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Domenico Bettinelli Jr. is the managing editor of Catholic World Report magazine and Catholic World News web site. He resides in Danvers, Mass., and has been blogging at his own web site,
Bettnet.com
, since 2001.
Mahony Unplugged
Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles
is set to give his first deposition
in the lawsuits combining hundreds of sex abuse allegations against him in both LA and his former diocese of Stockton, California. While the time and location are secret, it is expected that the deposition itself could become public next month. That would be devastating for him.
Time and again, we have seen that when bishops are put in the legal hot seat, whether it's
Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston
or
Archbishop Flores in San Antonio
or
Bishop Joseph Imesch of Joliet
, when these bishops emerge from behind the pulpits (and from behind their official spokesmen and PR flacks), you get right to heart of what's wrong in the Church in the U.S., problems that have yet to be corrected by the "reforms" put in place by the bishops' conference.
For example, check out
this excerpt from a 1985 deposition
by attorney Mark Bello of Bishop Imesch:
Bello: What do you feel, or do you know, is the penalty for violation of these premises?Imesch: Eternal hellfire. I -- you know, what's the penalty? Put in that I laughed.
Bello: At the question or the answer?
What rhetorical gems and "nuances" of Church teaching can we expect from Cardinal Mahony's deposition? Perhaps
these 2002 emails
between the cardinal and his inner circle offer an interesting preview, of temperament if not content.
Should the Center Hold?
Last week, the U.S. bishops held their biannual meeting and one of the hot items discussed by the press was a proposed uniform policy on Communion for Catholic politicians who are pro-abortion. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington is heading up the task force delegated to handle that task and he
told the Washington Post
that most U.S. bishops and the Vatican are not inclined to deny Communion on that basis.
How can he say that when we have the
text of a letter
sent by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the leading Vatican voice on the matter, to McCarrick that says just the opposite?
Ratzinger is very clear and unambiguous:
Apart from an individuals's judgement about his worthiness to present himself to receive the Holy Eucharist, the minister of Holy Communion may find himself in the situation where he must refuse to distribute Holy Communion to someone, such as in cases of a declared excommunication, a declared interdict, or an obstinate persistence in manifest grave sin (cf. can. 915).
Notice he uses the word "must" not "may", implying that the Eucharistic minister has an obligation and a duty to follow through.
There's something else that's strange about the interview McCarrick gave to the Post. He didn't make similar comments at any of the press conferences. Neither did his task force make any statement at the conference, and in fact the issue was never discussed. In other words, how can he say he's expressing the view of the majority of the U.S. bishops when they've had not direct say in the matter?
A couple more details: McCarrick says that most bishops "are moved by the fact that the Roman position has always been you don't have a confrontation at the altar rail." Funny he should use that term, since most U.S. Catholic churches no longer have altar rails, having had them torn out long ago by pastors and liturgists operating at the behest of the bishops conference's liturgical documents. Perhaps if the bishops didn't spend so much time worrying about not offending pro-abortion politicians, they could fix the liturgical mess affecting the Church.
Also, he says: "The vast majority of bishops are in the center, and the center is holding." I'd rather have a bishop who is "extreme" for the truth than one who is wishy-washy toward it. Moderation is not a virtue when it comes to doing the will of God.
In the end, some bishops continue to say that being a pro-abortion legislator is such a grave sin that one should be denied Communion, while others say that it is not, and the Catholic faithful are left in confusion. Cardinal McCarrick's solution appears to be that it is better to leave them confused. Is this more relativism sneaking in through the back door of the church?
Catholics in Congress
There are more Catholic Republicans in Congress than ever before, according to the
Associated Press
.
In fact, there are 67 Catholic Republicans, including six of the nine new Catholics in the House. There are 86 Catholic Democrats.
There has been an interesting shift in Catholic political belief in the past several decades as many Catholics have left their former home in the Democratic Party and crossed over to the GOP. Or to be more accurate, the Democratic Party has left behind practicing Catholics, as it sought to become more "progressive," more concerned with social engineering, and more at odds with Catholic teachings, while the Republican Party became a more hospitable home for Catholics who actually believe what their Church teaches. It will be interesting to see how this trend carries out to the future.
The article makes at least one mistake. The name of the Republican representative from Nebraska is
Jeff
Fortenberry, and he holds a theology degree, not a divinity degree. It may be all the same to most people, but there is a distinct difference. And I know this because Jeff and I were roommates at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
In addition, I think it's a rather shallow analysis. For example, it lists the ten most Catholic states by percentage of the population and says that the top nine went for Kerry. But what percentage of those populations are actually practicing Catholics and how many are nominal Catholics, whose religion is an identity they keep in their wallet and that's about it?
There's going to be a lot of analysis of "morality" voters and religious voters over the next few years because of their impact in this election. It will be important to use a critical eye when judging which ones to take seriously and which ones aren't worth the pixels they're pushing.
War on the Boy Scouts
Last week,
the Pentagon agreed not to sponsor Boy Scout troops
on military bases after the ACLU sued the government. The ACLU's suit ridiculously claimed that "the government should not be administering religious oaths or discriminating based on religious beliefs." This is stretching believability.
