July 2010 Archives

Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, who happens to be running for governor of the Volunteer State, has caught a bunch of flak for his recent comments on the stump suggesting that Muslims might not merit First Amendment protection. Asked to comment on the proposed construction of an Islamic community center in Murfreesboro, he said, "You could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion or is it a nationality, way of life or cult, whatever you want to call it. Now certainly we do protect our religions, but at the same time this is something we are going to have to face."

This has tempted me to wonder out loud if Ramsey's understanding of the First Amendment is that laws can be made prohibiting the free exercise of cults, to point out that one man's cult is another's religion, etc. But averse as I am to shooting fish in a barrel, and always actuated by a desire for deeper understanding, I figured I'd try to determine where Ramsey's coming from.

Where he comes from is Blountsville, which is about as deep as you can get into Upper East Tennessee. That's the hilly part of the state that has given the world NASCAR, thanks to the pressing need moonshiners had to outrace the revenooers. The local soft drink, brewed by Tri-City Beverage in Johnson City, is Dr. Enuf, originally sold as a tonic for hangovers, which is definitely what you get if you make a habit of drinking what they're running down from the hollers. The drink's marketing slogan is "Enuf is Enough," which, I can attest, is also true.

When it comes to cults, the most famous local variety features churches with names like the Church of God with Signs Following and the Church of Jesus with Signs Following and the Holiness Church of God in Jesus Name--all offshoots of the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) that, based on Mark 16: 17-18, favor the handling of snakes and the drinking of poison as signs of election. They also follow a distinctive way of life that eschews alcohol, carbonated beverages, coffee, and tea; smoking; dancing; the use of cosmetics and jewelry; and recourse to medical doctors. Male co-religionists greet each other with a vigorous hug and the "holy kiss," a mouth-to-mouth osculation. [continues after jump]

The prosecutors overreached...sez I.

In the indispensable Commonweal, Nicholas Cafardi, dean emeritus of Duquesne Law School and eminent canon lawyer, does a yeoman's job of trying to sort out the Vatican's sexual abuse story. The basic problem is this: In his 2001 letter clarifying John Paul II's motu proprio establishing the authority of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in sexual abuse cases, future pope Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger noted that the authority of the CDF (over which he presided) was "in force until now" (hucusque vigens). That is to say, such authority, granted in the 1922 papal letter Crimen Sollicitationis, had not been not superseded by the 1983 revision of canon law, which appeared to place authority elsewhere.

But, Cafardi contends, in order to maintain "bureaucratic bella figura" (proper form), Ratzinger fibbed. The CDF didn't really have, or at least didn't understand itself to have, authority over such cases. Rather than acknowledge that he had won the authority in a struggle with the Congregation of the Clergy and its lenient leader, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, Ratzinger gave the impression that nothing had changed. So in what might be taken as a bit of re-revisionist history, the "Historical Introduction" appended to Benedict's new set of norms points out that between 1994 and 2001, "no reference was made to the previous competence of the Holy Office [as the CDF was formerly known] over such cases." Previous or in force until now? You be the judge.

Well, OK. Cafardi's major point is that this is the kind of thing that happens when laws are promulgated in secrecy. What he doesn't offer is an explanation for why the Vatican, in 1962 as well as 1922, was so determined to keep under wraps the fact that the CDF was responsible for conducting trials of priests charged with the sexual crimes outlined in Crimen--such that bishops would only be informed of it on a need-to-know basis. If then.

This can't have been because no one was supposed to know that soliciting sex in the confessional was a serious canonical crime. As Cafardi points out, that had been the case for centuries. The only explanation I can come up with is that Rome did not want it generally known that the CDF was responsible for conducting laicization trials of priests charged with ugly sex crimes because, well, then people might want to know who was being tried and what the outcome was. And that could only create...scandal.

