An interesting piece via John Thavis at CNS regarding confession and absolution and sex abusers. The article is drawn from an interview in L’Osservatore Romano with Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, regent of the Apostolic Penitentiary, a Vatican court that handles issues related to the sacrament of penance:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — A priest who confesses sexual abuse in the sacrament of penance should be absolved and should generally not be encouraged by the confessor to disclose his acts publicly or to his superiors, a Vatican official said…

…Bishop Girotti spoke strictly about the response of a confessor, and not about the wider responsibility to acknowledge and investigate priestly sexual abuse outside the confessional.

When a priest confesses such acts, “the confession can only have absolution as a consequence,” he said.

“It is not up to the confessor to make them public or to ask the penitent to incriminate himself in front of superiors. This is true because, on one hand, the sacramental seal remains inviolable and, on the other hand, one cannot provoke mistrust in the penitent,” he said.

“From the confessor, (the penitent) can only expect absolution, certainly not a sentence nor the order to confess his crime in public,” he said.

These things are beyond my competence, but my layman’s notion of confession (reconciliation) was that a penitent in fact could be given a penance of some sort as part of (rather than a condition of) absolution. It could be ten Haily Marys or a vow to tell authorities about one’s crime, etc. I know this is dodgy territory, given the free lunch that is grace, and the absolute confidentiality of the confessional. But enlightenment would be welcome.

Thavis’s article goes on to explore some of these sfumature:

Other Vatican officials, who spoke on background, said a distinction should be drawn between what a confessor requires of a penitent as a condition for absolution, and what the confessor may strongly encourage the penitent to do.

In the case of priestly sexual abuse, for example, a confessor may want to recommend that a priest discuss the situation with superiors in order to avoid the occasion of future sins, they said. Publicly admitting the sin might even be required of a penitent if it would clear the name of another person unjustly accused of the same act, they said.

So is it just a recommendation — and then go on your way, absolved? (Girotti also makes an interesting argument about why absolution for abortion is reserved to bishops, something I didn’t know, though the sexual abuse of children is not. I’d vote for changing that.)

In any case, these issues are very much in the news given the scandals spreading through Europe, and increasing questions about actions by, e.g. Cardinal sean Brady in Ireland and ongoing questions about Joseph Ratzinger’s role in a terrible case in Munich. It’s easy to fuel suspicion about secrecy and the church.

The whole CNS story is here.

University of Chicago political scientist, John Mersheimer wrote with Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Though the two took a lot of heat, the book in many ways opened the current conversation about AIPAC. The credentials and moderate views of the two made it possible to have a normal discussion about the American-Israeli relationship. Here is Mersheimer on the recent flare up and his assessment of what is likely to happen.

“There will be more crises ahead, because a two-state solution is probably impossible at this point and ‘greater Israel’ is going to end up an apartheid state. The United States cannot support that outcome, however, partly for the strategic reasons that have been exposed by the present crisis, but also because apartheid is a morally reprehensible system that no decent American could openly embrace. Given its core values, how could the United States sustain a special relationship with an apartheid state? In short, America’s remarkably close relationship with Israel is now in trouble and this situation will only get worse.” http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/03/17/john-mearsheimer/taking-sides/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3206

UPDATE: Here are the views of the non-governmental U.S. foreign policy establishment: A Council  on Foreign Policy round table: Elliot Abrams, Leslie Gelb, Daniel Senor, Steven Cook, and Steven Simon. http://www.cfr.org/publication/21671/usisrael.html

UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer announces that the whole thing is Obama’s fault!   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/18/AR2010031802747.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

On a post below I referred to a prudential judgment made with biblical “fear and trembling” regarding the health bill’s non-funding of abortion.

Today’s Washington Post views the financial aspects of the bill with the more secular-sounding “trepidation:”

For some on the left or the right, the smart betting might be clear. For us, and we suspect for many thoughtful Americans, the decision is not so easy. We believe stronger and more principled presidential leadership could have delivered a bill that was paid for from the start, rather than one that relies on budgetary gimmicks in the short term — and, for the long term, on presidents and congresses mustering greater courage than the incumbents have displayed. But if legislators are asked to cast an up-or-down vote in the next few days, our advice would be to vote yes. With trepidation, we would say that the benefits of acting outweigh the risks.

The rest is here.

