America's Common Sense Cardinal

Friday was the Feast of St. Francis, and while Pope Francis spent the day in Assisi celebrating and commemorating it, he was simultaneously lamenting the latest immigration disaster at Lampedusa, saying,“Today is a day of tears. Such things go against the spirit of the world.”

In the spirit of St Francis, it's good every now and then to offer a word of praise for our own Capuchin Cardinal Sean Patrick O'Malley.  He's one of the Pope's so-called G-8 cardinals, who happen to be in Rome for meetings and consultations this week, and in my humble opinion, not only was O'Malley a wise choice for this group on the part of Francis, but the best choice out of the eight.  

In the wake of Francis' now-famous interview with La Civiltà Cattolica, a few American bishops have written columns offering commentary and perspective on it.  Some people might say that certain ones, including another particular Capuchin bishop, were offering spin.  Michael Sean Winters reported on at least one bishop who seemed to "get" what Francis was saying in the interview, and some who did not, in his NCR blog posts Cardinal Burke Still At It and Wuerl & Chaput on the Interview.

I can say with some confidence that Cardinal O'Malley is one of those bishops who "gets" Francis, and has done so right from the beginning.  Back in August he made the keynote address at the 131st Convention of the Knights of Columbus.  I find it interesting that while Bishop Tobin in our neighboring state of Rhode Island was reprimanding Pope Francis for not talking about abortion enough, Cardinal O'Malley already understood where the new pope was deciding to place new emphasis. He could see that Francis was looking at a broader context for issues respecting the dignity of human life. He knew this well in advance of the Civiltà Cattolica interview.  Interesting as well, that Lampedusa was mentioned in the keynote address, as it was by Francis today as a result of a fresh tragedy.  In his August 6th speech, O'Malley said...

Some people think that the Holy Father should talk more about abortion. I think he speaks of love and mercy to give people the context for the Church’s teaching on abortion. We oppose abortion, not because we are mean or old fashioned, but because we love people. And that is what we must show the world. Recently I read about an American relief worker in Africa, who reported on being at a camp for a food distribution line, it was very chaotic, even scary. He could see that they were running out of food and that these starving people were desperate. At the end of the line, the last person was a little nine year old girl. All that was left was one banana. They handed it to her. She peeled the banana and gave half each to her younger brother and sister. Then she licked the banana peel. The relief worker said at that moment he began to believe in God.

We must be better people; we must love all people, even those who advocate abortion. It is only if we love them that we will be able to help them discover the sacredness of the life of an unborn child. Only love and mercy will open hearts that have been hardened by the individualism of our age.

In the United States we are an immigrant Church. It is very significant that the Holy Father’s very first trip as Pope was to Lampedusa, to underscore his concern for the plight of immigrants. As the Archbishop pointed out so eloquently in his homily, this is an issue that it is great importance to us as American Catholics.

When the Holy Father went to the island of Lampedusa he threw a wreath of flowers into the sea where thousands of refugees have perished in the modern day coffin ships the bring refugees from North Africa. The Holy Father talked about the globalization of indifference – indifference to the suffering of others, to the fate of the unborn, the elderly, the handicapped, the mentally ill and the immigrants.

We must overcome this indifference in our own lives and help people to see that the Church’s teaching is about loving and caring for everyone. In his talk to the Brazilian bishops last week, Pope Francis said: “We need a Church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of mercy. Without mercy we have little chance nowadays of entering the world of wounded persons in need of understanding, forgiveness and love.” The Holy Father alludes to Cardinal Kasper’s work on mercy when he says that mercy without truth would be consolation without honesty and is empty chatter.

On the other hand, however, the truth without mercy would be cold, offputting and ready to wound. The truth isn’t a wet rag that you throw in someone’s face, but a warm cape that you wrap around a person, to protect and strengthen them.

Project Rachel has been just that kind of a combination of mercy and truth that the Church’s pro–life efforts need to be about.

Our efforts to heal the wounds of society will depend on our capacity to love and to be faithful to our mission. The Holy Father is showing us very clearly that our struggle is not just a political battle or a legal problem, but that we must evangelize and humanize the culture, then the world will be safe for the unborn, the elderly and the unproductive. The Gospel of Life is a Gospel of ercy. If we are going to get a hearing in today’s world, it will be because people recognize that authenticity of our lives and our dedication to building a civilization of love. We are called to live our lives as a service to others and commit our lives to give witness to the presence of God’s love and mercy in our midst.

No Redemption for Walt?

Breaking Bad and Morality in a Post-Religious Age 

 

 
 

At the last moment he found a bit of peace, perhaps, but not redemption.

I've had Badfinger's Baby Blue playing in my head for the last couple of days now. It was one of the best uses of of a classic rock song to close out a TV series or a movie that I've seen in quite a while, as Breaking Bad's main character Walter White looked wistfully for one last time over the object of his “special love” and the pinnacle of his life's work, his meth lab, just before dying. Music was used quite masterfully in the series overall, from what I could tell, such as the scene when Walt was pushing his last barrel of money through the desert as if it contained the weight of his accumulated sins, to the strains of Take My True Love. I've always felt that a dissonant juxposition of music with what is happening on screen can be devastatingly effective, ever since I first saw Martin Scorcese use Donovan's Atlantis as the soundtrack for the Billy Batts incident in Goodfellas.

