Rod Dreher

The plot thickens:

ROME (AP) -- Spanish media are quoting a retired Vatican cardinal as saying the late Pope John Paul II backed his letter congratulating a French bishop for risking jail for shielding a priest convicted of raping minors.

Web sites of La Verdad and other Spanish newspapers reported Saturday that Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, 80, told an audience at a Catholic university in Murcia, Spain, on Friday that he consulted with John Paul and showed him the letter. He claimed the pontiff authorized him to send the letter to bishops worldwide.

La Verdad said the audience at Universidad Catolica de Murcia applauded the cardinal's remarks.

If Castrillon Hoyos is telling the truth, then John Paul personally approved sending this letter in direct violation of the instruction Card. Ratzinger's CDF had sent down months earlier, urging bishops in countries where the law obliges them to report knowledge of sexual crimes against children to civil authorities, to follow the law. If Castrillon Hoyos is being truthful, it would suggest that, as far as the pontiff was concerned, the Ratzinger directive was window dressing.

By the way, one should not over-interpret that 2001 CDF instruction. As Msgr. Charles Scicluna of the CDF characterizes it today:

Msgr. Scicluna also emphasized that the Vatican's insistence on secrecy in the investigation of these cases by church authorities does not mean bishops or others are exempt from reporting these crimes to civil authorities.

"In some English-speaking countries, but also in France, if bishops become aware of crimes committed by their priests outside the sacramental seal of confession, they are obliged to report them to the judicial authorities. This is an onerous duty because the bishops are forced to make a gesture comparable to that of a father denouncing his own son. Nonetheless, our guidance in these cases is to respect the law," he said.

In countries where there is no legal obligation to report sex abuse accusations, Msgr. Scicluna said, "we do not force bishops to denounce their own priests, but encourage them to contact the victims and invite them to denounce the priests by whom they have been abused."

Anyway, what Card. Castrillon Hoyos said in Spain is very big news. It's the first time to my knowledge that someone who was in the curial inner circle under John Paul II has publicly said that the late pontiff encouraged a policy of covering up for clerical sex abuse. That's a bombshell.

By the way, do note how the laity who heard Castrillon Hoyos reacted to his admission: they applauded. People who believe the Church scandal is simply a matter of an out-of-touch clerical leadership squared off against a laity that wants to know the truth, and wants true reform, should consider this. It's not that simple, at all. If you wonder why some victims of abuse waited years to come out about what was done to them, you have part of your answer right there. Many laymen were quite willing to collaborate with evil to keep a truth they found intolerable to contemplate buried. Some still are. It's human nature. You can see it every day, if you look.

We spent today at the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania, which is out in the northwestern part of Philadelphia. Julie loves horticulture, and has been wanting to get out there for some time. There was a performance of Japanese taiko drummers from Swarthmore College that we wanted to see, which is what got me and the kids interested in going. The performance was pretty great, as it turned out, but what surprised me greatly was how much I loved the arboretum itself. We bought a family membership on the spot.

I marveled over how restful the grounds were. It's still early spring here in Pennsylvania, so the gardens aren't lush yet, but I was overcome by a sense of serenity as we walked around. It was such a powerful experience that I took out my prayer rope and silently prayed as I walked. I told Julie that the arboretum felt like a sanctuary to me -- and believe me, I'm not the sort of man who reacts so viscerally to natural beauty. It could well be that these past two months have been so anxious for me, given the transition to a new place, and more than anything else, my sister's cancer diagnosis, that I was especially susceptible to tranquillity imparted by trees, flowers, bushes, ferns and vines, and the Wissahickon Creek flowing through the grounds. We made our way around the fernery, and down to the sculpture garden in a pocket-sized meadow along the Wissahickon, I saw a small grove of trees in the clearing near the water, with a patch of jonquils, I think , growing at the base of the trees. Suddenly tears came to my eyes, and it took me a moment to realize why.

Earlier this week, in a post titled "The Impermanence of Things," I wrote about the tiny cabin in the country where my great-great-aunts Lois Simmons and Hilda Simmons Moss lived out the final years of their lives, and how their home, now long gone, was a haven for me as a small boy. Lois was an accomplished amateur horticulturist, and tended a remarkable garden. Here is a photograph of their cabin:

Those are fragrant sweet olive trees framing the porch. What you can't see from this view is the giant magnolia tree in the front yard, the magnolia fuscata tree with blossoms that smelled of banana, the dogwoods, the four o'clocks. On the right side of the cabin, behind the garage, were camellia bushes. A narrow path led around the left side of the house, to a bamboo stand, and beds of purple-blue phlox. If you took another path, you'd pass Loisie's compost pile, next to the place where her favorite cats were buried, and emerge into a small field, much of which was covered with daffodils, King Alfreds, spidery red lycorises, and above all, jonquils. That field was enclosed by cedars, gum trees, pin oaks and even a chestnut, among other trees. I seem to recall a venerable pear tree in the field, one we had to be careful walking near when fruit was on the ground, because the sweet rotting pears were a favorite of bees.