The degeneration of the political/populist right has provided no end of hilarious and pathetic spectacles that could provide fodder for every other blog post — and often do over at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, which is where I just saw this. I usually resist, but this video by the Columbus Dispatch of a Tea Party rally and the treatment of a man who says he has  Parkinson’s and wants health care reform is really shocking. They make drunken frat boys look like angels. What the hell is happening to us?

Stupak dismisses the nuns’ letter:

Congressman Bart Stupak, D-Mich, responded sharply to White House officials touting a letter representing 59,000 nuns that was sent to lawmakers urging them to pass the health care bill.

The conservative Democrat dismissed the action by the White House saying, “When I’m drafting right to life language, I don’t call up the nuns.” He says he instead confers with other groups including “leading bishops, Focus on the Family, and The National Right to Life Committee.”  [emphasis added.]

If this isn’t the best answer to the New Atheists I’ve seen, it’s certainly the best three-minute-and-fifty-nine-second answer I’ve seen.

Daniel Kurzer, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, 2001-2005, has an essay in the current issue of The American Interest. It shows the tenuous legality of the West Bank settlements and the views of some Israeli officials with whom Kurzer negotiated that  those illegalities are what is undermining the legitimacy of the State of Israel. Sobering.

“Gorenberg has noted the vital role that settlers and settlements played in the pre-state period, concluding that the success of this Zionist enterprise was the declaration of Israel’s independence in 1948. At that moment, however, the national mission changed—from building the infrastructure of a state-in-the-making to the protection of that state and the achievement of its recognition and legitimacy. He [Gorenberg] argues that, by pursuing an unbridled settlement push in 2009, Prime Minister Netanyahu was deconstructing the very state he has sworn to protect, confusing the issue of what Israel is and isn’t.” http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=781

E. J. Dionne’s latest column is up on our Web site. When it comes to the Senate bill and its prolife provisions, he takes the side of the Catholic sisters who support it.

Dionne points out something that strikes me as important, especially in light of accusations that the Catholic sisters have disrespected the bishops by publicly questioning their conclusions about the Senate bill:

Rather astonishingly, the bishops’ statement misrepresented the view of the CHA, whose members include 600 Catholic hospitals and 1,400 nursing homes.

Cardinal George acknowledged that the bishops’ “analysis of the flaws in the legislation is not completely shared by the leaders of the Catholic Health Association.” Then he said: “They believe, moreover, that the defects that they do recognize can be corrected after the passage of the final bill.”

But Sister Carol, as she is known, said the latter assertion was flatly not true. “We’re not saying that,” she said. Her organization believes the bill as currently written guarantees that there will be no federal funding for abortion and does not need to be “corrected.” Why the bishops would distort the position of the church’s major health association is, to be charitable, a mystery.

At least one bishop has had to correct himself after relying on that inaccurate summary from the USCCB. St. Petersburg’s bishop, Robert Lynch, is also on the board of the CHA. But he was in the hospital as a patient when the CHA released its statement. Catching up with the debate, he backed the USCCB on his blog — until Sister Carol (”a good woman of the Church, no liberal trouble-maker by any stretch of the imagination,” he avers) contacted him to set the record straight. He did so, much to his credit, in another blog post.

The CHA did have some specific suggestions for what might be included in the reconciliation package, which they expressed in a letter (pdf file here). But they weren’t about abortion. However you may respond to Cardinal George’s “Midwestern parlance,” his line about “a pig in a poke” is based on a completely inaccurate understanding of what the CHA (and others) actually said.

Given what’s at stake, it is vitally important to get this right. If you’re inclined to give the bishops’ interpretation more weight simply because it comes from the bishops, this sort of thing should give you pause. Even bishops can make mistakes. But this is a matter about which we can’t afford to be careless.

It’s all the Palestinians’ fault.Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States (and a citizen of the U.S.) explains why this is not a crisis, and it’s not Israel’s doing. As my mother used to say, “this takes the cake.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/opinion/18oren.html

A contrary view summed up by Commonweal regular, Andrew Bacevich in Salon: “In a lengthy statement offered to the Armed Services Committee earlier this week, Petraeus ticked off a long list of problems in his AOR — AfPak, Iran, Iraq, Yemen — and then turned to what he called the “root causes of instability.” Ranking as item No. 1 on his list was this: “insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace.” Petraeus continued:

“The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.”

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/03/17/bacevich_on_petraeus_israel?source=newsletter

From the AP, endorsement of HCR by the leaders of 60 orders, representing 59,000 nuns:

Meanwhile, in a rare public disagreement that will reverberate among the nation’s 70 million Catholics, leaders of religious orders representing 59,000 nuns sent lawmakers a letter urging lawmakers to pass the Senate health care bill. Expected to come before the House by this weekend, the measure contains abortion funding restrictions that the bishops say don’t go far enough.

“Despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions,” said the letter signed by 60 leaders of women’s religious orders. “It will uphold longstanding conscience protections and it will make historic new investments … in support of pregnant women. This is the real pro-life stance, and we as Catholics are all for it.”

UPDATE:  Here’s the letter.  (Thanks, Mollie!)

Looks like there are moves to step down: Clinton smiling at a State Dept. mike said the U.S. and Israel remained united in ensuring Israel’s security (no doubt). Ha’aretz reports that Netanyahu and Biden spoke on the phone long into the night Tuesday with Netanyahu’s advisers and the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. listening in (if Biden was forgiving that will leak to the Israeli media). On Tuesday’s Newshour the emerging trope: too bad about the mess-up but the U.S. has no policy in place to move the question; may as well go back to the status quo ante.

Is General Petreus proving to be the voice of reality? Before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday, he said, “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel.” Pretty straightforward. Here is a fuller account of Petreus’s views (posted earlier): http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/14/the_petraeus_briefing_biden_s_embarrassment_is_not_the_whole_story

Read Up:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/world/middleeast/17diplo.html?hpw
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1156807.html
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1157020.html

UPDATE:  “JERUSALEM — Israeli officials said on Wednesday that efforts were under way to calm tensions with the Obama administration and come up with a formula to diffuse a diplomatic crisis over building in contested East Jerusalem.

“The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, hurried to distance himself from remarks made by his brother-in-law, Hagai Ben Artzi, in a radio interview on Wednesday, in which he described President Barack Obama as an anti-Semite. Mr. Netanyahu said that he “utterly rejected” the comments made by his wife’s brother, whose hawkish views are well-known.

“In a statement distributed by his office, Mr. Netanyahu added that he had a deep appreciation for President Obama’s commitment to Israel’s security and for the profound relationship between Israel and the United States.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/world/middleeast/18mideast.html?hp

In the important and seemingly endless health care debate, a crucial item that has rightly received much attention here is whether the Senate bill provides sufficient safeguards in the matter of not funding abortion on the part of the federal government.

Despite the strong counter-position taken by the Bishops Conference, I am sufficiently impressed by the careful analyses of people like Peter Nixon and Matthew Boudway to think that in this prudential judgment of how pro-life principles may be preserved and hopefully strengthened, I can, in conscience, support the Senate bill in this respect.

But I think it important to underline that this is a prudential judgment, based in part upon a personal, non-expert,  reading of the material, but also on personal trust placed in those who seem to be both extremely knowledgeable and deeply committed to moral principles in keeping with the Catholic tradition. I certainly do not escape responsibility for that prudential judgment. May I also, respectfully, suggest that those who advocate for such a decision, in favor of the Senate bill, also bear an added responsibility for their advocacy.

It might be of help, then, if all sides were to acknowledge the fallibility of their prudential judgment, and that it is entered upon with a certain salutary “fear and trembling,” since so much is at stake.

That said, there are other aspects to the bill that also merit attention, as this story from today’s Washington Post indicates:

virtually everything House Democrats want to achieve in their package costs money. For example, Obama and House leaders have promised to increase government subsidies to help lower-income people purchase insurance, to fully close the coverage gap known as the doughnut hole in the Medicare prescription drug program, and to extend to all states the deal cut with Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson (D), under which the federal government would pay for a proposed expansion of Medicaid.Meanwhile, House leaders want to dramatically scale back one of the most powerful deficit-reduction tools in the Senate bill: a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost insurance policies. Obama has proposed to delay implementation of the tax until 2018 and to limit the number of policies that would be subject to the tax.

Obama and House Democrats have proposed to pay for their changes by raising Medicare taxes on the wealthy. They were hoping to reduce deficits further by incorporating Obama’s plan to overhaul the federal student loan program to cut out private lenders.

Those changes are unlikely to match the long-term savings proposed in the Senate bill, aides and lawmakers said, leaving House leaders scrambling to come up with additional sources of cash. Failure to comply with the reconciliation rules would imperil the package in the Senate and could cause big problems in the House, where the votes of many fiscally conservative Democrats hinge on the ability of health-care legislation to rein in soaring budget deficits.