The first time I heard about Breaking Bad was on a highway in northern Indiana in the Spring of 2011. I was in a rental car, driving my oldest daughter from Chicago to South Bend. She was a senior in high school at the time, and we were on our way to visit St. Mary's College for an accepted students day. Just a few miles out of South Bend, she was telling me about this new TV show that she’d recently become hooked on. Alternately horrified, fascinated, and intrigued by the fact that my daughter was telling me about watching a show that gave a sympathetic treatment to a meth-amphetamine cook, I must have stepped more heavily on the gas than I realized. I was clocked by the Indiana State Police at 85 mph and was given a speeding ticket.

Not that my wild ride was anything like the existential mid-life crisis that Walter White, played brilliantly by Bryan Cranston, had in Breaking Bad. Even after I first heard about it, I had no real interest in watching a show about the meth trade, whether it was sympathetic to the characters or otherwise. It wasn't until this year that I heard enough buzz about the excellent writing and acting associated with the program, to finally give it a look-see. I didn't start watching it, in fact, until after Walt's DEA agent brother-in-law Hank finally discovered that Walt was in fact the mysterious Heisenberg, the meth-making genius that he'd been hunting for. Therefore, I missed the vast amount of high drama in the show. Nevertheless, just watching those last few episodes was enough to get me completely hooked, and to leave an emotional impact on me when it ended.

My wife was as dubious as I was when I first heard about it, and she remained so. Myself, I wouldn’t tolerate for one moment the hell on earth that is meth addiction, or the hideous crime of it’s production and distribution. For me, however, the series was about much more than that, chiefly, how easy it is for human beings to make minor moral compromises that can snowball into major ones, leaving lasting damage in their wake. It brings to mind St Paul saying, ’I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” A show with such an edgy premise and theme was only as successful as it was because it was characterized by expert writing, but more importantly, because of its superb casting. They couldn't have done the casting more perfectly.

From the beginning of the show to its end, there has been a lot of consternation about the moral ambiguities presented within it, and what it says about us as a society, as we become more and more disengaged from traditional Judeo-Christian values. Ross Douthat, for one, fretted about those who identified with, and were rooting for the main protagonist, no matter what kind of atrocities he committed, in a group he refers to as  “Team Walt.” While realizing that they are not reading the writer’s intentions for the show quite properly, he’s concerned about the Darwinian ethics they’ve embraced.

The allure for Team Walt is not ultimately the pull of nihilism, or the harmless thrill of rooting for a supervillain. It’s the pull of an alternative moral code, neither liberal nor Judeo-Christian, with an internal logic all its own… embracing Walt doesn’t requiring embracing “individual savagery” and a world without moral rules. It just requires a return to “old rules” — to “the tribal, family-oriented society and the honor culture that actually did precede the Enlightenment’s commitment to universal values.”

To be clear, I don’t think the show itself is actually on Walt’s side. I think Team Walt badly misreads the story’s moral arc and vision.

But the pervasiveness of that misreading tells us something significant...

I’ve surely considered the same thing myself, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the whole story.

Granted, I came in late, so I didn’t see all of the terrible things that Walter White did. Maybe I’d feel a lot differently about his character if I did. The question remains, however, as to why so many people had sympathy for Walter White… Why were so many rooting for things to turn out all right for him and his family in the end? Why were so many hoping for his redemption?

I think a lot of it simply came down to the skill of Bryan Cranston, the actor who played him. I haven’t seen an actor in quite some time who has been able to deliver sheer pathos the way that he did. Every pained, angst-ridden expression spoke more than a thousand words, and the raging conflicts within him just exploded out of every glance and gesture. I think there is an instinctive reaction on a large part of the audience; a reaction that just wants to assuage that kind of pain.

While I don’t necessarily know what goes through the mind of younger viewers, I wonder if the prolonged economic situation we are living through strikes a chord with the middle-aged who are living under a cloud, living those “lives of quiet desperation,” feeling their health decline, feeling at mid-life that they’ve lived little more than a beige, mediocre life. Walter White steps out of this and his life spins out of control, but he barely looks back. Maybe there are many who wonder if such a thing could live within themselves.
Many were waiting for redemption in the final episode, but apparently Cranston and the writer, Vince Gilligan, decided that it was not to be. In his final visit with his wife, there was this exchange…

Skyler: "If I have to hear one more time that you did this for the family..."

Walt: "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really -- I was alive."

Speaking of Vince Gilligan, what is his take on what kind of a moral message, if any, are we to take out of the show? David Segal of the NYT reports on it in The Dark Art of ‘Breaking Bad’, and it confirms much of what I observed myself. Most of the characters in the show made some kind of serious moral compromise at some point, and they all paid for it in spades.

Gilligan and his writers have posed some large questions about good and evil, questions with implications for every kind of malefactor you can imagine, from Ponzi schemers to terrorists. Questions like: Do we live in a world where terrible people go unpunished for their misdeeds? Or do the wicked ultimately suffer for their sins?