When I was a small boy -- 3, 4, 5 and 6 years old -- I spent a lot of time with Loisie in these gardens (here's a photo of her in her kitchen during those years). I would walk alongside my elderly aunt, who wore a thin cotton dress and an ever-present green visor, and steadied herself with a dried bamboo staff. And we would talk. She would tell me about her plants, her cats, and the birds who came into her garden. Lois had lived a life that seemed dramatic to a country child like me. When she and Hilda were young, they were Red Cross nurses serving in the canteen in Dijon during the Great War. Lois later lived in Honduras (I used to say the word "Tegucigalpa," her town, over and over, because it tasted so exotic in my mouth), and would tell me about iguanas that used to sun themselves on her lawn there. She spent her years before moving to the country in New Orleans. I want to say she lived on Esplanade Avenue, but I'm not sure. I do know that I heard her speak of Esplanade Avenue, and it sounded so magical to me: Esplanade Avenue. Lois introduced me to so many words that delighted and entranced me.

And so many worlds too. I have written in this space before about how Lois and Hilda would sit with little me on their red-leather couch, a 1951 Rand McNally atlas splayed across my lap, drawing routes on the map with my index finger, and telling me what we were seeing as we passed through those places. I still have that atlas, with my childish writing in pencil on some pages. Here is the actual pages of France and the Low Countries, where we did most of our imaginative traveling.

They took me with them to the Red Cross canteen the night Gen. Pershing showed up unannounced, and Lois, unable to find the key to the pantry, had to strain the general's tea through her petticoat. I was there with Hilda on the Champs-Elysees when the Armistice was announced, and a Frenchman grabbed her and gave her such a kiss. I was also with them on the nearby plantation they grew up on after the turn of the century, the daughters of one of the plantation managers. They introduced me to the black sharecropper who wouldn't wear shoes, and who struck matches on the callused soles of his feet. I met their late brother Clint, a whiskey fiend whose faithful old horse knew the way home to the country, six miles south of the saloon in town, when Clint was passed out in the saddle. These were the worlds they gave me, in a time in my life when these stories entered my mind with the power of myth to shape the course of my life.

Lois's signature is inscribed indelibly on the margins of my life's passages. Many of these mythic stories came to me by the fireplace in their cabin. Others they passed on to me in the rocking chairs on their front porch. But some came to me from Lois as we walked together in her hidden gardens, under the Chinese rain tree, amid the japonicas, the magnolias, the bamboo, the wisteria vines, the spidery red lycoris, the daffodils and, above all, the sweet, sweet jonquils.

Jonquils like those I saw in the grove today.

That grove was not like anything in Loisie's garden, but it did have a quality of ... enclosure that brought to mind how it felt to be in Loisie's world when I was a boy. There was nowhere else like it. She cast a spell on me, and taught me about wonderful things. She showed me the old speckled king snake who lived in the bushes under her magnolia grandiflora, and told me he was our friend. When I walked to Loisie's with a neighbor boy one summer afternoon, and saw the old king snake stretched out sunning himself in the pea gravel lane in front of the cabin, my buddy froze in fear, but I stepped gingerly over the snake, unafraid. Loisie said he was a friend, and inasmuch as she was the happy genius of this garden, who was I to doubt her?

Lois and Hilda are long gone, as is their cabin, their gardens, the orchard, all of it. I have memories, and a few relics of that world: a pale green Depression glass bowl that Loisie mixed cupcakes and pecan cookies in, that Rand McNally atlas, and a 1768 color print of Taylor birds and fruit that hung on the cabin wall. If we were fortunate enough to have a grove of wonderment in which to hide during our childhoods, I think we spend the rest of our lives trying to get back there. Sometimes, we stumble upon fragments of them, serendipitously, in unlikely places. And that is a grace.

It's no surprise that this is on my mind these days. My sister Ruthie, who's fighting cancer, lives in a house she and her husband built in what was the far edge of Loisie's orchard. In her yard is one of Loisie's camellia bushes, still blooming after all these years.

UPDATE: On further reflection, prompted by good comments from MargaretE and Rombald, the perfectly obvious whapped me in the face: I was exiled from the "sacred grove" of my early youth by the passage of time, and by the death and decay that comes with it (Aunt Lois passed away, and Aunt Hilda moved to a nursing facility, and later died). I long deeply to return to that state of paradise and enchantment and security. Just like Adam and Eve with Eden. Genesis is the story of all sorrowful humanity.