Perriello, a social justice, pro-life Democrat, made headlines in fall 2008 when he won a Virginia seat dominated by Republicans. He is extremely vulnerable for this fall (think of him as the Democratic version of Louisiana’s GOP freshman, Anh “Joseph” Cao) but today indicated he might support the Senate bill. Most important, he said the Senate’s abortion funding provisions were as solid as those in the House bill, which he had previously backed.

My take at PoliticsDaily is here. Below are key grafs from his statement:

“As health care experts and pro-life leaders agree, the abortion language in the Senate bill upholds the Hyde Amendment standard. The Senate health care bill prevents federal taxpayer dollars from funding abortions, as the Catholic Hospital Association and legal experts have recently stated and as my own research has confirmed.”

“Furthermore, several key yet unadvertised provisions of the bill are likely to reduce the number of abortions in this country in ways that move beyond politics toward a real impact on the culture of life in our country, such as those that provide $250 million for programs to support vulnerable pregnant women and increase the adoption tax credit, also making it refundable, so that lower income families can access it fully…”

“…”I have plenty of serious problems with the Senate bill and, until I see the final language, I cannot take a position on final passage. But the existing language on abortion in the current Senate bill meets the pledge I made to ensure no federal funding for abortion in this health care bill.”

We’ve just wrapped up our March 26 issue, but we thought you’d like to see the editorial right away. Our take on the “prolife” push to halt the Senate health-care reform bill is online here.

One needs a good reason to oppose a bill that would cover 30 million uninsured Americans and greatly improve insurance for those who already have it. If the Senate bill did clearly authorize the federal government to pay for elective abortions, prolife Americans might have such a reason. To conclude the bill does this, however, requires one to believe that every ambiguity—every possible complication the bill doesn’t explicitly address—is a ploy by prochoice politicians to sneak abortion funding into the system. President Barack Obama and his party’s leadership have promised the bill won’t be used in this way. Their critics instruct us to presume that they’re lying.

Read the whole thing.

“But as the stalemate continues — envoy George Mitchell just canceled his trip to Israel — Democratic critics have begun to question the White House’s public pressure on Netanyahu to reverse plans for controversial new housing and make other, unspecified concessions. The pro-Israel group AIPAC and others have been lobbying Congress to rein in the administration, and the Democrats join Republicans and Senator Joe Lieberman, whose intense criticism of the administration’s Mideast policy has been a constant.”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0310/Democrats_begin_to_criticize_Obama_on_Israel.html

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, …will hold a meeting with Jewish members of Congress on Tuesday, Hill and diplomatic sources said…. “Some Hill staffers said the Jewish members’ invitation to meet Netanyahu did not constitute a leaning to him in the current dispute, though the lone Jewish Republican member of Congress Eric Cantor (R-Va.) issued a statement calling on the White House to lay off the tough public rhetoric on Israel, as have several other members. And the Israeli government has summoned all hands on deck to try to ease and counter the Obama administration’s rebukes, replete with suggested talking points [see below].”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0310/Netanyahu_to_meet_Jewish_Congress_members.html

The Talking Points of the Israeli Government: http://www.politico.com/static/PPM143_100316_bnia.html

And already: the counter-counter offensive (we should always remember that the sharpest critics of the Israeli government are Israeli’s themselves). “To the delight of Mahmoud Zahar [Hamas official] and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel’s homemade weapons of mass destruction – pro-settlement bureaucrats with conflicts of financial and ideological interest – have done in one meeting what Israel’s foes have sought for generations: driving a stake through the heart of Israel’s relationship with the White House.
“We should have known. But in the swamp of anomaly and impossibility that is Jerusalem, you can easily lose sight of, and belief in, the basics:  One of the curses of endless war, is the tendency to become one’s own worst enemy – in every sense. ”
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1156827.html

Nick Baumann, who covers national politics for Mother Jones (and is the son of Commonweal’s editor, Paul Baumann), explains here why the Senate bill fails to explicitly apply the Hyde Amendment to the new funding for community health centers.

The pro-lifers are wrong. The Senate bill won’t lead to government directly funding abortions.  But the Democrats screwed up. They could have easily prevented this particular line of attack. All it would have taken is a single line of text.

Peter Nixon’s comment on Matt Boudway’s Jost post is worth highlighting here:

I worked in Washington DC for ten years and am familiar with… “worst case scenarioism,” where opponents of legislation come up with increasingly bizzare predictions of how a particular bill could lead to disastrous unintended consequences. The idea that the Senate bill will enable CHCs [community health centers] to perform abortions falls into this category. It comes across as a desperate ploy rather than reasoned legislative analysis.

