April 2008 Archives

I thought I'd answered this column by Mark Shea, defending inaction by Pope JP2 and Pope Benedict XVI against derelict US bishops but the date on it is today, and a couple of you have forwarded it to me, so maybe not. I don't have anything fresh to say, really. But a couple of points:

To begin with, it's a straw man to say I have ever asserted that bishops exist in some special mystical state that the pope shouldn't threaten by merely removing them from office when they've failed spectacularly as shepherds. I'd have a rough time arguing that, since -- as I have repeatedly noted -- the pope has removed bishops from their office. With respect to the American situation, the "trigger" has usually been "active participation in the sin," as near as I can see. So when Cardinal Law tries to resign repeatedly, John Paul II refuses the resignation -- apparently because Law did not himself abuse boys but only reassigned priests who did. Same for other bishops (and not all did this, of course). But when O'Connell and Symonds down in Palm Beach are found to have actually been molesting boys? They're outta there like a shot.

So, there is no serious sin involved in covering up rape of children, and transferring around priests who raped children, to say nothing of using one's episcopal office to intimidate victims of sexual abuse and their families into silence and shame? What a low view of the office of bishop, to believe that as long as a bishop doesn't diddle an altar boy himself, there's no reason to remove him from office.

Mark and I are never going to agree on this. He thinks I make straw man arguments; I think he's willing to twist himself into pretzels to avoid finding fault with this or any pope.

Here's a relevant couple of passages from Leon Podles book "Sacrilege":

The Vatican helped set the stage for the abuse by cultivating a clericalist mentality that saw the clergy as the real church, and making the purpose of canon law the protection of the rights and reputation of the clergy, not the protection of children from abuse. The Vatican had also carefully chosen and appointed bishops who would not rock the boat, who would not discipline the clergy and perhaps create a schism. The Vatican — and this means Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II — sought to maintain a façade of institutional unity by tolerating heresy, dissent, and immorality, and got a Church (at least in the United States) in which the laity mistrusted priests, bishops, and popes; the priests mistrusted the laity and bishops; the bishops mistrusted the laity, priests, and the Vatican. In fact, it is hard to explain why bishops almost always followed the same policy of transferring rather than punishing abusive priests unless they had been so instructed by the Vatican — the pope must have either let the situation develop or set the policy himself.

More:

The Vatican -- the pope and the curial officals he appoints -- bears much responsibility for the sexual abuse of minors in the United States and throughout the world. Some of the failures were caused by flawed policies which inadvertently allowed sexual abuse to flourish. The Vatican created organizational conditions that allowed the abuse to go on with little or not correction. Some of the conditions grew up haphazardly as the Church was centralized.

[snip]

The Vatican also thought that the laity must be protected from the knowledge that priests were not perfect. In 1993 the Vatican saw that the main problem was not the abuse but the press: Pope John Paul II said that "it is unaccepetable for moral evil to be treated as an occasion for sensationalism" because "harm is done to the fundamental right of individuals not to be easily exposed to the ridicule of public opinion." That is, priests who molest children have a right to have their reputation protected and not to be exposed to public obloquy. Rev. Gianfranco Ghirlanda, dean of the canon law faculty at Gregorian University in Rome, wrote in the authoritative Civilta Cattolica that "a priest who is reassigned to a new parish after being treated because of a history of sexual abuse should not have his 'good reputation' ruined by having his background revealed to the new pairsh." The Vatican believe that clergy have the right to an undeserved good reputation.

The Vatican knew what was going on in the United States. It received complete dossiers with confessions of priest child molesters who were asking to be laicized. The pope or a high official reviews every case. No one in the Vatican, as far as is known, no pope, no cardinal, has ever expressed anything beyond generalities, has ever expressed any concern for particular victims or has ever inquired about their needs. [Obviously this book was published before Benedict met with victims in Washington -- RD]

The bishops took the failure of the Vatican to criticize their handling of abuse cases as implicit approval of the way they were handling those cases: give the priest every chance, year after year, no matter how many children he molested, no matter how many families had their faith destoryed, no matter how many boys committed suicide. ... Everything the bishops did must be directed to one goal: preserving the clerical career.