For one thing, the oath involved here is not an oath of loyalty to the government, but an oath provided by the Boy Scouts organization (although some government oaths do mention God). And for another thing, the Boy Scout Oath only mentions God once and not in a way tied to a specific religion. But then, the ACLU and its liberal anti-religion allies have successfully lobbied the courts over the years to declare that the First Amendment requires an absence of religion in the public square.
Also, if the ACLU's argument were taken to its logical conclusion, then you'd have to ask how religious chapels on military bases and the military chaplaincy itself are any better. In fact, they are
more
explicitly religious than the Boy Scouts. Will the ACLU's next lawsuit demand the termination of any accommodation for religion in the military? Or will they just be satisfied with the absurdity of including atheists as military chaplains, too. (What will the insignia on their uniforms be--a question mark?)
But the real target today is the Boy Scouts of America. The liberal elites have decided that the BSA must be destroyed because, unlike the Pentagon, it has not bowed to the forces of political correctness by weakening its belief in the civic virtue of religious belief or by allowing homosexuals as Scoutmasters or any of several such attempts to water down their traditional principles. In 2000, the Scouts were able to argue in court that they should not be forced to include homosexuals because they are a private, religious organization. Now the forces of political correctness are using that argument against them.
Thus the ACLU and others have filed numerous lawsuits against the group across the country. San Diego was recently sued because it allows the Scouts to keep a campground in a public park. Chicago was sued and it pulled its sponsorship of 30 scout programs. In Berkeley, California, the city stopped giving a Sea Scouts troop free berthing space at a city marina. And now the Pentagon is under fire from the ACLU again over its support for the Scout Jamboree held every four years at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia that gathers about 40,000 scouts and leaders.
So, while the Boy Scouts provides a real public service to America--forming boys into young men imbued with all-too-rare virtues-- the ACLU is on a crusade to shut it down. Which one is the real threat to the American way of life?
Charlotte Allen, the author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus," co-edits the
InkWell weblog
for the Independent Women's Forum.
Remembering Gerald Serafin
Gerald Serafin's
A Catholic Blog for Lovers
and
A Catholic Page for Lovers
were some of the loveliest things on the Internet. He died yesterday of a chronic and worsening heart condition. Gerald had once been a Catholic priest, but during the late 1970s, he was arrested in a sexual episode involving a 17-year-old youth and had to leave the priesthood. He spent the rest of his life living quietly and making amends. When the priestly sex scandal broke two years ago, many Catholics, including me, tended to be over-censorious toward Gerald, who had always been kind and generous to us. Now, I hope that he will pray for us all.
Gerald blogged until last Monday, ever cheerful about his condition, and continuing to mark the saints of every day. Here is his last post on his website, a quotation from Hans Urs von Balthasar:
"The first thing that must strike a non-Christian about a Christian's faith is that it is all too daring. It is too beautiful to be true: The mystery of being, unveiled as absolute love, coming down to wash the feet and the souls of its creatures; a love that assumes the whole burden of our guilt and hate, that accepts the accusations that shower down.. all the scorn and contempt that nails down his incomprehensible movement of self-abasement -- all this absolute love accepts in order to excuse his creature before himself......"
Gerald, you are now awash in that absolute love. Please take care of us who are lesser than you.
Celts vs. Anglo-Saxons
Amy Welborn
, America's premier Catholic blogger (and she's just gone to the hospital today to have her third child--so let's offer prayers for both), alerts me to this
wonderful article in the U.K. Tablet
about all the American and English New Agers who make pilgrimages to Ireland, Scotland, and Wales to find their "Celtic roots":
Tablet writer Marcus Tanner writes:
"A ceaseless flow of books spreads the idea that 'the Celts'--usually taken as a homogenised lump--once professed a superior brand of Christianity that conveniently anticipated modern Western society's relaxed attitudes to sex and its interest in alternative medicine, wildlife, conservation, gender equality, and so on. The Celtic churches, so this narrative runs, were in touch with nature, proto-feminist and anti-hierarchical.
"One book that I picked up on my journey, called the Celtic Alternative, which was fairly typical of a whole genre, suggested the Celtic Church had more in common with Buddhism than, say, institutional Catholicism. A 'church without martyrs', it was at peace with nature, was at peace with nature, feminist and concerned with "celebrating life" - not death."
In fact, as Tanner points out:
"What traditional Irish Catholicism, the Calvinism of the Highlands and the Calvinist Methodism of Wales shared, at least until recently, was a set of values that would have most modern Celtic revivalists shuddering, namely a keen interest in theological nitpicking, spiritual severity, and a fairly hard and unforgiving attitude towards the flesh."
