The Kind of Pope We've Needed

My faith was never really in danger, but it needed a real boost, a real shot in the arm.

The election of Pope Francis has provided that for me. His predecessor was not without certain strengths, and the press has been presenting various contrasts and continuities between the two, but for me, the main difference is this...

Francis genuinely loves us. People can sense it. They can feel it. The sad truth is, Benedict, for all of is intellectual strengths, held many of us in a kind of cool contempt. He was a relentless scold.

A particular subset of traditionalists has fallen into sheer panic over Francis, as especially shown by the way they've flipped out over his washing of the feet of females. What a spectacular failure they show in their ability to internalize the Gospels. They give truth to the old saying, "They only obey the Pope when he obeys them."

The symbolism of the Washing of the Feet is not meant to represent the ordination of priests but the injunction upon the priests to be servant leaders. To be the Servants of the Servants of God. I was particularly moved by some of these letters written by inmates in a juvenile detention facility in Los Angeles, after Francis had washed the feet of incarcerated youth in Italy.

Dear Pope Francis, Thank you for washing the feet of youth like us in Italy. We also are young and made mistakes. Society has given up on us, thank you that you have not given up on us.

Dear Pope Francis, My many friends are in two different maximum security prisons in one of our state’s 33 state prisons.Calif. I am writing to tell you that I feel bad that more youth of color are in prison in our state than any other place in the world. I am inviting you to come here next year to wash our feet, many of who have been (given) sentences to die in prison. God bless you.

Dear Pope Francis, I read that the harshest sentence that a youth can receive in Italy is 20 years. I wish this was true here. I hope I hear back from you. I have been catholic and glad I am catholic because I have a pope like you. I will pray for you every day because we need examples of God like you are in this violent world.

Dear Pope Francis, When Jesus washed the feet of his friends he gave an example of humility. I have been raised to believe that it is only with respect in hurting your enemy that you are a man. Tonight you and Jesus show me something in this washing of the feet something very different. I hope we kids learn from this.

Dear Pope Francis, I have never been to Rome. I do not know if it is near Los Angeles because all my youth I have only known my neighborhood. I hope one day I will be given a second chance and receive a blessing from you and maybe even have my feet washed on Holy Thursday.

Tom Friedman's Busted Escalator

Someday we'll have to admit that protectionism is the only answer



It isn't every day that you'll see me offer words of praise for a FOX commentator, but I guess there's a first time for everything.

Actually, Martin Sieff may be better known as an author and analyst at an outfit called The Globalist Research Center than he is for his work at FOX. A few years back he wrote a book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East. I'm dubious about how useful the politics in it was, but there sure was a lot in it that was just plain incorrect. As I recall, his main thesis was that the only time the Middle East was functional at all was when the Ottoman Turks ran it despotically with an iron fist, and that this is what it needs today, with the Saudis basically filling in the role that the Ottomans once did. I don't think I was able to get all the way through it.

There is one particular matter, though, where I find myself in complete agreement with Mr. Sieff (even though that troubles me somewhat), and that is in his blistering critique of the free trade, globalizing thoughts of Thomas Friedman, who recently wrote a book with Michael Mandelbaum called, That Used to Be US: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.



I've written about Friedman before; about his wide influence and how in his previous books, speeches, and  interviews, he has succeeded in turning "protectionism" and "fair trade" into dirty words. In his latest effort, much like Charles Lindbergh returning from the Third Reich in the 1930s, he laments the fact that the USA lacks the drive and efficiency that he saw in the fascist state he just visited. Having been recently bedazzled by a high-speed railway station and a convention center thrown up by the Chinese in a matter of months, he couldn't help but to compare them to the broken escalators he saw in Washington DC subway station, which had been out of service for almost as long a period of time as it took the Chinese to build their state-of-the-art monuments to the 21st Century.  In an interview he did on WBUR's On-Point program, it was described this way:

In September 2010, Tom attended the World Economic Forum’s summer conference in Tianjin, China. Five years earlier, getting to Tianjin had involved a three-and-a-half-hour car ride from Beijing to a polluted, crowded Chinese version of Detroit, but things had changed. Now, to get to Tianjin, you head to the Beijing South Railway Station -an ultramodern flying saucer of a building with glass walls and an oval roof covered with 3,246 solar panels- buy a ticket from an electronic kiosk offering choices in Chinese and English, and board a world-class-high-speed train that goes right to another roomy, modern train station in downtown Tianjin. Said to be the fastest in the world when it began operating in 2008, the Chinese bullet train covers 115 kilometers, or 72 miles, in a mere twenty-nine minutes.

