A New Breeze?

Word came during the first Saturday morning breakout sessions at Chestnut Hill College's conference on Vatican II that Pope Francis had appointed a committee of eight cardinals to review and, perhaps, reform the Roman Curia.  This came as welcome news.

Already throughout Friday night and during the first parts of Saturday morning, our conversations at the conference had cataloged a full range of familiar frustrations.  Mostly, conference participants had lamented perhaps the most far-reaching of all post-Vatican II disappointments--the failure to fulfill the promise of episcopal collegiality.  For centuries, since the papacy became a medieval monarchy and gathered a king's court ("curia") to rule the kingdom, local bishops outside Rome gradually came to find their roles reduced to being little greater than franchise managers serving a larger corporate master instead of what they had been in the earliest centuries of the Church: equals, each a member of a whole group of bishops that led the Church under the direction of a first-among-equals Bishop of Rome.

Vatican II had promised to restore the role of bishops.  Regular meetings of bishops from around the world--synods--were to be called as opportunities for bishops to join in the making of decisions that affect and govern the whole Church.  That promise was squelched under the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  Synods took place, but followed scripts prepared by the Curia from which they did not deviate.  Shared governance never really happened.

I have called this disappointment the most far-reaching of all the post-Vatican II disappointments.  But, why?

If you wonder how it can be that Rome would impose such a clumsy translation of the Mass, consider that Curial officials were safely insulated from any accountability to bishops in the English-speaking world by the neutering of the synodal process.

If the Vatican's latest round of financial scandals finds you scratching your head about how this keeps happening again and again, consider that no one inside the Curia feels answerable to anyone outside it--including secular governments.

How did Marcial Maciel Degollardo, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, forestall for years any investigation into his own financial misdeeds or the child who is the product of an illicit relationship?  All indications are that he bought protection for himself by ingratiating himself with the right Curial officials.

Are you mystified about why Rome seems to hear nothing from the faithful about their questions concerning the ordination of women?  A married priesthood?  Birth control?  Other questions of human sexuality?  Or, anything else in a range of issues at least demanding a fresh look?  If your bishop cannot get a hearing in Rome, how can you?

How--Why??--did Rome drag its feet for years when it should have addressed the sex abuse crisis aggressively?  By now, you've got the point.  An institutional culture with no transparency is a culture that encourages keeping secrets.

Pope Francis has opened a crack.  He has placed a layer of powerful local bishops between himself and the Curia.  It is an impressive beginning.  But it is only a beginning.  To transform a bureaucracy that successfully resisted the reforms of the Second Vatican Council will not happen overnight.  Rome cannot be unbuilt in a day.

Still it could be tempting to give credit so thoroughly to Pope Francis as Walter Cardinal Kasper does.  It also was reported this weekend that Cardinal Kasper believes Pope Francis has launched "a new phase of Vatican II."  I don't wish to take anything away from Pope Francis, who so far certainly deserves a lot of credit.  But Cardinal Kasper may be too generous.  And, the real explanation may be more pathetically tragic.

Famously, Pope John XXIII convened the Council to 'throw open the windows of the Church and let the fresh air of the spirit blow through.'  To carry that metaphor further, John Paul II and Benedict XVI closed the windows again at least by frustrating the synods of bishops.  In the stagnant air of that closed Church, what "filth" (to use Pope Benedict's own word) festered?  And, in fleeing that fetid and stultifying air, is Pope Benedict finally anything else so much as a man who, unable to find any other solution, departed a stuffy room?

For thirty years, the Curia enjoyed the impunity of being responsible only to one man, a man who knew only what they told him.  If a new phase of Vatican II has begun, it is not because Francis began it.  Rather, it is because the old, pre-Vatican II way of doing things tottered and caved in on itself fifty years after it should have been repaired.

It is tempting to celebrate while a new Holy Father tries to break through the glass and leave the windows permanently open.  Indeed, we should celebrate.  But our celebrations should be tempered a bit as we reflect on the last several decades, all the people needlessly hurt, and all that was lost to the Church by what Pope Francis calls "ambition, careerism, a taste for success, placing ourselves at the centre, the tendency to dominate others." 

In any event, only time can tell us if our celebrations are warranted.

Quid Habemus?

The endless expressions of surprise and wonderment at the humility of Pope Francis since his elevation not quite 36 hours ago already have grown a bit stale.  Then again, since the world knows little more about him than the name he chose and a few nuggets from his work in Buenos Aires, there is little more to say.

But even with what little information we have, there are some things for us to digest.