As the offspring of lace-curtain Irish myself, and also a medievalist, I can say Amen to that. All you have to do is pick up
The Vision of Drythelm
, the
Venerable Bede
's account of Purgatory as seen by a seventh-century Northumbrian. If you didn't make it to heaven, in Drythelm's vision, your naked soul spent thousands of years jumping back and forth between unbearable heat and excruciating chills. Hell was even worse. When Drythelm returned from the other world, he spent the rest of his life in a monastery, where he practiced asceticism by standing up to his neck in an icy river. When friends asked him about the temperatures, he answered, "I've seen colder. That was the way it was for the Irish hermits. There were no martyrs in the Celtic lands, so they made their lives living martyrdoms. As Tanner writes:
"It was the English, with their cut-and-paste national creed, who first cornered the market in 'touchy-feely' religion--Anglicanism being not much more than what Elizabeth I felt comfortable doing, seeing or hearing in her chapel. It was the Celts, the real Celts, who have always provided the hard, uncomfortable ideological edges in British or Irish religion, and the Anglo-Saxons who have added the fudge."
NARAL Catholics
Yes, they both claim to be Catholics. Nancy Keenan, the former Montana legislature who's just been named president of NARAL-Pro-Choice America, the nation's flagship abortion lobby, and Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way, for which Keenan worked as education policy director before she got her new job, both belong to the Church of Rome.
The two are thick as thieves, too. When NARAL picked Keenan to succeed Kate Michelman (another Catholic, sort of) as its head, Neas wrote
this gusher of a press release
:
"At a time when many of the fundamental rights of American women are at risk, NARAL has found the perfect champion in Nancy Keenan....
"We will miss her skill and savvy, but we know we will still be fighting side by side in the looming battles over the Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill, and in legislative chambers across America. With Nancy in charge, Naral Pro-Choice America and People For the American Way will continue their steadfast partnership in safeguarding reproductive rights and personal privacy for the women of America and their families."
It's interesting: NARAL is, of course, about abortion, abortion, abortion, without the slightest restriction--but People for the American Way began its life a half-century ago as a group of religious Protestants concerned about what they perceived as unconstitutional government aid to Catholic schools. Now, as the symbiotic Neas-Keenan relationship indicates, both organizations make up a unified front dedicated to imposing a militantly secular world-view upon religious and pro-life Americans. Praying at a football game goes hand in hand with Laci and Conner's Law in the NARAL/PFAW worldview: both must be eradicated.
Both Keenan and Neas, however, are not above whining about religious persecution of them as Catholics when it serves their purposes. The
Washington Post notes
:
"In 1989, when she was a Montana legislator, Keenan and a colleague were publicly rebuked by a Montana bishop for speaking at an abortion rights rally, she said. The ordeal became news, she said, with talk of her being excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church. 'It was a very personal experience for me having been born and raised Catholic,' she said. 'It was very, very big.'"
As for Neas, he made like St. Thomas More, when
John Mallon wrote an op-ed
for the Washington Times pointing out that PAW's aggressive opposition to Bush appointees with pro-life leanings did not sit well with the Catholic Church's moral opposition to abortion.
Neas lashed back
in a letter to the Times:
"In addition to misrepresenting the substance of my remarks, Mr. Mallon's article includes contemptuous remarks about my faith - I am a lifelong Catholic - that are appallingly beyond the pale. His article is part of an unfortunate and deeply offensive campaign attacking Catholics in public life based on the selective enforcement of theological orthodoxy. (Mr. Mallon does not address, for example, church teachings on the death penalty or artificial birth control. Does he believe people who support access to contraceptives or who support current death penalty laws are anti-Catholic?)"
I'm not advocating public excommunication for both the holier-than-thou Keenan and the even-holier-than-thou Neas--but it's a thought.
The Irony of the Episcopalian Druids
One of the many things that makes me glad we Catholics don't ordain women is that when I go to my parish church, St. Dominic's, on Sunday no one, absolutely no one, will ever, ever substitute this liturgy for the Mass:
"We gather around a low table, covered with a woven cloth or shawl. A candle, a bowl or vase of flowers, a large shallow bowl filled with salted water, a chalice of sweet red wine, a cup of milk mixed with honey, and a plate of raisin cakes are placed on the table.
"When all are seated on the floor and comfortable, one of the women lights the candles saying, 'Mother God, Giver of light, let this flame illumine our hearts and minds. May its warmth remind us of the love in which you embrace us all. We thank you, Mother, for light.'"
Nope--no "salted water" or "raisin cakes" at St. Dom's! No "Mother God," either. And although we might have to sing "On Eagles' Wings" every once in a while, we don't have to sit on the floor.
What I have quoted from above is, of course, the infamous "Women's Eucharist" that appeared for a while on the
Women's Ministries pages
of the official website of the Episcopal Church U.S.A.--until reporter
Ted Olsen at Christianity Today
got wind of the new liturgy and pointed out that it was actually "promoting pagan rites to pagan deities."
As Olsen pointed out, those raisin cakes come right out of the Bible (Hosea 3:1), where they're the offerings of the heathen Canaanites to their idols. The idol at issue in the Women's Eucharist is the "Queen of Heaven"--no, not Mary, Regina Coeli and blessed mother of our Savior, but Ishtar of Babylon or perhaps Aserah, wife of Baal, whose worship was specifically condemned in the Old Testament (Jeremiah 7).