The conference itself took place at the Tianjin Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center¬a massive, beautifully appointed structure, the like of which exists in few American cities. As if the convention center wasn’t impressive enough, the conference’s co–sponsors in Tianjin gave some facts and figures about it. They noted that it contained a total floor area of 230,000 square meters (almost 2.5 million square feet) and that “construction of the Meijiang Convention Center started on September 15, 2009, and was completed in May, 2010.” Reading that line, Tom started counting on his fingers: Let’s see—September, October, November, December, January . . . Eight months.

Returning home to Maryland from that trip, Tom was describing the Tianjin complex and how quickly it was built to Michael and his wife, Anne. At one point Anne asked: “Excuse me, Tom. Have you been to our subway stop lately?” We all live in Bethesda and often use the Washington Metrorail subway to get to work in downtown Washington, D.C. Tom had just been at the Bethesda station and knew exactly what Anne was talking about: The two short escalators had been under repair for nearly six months. While the one being fixed was closed, the other had to be shut off and converted into a two-way staircase. At rush hour, this was creating a huge mess. Everyone trying to get on or off the platform had to squeeze single file up and down one frozen escalator. It sometimes took ten minutes just to get out of the station. A sign on the closed escalator said that its repairs were part of a massive escalator “modernization” project.

What was taking this “modernization” project so long? We investigated. Cathy Asato, a spokeswoman for the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority, had told the Maryland Community News (October 20, 2010) that “the repairs were scheduled to take about six months and are on schedule. Mechanics need 10 to 12 weeks to fix each escalator.”

A simple comparison made a startling point: It took China’s Teda Construction Group thirty-two weeks to build a world-class convention center from the ground up -including giant escalators in every corner- and it was taking the Washington Metro crew twenty-four weeks to repair two tiny escalators of twenty-one steps each.

Why, those lazy American slackers! Why can't they work hard, fix those escalators chop-chop, and make the trains run on time like El Duce and Der Fuhrer...er, sorry... I mean Hu Jintao... There are all kinds of things wrong with the simplicities laid out in those paragraphs, but I'll leave it to Martin Sieff to take apart Mr. Friedman's analysis. This following is taken from the introduction to his riposte to Friedman's book. It is called, That Should Still Be Us: How Thomas Friedman's Flat World Myths Are Keeping Us Flat on Our Backs.

Here we have the core of Thomas Friedman’s prescription for America.

First, we let China and South Korea have all those high-paying old-fashioned- jobs making cars. We don’t need them.

Second, we retrain all those auto workers as doctors, engineers, and MBAs.

Then, we get those Asian countries to start venture capital funds to pay for thousands of start-ups that may or may not bring products to market. Everybody wins!

Well, no. China wins! South Korea wins! Japan wins! But America loses! America loses! America loses!

America loses because most of the well-paying industrial jobs in China, South Korea, and Japan are not in Friedman’s cutesy little enterprising high-tech startups…

Memo number one to Messrs. Friedman and Mandelbaum: if you insist on focusing US government efforts on high-tech research and development and refuse to protect low-tech, far-from-cutting-edge traditional industries, you can expect endless delays in getting spare parts for your Metro rail escalators, your buses, the wonderful new high-speed-train systems, and everything else you fantasize, because you no longer have the broad industrial base to produce those spare parts and basic systems yourself.

And that is likely also the real reason why China was able to build its new super railway station in only eight months: it’s capable of producing most, if not all, of the components for anything it wants to build right there in its own factories. And it has the foreign currency on hand to easily afford the rest overseas.

And why is that? Because the Chinese, like the Germans, have very sensibly protected their own industrial economy from potentially destructive foreign competition.

And where did they learn to act in this manner, which is so different from the idealized flat world of Friedman’s endless siren songs? They learned it from us because that used to be us.

Pardon Paolo Gabriele Right Now

Why not? Your minions in the curia will spin it like it's a saintly gesture on your part in any case.