Jost’s analysis is accurate and compelling. As I and others have argued at length, the Senate language, while different from the House, provides sufficient protection of current abortion policy to meet the USCCB’s stated test that health care reform be “neutral” with respect to current law. What deficiencies remain are not of the magnitude to justify defeating a measure that will extend health insurance to tens of millions of low-income families.

It seems to me, though, that many of the bishops and their lobbyists are increasingly closed to any dialogue on this. Stupak and only Stupak will do. It’s bad enough that the USSCB–for all its protestations to the contrary–is perilously close to becoming a single issue lobby. But its degeneration into a single amendment lobby would be comic if the consequences for the nation’s millions of uninsured were not so serious.

March Madness is here, and the New York Times marks the occasion with a profile of Sr. Rose Ann Fleming, SNDdeN, the academic adviser to the men’s basketball team at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

Xavier, a Jesuit university in Cincinnati, is entering the N.C.A.A. tournament seeded sixth in the West Region with a 24-8 record. But Sister Rose Ann Fleming is a perfect 77-0. Since she became the academic adviser for Xavier athletics in 1985, every men’s basketball player who has played as a senior has left with a diploma.

…

“Our alumni over the years have told me that they’re so proud of the graduation rates,” Fleming said over a post-Mass coffee at Starbucks last week during the Atlantic 10 Conference tournament in Atlantic City. “They don’t want to hear about Xavier, or any university, using students athletically and then dumping them without a degree.”

Of course, you can’t write about women religious without invoking the usual cliches (she’s not one of those nuns who hit people with rulers — she even smiles!). But for the most part, the article (by John Branch) is a positive look at how religious women are still putting their experience in education to work — and, more broadly, at what ministry can mean for modern sisters. (Compare the paragraph on Sr. Fleming’s daily routine with the limited perspective on apostolic religious life Oprah offered last month.) It’s also an interesting look at how Catholic colleges hold themselves accountable to their mission, even in athletics.

On Day 7, our last episode, Joe Petit raised a question about the Palestinian right of return. This raises a fundamental question about the future of the one-state, two-state solution. Here is my take on that fraught subject (corrections welcome).

The question about the right of return points to another “solution” of the conflict, one that has increasingly come to the fore, namely the one-state solution, i.e, the people now living between the sea and the Jordan comprising Israel, Gaza and the West Bank would become one state. Would it remain a Jewish state? Would it remain a democracy? Would it be a bi-national state, i.e., Jewish and Palestinian? If it remains a democracy, the Palestinians would be the majority.

When people like Livni (the Kadema candidate in the last elections) point to one-state as the outcome if a settlement is not reached for a two-state solution, she is pointing to a probable outcome of the failure to end the conflict; she favored the two-state solution.

Lieberman the current foreign minister in the Netanyahu government, during the election campaign raised the threat of expelling Arabs now living in Israel (who are Israeli citizens) to ensure the Jewishness of Israel. To the original Zionists this would have been unacceptable (though this is what happened to in the 1948 war–the source of the refugees and the “right of return” issue). As Israel’s population has become more extreme politically, such proposals seem to get a more sympathetic hearing in the Israeli electorate.

Jimmy Carter was pilloried for using the word, “apartheid,” to describe the current divisions in which there is one state, Israel, which controls another nation/people in Gaza and the West Bank. But that is the situation in which Israel finds itself. We can argue about who’s at fault–both Israelis and Palestinians to varying degrees. But that doesn’t resolve the conundrum in which both find themselves.

Israel’s ties to the United States (”the indispensable nation!”) not only support and protect it. Those ties have also allowed Israel to avoid facing it’s true existential situation (which is not Iran). Israel must make peace or rule over a hostile population forever. That is its true existential threat as a democracy.

UPDATE: According to Ha’aretz these are the three conditions that the U.S. has put on the Israeli table. “Israel must reverse its approval for construction in Ramat Shlomo, make a “substantial gesture” towards the Palestinians and publicly declare that all of the “core issues” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the status of Jerusalem, be included in upcoming talks.”    http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2010/03/us_envoy_cancels_mideast_trip_israel_feud_deepens.php

From this morning’s Washington Post:

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic — known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass” — has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

“It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. “But I like it,” she said, “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.”

A “deem and pass” — is that what philosophers call a “performative utterance” and theologians call a “Hail Mary pass?”