Lee Podles is not a liberal Catholic, but an orthodox one. Not that it should matter, but please, don't come back with, "He's got an agenda to destroy the Church." In fact, his previous book was an important critical examination of the "feminization" of the Church that was praised by orthodox Catholics.

Anyway, look, everybody should know that I like Mark, and our argument over this is not about personal animosity. I must say, though, that I find Mark's arguments to be rationalizations for papal inaction. I don't think Mark will ever, or can ever, find serious fault with the way this or any pope handles the sex abuse crisis and the US bishops' central role in it. I don't understand why, if the Catholic Church centralizes so much power in the office of the Bishop of Rome, giving him universal and immediate jurisdiction over the whole church -- which it certainly has -- it is somehow theologically off base to expect him to use that power to govern the Church for the good of the whole Church -- including Catholic children and families -- not just the interests of the clerical class.

Mark has said many times, and not only in disputes with me over this, that we Americans "get the bishops we deserve." Which to me sounds like, "Daddy beats you because you're bad."

I love this story. A group of pissed-off Lesbians -- that is, people of Lesbos -- have filed suit in Greek civil court against a gay rights group, trying to force it to quit using the word "lesbian" in its title:

"My sister can't say she is a Lesbian," said Dimitris Lambrou. "Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos," he said.

The three plaintiffs are seeking to have the group barred from using "lesbian" in its name and filed a lawsuit on April 10. The other two plaintiffs are women.

[snip]

Lambrou said the word lesbian has only been linked with gay women in the past few decades. "But we have been Lesbians for thousands of years," said Lambrou, who publishes a small magazine on ancient Greek religion and technology that frequently criticizes the Christian Church.

The agony of a man whose sister can't say she's a Lesbian! Dadgum, they've been lesbians for a thousand years, and Ellen DeGeneres has only been out of the closet for what, 15?

This story, with those priceless quotes, should provide endless rounds of vulgar snickering. Scott Lahti, you're on deck!

Bill Gates recently gave $27 million to fight a new form of wheat rust. Why? Given global wheat shortages, the prospect that the ug99 strain of the fungus could wipe out Africa's wheat crop, and spread worldwide, has focused minds. Take a look:

In the first half of the 20th century, wheat rust destroyed hundreds of millions of bushels in Canada and the United States, two of the world's biggest food producers. But the world population has tripled since 1950. Now, with four billion additional people to feed, wheat rust is on the march again and resistant strains bred to defeat it are no longer immune.

A strain named Ug99 emerged in Africa in 1999. Despite containment efforts, winds carried spores to the bread baskets of the Middle East. It is now poised to infect prime wheat growing regions in Europe, Ukraine, Russia, India and Pakistan.

Should even one major wheat producer have a crop failure, the effect on the world's ability to feed itself would be immense, which explains why crash programs to develop new rust resistant strains are now underway.

However, if Ug99 spreads swiftly, devastating crops before science can breed resistant strains, already grave food security problems will expand. So this isn't simply a distant problem for poor nations, it looms over rich ones like Canada and the United States, too.

On Sunday, Britain's Observer newspaper reported World Bank president Robert Zoellick's blunt warning to the world's richest countries that a potential planetary catastrophe is unfolding with frightening speed.

This, from Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who is father of the Green Revolution, explains why the emerging wheat rust crisis is so urgent. And New Scientist reported in March:

A wheat disease that could destroy most of the world's main wheat crops could strike south Asia's vast wheat fields two years earlier than research had suggested, leaving millions to starve. The fungus, called Ug99, has spread from Africa to Iran, and may already be in Pakistan. If so, this is extremely bad news, as Pakistan is not only critically reliant on its wheat crop, it is also the gateway to the Asian breadbasket, including the vital Punjab region.