Here's the Raisin Cake Anaphora:
"Mother God, our ancient sisters called you Queen of Heaven and baked these cakes in your honor in defiance of their brothers and husbands who would not see your feminine face. We offer you these cakes, made with our own hands; filled with the grain of life--scattered and gathered into one loaf, then broken and shared among many. We offer these cakes and enjoy them too. They are rich with the sweetness of fruit, fertile with the ripeness of grain, sweetened with the power of love. May we also be signs of your love and abundance."
What if you had to recite this stuff every darned Sunday?
In the most amusing turn of all, the entire Women's Eucharist seems to have been kiped from a Wiccan website called
Tuatha de Brighid
and dedicated to worship of the Mother Goddess. Once Olsen broke his story, the Episcopal church went into a
frenzy of backtracking
, erasing the Women's Eucharist from its website (but you can read the whole thing
here
), claiming that it
wasn't intended for actual worship
but only "to spark dialogue, study, conversation and ponderings around women and our liturgical tradition," and apologizing for a possible copyright violations in connection with the Brighid people.
Then it turned out the the author of the Women's Eucharist, Glyn Ruppe-Melnyk, an Episcopal an priest, wasn't just making like a Druid; she was a Druid. She and her husband, William Melnyk, also an Episcopalian priest, worshipped a la Stonehenge when they weren't tending their respective churches in Malvern, Pa., and on pagan websites they went by the names Raven and Oakwyse. William "Oakwyse" Melnyk's
personal web page
says that he was interested in "Celtic Sprituality," which undoubtedly got him into his Druid robes when he got out of his clerical collar. Glyn Ruppe-Melnyk descibed herself to the press as a "non-conforming, high energy, old hippie." That she was.
To their credit, and thanks undoubtedly to Christ's grace, both Melnyks not only apologized but
renounced their Druid affiliations
and affirmed their Christian faith. William Melnyk resigned from his church.
The irony of all of this is that no part of the Women's Eucharist, or indeed the Wiccan Druidism to which the Melnyk's recently subscribed has anything to do with any historical pagan religion, Canaanite, Celtic or otherwise. Three years ago, I intereviewed a bunch of scholars who actually study pagan religions and wrote
this article for the Atlantic
:
"In all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story is true. The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly new religion, a 1950s concoction influenced by such things as Masonic ritual and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with the esoteric and the occult, and that various assumptions informing the Wiccan view of history are deeply flawed. Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no indication, either archaeological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal goddess--a conclusion that strikes at the heart of Wiccan belief."
That should give you comfort if you dread having to eat rasin cakes on an empty stomach on Sunday morning.
What's with the Bishops?
What's with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops? First the bishops, meeting in Washington, D.C. this week for their annual convention, elect William Skylstad, bishop of Spokane, Wash., as their president--just a week after the diocese announces
plans to file for protection under Chapter 11
of the federal bankruptcy code to deal with the $1.8 million in legal costs it has incurred from 101 credible claims of sexual abuse of minors allegedly committed by Spokane priests.
That shores up confidence in our nation's bishops, doesn't it? Furthermore, as the
National Catholic Reporter's John Allen points out
:
"Three decades ago, Skylstad was pastor of a parish where one of the most notorious abusers, Fr. Patrick O'Donnell, served as an associate. In court depositions related to the case, Skylstad repeatedly said that he does not remember or cannot recall many of the circumstances surrounding the abuse committed in the rectory he supervised."
"Many" of the circumstances? In his own rectory? What could the bishops have been thinking when they catapulted Skylstad to the most publicly visible post in their organization on Monday?
Then, icing the pederasty scandal-tinged cake with gruesome liturgical frosting, the bishops reelected Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, Pa., to head their liturgy committee. The combination of Trautman and the diocese of Erie virtually guarantees a double-whammy continuation of everything bad, banal, and downright demoralizing about contemporary Catholic worship these days. Whether it be unsingable hymns, churches that look like bank branches, or politically correct English translations of the Mass that skirt around calling God a "he," you can bet that either Trautman, the Erie diocese, or both have something to do with it.
First, Trautman. He's baaack! Trautman served as chairman of the liturgy committee during the mid-1990s, when he became known for his aggressive promotion of "gender-neutral" liturgical language--avoiding all reference to sex-specific pronouns in the Mass, such as reciting in the Creed that Christ became "man." That apparently makes man-hating feminists feel bad; they'd prefer to say that He (no, not "He"!) became "fully human." As the Vatican sought to crack down on the International Committee for English in the Liturgy, the bureaucrats who propound this sort of of thuddish and theologically obtuse "free" translation from the Latin, Trautman invariably sided with ICEL against the Holy See.
In 1997 Trautman, according to this
report from Catholic Net
, blasted the Vatican's new Lectionary for its failure to use "inclusive language." As Adoremus reported:
"The absence of inclusive language, Bishop Trautman argued, 'denies women their own identity.' As authority for that statement he cited an exchange between two female university students (perhaps unfortunately identified in the [Erie] diocesan newspaper as 'college girls'), one of whom asked the other: 'Why should I come to church when all I hear is language that excludes me?'"
