times' ongoing coverage of the current Catholic crisis by cocking a snoot at Michael Luo's review of the history of Cardinal William Levada's handling of sexual abuse cases in yesterday's paper. Nothing new there, saith Bottum. Just the Gray Lady intent on tying the scandal as closely as possible to the pope.

Hold on. As Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Levada is the Vatican's guy in charge of all abuse cases. In the present situation, it's important to revisit his record, even if that means retelling some old stories. It's also worth considering that record in light of his current statements, such as occurred in the following exchange with the New Hour's Margaret Warner last week:

MARGARET WARNER: Now the focus seems to be in this way very much, less on the individual cases and more on how the church hierarchy handled it. And the overall charges that the church for decades seemed more concerned with protecting priests and the image of the church than in protecting children. TDo you think that is a fair reading on it?

CARDINAL LEVADA: I think it's, I think it misses another aspect that has to be taken into account again it's an aspect that applies to the church and to society at large that it has been a learning process and the learning process has not finished in society certainly, even in the church here in Europe and other parts of the world, we know that. I was named a bishop in 1983. I can say to you at that time I had never heard of case of priest abusing a child. But in what we've seen reported, it was going on. It was going on behind closed doors. Nobody was reporting it. And it took us a lot of time I think to understand how to deal with this part and it took a lot of time to understand how much damage is done to victims, to children, by this kind of behavior.

As Luo's story recounts, however, Levada was among the first American bishops to get a graphic picture of what was going on:

In the spring of 1985, the alarm was sounded by an unlikely trio of concerned Catholics, the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a Vatican canon lawyer; Raymond Mouton Jr., a Louisiana criminal lawyer who defended the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, a notorious pedophile priest; and the Rev. Michael Peterson, a psychiatrist.

In the wake of the Gauthe case, the three men produced a strongly worded 92-page report that argued for immediate action to deal with sexual molestation in the church.

In May 1985, Cardinal Levada, then a young auxiliary bishop from Los Angeles, was sent by church leaders to meet with the men. The meeting at a Chicago airport hotel went on all day, Father Doyle and Mr. Mouton said recently, with Bishop Levada going through their report almost line by line. They said he seemed enthusiastic about their proposals.

But what should have been a wake-up call wasn't.

Two weeks later, however, the bishop called Father Doyle and told him that their report was being shelved and that the bishops would convene their own committee to examine the issue. But no such group materialized.

Two decades later, in various sworn depositions, Cardinal Levada would assert that he recalled little from the meeting. But his detailed briefing would have given him a far deeper awareness of the issue than a vast majority of church officials at the time.

It's not a question of tying the mess to the pope. It's a question of taking the measure of the guy charged with cleaning it up. And Levada's record is, as Luo makes clear, decidedly mixed.

If nothing else, Franklin Graham. Before doing his own little things outside the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, he had this to say to Fox:

The Muslims have their holidays that they celebrate at the Pentagon. They celebrated Ramadan. They have prayer services there. But for us Christians to have prayer services, and for them to object and for the Army to give in to their objections is something that I just don't understand.

Leave aside the misapprehension (which he seems to have gotten straight today) that it was "the Muslims" rather than Mikey Weinstein who objected to his Pentagon appearance. Graham thinks that the National Day of Prayer is a Christian holiday, as per the National Day of Prayer Task Force, which he co-chairs:

The National Day of Prayer Task Force's mission is to communicate with every individual the need for personal repentance and prayer, mobilizing the Christian community to intercede for America and its leadership...

And now Graham's going after the president? Enough already.

The current number of the New York Review of Books includes Princeton historian Anthony Grafton's Machiavellian post of a couple of weeks ago about Pope Benedict and his troubled church. Although he expresses great appreciation for Benedict the theologian, calling him "probably the greatest scholar to rule the church since Innocent III" (and that's a compliment to Innocent), Grafton doesn't think much of his handling of pedophile cases prior to becoming pope, nor does he expect him to be able to do what ought to be done to reform the Church.

He does, however, hold out some hope:

But that is no reason for Catholics--or non-Catholic admirers of the Church, like the present writer--to despair. Over the centuries, the central institutions of the Church have often worked in counter-productive ways, emphasizing the powers and prerogatives of the institution over the spiritual life of the faithful. Again and again, Catholics have proved astonishingly resilient and inventive, and have come forward to offer what the hierarchical church was not providing. Under Innocent III, the Curia crystallized as a superbly effective institution, intent on rights and revenues, rather than tending to the poor and sick who were crowding into Europe's rapidly growing industrial and trading cities.

But when Francis of Assisi founded an order of men who were willing to give up all they had and minister to the urban poor, and Dominic founded a second one of men dedicated to preaching the truth and rooting out heresies, Innocent III immediately gave both of them vital encouragement. Three centuries later, between 1534 and 1549, a very different pope, the politician and aesthete Paul III, offered warm support when Ignatius Loyola arrived in Rome with a few tattered followers and a plan to preach to former Catholics in Protestant lands and to non-Christians overseas, and when St Angela Merici created a new form of religious life for women.