Is there anything the writer William T. Vollmann won't try for the sake of a good story? He visits a Japanese make-up artist who caters to Japanese businessmen who secretly want to cross-dress. He discovers, among other things, that the greatest cosmetic obstacle to men looking like women is "coarse skin." More:

She selects a wig. Then she invites me to study myself in the mirror; and it seems that a woman is looking back at me--not a beautiful woman, perhaps; but still, here is someone who came into the world just now and will exist more briefly than I, a woman who has feelings (my feelings); she wants to look her best. What is grace? I assuredly lack it. But I have become pleasingly alien to myself; I am other just as distinctly as misted purple-gray mountains stand out from blindingly snowy rice-fields.

What changed my appearance the most?--The wig and the lipstick, I would say; much of the other procedures simply diverted attention from the age of my skin. In this connection it is interesting to insert another claim by the zoologist Desmond Morris: Long hair and a hairless (or pale and uniform) face increase contrast, thereby making the woman more visible to potential mates. Puffed-out lips (and my made-up mouth does express the illusion of more voluminous lips) are more juvenile, hence indicative, I suppose, of fresher ova.--But then I wonder to what extent convention plays a part. Why wouldn't Cro-Magnon men have let their hair grow as long as their women did? Besides, the Noh museum in Kanazawa displays a certain atsuita, a thick cloth robe mostly for male roles, which offers its audience a base of turtle-shell octagons, with embroidered patterns pertaining to each of the four seasons within cloud- or fan-shaped borders; it is beautiful, but why should it be male?

--And so once again I feel myself to be, as I so often do when I try to comprehend the nuances of Noh, an ape in a cage.--In Yukiko's studio, an ape in a wig stares back at me with sad blue eyes.

Are ideal female body types (according to heterosexual men) innate, or culturally conditioned by advertising and suchlike? Dutch researchers loaded sexy mannequins into the back of a van and visited with straight men who have been blind from birth to see what they could find out. Past research indicates that around the world, while men in some cultures have preferred larger women than their counterparts in other cultures, the proportions of the ideal female body have been remarkably consistent. This suggests that there must have been some evolutionary advantage to idealizing women of a particular corporeal form.
But there have been studies that contradict this.

So:

Amid all the conflicting evidence, Karremans sent his mannequins around the Netherlands. The blind stood before them; they were told to touch the women, to focus their hands on the waists and hips. The breasts on both figures were the same, in case the men reached too high. The men extended their arms; they ran their hands over the region. Then they scored the attractiveness of the bodies. Karremans had a hunch, he told me, that their ratings wouldn't match those of the sighted men he used as controls, half of them blindfolded so that they, too, would be judging by feel. It seemed likely, he said, that visual culture would play an overwhelming part in creating the outlines of lust. And though the blind had almost surely grown up hearing attractiveness described, perhaps even in terms of hourglass shapes, it was improbable, he writes in his forthcoming journal paper, that they had heard descriptions amounting to, "The more hourglass shaped, the more attractive," which would be necessary to favor the curvier mannequin over the figure that was only somewhat less so.

But, with some statistically insignificant variation, the scores of the blind matched those of the sighted.

Read the rest of the article to find out possible explanations.

While we're on the topic of crooked and immoral church administration, let's look at the Orthodox Church in America. Shortly before he was elected primate of the Orthodox Church in America, Bishop Jonah gave an electrifying speech in which he said the two previous metropolitans of the OCA, Theodosius and Herman, were corrupt, and that they and some of their allies had "raped" the church. He also said, criticizing the corrupt autocracy of the previous metropolitans (Herman had just been forcibly retired in disgrace, and gone off to live with his longtime driver and friend), and suggesting how bishops should rule the Church:

"Authority is responsibility. Authority is accountability. It's not power."

Well, a recent special investigative report recently released detailed how, exactly, Herman raped the Church in one particular way with his gross abuse of power and financial chicanery at St. Tikhon's Monastery, ,which has left the monastery poor and deeply in debt. The report concluded that Herman, who lives on monastery property with his Friend, should be asked nicely to get out of the house on monastery property and leave for exile -- or else.

This is how they're treating the whited sepulchre who used to be the head of the Church, the closest thing the OCA has to a pope, over his calamitous misrule. From reading that devastating report, Herman is no doubt lucky that he's not being hauled off to jail. That the OCA is finally getting its house in order and holding its former top leader to account is confidence-building, if you ask me. No man is above the moral law. No man.

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