The question is, why did you hold a layman under house arrest for months,and put him through a Vatican trial to begin with? Who do you think you are? Did the whole world need to see these allegations of medieval mistreatment? For crying out loud, our apologists are still having to deal with trying to explain the Inquisition centuries after it occurred.  Now this?

Paolo Gabriele alleged in court yesterday that his cell was so small he couldn't spread his arms.

Also, the lights were left on 24 hours a day for his 20-day imprisonment in his first cell. The head of the Vatican police who was present in court looked decidedly embarrassed by the revelations of mistreatment.

Oh, marvelous.

How different you are, aren't you, from your predecessor? I can hardly imagine the pope who sat with and forgave the man who shot and nearly killed him, putting Mr. Gabriele, who testified that he was motivated by his belief that "the Pope isn't aware of some of the things being done in his name," through the things that you have.

If you can lift the excommunication of a notoriously anti-semitic schismatic, you should easily be able to find your way towards issuing a pardon within the next 24 hours for this guy.

If not, you can do us all a favor, though, eh?  If you can put a layman through this kind of trial and punishment, can you do the same towards some of those pedophile priests and their superiors who protected them? Can your start with Cardinal Bernard Law?

New Books Remembering Sargent Shriver, One of the Last of a Vanishing Breed

"Break your mirrors... Serve, serve, serve, for in the end it will be the servants who save us all."

This is what a Catholic public servant and statesman used to look like.

Sargent Shriver passed away in 2011 at the age of 95, after a long and difficult struggle with Alzheimer's. At one time he was well-known as one of the Kennedy in-laws, married to JFK's sister Eunice. He was a man of prodigious energy, with a long and distinguished career in civil service. As he once put it, "Joe Kennedy isn't in the habit of having incompetents around. I wouldn't have lasted three months if I didn't have some ability."

A man of deep and abiding faith, a daily communicant, he provided the driving inspiration behind the creation of the Peace Corps, and directed that organization at the same time he was also running Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty." He's also known for his work at the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, his work on integrating Chicago's Catholic schools, founding the Job Corps, VISTA, Head Start, and serving as President of the Special Olympics, which was started by his wife Eunice. He was a signatory to the 1992 document A New Compact of Care: Caring about Women, Caring for the Unborn.

To but it bluntly as this blogger did, he represented the time when When Liberals Had Balls, Made Sense And Wore Ties.

Among all the members of the Kennedy clan, you might say that "Sarge" and the rest of the Shriver family have acquitted themselves over the years with the most decorum and the most impressive accomplishments. Sargent Shriver helped run JFK's presidential campaign and also organized his funeral. Despite the poisonous relationship between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Shriver, in his openness and integrity, was admired and trusted by both men. At one time, during his 1964 campaign, Johnson was seriously considering having Shriver on the ticket as the vice-presidential candidate, unbeknownst to Shriver. As reported in the new book by Scott Stossel, Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver, when Bobby got wind of this, in a rare moment of tension between them, he confronted Shriver in Hyannisport, grabbing him by the lapels and hissing, "Let me make something clear. There's not going to be a Kennedy on this ticket. And if there were, it would be me!"

It wasn't such raw ambition, though, that drove Shriver so much as his faith-driven imperative to pursue social justice - to serve. He was know for saying things like "It's the most rewarding thing to be a civil servant," and "It is well to be prepared for life as it is, but it is better to be prepared to make life better than it is," and challenging each of us to ask ourselves "What have I done to improve the lot of humanity?"

It's sad, and even tragic, that this kind of idealism is considered corny, sappy, and provokes eye-rolling today. It's sad to see how much the libertarian-inspired hatred and distrust of government taken hold of the popular mindset in this country. It wasn't always this way. People didn't always hold contempt for public service, I'm old enough to remember that. Unfortunately, as the hopes of the Sixties crumbled into the ugliness, disillusionment, and failures of the Seventies, even the mention of LBJ's "War on Poverty" causes people to wince today, and the work and reputation of men like Sargent Shriver in needlessly and unjustly tarnished.

Even back in those days there were people who described him as a "boy scout" in his do-goody-good liberalism. By 1972, the otherwise progressive-minded National Lampoon magazine cruelly satirized him with their spoof entitled "Sargent Shriver's Bleeding Hearts Club Band."