Gilligan has the nerve to provide his own hopeful answer. “Breaking Bad” takes place in a universe where nobody gets away with anything and karma is the great uncredited player in the cast…

Cranston has found many nuanced ways to enact Walt’s many miseries, the most wrenching of which was the loss of his wife’s love. There is a long history in art of foisting suffering on characters who sin, but it seems to have fallen out of favor. As awful as Tony Soprano was, it’s left purposefully unclear at the end of “The Sopranos” whether he paid the ultimate price. Or consider the “simple chaos” take on the universe as represented in movies by Woody Allen, a director whom Gilligan admires. “And Woody Allen may be right,” Gilligan says. “I’m pretty much agnostic at this point in my life. But I find atheism just as hard to get my head around as I find fundamental Christianity. Because if there is no such thing as cosmic justice, what is the point of being good? That’s the one thing that no one has ever explained to me. Why shouldn’t I go rob a bank, especially if I’m smart enough to get away with it? What’s stopping me?”

“If there’s a larger lesson to ‘Breaking Bad,’ it’s that actions have consequences,” Gilligan said during lunch one day in his trailer. “If religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. That galls me to no end.”

“I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice, or something,” he said between chews. “I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen,” he went on. “My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. ‘I want to believe there’s a heaven. But I can’t not believe there’s a hell.’

Regarding Pope Francis... Will Everyone Please Chill?

The Catholic Circular Firing Squad goes on, like an endless loop of Reservoir Dogs

I suppose it was only a matter of time before our segmented, siloed, sorted, and completely polarized American political culture infected us as a Church. How could it not? It has been percolating since Holy Thursday, but look at the recent fallout over "The Interview." We treat popes now the same way we do presidents and other politicans.

So much for us being united as the Mystical Body of Christ. Maybe the late Fr. Raymond Brown was right when he said in his book The Churches the Apostles Left Behind, "Within Roman Catholicism, if we have another decade of the dominance of the People of God imagery, the Body of Christ mo­tif will need to re-emerge."

Poor Pope Francis... One has to feel badly for him, because of all the pastoral damage that had already been done before him. He has a mighty hill to climb.

Despite mostly favorable MSM coverage so far, take for a moment the challenges he faces with people on the Left...

Even when he says all the right things, many liberals, at least here in the USA, are still going to dislike and discount him. For example, simply take a look at the comments about him on posts referencing him on liberal sites like the Huffington Post. Even if he talks primarily about inequality and concern for the poor, he gets comments like "How about if the Vatican sells off all of their riches first," as if they are sitting on mountains of cash instead of museum pieces and a chronically chaotic and mismanaged bank.

Those are the kinder comments. As we all know, the pedophilia scandal is the "gift" to anti-Catholics that keeps on giving, and it is the well dipped back into over and over again for combox screeds. That may take centuries to erase, if ever.

Among the specifically Catholic Left, I suppose some are disappointed in the way he speaks of "spinsters" and "female machismo" in a fashion that convinces them that he has an anthropologically retrograde, Latin American way of thinking about women, and they would actually like to see some concrete changes in doctrine, which is very unlikely. If not that, they'd at least like him to back off of the LCWR. I think that may still happen, but unless doctrine actually changes on women's ordination and same-sex relationships, I don't think these folks are ever going to be truly happy, no matter what kind of tone he sets. As I said, that's highly unlikely.

The real matter for concern, however, is the absolute conniption that's being thrown on the Right.

Laypeople on the Left have a long history of criticizing popes openly, but except for the sedevacantists on the fringe, this was unthinkable for conservatives prior to now.
While recognizing that their "enemies" aren't exactly crawling back in repentance like the prodigal son, these Catholics would do well to remember the father's words to the older son.

My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours ~ Luke 15:31

Why all the anger and sense of betrayal? To an extent, I suppose I can understand the frustration. My wife and I have six kids and have always been vocal and active in regard to our Pro-Life views.  It hasn't always been easy, in a pornified cultural sink, where people can be hostile, condescending, or simply uncomprehending in regard to our beliefs, but we can also see what hasn't been working. Like Pope Francis, we can see that there are battlefield casualties that need healing.

Francis didn’t say we were wrong to have opposed abortion, or to have wasted our time talking about it. He didn’t say we shouldn’t continue to oppose it or continue to talk about it. He just told us to put it in the proper context and not to obsess over it. At the end of the day, the Faith is about Jesus Christ and his salvific mission, and we always have to be careful about cultivating and nursing our own pet idolatries instead. What I mean by that is, for all the good work we do in the Pro-Life sphere, for some of us, opposition to abortion has not become just a marker of the Faith and primary moral concern, but the be-all and end-all of the Faith. In a sense, for some of us, it has become the Faith itself. This isn’t meant as a condemnation on my part of the doctrinally conservative, so please don’t read it that way. The progressives can equally make an idol out of social justice, or the poor, or any other issue. All of us need to be cognizant of our own obsessions and tendencies, because idolatry is pernicious in the way it creeps up on us.


So, while I recognize to a degree that this is a sort of trial for those who feel like they've suffered through sacrifices and the slings and arrows of the culture wars, only to be stabbed in the back, I think there is something else larger going on here. After all, in regard to the moral issues and "tone," Rod Dreher has done a good job of pointing out that Benedict has at times said very much the same thing as Francis.

I think a lot of it comes down to this... Not only more liberal, but ordinary, lax, half-catechized, cultural Catholics love Francis in a way that they never extended to Benedict, and are showing signs of responding more favorably to the Faith again.