Furthermore, Trautman is co-author of a book, "
Building From Belief: Advance, Retreat and Compromise in the Remaking of Catholic Church Architecture
". The covers shows the kind of Catholic architecture that Trautman wants to see more of: the cross on top of the church that looks like a TV antenna, and so forth.
Trautman's co-author, Michael DeSanctis, is a professor of fine art at Gannon University in Erie. Gannon U., from what I can tell, is the epicenter of all that is avant-garde in today's Catholicism. I remember interviewing a liturgy professor at Gannon a few years ago who told me that he never referred to the Mass as the "Mass," because that sounded too medieval. If you're avant-garde, you're supposed to call it a "Spirit-filled community eucharistic celebration" or something like that. Erie itself is the headquarters of liturgical consultant
Richard Vosko
, who promises that for a few dollars he can turn the interior of your own parish church into a
Druid's Circle
by removing only a few pews.
DeSanctis fights the liturgical wars on the architectural front, taking on the neotrads in his profession who want to get back to basilicas and other centuries-old models of church designs.
The San Diego News Notes reported
:
"Writing in the April 21, 2000 National Catholic Reporter, DeSanctis blasted the University of Notre Dame's Institute of Sacred Architecture for eschewing modernist design in favor of classical, sacred architectural elements. He described their designs as 'an expanse of lovely, antiqued shrine boxes' that would be embraced by 'today's tabernacle-obsessed bishops, biretta-topped seminarians and a handful of cardboard monsignori.'"
I don't think that seminarians wear birettas--that's only for ordained priests--but you get the idea.
Trautman's most recent blast at traditionalists came last year, after Pope John Paul II issued his encyclical
Ecclesia de Euharistia
, requiring that Catholic churches get back to a few sacred basics during Mass, such as, say, kneeling during the Consecration. Trautman wasn't having any of that. According to Adoremus, he told a liturgists's conference:
"When such Roman liturgical drafts call us to return to a liturgical mentality prior to Vatican II, we need to say to one another: Keep up your courage. When liturgical expertise is not respected, we must say to one another: Keep up your courage. When fundamental principles of liturgical renewal are reversed, we must remind one another: Keep up your courage. When liturgical offices are closed and liturgical budgets are slashed, we must say to one another: Keep up your courage.
"When we see liturgical renewal still wanting in many parishes and when we feel the pain of the clerical sex abuse scandal and its impact on worshipping assemblies and presiders, let us give hope to one another."
Hmm, if I had been Donald "Chapter 11" Trautman, I wouldn't have brought up the sex abuse scandal. Trautman might well have to slash his own liturgical budget in the near future, and I have a feeling that many of the Catholics of Spokane, tired of having avant-garde worship shoved down their throats along with the crimes of their priests, won't mind at all.
Rod Dreher, 37, is assistant editorial page editor of
The Dallas Morning News
, and a contributing editor to Touchstone and National Review magazines. Formerly the chief film critic for the New York Post, he is also an occasional contributor to the Wall Street Journal's "Houses of Worship" column. He is a Roman Catholic convert. Contact him at
rdreher@dallasnews.com
.
Trust Us
The Catholic bishops voted today to quit having outside auditors come in and assess their compliance with policies to combat clerical sex abuse, instead opting for--try to say this with a straight face--"
self-auditing
". I'm not making that up. A majority of them seem to be under the impression that they have restored their credibility on this issue, and that we can get back to business as usual.
And you know what? They might well be right. I don't expect ever to trust the bishops again, but then again, I have way, way more information about the scandal than most Catholics. I spend a lot of time in the relatively tiny world of Catholic blogdom, and because I have a particular professional interest in the scandal, I stay up on the latest news on the Church scandal. I am constantly amazed, however, even after everything that's happened since January 2002, when the rocks began to be overturned in Boston, that many, many American Catholics simply don't grasp the magnitude of what's happened. There were some of us who thought back in 2002, "Surely this is going to be the straw that breaks the bishops' collective back. Surely there will be no going back after this. Surely the people won't stand for the status quo."
But they have.
Now He Tells Us!
Cardinal Adrianis Simonis of Utrecht, a Dutch city that once gave the Catholic Church a pope, says that
Holland has morally disarmed
in the face of Islamic extremism:
Cardinal Adrianis Simonis of Utrecht believes that the "spiritual vacuity" of Dutch society has left the Netherlands open to an Islamic cultural takeover.
"Today we have discovered that we are disarmed in the face of the Islamic danger," the cardinal told the Italian daily Avvenire. He pointed out that even some young people who were born and raised in the Netherlands have become militant Muslims. The rise of Islam, Cardinal Simonis said, is related to "the spectacle of extreme moral decadence and spiritual decline that we offer" to young people.