(Lyrics sung to the tune of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

Just a dozen years ago today,
Sgt. Shriver taught the clan to play
Once they played for Bobby and for John
Now they’re guaranteed to raise a yawn
We now reintroduce to you
The act we’ve blown for all these years,
Sgt. Shriver’s Bleeding Hearts Club Band.
We’re Sgt. Shriver’s Bleeding Hearts Club Band,
The martyred brothers’ kith and kin.
We’re Sgt. Shriver’s Bleeding Hearts Club Band,
Sit back and watch the votes roll in.
Sgt. Shriver’s bleeding, Sgt. Shriver’s bleeding,
Sgt. Shriver’s Bleeding Hearts Club Band.
It’s wonderful to be here,
It’s certainly a thrill.
You’re such a dumb electorate,
We’d like to take you home with us.
America, come home!
We don’t really want to stop the war,
But that’s what you’ll all be voting for.
You’ll forget amidst this stupid sham,
We’re the ones who got you into ‘Nam.
So let us introduce to you
The once and future Tommy—who?
And Sgt. Shriver’s Bleeding Hearts Club Band.

Well, whatever one might make of that, it's interesting to note that Sargent's son, Mark Shriver, has written his own book, A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver, sharing his reflections on the significance of his father's life and on their relationship. He's keen to point out that his father was a "good man," if not necessarily a "great man." By that, he means to say that great men are known for their power, or their wealth, and are hailed in the press for one reason or another... Good men are good in the small corners of life, as devoted husbands, fathers, and men of faith. They treat the more invisible people in life like waitresses and airport workers the same way they treat big shots, even when the cameras aren't on them.

Please listen to this America Maganzine podcast interview with Mark Shriver here, in A Man for All Seasons.

Mark Shriver described the three principles driving his father's life as Faith Hope, and Love. As a student at Yale he once invited Dorothy Day to speak there, and he took seriously the injunction to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and house the homeless.

In an anecdote I found interesting, Mark related a speech that his father gave at Xavier University in 1966. I think it would be considered quite poitically incorrect today; a view on church and state that's way out of line with where we are now in 2012, when culture war issues have become encrusted around reproductive, gender, and orientation issues. The poor have somehow been forgotten.

Just three or four years ago it was practically impossible for a federal agency to give a direct grant to a religious group. People said there was a wall between church and state, but we said that wall was put there to keep government out of the pulpit, not to keep the clergy away from the poor.


That wall protects belief and even disbelief. It does not exclude compassion, poverty, suffering, and justice. That is common territory, not exclusively yours, or mine, but everybody’s, with no wall between.


And so we said “Reverend Mr. Jones, or Father Kelly, or Rabbi Hirsch, if you’re not afraid to be seen in our company, we’re not afraid to be seen in yours, because we are all about Our Father’s business.”

Peter D. Williams Wins the Laurel Leaf

He has a new fan in me

 
Sir Thomas More, by Hans Holbein the Younger (1527)

My wife is an anglophile. It’s understandable. She has some English and Welsh in her blood. As for me, not so much. Sure, I love Downton Abbey, British comedies, and much of what can be seen on PBS Mystery and Masterpiece Theater. I love the British Invasion bands from the Sixties, and the Punk and New Wave bands from the Seventies and Eighties too. Almost all of the best actors on both stage-and-screen come from there.

There is a coldness in the rule-ridden reserve of the UK that rankles me, however, and the reflexive, knee-jerk anti-Catholicism of the place just ticks me off to no end. It seems that the Book of Martyrs and the shadow of the Spanish Armada still hang heavily over the British psyche, for both believers and atheists alike.

I only spent a few days in London at my brother-in-law’s ordination to the deaconate a couple of years ago, and although it was a nice visit, I got the distinct impression that it must be a difficult place to be a Catholic these days…

Which brings me to Peter D. Williams of Catholic Voices. I first heard Williams on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable program, a weekly show on Premier Radio that usually pits believers and unbelievers against each other in debates that last for about an hour-and-a half. It’s a pretty interesting show if you can get past certain biases peculiar to the UK. I enjoy listening to the podcasts quite often. One time I heard Williams in a debate with a secularist about whether or not the Catholic Church was a force for good or evil.  In a way, it was an attempt to undo the debacle we suffered in the infamous Intelligence Squared debate, when Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry just massacred Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Anne Widdecombe. I thought Williams did a really nice job. On another occasion, William Johnstone, another apologist from Catholic Voices, debated Duncan Boyd of the Protestant Truth Society about whether or not the papacy was biblical.  I thought Johnstone did pretty well too, but I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “I wish it had been Peter D. Williams who’d debated Boyd.”