Scientists met this week in Syria to decide on emergency measures to track Ug99's progress. They hope to slow its spread by spraying fungicide or even stopping farmers from planting wheat in the spores' path. The only real remedy will be new wheat varieties that resist Ug99, and they may not be ready for five years. The fungus has just pulled ahead in the race.

Mike Huckabee was the only presidential candidate who discussed the national security implications of food availability. Isn't it about time we started talking about a federal food policy in these terms?

My son Matthew recently went through a collection of my old comic books. He found an obscure one from 1972, featuring a Terrytoons mouse called Hashimoto-san. Hashimoto-san is a Japanese mouse who heads a mouse family, and uses his judo chops to beat up his cat nemesis. The dialogue is startling to contemporary eyes. It's total chop-socky. For example, I'm holding in my lap the comic Matthew found, looking at a panel in which Hashimoto-san is helping his wife onto a trolley leaving for Mount Fugi Buji:

HASHIMOTO-SAN: "I have made it! Now honorable wife -- grab hand!

WIFE: "Yes, venerable husband. Now you see why we need a motor car.

Later, Hashimoto-san tells his wife and kids, "Honorable head of family say this good exercise! Keep family very young!" Etc.

It's cringeworthy to read it today, but according to the Wikipedia entry, not only was Hashimoto-san conceived in 1959 by a Japanese-American cartoonist, but the character was actually considered progressive because it was the first American comic to feature the Japanese in a positive light. Here's more info on the character from Toonopedia. It's interesting to reflect on how things we find embarrassingly regressive today were, in their time, representative of enlightenment.

An open letter to Michelle Obama, after a killer week for her husband's campaign.

UPDATE: David Sedaris, on the semiotics of cigarette brands when he was younger:

It was in a little store a block from our hotel that I bought my first pack of cigarettes. The ones I’d smoked earlier had been Ronnie’s—Pall Malls, I think—and though they tasted no better or worse than I thought they would, I felt that in the name of individuality I should find my own brand, something separate. Something me. Carltons, Kents, Alpines: it was like choosing a religion, for weren’t Vantage people fundamentally different from those who’d taken to Larks or Newports? What I didn’t realize was that you could convert, that you were allowed to. The Kent person could, with very little effort, become a Vantage person, though it was harder to go from menthol to regular, or from regular-sized to ultra-long. All rules had their exceptions, but the way I came to see things they generally went like this: Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems for alcoholics, and Mores for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t. One should never lend money to a Marlboro-menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular-Marlboro person to pay you back. The eventual subclasses of milds, lights, and ultra-lights not only threw a wrench in the works but made it nearly impossible for anyone to keep your brand straight. All that, however, came later, along with warning labels and American Spirits.

The cigarettes I bought that day in Vancouver were Viceroys. I’d often noticed them in the shirt pockets of gas-station attendants and, no doubt, thought that they’d make me appear masculine, or at least as masculine as one could look in a beret and a pair of gabardine pants that buttoned at the ankle. Throw in Ronnie’s white silk scarf and I needed all the Viceroy I could get, especially in the neighborhood where this residence hotel was.

My parents were, and are, devoted smokers of Marlboro Reds. I've always hated that: I'm not a smoker, and Marlboro Reds are the cigarettes I don't smoke. Because see, you just couldn't trust those Winston smokers. They seemed dodgy to me. And one of our neighbors smoked Salems, which struck me as kind of girly for a man to smoke. There was the lady in the subdivision who smoked Vantages, which had a hole in the filter -- can you imagine? What the hell was she hiding? My uncle smoked filterless Pall Malls, which struck me as savage, but not as savage as the filterless Camels that the air-conditioner repairman down the road. But then again, he really was a badass (he was Snafu Shelton, one of the most memorable characters in E.B. Sledge's classic memoir of U.S. Marine combat in the Pacific war, "With the Old Breed" ).