Before Joseph Ratzinger became the pope, he was well-known as a lightning rod, but he had a sizable and devoted following. He had a "fan club." John Paul II, by contrast, nor any other pope before him, for that matter, ever had this. After Joseph Ratzinger became the pope, Ignatius Press published just about everything he ever wrote. You couldn't go into your local Barnes & Nobles and look at the Catholic section of books without seeing a veritable wall of his writings. This was a pivotal moment. For his devoted followers, this was when things were finally going to be set to rights. Every thought of the pope was published and analyzed,and it was incumbent upon every serious Catholic to get to know the mind of this "teaching pope." The papacy had become more important than ever before.  In their enthusiasm, I think they may have missed how much the sartorial splendor and constant scolding coming from Rome was grating to other people, but they may not have cared even if they did.

The resignation was a shock, right when the pendulum swing to the right looked like it was picking up it's full head of steam and building towards a critical mass.

Pope Francis came in. Then the comparisons began, along with the unadorned affection of the great unwashed for Francis.

This is what they seem to hate most of all. They had gotten used to being coddled and pampered and catered to during the pontificates of JPII and Benedict, especially the latter, who believed in having no enemies to the right. They were the darling children, the creative minority, the faithful remnant, and they were looking forward to the day when everyone else would be kicked out, or, even more charitably, to die off, useless, aging hippies that they were.

The Right could not be comfortable loving Francis if they loved him too. Either they loved him for the wrong reasons, or something must be terribly wrong. The folks at the Vatican who still read all these blogs that they used to be so hopeful about must be very alarmed at these reactions right now.

Even though Francis is clearly his own man, Father Zuhlsdorf, for instance, who's become a sort of Baghdad Bob these days, insists that we can and must "Read Francis through Benedict." For the SSPX-sympathizing types at places like Rorate Caeli, they are not fooled. 

I mentioned the former Catholic Rod Dreher earlier, and he summarizes the reaction on the Right in a post called Conservative Catholics Confront Francis’s Message. Some interesting stuff in there. He quotes favorably and powerfully from Larry Chapp at Ethika Politika, but I think he missed the key quote from Chapp's column, which was this...

Along these lines, I have to say that I have been harboring the guilty hope that this liberal honeymoon with Francis will soon be over and things will get back to normal as soon as they see he is “not one of them.” That will make me feel “vindicated” again and “right.” But why should any of us hope that they stop liking the Pope? Why should we not hope instead that this first acceptance of theirs of his message will bear fruit as their own hearts open to truths that they too will see they should be more willing to accept? So what if they like him for what we think are “the wrong reasons”? How are the Right-wing bloggers so certain that they don’t dislike him for all the wrong reasons? Why should we not hope that a new conversation can be started where, even if we still disagree, our common love for Christ and his Church will forge a new amity? Why should I hope they return to alienated distrust? This Pope is calling all of us out of our selfish and pinched pettiness. And God knows we all need to heed that call. I know I do. I am starting to think this Pope might actually be, indeed, a truly wise and holy man.

Amen. Go ahead. Love Pope Francis. We love him too. Why can't we both?  Enough of Catholic infighting.

More on Syria and Other Matters...

Some interesting things on the web I noticed over the weekend...

1) A beautiful prayer from a Syrian Jesuit who is now studying at Creighton University.

A Prayer for Syria 

2) A Syrian-American woman gives an earful to John McCain at a town meeting.



As for Obama, shame on the Democrats for not speaking up more strongly on this.  It if was George W. Bush doing this, they'd be all over him.   Shame as well on Catholic politicians of both parties who are supporting this proposed attack.

3) A certain Father Zuhlsdorf commented yesterday on How the Catholic Left will support Pres. Obama’s attack on Syria, and a couple of days earlier on The Jesuit General’s selective indignation.  With regard to the "Catholic Left" at the National Catholic Reporter, which he calls "The Fishwrap" (which might have been funny the first 100 times he did so), he quotes Matt Bowman from CatholicVote saying:

On the NCReporter’s main page, it has forgotten how to plainly condemn bombing. It lists some articles in favor of the bishops’ view, yet at the same time it hosts what can only be called a “diversity” of views on the topic.

Hmm. Here's what NCR's page looks like this morning.

Seems like a pretty unambiguous focus to me....  Granted, it seems as if the main thrust of Mat Bowman's attack, and by extension, Zuhlsdorf's, is the supposed reticence of Michael Sean Winters to get with the program over at NCR, but as Fr. Zuhlsdorf laments the selective indignation on the part of NCR and the Jesuits, supposedly for taking this Syrian matter more seriously than topics like abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage, where have his posts been, unambiguously condemning bombing in Syria or elsewhere? 

4) Finally, I noticed Sandro Magister had pointed out that the current head of the CDF, Gerhard Muller,  co-wrote a book with Gustavo Gutierrez about liberation theology. but of course, Magister says that Francis is dead-set against LT, saying Bergoglio Isn't Falling For It.

It isn't quite that simple... Despite the fact that Magister takes into account in his article the public rift between Leonardo Boff and his brother Clovodis, who plainly stated that even with his change of heart his "intention [was] not to disqualify liberation theology," he seems to miss the nuances and breadth of views within LT itself.  Magister seems to cling to the perception that in order to do LT, you need to have a beard and a beret like Che Guevara, quote Marx, and carry a Kalashnikov.

Despite what Magister says, even Father Zuhlsdorf cites the article and is accepting the fact that he will have to come to terms now with some form of liberation theology during this pontificate.