Be all that as it may, it's evident that when the Holy Office/CDF regained its authority over sexual abuse cases, it was with less authority than it had under Crimen. That's because, hitherto, there were no statutes of limitations for matters under CDF jurisdiction. The supposed increase in the limitation for sexual abuse cases, from five years in the 1983 Canon Law to 10 years in 2001, to 20 years in the latest papal instruction, shouldn't obscure that fact.  

On the country's religious founding.

Making his own effort to explain Latino Catholic support for same-sex marriage in California, Joseph M. Palacios offers the following:

It is important to note that modern Latin Catholicism has a dual nature: it is "conservative" in the sense of family communalism and tradition that the church offers, yet it is classically "liberal" in the sense of not wanting the Catholic Church to have power in political life-- particularly after the long historical experience of the Latin American Church "meddling in politics." As Mexicans put it: "No meta en la política." A sizable majority of U.S. Latino Catholics shares these attitudes with them. Increasingly they are joining their Latin counterparts in accepting gays and lesbians as part of the social family that is both Catholic and liberal.

This makes sense to me--particularly since so large a proportion of Latinos in California have roots in Mexico, where keeping the church out of public life has been a state ideology since the revolution.

What's worth pondering are the implications of this for Catholicism in America. Over the past couple of decades, the (mostly non-Latino) hierarchy has become increasingly inclined to meddle in politics--an inclination most recently manifested in the USCCB's effective alliance with the Republican Party in seeking to block health care reform.

As the church becomes increasingly Latino, it will be interesting to see if the rank and file become "Americanized" into a more assertive political stance, or if they stick to their own inclination, and continue to ignore the bishops' heated rhetoric about how (in this case) same-sex marriage signals the end of civilization as we know it. It's even possible, I suppose, that the bishops will take a deep breath and consider the virtues of keeping a respectful distance between the church's norms and the norms of a pluralistic civil society.

The most notable result of the new Public Religion Research Institute survey of attitudes toward Proposition 8 is the divide between Latino Catholics and Latino Protestants. The former are more in favor of same-sex marriage than any other ethno-religious group in the survey; the former are more opposed. (That's Catholics 57-38 in favor versus Protestants 73-22 opposed.) The correlation that's caught most attention is the disproportionately high number of Latino Catholics (41 percent) who think of God as an impersonal force. Although we're unfortunately not given a number for Latino Protestants, we are meant to assume that most of them regard God "as a person with whom one can have a relationship."

I can't dispute the Catholic number, but it makes no sense to me as an explanation. Latino Catholicism is, by all accounts, rich in personal connection--to the Virgin Mary and other saints, for example. I'd suggest that for Latino Protestants--as for evangelicals generally--same-sex marriage is a major issue, in effect a defining element of their faith. For Latino Catholics, it's not.

A few days ago, WaPo's Michelle Boorstein put up a plaintive post on the newspaper's Under God blog asking for help in finding out what's up with the faith-based initiative out in the dozen federal departments that have dedicated officials embedded in them.

I've been requesting access to even a few of these offices for more than six months, but am getting nowhere with the White House. And the people who run the offices aren't allowed to say three words to a reporter.

If you know what these people do, or if you know someone who knows what these people do, or if you have some good ideas for us as we explore what these people do, please e-mail me: boorsteinm@washpost.com

Boorstein's the local religion beat reporter, and no one's done more to cover the faith-based initiative since Obama took office. If anyone ought to have access to the relevant federal officials, she should. Why the hell shouldn't the public be entitled to know what's going on? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that religion, like race, has become something of a toxic subject at the White House. It's also hard to avoid the conclusion that, actually, not much is happening.

The most consequential of the departmental appointments thus far has been Peter Groff, the former president of the Colorado state senate, who took the faith-based position at the Department of Education last year. Earlier this month, he resigned to become CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. What did Groff do while he was at DOE? He doesn't seem to have had much to tweet about. Maybe he'll talk to you now, Michelle.  

For the story I wrote back in 1993.

Tea Party paladina and Southern Baptist Sharron Angle, the Republican running to unseat Harry Reid in Nevada, recently offered the following interpretation of Thomas Jefferson's famous 1801 letter to the Danbury Baptists, in which he interpreted the religion clauses of the First Amendment as erecting a "wall of separation" between church and state.