This is strongly reminiscent of what Machiavelli has to say about the Church at the beginning of Book III of the Discourses on Livy, where he emphasizes the importance of renewal for both republics and religious bodies (which he calls "sects"):

But as to sects, such renewal is also seen to be necessary by the examples of our religion, which, if it had not been brought back to its principles by Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, would have been entirely extinguished: for by their poverty and by their example of the life of Christ, they brought it back to the minds of men where it had already been extinguished; and their new orders were so powerful, that they were the reason why the dishonesty of prelates and the heads of the religion did not ruin her; by still living in poverty and having so much credit with the people through confessions and preachings, they are able to make them understand that it is evil to speak evil of the evil, and that it is good to live rendering them obedience, and if they make errors to leave their punishment to God. And thus these bad [rulers] do as much evil as they can, because they do not fear that punishment they do not see or believe. This renewal [of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic] therefore has maintained and still maintains this religion.

Machiavelli, you'll note, makes Francis and Dominic into enablers of curial corruption. Grafton, more gentle-minded, merely claims that such spiritual renewal makes it possible for Catholics to persevere in their faith. Either way, reform at the top is not in the offing.

Asked the other day whether he would "support deportation of natural born American citizens that are the children of illegal aliens," Rep. Duncan Duane Hunter (R-CA), a Baptist who represents the San Diego hinterland, said yes, he'd have to.

We just can't afford it anymore. That's it. And we're not being mean. We're saying it takes more than just walking across the border to become an American citizen. It's what's in our souls.

But, uh, those natural born children of illegal immigrants didn't walk across the border. They were born here. They have America in their souls, don't they?

But evidently he meant that you don't have America in your soul if your parents walked across the border illegally. And what about your grandparents? What if they walked across the border illegally? Or if their parents did? OMG, maybe there are un-American souls all over the place!

According to the latest WaPo/ABC poll, white evangelicals are evenly divided between the GOP and the Tea Party when asked which best represents "their own personal values." This should put to rest any doubts that the Tea Party, with its exclusively economic public agenda, somehow is failing to appeal to social conservatives.

Since this is the first time the poll offered the Tea Party as a "best represents" choice, it's impossible to know what the trend line is. But last November, only 57 percent of white evangelicals (three-quarters of whom tend to vote Republican) said the GOP best represents their interests. White evangelicals may constitute the religious base of the Republican Party, but at least when it comes to party i.d., they're not, at the moment, a particularly loyal one.

Not that it's going anywhere, but Rep. Jack Kingston's call for congressional hearings into what he alleges is "clerical censorship" by the Pentagon could provide a useful little exercise in public education. Kingston claims to be "deeply concerned" by disinvitations of Family Research Council head Tony Perkins and evangelist Franklin Graham from places of honor at military prayer services, the former for publicly opposing termination of Don't Ask-Don't Tell, the latter for his animadversions against Islam.

Political correctness and placating all religious views in the military community have had the effect of marginalizing our military chaplains. The simple fact is that sometimes Biblically-based ideas may run afoul of the approved politically correct message. The purpose of military chaplains is to first and foremost serve the spiritual needs of military members and their families. Being a chaplain is an inherently religious activity; to make it subject to politically correct sensitivities renders military chaplains ineffective. A Christian chaplain should be able to share the teachings and beliefs presented in the Bible, a simplistic concept that seems obvious but is currently under attack by the Pentagon.

It is, indeed, simplistic to assert that military chaplains, Christian or otherwise, may exercise their faith however they choose. As noted below, this is actually a complicated issue. But  Perkins and Graham are not military chaplains and the decisions to disinvite them are not complicated. Moving to get rid of Don't Ask-Don't Tell is now official military policy. Respect for the religious commitments of all military personnel is central to the very provision of religion in the armed services.

Having the right to express a contrary opinion does not mean you have a right to be honored for it. And the Pentagon need not honor with places on its daises religious figures who have placed themselves at odds with its policies. In fact, it shouldn't. That's not simplistic. It's simple.

Update: It seems that Franklin Graham thinks his rights have been violated. As he put it in an interview with Newmax, "I'm being restricted from my religious rights, and from what I believe." Nope.

A propos the Broder-Douthat-Will-et al. judgment that Arizona legislators and their constituents aren't to blame for trampling the Constitution and ratcheting up anti-immigrant prejudice because the real responsibility belongs to Washington for failing to provide adequate border control: Shall we similarly excuse the anti-Catholic bigotry of the Know-Nothings because Congress failed to halt Irish immigration during the Potato Famine?

Extra credit: Should the aforesaid be considered examples of "situational ethics"?

OK, I confess. I have long been a fan of the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence, warts and all. The Lemon Test...cool. The Endorsement Test...it'll do. But with Salazar v. Buono, Scotus has jumped the shark. Sure, Stevens and the girls are holding onto the old regime for dear life--in the minority. Breyer, also in the minority, seems anxious mostly to slice the particulars of a case so fine, procedurally or substantively, as to to preclude further discussion.

Meanwhile, on the majority side, Scalia is intent on permitting religious establishments by denying standing to anyone disposed to challenge them. Thomas, we know, wants to dis-incorporate the religion clauses from the 14th Amendment, thereby permitting states to do whatever they want, just the way the founders arranged it. But since this was a federal case, he went with Scalia. Kennedy, for his part, is prepared to make tortured arguments about why religion isn't religion--joined by Roberts and Alito, who seem unconcerned about anything other than letting little establishments stand.

One can fairly ask: What would the conservatives like, if they had their druthers? My guess is that they'd turn government space like public schools and courthouses and land into public forums, where any and all actors--including public officials--are free to exercise their religious views. But Kennedy isn't ready to go that far.

When there's no consensus on what the standard of review is, chaos ensues. And that's where we are now, with little prospect for change any time soon.