Thanks, Eminence. The Dutch Catholic Church has been an infamous disaster zone for the past 40 years. Last time I was in Holland, in 2002, my family and I went to mass in a parish near Amsterdam. There were few people present, and aside from a single other family, we were the only ones there without gray heads. We introduced ourselves to the other family, a couple with three teenage boys. Great folks. They invited us over for dinner. They told a very sad story of decline and fall. The father said he was one of 12 kids raised Catholic by devout parents--and the only one left still practicing his faith. The mother told of trying to take part in diocesan activities to pass on the faith to younger people, and being reprimanded by the bishop's catechist for, get this, her fidelity to Catholic teaching. In 1991, I went to midnight Christmas mass at a Catholic parish in a small city in the heart of Noord-Brabant, once a thriving Catholic area, and the priest led everyone in singing John Lennon and other secular songs in the liturgy. This, my friends told me, was the only church service anyone in town bothered with anymore. My friends, all lapsed Catholics, approved of the priest's attempts to bring young people to mass. "Does it work?" I asked. Said they, "Well, no."
Here's a
National Review story I wrote
a couple of years ago, in the wake of the Fortuyn assassination, about the moral collapse of Dutch society. Even if you don't care about the Netherlands, you need to read this story, because the Dutch are canaries in the cultural coal mine. Says one guy I quote in the story: "The things you Americans are facing today, Holland faced ten or fifteen years ago," says Rob Hondsmerk, a child psychologist who directs Focus on the Family-Netherlands. "I see America going down the same path, and if things keep going at the present rate, it's not going to take you fifteen years to get there."
How Doctrine Dies
I was recently visiting my hometown, and talking to a friend about her church, a mainline Protestant denomination. Mind you, this is a town in the Deep South, the kind of Red America hamlet you expect to be a stronghold of religious traditionalism. My friend mentioned to me casually that her Sunday School teacher didn't believe in the Trinity, or that Jesus was the Son of God.
"You're kidding," I said.
"Nope," she said, unpeturbed.
"Do you understand that your teacher is technically not even Christian?"
"Now, now, everybody has the right to their own opinion."
I thought my friend was being ironic. She wasn't. That's much of the South for you: the unforgivable sin is to embarrass everybody by saying something unpleasant in a social setting. Comity above all. Better to let someone who doesn't even believe in basic Christianity teach your Sunday School class than to upset folks by saying, "Umm, y'all, this is kind of important, don't you think?"
Liberalism and Islam
Comes news that a
14-year-old Iranian boy has died after receiving 85 lashes
, imposed by a mullah because he broke his Ramadan fast. This death will go entirely unremarked by American liberals, who are too busy obsessing about "the Ayatollah wing of the Republican Party" (in Ellen Goodman's asinine phrase) to pay attention to the fact that radical Islam is by far and away the greatest threat to everything that liberals -- and the rest of us in the West--prize.
In fact, as
Andrew Sullivan asked the other day
on his blog, "Can anyone point me to a single liberal American columnist who has written about the Theo van Gogh murder? Hitch doesn't count. I've been a bit stunned by the silence. But maybe I've missed some." Know what he's turned up from that bleg? A single line in a Roger Ebert column. That's it. A filmmaker is ritually slaughtered on the streets of a Western capital for having had the gall to make a short film protesting the way women are treated under Islam, and his assassination is greeted with ... silence.
Why is that? Is liberal guilt so great that liberals cannot bring themselves to take their own side when the attacker is a racial or religious minority? In the Netherlands two years ago, Pim Fortuyn ran a successful campaign for prime minister by making an issue of the threat to Holland's secular liberalism from the growing, and increasingly radical, population of unassimilated Muslim immigrants. Fortuyn was openly gay, and his politics were far to the left of John Kerry's. But the politically correct media in Holland and elsewhere routinely denounced him as a racist, and compared him to Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jorg Haider, who really are racists. Fortuyn was set to win the election, but was murdered by an animal rights activist only days before balloting; the killer said he was acting in part to defend immigrants.
Now that the jihadis have butchered a liberal for his liberalism, the Dutch people have had enough of political correctness, Deo gratias. What's it going to take for American liberals to wake up? Islamic fundamentalism is thriving in mosques throughout this country. Here in Dallas, local Muslims earlier this year held a quiz competition in which high school students were quizzed on the finer points of "Milestones," a book by Sayyid Qutb that is the "Mein Kampf" of Islamic fundamentalism. This quiz contest is a national thing, sponsored by a couple of Islamic radical organizations playing at being mainstream. Do people know about it? Do the liberal American news media care to tell them? Or are we all supposed to pretend we're still living on September 10, because that's so much easier than facing unpleasant facts?
On Others Not Getting Religion
Yesterday, we at the Dallas Morning News editorial board received a visit from Aaron David Miller, the president of what sounds like a wonderful group,
Seeds of Peace
, an organization that takes groups of Israeli Jewish and Palestinian kids to a camp in Maine, to help them get to know each other as human beings, and not as the Enemy. Miller is a former top U.S. diplomat on Dennis Ross's negotiating team trying to broker peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He knows as much as anybody in this country about the conflict there.
We asked him what should happen next, now that Arafat is gone and Condi Rice is coming in to run the State Department. He answered the question, then I asked him how any Palestinian leader can overcome the fanatical--and heavily armed--opposition to peace with Israel coming from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both of which have already said they're not going to participate in the January election, and that they have no intention of making peace with Israel. Miller said that these groups have to be "delegitimized," and that you do that by denying them financial and logistical assistance, by denying them the ability to provide social services (in Gaza, primarily), and by providing the Palestinian people with hope for a better life.