"Thomas Jefferson was addressing a church and telling them a wall of separation had been put up precisely to protect the church from being taken over by a state religion," Angle said last month in an interview on "Face to Face With Jon Ralston." "That's what they meant. They didn't mean we couldn't bring our values to the political forum."

Sure, it's spitting in the wind, but for the record, the Baptists in Connecticut were not seeking protection from "being taken over by a state religion." What they objected to was that, under Connecticut's Standing Order, the state taxed all citizens to support, well, the church of their choice. (If you didn't have one, the taxes went to the Congregational church, which in those days dominated the local religious landscape.)

The Baptists didn't want the state forcing them to support even their own church. The very idea of the state doing anything to advance religion was anathema to them. Like Jefferson the deist, they were the strictest of separationists, which was way they had looked to him for help. Sharron Angle and most of her fellow Southern Baptists have backslid pretty far from that old-time religion.

My take, from my turn in Georgia, over at Beliefnet.

How to explain the willingness of some conservative evangelicals to join forces with President Obama to support comprehensive immigration, as the NYT reported yesterday? Well it could be that it's the Judeo-Christian thing to do. (Or maybe not, if you're Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association.) But for sure there's a political calculus, as baldly stated by that most political of evangelicals, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission:

"I've had some older conservative leaders say: 'Richard, stop this. You're going to split the conservative coalition.'...I say it might split the old conservative coalition, but it won't split the new one. And if the new one is going to be a governing coalition, it's going to have to have a lot of Hispanics in it. And you don't get a lot of Hispanics in your coalition by engaging in anti-Hispanic anti-immigration rhetoric."

Actually, this understates the GOP's problem. According to the recent Trinity ARIS Latino survey, between 1990 and 2008 the proportion of Latinos who support the Republican Party dropped from 24 percent to 12 percent. That's before Arizona passed its little illegal immigrant search law. It's telling that in this summer of Obama's discontent, the latest Gallup survey finds that he's got a higher approval than disapproval rating in Texas, which he lost to McCain by 55 percent to 44 percent. The approval is not coming from Anglos. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this horse is out of the barn.

The widespread astonishment, contempt, and anger that has greeted the Vatican's decision to include the "attempted ordination of women" among the "graver crimes" falling under the juridical purview of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has forced apologists for the new norms to issue explanations for how it's really not the case that (as I put it back on July 9) "Ordaining Women = Raping Children." The explanations boil down to distinguishing between violations of the sacraments and moral derelictions.

As Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the Vatican's abuse prosecutor, put it, "Sexual abuse and pornography are more grave delicts, they are an egregious violation of moral law...Attempted ordination of women is grave, but on another level, it is a wound that is an attempt against the Catholic faith on the sacramental orders." In other words, a rotten apple is not the same as a rotten orange, even though they both need to be thrown out. I could be fired for sleeping with an undergraduate, plagiarizing an article, or murdering my next-door neighbor, but that doesn't mean that those acts are equivalent.

Enough said? Not quite. That neat distinction between the moral and sacramental levels is, I'm afraid, bogus. Consider how the CDF came to be involved in sexual abuse cases in the first place.

Along with the new norms the Vatican issued a fascinating "Historical Introduction" explaining the evolution of this latest exercise in canon law, going back to the 1922 letter (reissued in 1962) that occasioned some heated back and forth after the NYT published its long article July 1 on Pope Benedict's time as head of the CDF. This account does not quite correspond with the analysis canonist and Vatican critic Fr. Thomas Doyle did a couple of years ago, but never mind. If your Latin is good enough, you can confirm from the original document ("Crimen Solicitationis") that the involvement of the CDF in abuse cases stems from the need to discipline priests who use the confessional for sexual purposes. [Update: English version here.] The fifth section of "Crimen" simply extends that concern ("mutatis...mutandis") to "very bad" sex crimes engaged in by clergy outside the confessional.