I don't wish to rain cynicism down on what I believe could actually be a most salutary turning point in the modern history of the Church.  But the spectacle of at least one cardinal-elector praising the new pope for being "so simple and unpretentious" should raise more eyebrows than it has raised.  Will not this cardinal-elector return home to the rather sophisticated and (dare I say?) 'pretentious' life of a prince of the Church?  Is it that Pope Francis seems "so simple and unpretentious" because he appeared without the mozetta?  How many unacknowledged-but-clearly-implied criticisms can we unearth from this cardinal-elector's observation?  And, what is most interesting is that those criticisms do not really reflect on that cardinal or on Pope Francis's predecessor.  Indeed, those criticisms redound to the Church, itself so caught up for so long in the medieval trappings of power that a moment's simplicity can glean such a remarkably unguarded admission from a prince of the Church.

We can be certain of some things.  We know that St. Peter's Square has seen very few moments such as the one depicted above, moments in which a pope connected with the people in the square with such direct, informal warmth.  When Pope Francis asked for blessing before he offered one, I was reminded of the only other moment that equaled it.

As papal debuts go, Pope Francis's appearance in St. Peter's Square also calls to mind The Smiling Pope who blessed the city and the world in September, 1978.  Yet both Pope John Paul I and Pope John XXIII were good men who strained and struggled against the curial bureaucracy.  

Much as in those two cases, the success of Pope Francis's papacy will not come ultimately from his ability to move us or to impress us.  Now perhaps more than ever in memory, this papacy must succeed despite the bureaucratic machinery that surrounds it.

Can Francis's spirit of unpretentious simplicity tame the curial beast?  Will it even persuade his cardinals to let go some of their own trappings of prestige and power?

The answers to these questions will tell us much about what we have in Pope Francis, as they will tell us much about the Church that is to come.

To the Right of the Right

One need not be a political scientist to understand what a difficult problem John Boehner inherited when he became Speaker in 2011.  The good news was that a wave of conservative enthusiasm, the Tea Party Movement, had swept a Republican majority into the House and elevated him to the speakership.  The bad news was that Boehner, with a two-decade career in the House as a moderate, establishment Republican, just had been crowned ruler of a majority disdainful of moderation, one sent to Washington to challenge the establishment.  Boehner has led a fractious coalition ever since, one where his chief problems come not from the Democratic minority but from the rightward side of his own party.  The recent election has strengthened his hand somewhat.  But the House Republican Conference remains more conservative than Boehner, as Eric Cantor--more in step with those conservatives--seems to have his eyes on the Speaker's chair.

When then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan won the presidency of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over a Cardinal Bernardin-protege, Bishop Gerald Kicanas, in 2010, the event was recognized as a rebuke for more moderate or 'liberal-progressive' theological voices in the conference.  A few short months later, conservative voices in American Catholicism celebrated the victory by claiming, among other things, "The End of the Bernardin Era."  

Then came the Affordable Care Act, the HHS mandate, and the imbroglio over religious freedom.  To say that 2012 was a divisive year within the Catholic Church in the United States somehow seems inadequate.  That annus horribilis for the bishops ended with Barack Obama carrying the Catholic vote, and 2013 has dawned to find the re-elected president still seeking to accommodate the concerns of religious groups.  The President announced further accommodations on Feb. 1, and the response of the USCCB has been...enigmatic.  

First there were signs of cautious optimism.  Then there was a statement from Cardinal Dolan that appeared to reject the accommodation.  Then there was a follow-up from the Cardinal where he suggested the accommodation had not been rejected fully.  Along the way, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia suggested that Cardinal Dolan and the USCCB may be spineless.  Most recently, Bishop Robert Lynch has suggested that Cardinal Dolan and the USCCB do not speak for the whole Church and the accommodation might be just fine.

As President Reagan used to say that the Eleventh Commandment is, "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican," the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has long sustained itself on a spirit of fraternal collegiality.  Bishops disagree with one another as often as other human beings do.  But never, never in public.  There have been exceptions, but they have been rare.  And that is what has made this last week so breathtaking.

The public spectacle of Cardinal Dolan caught between a rightward faction of bishops who seem worried he is about to give away the store and a leftward faction of bishops worried he is being controlled by the rightward bishops only can remind us of John Boehner's predicament.  

In the House of Representatives, a conservative victory did not mean the disaster for the left that everyone thought it meant.  Instead, it has been the cause of chaos on the right because, for some people, enough is never enough.  There is no satisfying them.  It is the mania common to that variety of conservatism, wherever we encounter it, that rejects all moderation.  To draw closer to victory is only a maddening reminder that total victory has not yet been achieved.  Having defeated Nancy Pelosi and rebuked President Obama was not enough for the Tea Party in 2010.  Growing nearer to total victory only made the distance from it infuriating.  Remarkable extremism and divisiveness was the result leading up to the 2012 election, and there has been more even since the Tea Party, itself, has been rebuked.

Among the bishops, the defeat of Bernardin followers in 2010 was much the same.  What seemed like a defeat for those leftward bishops has become a fracture among the rightward bishops.  With total victory in sight, the enemies of moderation who can imagine no compromise with the secular world or modernity now police Cardinal Dolan for any sign that he lacks a spine.  The breach of fraternal collegiality has had results, and the fracture has widened now toward the left.  Cardinal Dolan sits amid it all, trying to hold the whole thing together.