A "better life" by whose standards? By materialist standards? Can that possibly satisfy a pious Palestinian Muslim who believes the Jews have taken from him what God requires him to seize back? I think what's missing from Miller's analysis--though perhaps he would have said as much had he more time with us to expand on his views--is a recognition of the motivating power of religion. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are religious movements attracting people who are willing to slaughter and be slaughtered--and even slaughter themselves, via suicide bomb--to destroy Israel. They promise their followers rich rewards in the afterlife. What possible material rewards can be offered that would compete with the power of that religious vision? It seems to me that secularists simply do not grasp the mentality of someone who would sacrifice his life to serve God--whether it's a martyr, like Christian missionaries killed for their faith, or an Islamic so-called "martyr" who won heaven by blowing up himself and Israeli innocents.
Someone who does get it is "Spengler," the pseudonymous Asia Times Online columnist. In
his latest piece
, Spengler addresses the motivation of the jihadi who assassinated the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Excerpt:
Radical Islam stems from despair in the face of cultural death; precisely for that reason it bespeaks a ghastly indifference toward individual death, analogous to the Mut der Verzweiflung, or courage borne of desperation, that impels the soldiers of a defeated army toward a final charge at the enemy cannon. Absolute certainty informs the faith of the assassin Mohammed B, but it is the certainty of cultural extinction that makes the death of the individual the supreme test of faith. Existential despair inspires the conclusion that better than defeat is to fight to the death. Peace is to be achieved when those who hold this view will have had the opportunity to do so.
The opposite of despair is hope. But what the Palestinian followers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad hope for--the end of Israel--is not achievable. Thus they'd rather die than live as they do now. I don't know how this problem is solved, except, as Spengler suggests, by giving them their wish.
The USCCB's Pomps and Works
I knew the US Conference of Catholic Bishops couldn't get out of their November meeting without embarrassing themselves and all us Catlicks. As has been noted elsewhere in the papist blogosphere, Our Friends the Bishops managed to name as their new president Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, a diocese that had to declare financial bankruptcy over clerical sex abuse claims. The
best Skylstad quote ever
was reported by the Seattle Times, which relayed the bishop's statement to his flock on what he'd learned from the scandal: "I also came to understand better that there really is no such thing as a supposed consensual sexual relationship between any adult and a minor."
Golly, ya think! See brethren and sistren, this is the kind of penetrating moral insight you have to become a bishop to acquire. I know you're saying, "Hey, my garbageman could have told me that!" But that just shows how little spiritual discernment you have.
Then came news that the bishops, in their wisdom,
voted down a project
that would have resulted in a pastoral letter urging the faithful to read the Bible more. Some bishops griped that the conference tries to do too many things, and because Bible-reading is already encourged by the Catechism, this is not a pressing project. I'm somewhat sympathetic to this, only because it's silly for bishops to have to fund a study to tell Catholics they ought to be reading the Bible more. I mean, duh. If you are a successor of the Apostles, do you really need a commission to tell you that?
Yet I appreciate the fear expressed by Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Sullivan of Brooklyn, who said: "I can imagine the headline tomorrow: 'Bishops, in attempt to cut expenses, do not encourage people to read the Bible.'" Take it from a Catholic convert living in Dallas, the most vigorously Evangelical big city in America: Bishop Sullivan is right. I am amazed by how well Evangelicals here know their Bibles, and how much it's a living part of their spiritual lives. In general, Catholics can't hold a candle to them.
The Washington Times quoted
Milwaukee Auxiliary Bishop Richard J. Sklba saying
, "I worry a bit about an increasingly evangelical slant" among Catholics who study the Bible. It seems clear that he was afraid Catholics were going to become like Evangelicals, and believe that they have freedom to interpret Scripture as they wish. Still, what a pathetic statement to make! I've been a faithful, massgoing, orthodox Catholic for over 11 years, and I almost never hear or have heard clear doctrinal teaching from the pulpit. If lay Catholics are drawn to the Evangelical love of Scripture, and find sustenance there, perhaps it's because our own clergy, bishops first among them, aren't giving us what is rightly ours.
Funny, but when I was 13 or so, I left my doctrinally empty mainline church for a passionate yearlong dalliance with fundamentalism. I was a devout reader of
Jack Chick comics
, which are, of course, virulently anti-Catholic. Years later, after losing my faith and coming to Catholicism in my mid-twenties, I chuckled over how appalled my 13-year-old self would have been by my consorting with the Whore of Babylon. Sadly--sickeningly--everything we've learned about the Church since the revelations of 2002 out of Boston has given validation to the most lurid prejudices of Chick-reading fundamentalists. So does the bishops' inability to get it right on the Bible.
"The Press ... Just Doesn't Get Religion"
That Bill Schneider quote is the motto of
one of my favorite blogs
, and has been on my mind a lot in the past few days. I started a big stink on the listserv of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, the professional organization for people like me, when we began to discuss possibilities of inviting religion experts to our next conference to brief us on current trends in American religion and politics--this in response to the "moral values" voters and the 2004 elections.