The Syrian Question

We don’t understand this region at all. It is ruled by the Law of Unintended Consequences

I’m old enough to remember the various escalations, de-escalations, truces, cease-fires, harbor minings, troop buildups, troop withdrawals, and intensified bombing campaigns that took place during the war in Viet Nam, all geared towards the purpose of “sending a message.” Ultimately, it was all fruitless effort expended in a part of the world that we had barged into without fully understanding.

It was a mistake that we shouldn’t repeat, and if events of the past decade can also serve as lessons to us, embarking on a war of choice is a mistake as well. Wars are a lot harder to get out of than they are to get into. At least Congress is going to do their job and take a vote on it. I was worried for a while there that they wouldn’t.

I fully understand the importance of maintaining an international consensus that puts the use of chemical weapons beyond the pale. It’s pure barbarism, beyond the acceptability of any civilized norms. Unfortunately, the international community has shown little interest in supporting the idea of collective security envisioned in the charters of the United Nations, and even less inclination to do anything about the use of biological and chemical weapons. It’s unfortunate as well that our claims to moral superiority in this regard ring hollow to the rest of the world, due to the fact that we knew Iraq was using chemical weapons in their war against Iran during the 1980s, but provided covert strategic assistance to the Iraqis anyway. The strategic imperative was to stop an Iranian victory at any cost, and we did not protest or intervene. Our unlimited use of drone strikes around the world doesn’t help us to make a persuasive case either.
   
As much as I might be sympathetic towards Obama’s goals on this issue, it is actually the limited nature of what he is proposing that most makes me inclined to oppose it. Getting rid of Assad might be one thing, but what he is proposing would have little practical effect other than to bolster Assad and to get more people killed. Inevitably, more innocent people will be killed.

Fundamentally, it is morally wrong to kill people for the purpose of “sending a message.” 
  
Even if we were to intervene in a way that would tip the balance against the Assad regime, is that what we really want to do? I’m no expert, but from what I’m gathering, most of the secular-minded and ordinary citizens who took up arms in the Free Syrian Army against the regime a couple of years ago have either been killed, fled the country, or gone home in disillusionment. The anti-Asad movement now seems to be dominated by foreign jihadis and the al-Qaeda affliated Jabhat al-Nusra.

A few months ago I saw this interesting speech given by Sheik Nasrallah in Lebanon around the beginning of the year, about Hezbollah's looming showdown with al Qaeda in Syria. What he warned about has since come to fruition, and Hezbollah is now providing overt military support to the Assad regime, destroying its own credibility on the Arab Street in the process…. The Middle East never lacks for irony as Hezbollah, of all people, whine about the "meanness" of people who set off car bombs.... This has become a sectarian Shia-Sunni conflict through and through, and we should not allow ourselves to be pulled into it. There is blowback for everything we try to do in the Middle East. I feel badly - terribly - for the children of Syria, but unfortunately the place is ruled by the Law of Unintended Consequences.
   
 
   
Putting up a video like the one below is somewhat out of character for me, but there are much more explicit and barbarous ones out there. It shows the actions of the “Takfiri” that Nasrallah speaks of… The treatment of Christians in Syria is well-documented, if still not widely known, but look at how these sectarian thugs treat a small, unarmed group of muslim truck drivers who fail their Sunni quiz. These were guys just trying to make a living. Their trucks weren’t even hauling trailers. I was deeply moved by the courage of these ordinary men, as they stoically came to realize that they could lose their lives at the hands of these crackpot zealots, for just trying to do their jobs. (WARNING… Very disturbing).
  

   
Senselessness. Somewhere the cycle of tit-for-tat violence needs to stop. When will these wars end? Let’s heed Pope Francis’s advice on the Day of Prayer and Fasting. To suggest a fast is something new, positive, inspiring and welcome. It puts faith and sentiment into notable and noticeable action.

Pope Francis: renewed appeal for peace

Pope Francis: renewed appeal for peace

The Charismatic Moment?

Fr. Marcelo Rossi is quite something, but I’m still feeling a little wary of celebrity priests. 

Way back in 2006, I put up a post called Do We Need a Fulton Sheen for Today? I was lamenting the fact that the American Church seemed to lack spokesmen with charisma and communication skills like Father Sheen's.

Man, did we ever get them after that.

Man, were we ever sorry.

There was the infamous John Corapi meltdown and scandals involving Fathers Thomas Williams and Thomas Euteneuer. There were minor financial scandals involving Fathers Peter Stravinskas and Frank Pavone. It appeared instead as if celebrity priests were the last thing we needed.

The USA may be one thing, and Brazil another.

The conservatives and the Latin Mass trads blame progressives and liberation theologians for losing Latin America to Pentecostalism. Maybe there's some truth in that, maybe not, but these people in Brazil don't look to me like they are missing the Latin Mass very much.


That’s not to say that these folks aren’t conservative, but there’s one thing and one thing only that Pope Emeritus Benedict and the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff have in common. They both have little use for Fr. Marcelo Rossi and the Charismatics.

It's strange stuff to me too, this show business, but Rossi and priests like him seem to be the only guys keeping people in the Catholic Church in Brazil. They’re the only ones keeping the mass exodus in check.

When B16 was in Brazil in 2007, they didn't let Rossi anywhere near him, but Francis let him take part in WYD this year. To be fair, it should be noted that by 2010, Benedict may have had a change in heart, when he bestowed the Van Thuan Solidarity and Development Award on Fr. Rossi.