The point is that the original jurisdictional issue had to do with a crime that was both "moral" and "sacramental"--a moral violation of the sacrament, if you will. But is that even a meaningful thing to say, in canon law terms? Does the Vatican claim that it's not immoral to ordain a woman? Not that I've heard.

The crux of the matter is that the Pope and Curia have deemed it more important to give the CDF the power to try bishops for ordaining women than for covering up sexual abuse by priests. By their lights, the former is a more serious problem than the latter. By mine, that's a moral problem.

If I were Mike Huckabee (and planning to run for president in 2012), I'd be happy with the latest Gallup poll. Among the leading GOP contenders, he's got by far the best ratios of approval to disapproval with both Republican voters and the public at large. With Republicans, it's better than 6-1 favorable, compared to Palin and Gingrich at under 4-1, and Romney at under 3-1. With the public at large, Huckabee's close to 2-1 with twice the favorability margin of Romney (+17 versus +8). Both Palin and Gingrich have slightly higher unfavorables than favorables. Huckabee does better than Bobby Jindal too, but nearly half of Republicans and the general public don't know enough about he latter to have an opinion, so I've left him out of account.

The new set of canon law norms issued by the Vatican yesterday was intended to win some PR points on the sexual abuse front, but its substantive goal is to ensure that no Roman Catholic bishop starts ordaining women. Far from being a maladroit add-on to the list of "graver crimes" (graviora delicta) subject to the juridical control of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the ordination issue is the document's main business. That's my conclusion.

Talk to a canon lawyer and you will learn that there's nothing much new in the other stuff. Under the norms issued in 2001 by Pope John Paul II, the Congregation Formerly Known as the Inquisition already had been given jurisdiction over graviora delicta involving sexual abuse and the sacraments. If the statute of limitations needed to be extended in a given case, getting a dispensation was a routine matter. OK, child porn has become a serious "delict." But it's the formal acquisition of jurisdiction over "attempted women's ordination" that's the significant innovation. Although the CDF issued its own decree on the subject in 2007, now the pope has given the congregation formal procedural control over such cases.

There's more. In the 2007 decree, the CDF simply announced automatic excommunication for both the cleric doing the ordaining and woman receiving it. The new norm goes further and declares that the ordainer "may be punished by dismissal or deposition"--i.e. formally removed from the priesthood: laicized.

In her report in today's NYT, Rachel Donadio takes note of this addition, writing:
 

The revision codifies a 2007 ruling that made attempting to ordain women an offense punishable with excommunication. The new document said that a priest who tried to ordain a woman could now be defrocked.

What's important to bear in mind is that while the odd priest has participated in ceremonies to ordain women, proper ordination in the Catholic Church is the responsibility of bishops. Suppose a bishop--a Lefebve of the Left--were to start ordaining women, and not only as priests but also in due course as bishops. Then there's apostolic succession and a full-fledged gender-equal schismatic sect--call it the Society of St. John XXIII. That's the nightmare scenario the CDF has been equipped to foreclose. 

If the Vatican had wanted to make clear that it didn't regard attempted women's ordination as being as serious a crime as raping children, it could have kept the 2007 decree as is. Yes, CDF spokesman Monsignor Charles Scicluna could have said, they're both graviora delicta, but the punishments are not of equal severity: A clerical offender can't be laicized for the former, only the latter. That's not the way it is. Try to ordain a woman, Archbishop Lefty, and we get to kick you all the way downstairs.

If current trends hold.

The most religiously bigoted political attack ad in U.S. history, according to me.

Ever alert for Republican wackiness, TPM calls our attention to a recent TV interview with Ed Martin, who's got the GOP nomination to run against Rep. Russ Carnahan to represent Missouri's Third District in Congress.

One thing I like to say is: America is great, not because of our genetics. We're great because we created a place and space where people can be free. And they can choose Christ, they can choose to be faithful. They can worship, and they find their way to the Lord. And -- or some of them don't. We sure want them all to, but some of them don't.