Some of the editorial writers suggested inviting Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who haven't really mattered in a serious way to US politics for a decade or so. One suggested inviting Daniel Berrigan, the radical Jesuit who was a fringe player 30 or 40 years ago. The writer who suggested Berrigan was clearly angry over religious conservatives, and wanted to spite them. Another writer suggested bringing in John DiIulio, who might be a good choice, but not for the reason the editorialist suggested (and I paraphrase): to explain to us how "values"--the ironic quotes were his--can be exploited for political gain.
I pointed out on the list that this kind of thing is exactly what's wrong with editorial writers. It sounded like we weren't interested in hearing from thinkers who could actually tell us what we needed to know about the current religious and political landscape, but from people who would tell us what we wanted to hear. This listserv is famous for going to pieces anytime one of the few conservatives on it voices dissent, and that's what happened this time too. The discussion ended abruptly, and I was deemed the source of incivility.
See dear hearts, this is the kind of fresh, critical thinking that make the nation's editorial pages so scintillating, informative and relevant to leading public opinion. No wonder we're all losing circulation.
Kathy Shaidle started
RelapsedCatholic.com
in 2000, making it one of the world's oldest weblogs. Orthodox yet curiously irreverent, her blog looks at religion and pop culture from the vantage point of that rarest of creatures: a Canadian conservative.
Fr. Neuhaus: In the Zone!
I think it was every Canadian conservative's favorite atheist,
Colby Cosh
, who observed forlornly:
"Sometimes 'the zone' is just 'too much coffee.'" Whatever Fr. Richard Neuhaus has been drinking lately, I pray he keeps it up; his long form musings in "First Things" have displayed even higher-than-usual levels of pitch perfect prickliness in recent months.
To take just one example: you can almost hear him dismissing Barbara "Poor People Aren't Smart Enough To Know They're Stupid" Ehrenreich with a finger snap, and really: who deserves it more?
Earlier this year, in the New York Times, Ehrenreich wrote about her two abortions with something approaching stubborn pride. Neuhaus winds up
his takedown
:
"Sure it1s unfair, but, then, life is unfair. The children died in the cause of giving the public Barbara Ehrenreich and giving Barbara Ehrenreich some really neat advantages. Do these women know what it1s like to live in a grubby lower-middle-class world with a husband who works in a warehouse? Barbara Ehrenreich should feel guilty about what she did? Get real, ladies."
(PS: Being "just a dollar an hour freelancer"--one excuse Ehrenreich serves up for her decision to abort--sounds darned impressive to me. A U.S. dollar!? Twenty years ago?! Sheesh. America is wasted on some people.)
When Televangelists Attack!
"It's Tough Love time bucko! Jonathan Bell says we're stupid, Pastor Don Caviness says we're little sissies, Arnold Murray says our future's all tied up in the number 153 and WV Grant explains why Jews can cheat on their wives and still be blessed!"
Tune in for the righteously funny clip show at
DoorTV
.
Will the Real Intolerant Bigots Please Stand Up?
Toronto Sun columnist Michael Coren
introduces us to a few of his friends from the Christian Right. Folks like the Burmans:
"The Burmans lead their church mission to the inner city. They never discuss Jesus unless asked, but they do work with alcoholics, drug addicts and the abused. Both Dean and Cindy Burman have been physically attacked in their work, but they wouldn't abandon their friends for anything. They voted for Bush."
Coren concludes:
"The Christian Right. Some are saints, some are the contrary. They can be intolerant and annoying. Just like, in fact, The Secular Left.
"But we all have a right and a responsibility to have an influence over our political system. How outrageous that the smug and powerful encourage one group but despise the other.
"Thing is, Jean, Dean, Cindy and Rick will forgive them. Perhaps it's this that makes them so very angry."
Meanwhile, over at The American Spectator,
George Neumayr
proposes "a new strategy for the Democrats: What if they treated Christians as respectfully as they treated Yasser Arafat?"
Paging Dr. Mengele--I mean, Dr. Kinsey
The mainstream media is raving about "Kinsey," and why wouldn't they? The film glorifies the man whose dubious "research" gave us the now-debunked statistic that "10% of the population is homosexual", among other ridiculous yet politically useful "facts".
Not everyone shares their enthusiasm. At ChristianityToday.com, Jeffery Overstreet rounds up
the reaction from conservative Christians
:
"Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America says Kinsey deserves a place in history next to 'Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist'" and "adds that the film 'ignores the massive fraud, Kinsey's sado-masochistic practices, and barely touches on his use of data on children in sex experiments.'"
Plus: "Family Research Council has produced a documentary about the children who were abused in Kinsey's experiments. It's called 'The Children of Table 34.' Focus on the Family has organized a page listing other valuable resources in exposing the things that the film Kinsey covers up. Another group, Generation Life, declared that it would have picketers ready at screenings of the film."
Pickets are tired and patently counterproductive, but I'm heartened to see the Family Research Council doing something I've advocated for years: if Christians really want a seat at the cultural "grown up table", they should forget boycotting other peoples movies, and start making their own.
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