As for Boff, nothing doing. No change of heart. Here are some excerpts of choice remarks he’s made about Rossi here and there.

Leonardo Boff, a former Franciscan priest and the most well-known liberation theologian in Brazil, was acerbic, describing Father Rossi as the Brazilian equivalent of a “dumb blonde,” and as a “byproduct of the market economy, which provides the sort of druglike joy that people want [in order] to forget the commitment to the poor. He is not committed to the poor.” 

Theologian Leonardo Boff has been especially critical of Rossi, calling his style ‘commercial religion’. ‘Father Marcelo is happy believing God is in heaven, without realizing that people don’t have bread,’ says Boff, author of 40 books on theology and the Church...

When I want to get really angry, I tune into the religious programs on television. They are in bad taste and poor. They are not up to the Christian message. They are closer to Xuxa than to the Gospel. There is a lack experience in dealing with the media and the Church is not preparing them for that. What they do is manipulate emotions. I have never seen Father Marcelo Rossi say that there are 1.1 million unemployed in Sao Paulo or ask God to guide the government in the path of justice and ethics. But I did see him do aerobic dancing.

Rossi’s either too charitable or too shrewd to respond in kind, but he did have this to say about liberation theology and Leo Boff...

Father Rossi responded that a large number of the people who feel renewed by his Masses and songs “are very poor people, those who suffer most.” 

When I rediscovered the faith,Father Marcelo said in an interview, it was a period in which the Church was immersed in political questions, because of the influence of liberation theology. A form of theology that certainly had a positive role during the dictatorship, but that has left a void. I had lost one of my cousins, and I was looking for the word of God, but when I went to church they were talking about politics. From that moment, I understood what I had to do.” Which meant returning to the essential, proclaiming the Gospel using the means of communication, in particular music, the greatest and most widely shared conduit of emotions and words in the daily life of the people. Using it to meet the thirst for God and reawaken love for the Church, for Mary, for the Eucharist, worn away by the proselytism of Pentecostal groups and factions. 

Father Marcelo is also a priest who recalls the importance of faithfully following the magisterium, of knowing and defending Catholic doctrine. And who, as he has stated recently, feels more at ease with the spiritual children of Escrivà de Balaguer than with those still attached to the utopias of the Boff brothers. 

To that last one, the Boff boys Leo and Clovodis might say “ouch,” but let me say this to Fr. Rossi.

Well done. Keep up the good work, but keep your wits about you. You’ve placed too heavy a burden upon your own shoulders to ever throw it all away with a scandal. You would destroy the faith of millions. Watch yourself with the ladies and elsewhere. Looks like you have a lot of adoring fans.

Always remember that it’s all about Christ and not about you. I don’t want to be reading about you what I’ve read about these other guys.

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.

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!

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?

The Meaning of Mr. Hollande

As predicted by many, the Socialist Francois Hollande has defeated the sitting French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
  
In absurd fashion, the right-wing Drudge Report has tried to spin this event in its headlines as bad news for Obama because it's a case of an incumbent being unseated.

Contrary to what Drudge might think, it's clearly a case of people in Europe becoming fed up with IMF-mandated austerity, but what is the broader picture? It looks like it may be the beginning of the end for austerity, and possibly the end of the Eurozone itself, if France breaks with Germany in the current strategy for dealing with the debt crisis so far. Does it also mean a resurgence of the left in Europe? Maybe not. The French Socialists are known for being pragmatists rather than ideologues. Things might not change that much. Should the Socialists in France take heart at the results, or was it more a case of the French people being fed up with Sarkozy's arrogance and buffoonery? The strong showing of the the far-right, anti-immigration National Front Party of Marine Le Pen in the first round has caused more than a little bit of disquiet.
 
I was reading an article in Slate the other morning, which seemed to indicate that despite the Socialist victory, the real story of these results is the resurgence of extreme right-wing parties, not only in France, but throughout all of Europe. The thesis of Yascha Mounk’s article seems to be that instead of strangling them in their cribs like they should have, center-right parties in Europe formed coalitions with extreme rightist parties over the years in order to win elections against the left, but have now lost the ability to control them.

The true winner of this election isn’t France’s left; it’s Europe’s far right…The reason is simple. In this election, France’s establishment has embraced Islamophobic ideas to an unprecedented degree.

Right-wing populism, once a fringe phenomenon, has been conquering the bastions of Europe’s political mainstream with frightening speed.. It’s difficult to know whether Europe’s populists are approaching the zenith of their power or will continue their steady rise. But one thing is certain: At no point in Europe’s postwar history has the far right’s influence been as pervasive as it is now….  

All of this matters beyond France because, historically, what happens in Paris often portends what will happen elsewhere on the continent. It’s not just that most Europeans think of the French Revolution as the cradle of modern democracy… Up until now, populists have celebrated their biggest successes in countries like the Netherlands, Italy, and Poland. But France isn’t as small as the Netherlands, as politically dysfunctional as Italy, or as new to democracy as Poland. The sad spectacle of the last several weeks is the culmination of a wider European trend of accommodating the far right—and it may suggest it’s about to get much worse...

Like in France, established political parties across the continent at first vowed to shun surging populist leaders like Jörg Haider of Austria or Geert Wilders of the Netherlands. A cordon sanitaire was to unite all democrats in their fight against the far right threat. But unity did not last long. As populist parties in these countries gained in strength, traditional coalition governments, especially those formed by center-right parties, lost their majorities. Center-right leaders realized that to gain or preserve power they would have to cooperate with the populists. As a result, in one country after another, center-right parties that had once vowed to fight the far right have come to rely on them to prop themselves up.