Until today, this memo by Timothy Stoltzfus Jost of Washington and Lee law school, was the best analysis of the Senate bill’s abortion language I had seen. Now the best analysis I’ve seen is his response to the USCCB’s critique of that memo. (Strangely, the USCCB’s critique was posted not on their own Web site but on that of the National Right to Life Committee.) Jost’s response is a model of courtesy, scruple, and analytical sobriety. He looks at every feverish speculation advanced by prolife opponents of the Senate bill and heads it off at the pass. He offers the economic and historical context without which it is impossible to understand what’s really at stake. He offers good prolife reasons to support the Senate bill (now the only bill worth talking about). And all the while he manages, quite remarkably, not to lose his temper with those who have made and repeated dubious claims even after they’ve been corrected.

Read the rest of this entry »

NCR’s Tom Fox has an exclusive interview with the lesbian couple whose children are no longer welcome in the Archdiocese of Denver’s Catholic schools.

What happened? It all began two weeks ago:

“I went in to turn in our daughter’s kindergarten application and was called into the principal’s office. That’s when, she said, she got “blind sided.”

“She sat me down and told me we were no longer accepted here any more. She said it was not going to be a good fit for our child and that she would encourage us to look elsewhere,” Martha went on, explaining the principal said she was worried there could be confusion when the teachers teach about the family unit.

“Her main point was she was concerned about our child, about her well-being. She never came out and said we were not welcomed to stay. But she pretty much told us it was time for us to move on.”

That evening the women discussed what was said adding they were upset and so they decided they wanted clarification because the principal had stopped short of saying their daughter could not enroll, just that it would not be wise to do so.

Mary said she called the principal and asked for clarification. She recalls asking: “Are you just worried about how this is going to be for my child because of the church’s stance on homosexuality?” She said she told the principal that if that was the case the women could handle it. I told her we did not expect any accommodations for our children based on our family situation. She then asked directly: “Are you telling us we are not allowed?”

At that point, Mary said, the principal replied that she needed to call the archdiocese. The next day, with the principal and the pastor of Sacred Heart parish, Fr. William Breslin, on the line, the women were told that their daughters could stay one more year in school and after that they would be out.

That came as a shock because for the past three years the nature of their relationship had never been an issue. “When we first enrolled our daughter in pre-school we told the school administrators our daughter had two moms. We asked if this was going to be a problem. We said that if it was going to be a problem we could go else where. We were very open and they said it would not be a problem.”

Who went to the press? Apparently a Sacred Heart teacher. “It didn’t come from us.”

Are they on a mission to change the church’s teaching on marriage and homosexuality? No. “We did not feel then and we still don’t feel now that pushing the church to change its mind would be in our children’s best interests.” They don’t consider themselves gay activists: “You have never seen us at protests or marching in parades. We never intended to pave the way for gays in the Catholic church. We just wanted to be a normal family.”

Why would a lesbian couple want to send their kids to a Catholic school? They’re Catholic. They were raised Catholic. One of them attended Catholic schools from preschool through high school. The other is a Domer. One of them has a mother who taught in Catholic school for twenty-five years. The other’s aunt was a Catholic-school teacher for decades. “We have a lot of history with the Catholic school system. It is what we are familiar with. It is what we are comfortable with. We value what a Catholic education can do for our kids.”

Why Sacred Heart? They’re Mass-going parishioners. They value the moral foundation provided by a Sacred Heart education. “We want our kids to learn about religion. We feel religion is really important. And they love it. They love God. They love their school. They love their friends. They love their teachers.”

The children were baptized Catholic. They go to Sunday school and Mass. And a local priest suggested they raise the kids Episcopalian. “We are trying to live up to the promises we make to raise our kids as Catholics and now the church we made the promise to is sort of undermining our attempts to do so.”

Their pastor explained that the family could remain in the parish and that the children could still attend CCD. Tom Fox writes: “’Isn’t the doctrine the same?’ they asked. They felt Breslin was not able to provide an understandable answer.”

And so they will find another school for their kids. A non-Catholic one. But they worry what their children will lose as a result of Archbishop Chaput’s decision:

Last week they were driving home from school having just picked up their children in the car. Recalled Martha: “In the car, our older daughter was helping our younger daughter with words from the “Our Father.” They were both trying to get the words right. Then they began the “Hail Mary” and we listened we had tears in our eyes.”

Read all of Tom Fox’s report right here.

