David Gibson: November 2008 Archives

Yes...that could be Huck's next campaign poster. Since election day, failed GOP contender and true-blue (or is that red?) evangelical, Mike Huckabee, has been settling some scores, as this TIME magazine piece on his new book shows.

Now it has gotten ugly. In the latest New Yorker, Huckabee tells Lauren Collins he was a bit cheesed that McCain picked Sarah Palin over him:

"I was scratching my head, saying, 'Hey, wait a minute. She's wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair.' It wasn't so much a gender issue, but it was like they suddenly decided that everything they disliked about me was O.K. . . . She was given a pass by some of the very people who said I wasn't prepared."

Hat Tip: Sarah Pulliam at CT

The focus of much of the Catholic right's doomsday prophesying about Barack Obama, a.k.a. the anti-Christ (see Stafford, Cardinal Francis, et al) has been about the inevitability of Obama signing the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would enshrine Roe into federal law and make abortion-on-demand part of a mandated kindergarten curriculum and push the Catholic Church back into the catacombs and lead to violence against bishops, who have said they will happily be martyrs for this cause, and gosh, all sorts of things unheard of since the days before Constantine. (George Weigel had the latest from Babylon here.)

Lost in all this prophesying is any recognition that the people who would need to pass FOCA think it's a bad idea and that it'd never pass, much less get to President Obama's desk. NCR's new publisher, Joe Feuerhard, has a solid take on the politics involved here, including the apt observation that Obama's 2007 pledge to Planned Parenthood to sign FOCA was political "pandering." Joe's bottom line: "FOCA has as much chance of passage as the 0-10 Detroit Lions have of winning the next Super Bowl." (Ouch. Even from my perach as a Giants fan, that hurts.)

So why the focus on FOCA by Catholic conservatives? I'd say a couple of things: One, the election was a resounding defeat for their camp, and exposed division in the church and within the pro-life movement. While they retrench, they need to keep the focus on an enemy, and FOCA serves that purpose. The pro-life movement has largely been an opposition movement, and that dynamic is hard to change, and it could hurt fundraising at a bad time for all fundraisers. Two, the conservatives can also claim "credit" for defeating FOCA when it does not become law.

The problem of course is that this straw men and red herrings divert us all from the hard work to be done on this issue, both within the church and in the public square. Opposition to FOCA should be part of that, to keep the pressure on and pols honest. But using a phantom FOCA as a single-issue means of demonizing one's political opponents does no good to one's cause, or the wider society.

Updating yesterday's Beatles post...A letter to the editor in today's NYT, clarifying that while the Osservatore Romano was trying to be generous, they still didn't quite " get" what Lennon was saying:

November 25, 2008
You Can Make It O.K.
To the Editor:

"Church Forgives John Lennon 'Boast' " (news article, Nov. 23), on the Vatican's "forgiveness" of John Lennon's 1966 remark that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus," missed an important point. Apparently so did the Vatican.

John's remark was not a boast or a blasphemy. He was pointing out the absurdity of the Beatles' fame, which at that point was at its madding zenith. For anyone who knew John Lennon, the observation was typical: indelicate, but spot on. He neither sought nor required forgiveness, only understanding.

Peter Brown

New York, Nov. 24, 2008

The writer, the Beatles' personal assistant and manager, was best man at John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's wedding in 1969.

Pope Benedict XVI gave an insight into his thinking on this topic in a letter to a friend and co-author, Marcello Pera, philosopher and former president of the Italian senate and an agnostic (perhaps even an atheist) who has nonetheless been a great champion of Benedict's project to protect Europe's Christian cultural heritage. Pera is one who has responded positively to the pope's call for unbelievers to "act as if God exists."

Benedict's letter to Pera was written up in the Italian papers, and now on the English-language wires and in The New York Times.

In quotations from the letter that appeared on Sunday in Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading daily newspaper, the pope said the book "explained with great clarity" that "an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible." In theological terms, added the pope, "a true dialogue is not possible without putting one's faith in parentheses."

But Benedict added that "intercultural dialogue which deepens the cultural consequences of basic religious ideas" was important. He called for confronting "in a public forum the cultural consequences of basic religious decisions."

Ratzinger/Benedict's view of interfaith dialogue has always seemed to me rather constricted, an "either/or" proposition that leaves little room for learning from others or truly engaging the "other," in ways that expand one's own faith without diluting it, and also expand one's appreciation of God's creation and its desire for Him. And it can, I think, lead to a kind of parochialism that sees Jesus as a "Catholic." (Italian, of course.) John Allen calls this "dialogue with teeth." Interlocutors on the other side of the dialogue can see it as a bared smile, not quite inviting, yet not altogether irrelevant, given the state of the world.

Thoughts from the gallery? What is, or should be, the point of interfaith dialogue?

That'd be John, not Vladimir. (Yes, I know, and it's Lennon, not Lenin.) And "forgive" would be the hedder on the Reuters version of the story about L'Osservatore Romano's remarkable appreciation of The Beatles on the 40th anniversary of The White Album.

It was John who, in 1966 and at the height of the group's fame, told a London newspaper, "We're more popular than Jesus now." Many were furious, of course--who wasn't in those days, which are so much like our own. But as the AP version has it, the Vatican's "official" daily was philosophical about the rocker's claim:

"The remark by John Lennon, which triggered deep indignation mainly in the United States, after many years sounds only like a 'boast' by a young working-class Englishman faced with unexpected success, after growing up in the legend of Elvis and rock and roll."

Lennon was also joking, displaying the kind of irreverent irony that was shocking then but which would become the foundation of much of modern discourse, and comedy.

Perhaps the bigger question is whether the article in the pope's paper will prompt any more brow-furrowing inside and outside Rome over the efforts by its new editor, Giovanni Maria Vian, to make the broadsheet a must-read. A recent article by Vaticanista Sandro Magister details some of the controversies.

Recall that a former archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Battista Montini, lamented that "no one reads it [l'Osservatore] at the coffee bar!" When Montini became Pope Paul VI, he reportedly wondered about including sports coverage. But the paper actually became more boring after Paul, and, ironically, under John Paul II, who had little interest in it. Left to its own devices, the newspaper became the Vatican version of Pravda, listing official activities of the Holy Father and glowing reports of audiences and texts of speeches. And none of it on line.

Pope Paul envisioned a newspaper that "does not seek only to furnish news; it intends to influence thought. It is not enough for it to report events as they happen: it intends to comment on them in order to indicate how they should have happened, or not happened. It does not only conduct a conversation with its readers; it conducts one with the world: it comments, discusses, polemicizes."

Well, 40 years later, much is finally changing. Then again, l'Osservatore did not include a critique of these lines of Lennon, from 1971, when he was on his own:

Imagine there's no heaven, It's easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky, Imagine all the people living for today...

Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...

Check back in 2011.

PS: Extra credit for figuring out which Beatle was Catholic. Over at dotCommonweal, Mollie Wilson O'Reilly has the buzz.

Prayer Card via this site.