Is there something to this? I've been reading a book that suggests that there is less here to worry about than meets the eye, but on the other hand, the book is a few years old now. It's called Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French. In explaining the strength of extreme parties in the first round of French presidential elections in 2002, when Le Pen’s father made it into the second round of voting, it says....

In the French system, the main danger comes from the potential of electors to express too large a variety of points of view; This is exactly what produced the upset of the 2002 presidential elections (When Le Pen’s National Front advanced to the 2nd round). The left spread its vote across too many parties, which allowed the extreme right candidate to push the left out of the second round…. Like all European extreme right politicians, Le Pen’s platform was strongly anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, and law and order. Naturally, all of France and the entire world decried Le Pen’s first round victory, Jacques Chirac, who had come first, called the French to rally behind him and on May 1, one million people gathered in Paris to protest the extreme right.

The aftermath was interesting. Le Pen was completely isolated and hardly made any progress. On the second round, he garnered 19 percent of the vote, which was barely the sum of the total extreme right vote in the first round.

Who’s right? Have things changed significantly in the last ten years?

This has been parallel-posted on Wordpress at The Doge.

A Missed Opportunity

The Best Scene in The Passion of the Christ

A few months ago I caught an episode or two of Person of Interest, the CBS series starring Jim Caviezel. It's not something I'd watch all the time but I think he does a pretty good job in it. He's a solid actor.

I was glad to see this, because in the wake of the 2004 Mel Gibson film, The Passion of the Christ, I was wondering if he was going to be caught in that Jesus part forever, as well as the culture-war imbroglio that followed it. Gibson warned him that it might harm his career, and last year Caviezel seemed to agree that this was in fact the case. I went to a Boston Catholic Men's conference in 2005, and he was a guest speaker, parlaying off his role in the film. His talk went over well with the audience, but I recall being struck by two things. Not only was he as devout and strident as his director Mel was at the time, but he seemed just as angry as well. I'm wondering how he feels now... I hope he's more at peace with it all.

During the Lenten season, I was looking at clips from some of the old Jesus films, the passion and crucifixion scenes in particular. I was amazed to see a stencil-colored one dating back all the way to 1903... but it made me remember how disappointed I was in Gibson's film when it came out. I had really looked forward to seeing it. I'd heard some of the criticism before I saw it, and I wanted the critics to be proved wrong. Unfortunately, I found it to be dark and demonic, and not in a constructive way. Gibson was approaching the height of what seemed to be some kind of self-loathing blood fetish in those years. In retrospect I found it no surprise that it was more popular with evangelicals of a fundamentalist stripe than it was with Catholics. In a sense, they were snookered into watching a movie version of the Stations of the Cross. For their part, Catholics were snookered into watching an extremely gory endorsement of penal substitutionary atonement.

In any case, one bright spot was the fine performance of Caviezel in the Jesus role, particularly in the flashback episodes. The flashback scenes were the best scenes in the film, particularly this one, and the one with Jesus and his mother at home. The flashbacks were welcome breathers from the almost non-stop brutality and gore throughout the rest of the film, and I couldn't help thinking what a lost opportunity this was; what a waste of an insightful and nuanced performance by Caviezel.

Credit needs to be given to Gibson for the idea of using Aramaic in the movie. That was a masterstroke. A brilliant idea. He cast it well too. If only he had done a more traditional Jesus movie, one that traced the whole arc of Christ's ministry, like King of Kings, or The Greatest Story Ever Told. If he had, it would have been The Greatest Jesus Film Ever Made.

This scene, in which Jesus teaches the crowd to "love your enemies" is the best half-minute of the film in my humble opinion, but it almost wasn't in there at all. It was done after everything else had been shot. Gibson was so piqued by the criticism he was receiving from Jewish and liberal scholars, based only on what they'd heard about the script, he included it as both a riposte and a spiritual reminder to himself. Very nicely done by Caviezel here. He'd done his research on semitic idioms, gestures, and mannerisms as well. In fact, as someone who's done a bit of acting himself, I'd venture to guess that he'd studied some videos of a sheikh or imam or two...

This post is parallel-posted on Wordpress at The Doge.

The Facebook Thread

Zeta Beta Tau, Delta Omega Chapter (R.I.P) Oh, how we miss it so... I've gone on record before saying I'm not a huge Facebook fan. I'm not especially enamored of the format, the concept, or the knowledge that I am their product rather than their customer. I don't really appreciate the fact that they are voraciously trying to find out as much about us as they possibly can in order to build marketing profiles on us. If I didn't need to keep an eye on my teenagers' accounts, it's doubtful that I would even have an account of my own at all. Generally speaking, I try to keep a pretty low profile over there, but I admit it's also kind of nice to be back in touch with some old friends again, and every once in a while I'll put a little something up, or comment on something I find interesting.

The other day, I put up a post signifying that I was excited about Elizabeth Warren's entry into the 2012 Massachusetts Senate Race (challenging Scott Brown), and it led to a short political discussion between me and a few of my college fraternity brothers. When I pointed out that they all seemed to share libertarian leanings with different points of emphasis, I was challenged on that by brother Bob, who denied having libertarian inclinations. In doing so, he also voiced some strong views, as is his wont, and in doing so he touched on the topic of abortion.