“If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it’s needed, she’s more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn’t it obvious?” — Cardinal Basil Hume to T. R. Reid, as reported in Reid’s Washington Post column, “Universal Health Care Tends to Cut the Abortion Rate.”

The Petraeus briefing: Biden’s embarrassment is not the whole story

“On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) “too old, too slow … and too late.”

Should we worry that the military is dabbling in foreign policy directly (not the first time, I know), or should we applaud their forthrightness in bringing home the bad news? (From Foreign Policy)

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/14/the_petraeus_briefing_biden_s_embarrassment_is_not_the_whole_story

Notre Dame has announced that the recipient of this year’s Laetare Medal will be Dana Gioia — the first poet to receive the honor.

“In his vocation as poet and avocation as arts administrator, Dana Gioia has given vivid witness to the mutual flourishing of faith and culture,” said Notre Dame’s president, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. “By awarding him our University’s highest honor we hope both to celebrate and participate in that witness.”

Gioia served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under President George W. Bush. In 2003, Commonweal published a profile of Gioia, written by Cynthia Haven. Read it here to get acquainted, or reacquainted, with his achievements and his outlook. A taste:

He speaks about how the chasm between art and religion in contemporary culture has impoverished both. “Art is one of the ways we can call people back into the church.” He says that the arts have always been congenial to the Catholic worldview, because Catholicism is a faith which believes that transcendent truths are incarnated. “The sacraments are models of this. They are outward signs that symbolize an inward turn of grace. The Catholic, literally from birth, when he or she is baptized, is raised in a culture that understands symbols and signs. And it also trains you in understanding the relationship between the visible and the invisible. Consequently, allegory finds its greatest realization in Catholic artists like Dante.”

…He speculates that “one of the ways to foster a healthier view of Catholic arts is by creating opportunities, commissions—by having magazines like Commonweal. Commonweal has an extremely important place in American intellectual life because it represents one of the doorways between religious and secular culture.”

Obviously a man of wisdom. Read the whole thing here. And for more background about the Laetare Medal, check out Cathleen Kaveny’s informative blog post from 2008.

Reported in Ha’aretz: “U.S. President Barack Obama did not hold back in condemning the humiliation caused to Joe Biden with the Israeli announcement of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem during what was supposed to be the vice president’s friendly visit to Israel.

“Instead of accepting Netanyahu’s partial apology and letting bygones be bygones, Obama issued a stern warning to the Israeli prime minister and is now demanding that he take “specific actions” to show he is “committed” to the U.S.-Israel relationship and to the peace process itself.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1156251.html

And here’s Tom Friedman (headline: “Driving Drunk in Jerusalem”)–a little behind the curve, but going the right direction: “I am a big Joe Biden fan. The vice president is an indefatigable defender of U.S. interests abroad. So it pains me to say that on his recent trip to Israel, when Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s government rubbed his nose in some new housing plans for contested East Jerusalem, the vice president missed a chance to send a powerful public signal: He should have snapped his notebook shut, gotten right back on Air Force Two, flown home and left the following scribbled note behind: “Message from America to the Israeli government: Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And right now, you’re driving drunk. You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality. Call us when you’re serious. We need to focus on building our country.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14friedman.html

From Sr. Carol Keehan, DC:

The insurance reforms will make the lives of millions more secure, and their coverage more affordable. The reforms will eventually make affordable health insurance available to 31 million of the 47 million Americans currently without coverage.

CHA has a major concern on life issues. We said there could not be any federal funding for abortions and there had to be strong funding for maternity care, especially for vulnerable women. The bill now being considered allows people buying insurance through an exchange to use federal dollars in the form of tax credits and their own dollars to buy a policy that covers their health care. If they choose a policy with abortion coverage, then they must write a separate personal check for the cost of that coverage.

There is a requirement that the insurance companies be audited annually to assure that the payment for abortion coverage fully covers the administrative and clinical costs, that the payment is held in a separate account from other premiums, and that there are no federal dollars used.

In addition, there is a wonderful provision in the bill that provides $250 million over 10 years to pay for counseling, education, job training and housing for vulnerable women who are pregnant or parenting. Another provision provides a substantial increase in the adoption tax credit and funding for adoption assistance programs.

Read the rest right here.

“Clinton Rebukes Israel on Housing Announcement”
“In a tense, 43-minute phone call on Friday morning, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel’s plan for new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem sent a “deeply negative signal” about Israeli-American relations, and not just because it spoiled a visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr….