Part of that freedom -- when you take a government and you impose, and take away all your choices. One of the choices you take away is to find the Lord. And to find your savior.

And that's one of the things that's most destructive about the growth of government. It's this taking away of that freedom. The freedom -- the ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation. And to find Christ, for me and you.

And I think that's one of the things that we have to be very, very aware of. That the Obama Administration and Congressman Carnahan are doing to us.

There's no indication that if Martin were asked to connect the dots, he could point to any specific way that the "growth of government" under Obama and Carnahan has undermined the ability of Americans to find Christ. It's just that O/C = big govt = no ultimate freedom. But there is a plausible recent example of such undermining, at least if taking up cudgels on the conservative side of the culture wars appeals to you. It's the Supreme Court's decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, which upheld the right of the Hastings School of Law to deny official status to the school's chapter of the Christian Legal Society for having a policy of excluding non-repentant gays and lesbians.

The only trouble is that if you want to blame someone for putting us on the road to serfdo...er, Christian Legal Society, it should be that paragon of constitutional originalism, Antonin Scalia, who in 1990 persuaded four mostly conservative justices to go his way in Employment Division v. Smith. That decision made it impossible for the "pro-religion" conservatives on the current court to actually argue on behalf of the constitutional guarantee of religious free exercise. The Hastings policy that officially recognized student groups must admit all comers may be idiotic (a Democratic club must admit Republicans?), but it's neutral and generally applicable--the Smith standard.

However, if you look at, say, Timothy Dalrymple's critique of CLS over at Patheos, you'll find nary a mention of Smith. Dalrymple is more than prepared to believe that the court majority acted against religious interests, but in fact, thanks to Smith, there never had to be a balancing of the right of free exercise against the principle of equality embodied by an "all comers" policy. And the fact is, there's real tension between the two that we as a society, and the Supreme Court as the arbiter of the Constitution, ought to face up to.

As retired Justice David Souter said in his Harvard commencement address,"The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another." One of the worst features of today's blog-eat-blog world is that it allows us to pretend that there are lots of easy answers.

Because GetReligion's Mollie Hemingway is gracious enough to concede that I've offered the "best defense" of the Goodstein/Halbfinger NYT article on Pope Benedict's performance as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and because I was perhaps ungracious enough to smack her around a little in a subsequent post, let me acknowledge the validity of her latest grounds for criticism.

First, G/H may fairly be charged with taking a swipe at then-Cardinal Ratzinger's position on Liberation Theology. Here's what they wrote:

As Father Gauthe was being prosecuted in Louisiana, Cardinal Ratzinger was publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed, which the cardinal saw as a Marxist-inspired distortion of church doctrine.

OK, if I'd been their editor I would have changed that to read "...for preaching that empowering the poor and oppressed was the church's central mission...." In the context of the article as a whole, I count this venial sin.

Second, and more importantly, Hemingway claims that the G/H time-line regarding when the CDF "dithered" is "a mess." With respect to the paragraph above, for example, her point is that the prosecution of Father Gauthe and the crackdown on liberation theologians took place in 1980s, but that knowledge of the CDF's full responsibility for abuse cases indicated in a letter from 1922 didn't surface until some time in the 1990s.

I'll stipulate that there is indeed considerable fuzziness about when the 1922 letter came to be known inside the Roman Curia. For all we know, the CDF's staff canonists may have been aware of it all along. But that's not the point. The CDF had some considerable responsibility for abuse cases all along. And we know in detail from the Kiesle case in the early 1980s that the CDF under Ratzinger didn't merely dither; it brought to a standstill a proceeding that had been moving forward. As I noted, G/H allude to the Kiesle case (which Goodstein and Michael Luo looked at earlier this year). Had I been the editor, I would have made a little space to name and describe it.

According to the Vatican's new norms, both count as graviora delicta--most serious abuses. H/T David Gibson.

Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but Mollie Hemingway's latest defense of the critics of the Goodstein/Halbfinger story in last Friday's New York Times shouldn't go unanswered. According to Hemingway, the the critics assert (and she agrees)

that it is false to say, as the Times alleges, that the 2001 action by Pope John Paul II was not a major turning point in rationalizing the Church's response to clergy sexual abuse. And they're saying it's false to say Benedict clearly had power to act and didn't and that he was part of the problem in the Curia.

Here's what Goodstein and Halbfinger actually alleged:

But church documents and interviews with canon lawyers and bishops cast that 2001 decision and the future pope's track record in a new and less flattering light.

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

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

Was 2001 "mainly a belated reaffirmation of longstanding church procedures"? Yes it was. That's not to say that the CDF didn't start looking busy. But it's also the case that prior to 2001 Cardinal Ratzinger, as Benedict then was, had power to act in abuse cases during his two decades as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. And, as I've pointed out, his exercise of such power as he understood the CDF to have was less than impressive. In the best documented case we have, he acted to slow the process to a crawl.

Yes, there seems to have been a good deal of uncertainty about exactly what the rules were. That's exactly the point. As the current archbishop of Adelaide, Australia, told the Times, "There was confusion everywhere." Ratzinger was the guy in charge of the CDF--i.e. he was "part of the problem in the Curia."

Hemingway does signal appreciation for canon lawyer Nicholas Cafardi's assessment in what she takes as a defense of the Times piece by Grant Gallicho over at dotCommonweal. Deep down in the lively back-and-forth is a lengthy comment (copied after the jump) from Jim Jenkins, who chaired the San Francisco abuse review board after the sexual abuse scandal rocked the American church into action in 2002. It's cautionary evidence for anyone persuaded that after 2001, Ratzinger's CDF had entirely gone over to the side of the angels.

Or so it seems to me.

U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro's peroration in Gill v. Personnel Management:

To further divide the class of married individuals into those with spouses of the same sex and those with spouses of the opposite sex is to create a distinction without meaning. And where, as here, "there is no reason to believe that the disadvantaged class is different, in relevant respects" from a similarly situated class, this court may conclude that it is only irrational prejudice that motivates the challenged classification.149 As irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest, this court must hold that Section 3 of DOMA as applied to Plaintiffs violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Plaintiffs sued for federal marriage-based benefits, and a federal judge says they're entitled to them. I presume the Obama Justice Department will appeal, but imagine if it didn't...Wow.

"Religion freedom rolled back by SCOTUS" proclaims yesterday's post by Rod Dreher on the Supreme Court's decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. Taking off from a post by Wendy Kaminer over at the Atlantic, Dreher claims the court "believes that it's licit to protect other groups, while singling traditional Christians out for special discrimination."

That's nonsense. What the court has done is decide that the Hastings Law School's "all comers" rule for providing support to student groups applies to the "traditional Christians" who run the Christian Legal Society. But what Dreher really needs to recognize is that the decision has nothing whatsoever to do with religious freedom--because two decades ago the court seriously truncated the ability of religious individuals and groups to make Free Exercise claims.

I won't repeat myself explaining this, except to say that the irony here is that it was Justice Scalia and his conservative allies (plus John Paul Stevens) who put in place the current standard that such claims cannot prevail against "neutral laws of general applicability." As the majority in Christian Legal Society makes clear, an "all comers" policy is neutral and generally applicable. Dreher's beef should be with Scalia & Co., who denied traditional Christians and everybody else the ability to make special claims on behalf of their religious views, in line with the way the First Amendment singles out Free Exercise for special protection.

Or so the new strategy goes. Not good enough.

Regular readers of this blog will know that a month ago I started up another blog over at Beliefnet, the religious multiplex where millions of subscribers can do one or another spiritual thing online. Likewise, those who follow religion-and-media news will know that Beliefnet, founded by Steve Waldman back at the end of the last century and acquired by Fox in 2008, has now been sold (for an undisclosed tax write-off) to Affinity4, a Virginia-based company run by evangelical Christians that (as Mark Oppenheimer noted in his NYT column Saturday) is dedicated to "the sanctity of the family."