Now, I don't even really like to talk about the "A" bomb here, let alone on Facebook. It's such an emotional topic, I figure most people I'm friends with really wouldn't appreciate having it in their morning feeds. What do I know about the private lives of some of my FB friends? What do I know about what kinds of pain or losses they've gone through?

At any rate, I suggested taking it up over here. It's not an evasion or a dodge. As many of the people who correspond with me here (if they are still reading, that is) are likely to disagree as agree with me on this, so here goes... Here is how it went on FB:

Bob: Libertarian? Me? Jeff, you are WAY off. I look over my right shoulder with binoculars to see Karl Marx. I exaggerate. A little. I'm a social ultra-liberal and a fiscal conservative. I'm in favor of social safety nets for people that NEED them (as opposed to the leeches that milk them for all they're worth.) I'm in favor of enacting legislation to abolish for-profit health insurance, because the ability of a citizen to get health insurance shouldn't be determined by an HMO accountant. I'm against having military bases all over the planet and being the world's police force. I'm VEHEMENTLY against allowing religion to have ANY say whatsoever in the operation of government, and think churches should pay taxes. I'm in favor of equal rights for all citizens, all the time. I'm in favor of same-sex marriage and transgender non-discrimination bills. I'm in favor of women having the 100% iron-clad right to decide what they do with their bodies - including if and when they will carry a fetus to term. I know (not "believe," but KNOW,) that a collection of undifferentiated cells or an embryo that has yet to develop a central nervous system or a functioning brain is NOT a human being and should not be accorded the rights of one. I'm in favor of erasing all laws that would be enforced by a "vice squad," and vigorously prosecuting the white-collar Wall Street thieves that brought us our current financial crisis. I don't know what all that makes me, but i do know it ain't a Libertarian.
Wednesday at 10:51pm · LikeUnlike

Jeff: Bob, I admit that when I read “I'm a social ultra-liberal and a fiscal conservative,” that translates as “libertarian” to me, and probably to most other people as well, but I suppose it’s not a precise match with the actual philosophical definition.I believe that we should have a social safety net, as every human being has dignity just by virtue of the fact that he or she is a human being, and does not have to earn that basic level of dignity by their utility. At the same time, we should discourage, by non-legislative means as much as possible, the behaviors that cause people to fall into safety nets.

Facebook is not a blog, and I think it’s a horribly inappropriate venue to discuss such an emotionally hot-button topic like abortion, but when you say…

"I know (not "believe," but KNOW,) that a collection of undifferentiated cells or an embryo that has yet to develop a central nervous system or a functioning brain is NOT a human being and should not be accorded the rights of one.”

… I have absolutely no idea how you can come to such a conclusion, or why anyone else should feel compelled to agree with such a subjective value judgement stated with such vehement authority, especially when you reject omnipotent authorities, but I’m not getting drawn into an abortion discussion on Facebook.

I do have a blog, however, where I discuss religious, political, and cultural issues. I’d be glad to discuss such things over there. If anyone is at all interested, you can message me to find out what it is.
Yesterday at 7:25am · LikeUnlike

Bob : It's simple Jeff, if something doesn't have a brain or a nervous system, it's not a human being. A human being has a brain for thinking and a central nervous system for feeling. The idea that "life begins at conception" is a religious belief, not a medical fact. The fetus i described can't think and can't feel, and therefore has no means of experiencing physical distress and no self-awareness to "kill."http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lripmsvxJy1ql6xr1o1_500.jpg



18 hours ago · LikeUnlike

Jeff: Is that a fertilized egg? The acorn already has every single solitary genetic attribute designating what it will ever be as a tree... The caterpillar is not a dress, but it is the same exact creature that will be recognizable later as a butterfly.... By what scientific reasoning does a central nervous system and a brain constitute what a human being is? That's as subjective a value judgement on what "personhood" is as any religious dogma I've ever heard. What gives you the right to say that "thinking and feeling" defines what a human being is, and that it represents a consensus on what the rest of us should believe? The notion that sentience is the defining factor over anything else is philosophy, not science.
7 hours ago · LikeUnlike

Allen: Bob: How do you know that?
7 hours ago · LikeUnlike


Craig: Though we'll likely never resolve the "when does a?" question, we should all recognize the loss we all suffer when the government takes an interest in and insists upon awareness of the gestational status of every female private citizen.
7 hours ago · LikeUnlike

Jeff : Oh well... I asked - politely - to be messaged on this, but my request was ignored... To Craig's point, yes, it is always best to propose rather than to impose... I find it interesting that at the same time the acceptance of gay marriage and full civil rights for gay people is growing, the support for the pro-life postion is ALSO growing. I haven't led an innocent, risk-free and sheltered life, and I do get the nature of the back-alley problem. I get it. Having said all that, I'd like to add that even if we did entertain the notion that 'thinking and feeling" had something do with defining personhood, you need to say * precisely when * that begins, and if you can't do that, you need to err on the side of caution and go back to the begining. If people of a scientific bent want to plant an arbitrary yardstick on this, why not set it at the point when our entire genetic makeup is defined?
6 hours ago · LikeUnlike

Craig: Give us the link! Just caught up with this one late last night, and figured I'd toss in a moderating two cents...
6 hours ago · LikeUnlike

Craig, please feel free to moderate away, if you like...