“Such blunt language toward Israel is very rare from an American administration, and several officials said Mrs. Clinton was relaying the anger of President Obama at the announcement, which was made by Israel’s Interior Ministry and which Mr. Netanyahu said caught him off guard….”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/world/middleeast/13diplo.html

Will 43 minutes do it?

In the meantime…..”Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon on Thursday defended Israel’s decision to approve construction of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, saying sovereignty over the capital has never been negotiable and that Israel would not make any more concessions for peace.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtVty.jhtml?sw=Deputy+Foreign+Minister&itemNo=1155755

Looks like it will take more than a 43-minute phone call!

And this from Abe Foxman, head of the ADL:  “The U.S. based Anti-Defamation League said late Friday that it was “stunned” by Clinton’s “dressing down” of Israel.
“We cannot remember an instance when such harsh language was directed at a friend and ally of the United States,” said Abraham Foxman, ….The ADL called Clinton’s remarks a “gross overreaction” to a “policy difference among friends.”
“One can only wonder how far the U.S. is prepared to go in distancing itself from Israel in order to placate the Palestinians in the hope they see it is in their interest to return to the negotiating table,” Foxman said.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1156070.html

Uri Avnery weighs in:

SOME WEEKS the news is dominated by a single word. This week’s word was “timing”.

“It’s all a matter of timing. The Government of Israel has insulted the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, one of the greatest “friends” of Israel (meaning: somebody totally subservient to AIPAC) and spat in the face of President Barack Obama. So what? It’s all a matter of timing.

“If the government had announced the building of 1600 new housing units in East Jerusalem a day earlier, it would have been OK. If it had announced it three days later, it would have been wonderful. But doing it exactly when Joe Biden was about to have dinner with Bibi and Sarah’le – that was really bad timing.

“The matter itself is not important. Another thousand housing units in East Jerusalem, or 10 thousand, or 100 thousand – what different does it make? The only thing that matters is the timing.

“As the Frenchman said: It’s worse than criminal, it’s stupid.” Read the rest….

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1268500889

Obviously, the investigation is ongoing, but this doesn’t look good:

A widening child sexual abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI, as a senior church official acknowledged Friday that a German archdiocese made “serious mistakes” in handling an abuse case while the pope served as its archbishop.  The archdiocese said that a priest accused of molesting boys was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties, before committing further abuses and being prosecuted. Pope Benedict, who at the time headed the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, approved the priest’s transfer for therapy. A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to later resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a statement.

What’s sort of surprising to me is that, even assuming the worst is true, anyone would be particularly surprised by this.  Although the Church leadership is fond of saying that all sorts of other institutions have experienced child sexual abuse, I cannot think of any organization that has had the same history of both (1) covering it up and (2) repeatedly sending the wolves back out to tend the sheep.  But that pattern seems to me to follow very naturally from the status of lay people within the Church’s bureaucracy.

Conservative legal scholars are constantly harping on what public choice theory teaches us about political structures and the perverse incentives they can create for public actors.  But conservative Catholic legal scholars — who are often very skeptical of government bureaucracies — seem extremely reluctant to apply those same insights to the Church’s hierarchy.  Given the nearly total lack of meaningful input into Church governance by lay people (short of the largely unutilized power to conditionally withhold donations), is it any real shock that the celibate clergy made decisions in the abuse scandal that largely track the interests of the celibate clergy.  And that the abuses were worse when the children involved had no families to look after them and were therefore particularly vulnerable?  For anyone who thinks that public choice theory offers even a modicum of insight (and, to be clear, I am skeptical of its reach), it would be surprising if it were any other way.

Why would the Church be exempt from the consequences of the perverse incentives created by a bureaucracy with almost no mechanism for democratic feedback?  The popes and bishops are, after all, human beings.  I suppose the argument is that the Holy Spirit is somehow looking out in a special way for the Church such that the normal tendencies of human motivation don’t apply.  The thing about providential arguments like that is that you can never tell where things are going to go next.  Perhaps the growing scandal rocking the Church is itself the work of providence and will put enough pressure on the institution to take a second or third look at its autocratic governance system.  If so, THAT will be the work of the Holy Spirit as well.

Last week I wrote here about a chart put together by Americans United for Life. The organization has responded to my comments here. The controversy about whether the Senate health-care bill funds abortion is complicated, tedious, and important. For those who still have a stomach for it, I answer AUL’s response below the break.

Read the rest of this entry »