I love my own family but am inclined think it a bit idolatrous to dedicate oneself to "the sanctity" of "the family." Certainly I am not so dedicated. Nonetheless, I have a year-long contract with Beliefnet and expect to honor same. As I understand it, the new owners are committed (if not dedicated) to a maintaining Beliefnet as a site for all seasons. And if I could work for Fox, I can certainly work for Affinity4.

Notwithstanding Michael Sean Winters at NCR, R.R. Reno at First Thoughts, Rod Dreher at Beliefnet, and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway at GetReligion, the big takeout by Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger in last Friday's NYT is no hatchet job. It is, by my lights, a piece of balanced, well contextualized reporting that added some essential insider commentary and a couple of very important evidentiary pieces to the jigsaw puzzle being put together to show how the Vatican has handled the sexual abuse scandals of the past quarter-century.

Let's begin by stipulating that with the scandals having come home to roost in Rome, it is essential journalistic business to get the best possible fix on the record of Pope Benedict, going back to the days when as Joseph Ratzinger he was archbishop of Munich and, especially, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Here's what the current archbishop of Adelaide, Australia, Philip Edward Wilson, had to say to Goodstein and Halbfinger about how the Vatican dealt with sexual abuse issues on Ratzinger's watch: "There was confusion everywhere."

The core question raised by the article is posed by Geoffrey Robinson, a retired auxiliary bishop from Sydney:

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

The answer, according to the Times:

Supporters say that Cardinal Ratzinger would have preferred to take steps earlier to stanch the damage in certain cases.

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

Do the critics claim otherwise? No they don't. The most they can manage is to suggest that Ratzinger was faced with a difficult situation, that he was the best of a bad lot, and that given John Paul II's resistance, he did the best he could. Maybe so, but the most detailed example of his handling of a case we have--that of the child-abusing Oakland priest Stephen Kiesle--indicates otherwise. That's my assessment based on a close reading of documents from the case file. The Times article does not discuss, but does allude to, Ratzinger's performance in the Kiesle case. The evidence is that the case was moving along with all deliberate speed until Ratzinger took charge of the CDF. Then it slowed to a crawl.

...for supporting what the Romans did. 

Elena Kagan was asked a few questions about the religion clauses yesterday, and the Baptist Joint Committee has a transcript. On my non-lawyer's reading, her answers are lawyerly, professorial, and determinedly unrevealing about where she herself might come down as a Supreme Court justice. She indicated that in resolving the tension between the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses, the Court did well to allow "some play in the joints"--an expression that goes back 40 years in the Court's jurisprudence. But the "play" was very different in 1970 than it is today, taking a more restrictive approach to religious establishments and giving more latitude to free exercise claims.

In explaining the issue, Kagan did offer an example worth thinking about:

So, suppose that a state government decides to give what is called a "voluntary accommodation" to some religious person - essentially a voluntary exemption of that person from an otherwise generally applicable law - and does that because the law would impose some substantial burdens on that person's religious practice, and the state thinks: "you know what, in those circumstances we think that the person should be exempted from the law so that the person can follow the dictates of her conscience." But then somebody else comes in and says, "well, what do you mean? You're giving that exemption but you're not giving me an exemption and why are you making that sort of special accommodation to this person? That special accommodation must count as an establishment of religion." And so there you get a claim where there's an accommodation to the free exercise of religion, but then there's a claim that that violates the Establishment Clause part of the First Amendment. And that's the kind of way in which there might be tension.

The problem here really is that under the 1990 Smith decision, the state government in question would be subject to Establishment Clause challenges that it wouldn't be if the Court still allowed Free Exercise challenges to neutral laws of general applicability. In effect, by deciding that there is no constitutional right to an exemption from a law that just happens to burden your religious practice, the Court has given the joints less play--turning every "voluntary accommodation" into a potential Establishment Clause case. It will be interesting to see if Kagan, in her next job, tries to do something about that.