To my surprise, I just found out the other day that Williams and Boyd had in fact actually squared off once, back in 2010, just before Pope Benedict’s visit to the UK. It was on a show called Live @ 9 on Revelation TV. The topic was, get this, “whether or not Benedict’s visit was good for the country.” In effect, they were arguing about whether or not Benedict should even be allowed to make a state visit to the UK!


Catholic Voices: Peter Williams debates in Revelation TV from Jack Valero on Vimeo.

Now there are plenty of Americans, both Catholic and non-Catholic alike, who aren’t fans of Benedict, but there really aren’t that many who would question whether or not the guy should be allowed to make an official state visit to the USA, but, as you can see, the UK is a very different kind of place. Very different indeed…

Anyway, I thought Williams did a superb job dismantling the glib, but smug, mean-spirited and hateful Duncan Boyd. Not only was he knowledgeable and well-prepared to defend against the invectives being hurled against the Church, but he was patient, even-tempered and charitable, even when he was being attacked by a one-sided and exceedingly hostile audience, who openly questoned his personal integrity, sputtering in red-faced fury about his “Jesuitical arguments.” Williams was mild-mannered throughout and handled it with grace and aplomb.

Well done, Mr. Williams. You won the laurel leaf in that debate, as far as I’m concerned. I’m looking forward to hearing more from you!

They Can't Pop the Corks Quite Yet

Can they really make a deal with just one out of four?

Remember those toothpaste and sugarless gum commercials from decades past when 4 out of 5 dentists were said to have all agreed on something or another?  My father-in-law was a dentist.  He liked to say that he was the 5th dentist.

SSPX Bishop Bernard Fellay must be feeling like one of those outliers today. 

It looks like there may be trouble in SSPX-land, eh? Despite all that confidence we've seen across the web in recent months, there appears to be some truth in the old saying that there's many a slip 'tween the cup and the lip. They can't uncork their bottles of champagne yet...

Despite the fact that Fellay is trying to reel them in, three out of the four SSPX bishops disagree with the whole process, and the CDF isnt happy about it. Nor should they be.

Benedict isn't forcing them to make a single concession, yet it's still not good enough for them to make a deal.

Today’s Vatican communiqué said the situations of the three other bishops “will have to be dealt with separately and singularly.”
Earlier this month, Bishops Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Alfonso de Galarreta and Richard Williamson sent a letter to Bishop Fellay warning that an agreement with the Vatican would see the Society “cease to oppose the universal apostasy of our time.”


They also argued that the Second Vatican Council “did not just include particular errors but represented a total perversion of the mind, a new philosophy founded on subjectivism.”

Pope Benedict XVI was dismissed by the three Pius X Society bishops as a “subjectivist.”

Benedict might take in Fellay and anyone who wants to come with him anyway, but what will be the effect of that? Another split, and the same problem will remain. Nothing much will have been solved.

So, no champagne quite yet, just Vichy Water for now. Those guys are used to that.

The Facebook IPO

Well, there's a certain amount of buzz going on regarding Facebook's big IPO week, and whether or not Mark Zuckerberg is showing the suits on the Street enough respect, turning up with a hoodie and a cocky attitude and all....  A lot of buzz, but maybe not as much as was expected.

I don't know, something about Facebook feels like a house of cards to me, like the Dutch Tulip Craze, when the price of tulips went through the roof in the 17th Century during a period of wild speculation, until somebody with sense stopped and said, "Hey, these are just a bunch of freaking tulips."

The habits of people under the age of 30 may be one thing, but the wise investor may ask him or herself just what people over the age of 30 find Facebook particularly useful for.  Personally, I've found it quite useful in discovering the differences I've developed in political and religious views from some friends that I haven't seen in decades, but I sense a lot of it has to do with the the beauty of FB stalking that allows a lot of people to say with grim satisfaction....



...which can only carry you for so far, but then again, I'm no investment genius.  Who am I to argue with 900 million people?