The sad fact is that the cleansing underway now in the GOP will be healthy for that party and for the country in the long term.  But the bishops' conference is not a political party, and neither are there really political factions among the bishops.  What they do is different, should be different.

These fractures in the unity of the bishops are failures of Christian charity that will have long, dreadful consequences for the Catholic voice in American social and political life.  There is no good news here to be found.

Another HHS Mandate Accommodation

I've been tracking this issue closely since before February 8 of last year and it has been a regular, recurring feature of this blog.  I really only have very little left to add.

Today's announcement that the HHS mandate would be adjusted again to accommodate religious concerns about contraception and abortion should come in its proper context.

1. Coming off a re-election victory that saw more Catholics vote for Obama than against him, the White House had no political reason to do this.  If Barack Obama were the ardent, devoted secularist who hates religion that too many 'respectable' religious leaders have caricatured him to be, this wouldn't be happening.  The only win here for the President is if he actually values the religious freedom of those who have been objecting--if he is fair-minded.  
2. It seems to me that this accommodation is further than he needed to go legally, but that doesn't make it a bad idea.  The dozens of lawsuits against the mandate have produced a mixed bag of results with the best claims emerging from a somewhat torturous reading of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and even those still awaiting implementation of the ACA in 2014 before they can be ripe for adjudication.  The mandate was far from being struck down before today's announcement.  But our concerns aren't only legal.  This also is a political question.  The White House needs the ACA to be widely accepted as quickly as it is implemented next year if it is to cement its place in American social and economic life as Social Security and Medicare did before it.  From that point of view, these accommodations--while not strictly necessary in a legal sense--are politically prudent and, again, give evidence of sensitivity to the American public, wiping away extraneous problems to let the ACA succeed on its own merit without distraction.
3. Plenty of people still won't be happy.  Some people will never be pleased.  That's life.  But they're the ones who really aren't worried about religious liberty or moral problems.  They reveal that their only agenda is to defeat the ACA, wielding religious liberty as a convenient cudgel.  Impressively, though, a lot of opposition has begun to evaporate. Even the ordinarily breathless Bill Donohue has said that "the decision to expand religious exemptions, and to adopt the IRS definition of a religious institution, is a sign of goodwill by the Obama administration toward the Catholic community."   Mirabile dictu!  Saints preserve us!  There is hope, yet.

Koch and the Cardinal

This remarkable obituary Ed Koch filmed in 2007 relates a really moving story starting at 16:00.

Ed Koch was pro-death penalty, pro-choice, and thought by many to be gay.  But at a low point in the early-1980's, suffering depression, the only religious leader who called him and told him what he needed to hear was John Cardinal O'Connor.

Maybe our bishops today still show such exemplary care for non-Catholic political leaders who are on the other side of the political and moral questions that the bishops care most about.  Maybe those very private phone calls still get made.  But it would be really nice if I could find that easier to believe, if the bishops' public posture could partake just a little bit of such charity despite the disagreements.

RIP, Mayor.  RIP, Your Eminence.  Let's hope we need give no RIP for the charity and care given by the Cardinal, the gratitude and love reciprocated by the mayor.

40 Years of Roe v. Wade

As the title of this blog should suggest unequivocally, I agree with the idea that we need to call abortion what it is: a grave moral evil.  As I have written in an earlier posting, I don't think that our certainty that abortion is a grave moral evil presents us with a clear political or legal solution to the problem.  Here is a bit of what I wrote:

What the pro-life crowd fails to understand is that, while they are quite right about the personhood of the fetus, the political and legal corollaries of that fact are perverse. Should every pregnancy be carried to term? Ideally, absolutely, yes. But to carry an unwanted pregnancy for nine months, with all that means for daily life and its effect on the body, demands an act of moral heroism.
Moral heroism is praiseworthy. It is the act of doing the best possible thing, regardless of its personal costs. Ideally, people should be morally heroic. But the law cannot reasonably demand moral heroism. The standard simply is too high. St. Thomas Aquinas agreed. He wrote that, "law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue," and that the law should forbid only "the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain." Abortion is a most grievous evil. But the moral heroism required by the pro-life movement's absolute position simply is not within the capability of most people. Most people lack that courage. The law must recognize that.

After many years of careful reflection I am at pains to find a better political or legal solution to the difficult problem of abortion than the one we have under Roe v. Wade--a balancing test that scales up the legal protection of the fetus according to fetal development and holds to the moderate legal principle that the law should not aim for a standard so high that most people do not have the moral capacity to reach it.  Pregnancy is a formidable intrusion upon the body; it is no mere inconvenience.  It would be a strange understanding of our constitutional government and its foundations to say that we value human dignity so much that the state should force this personal intrusion upon citizens who either do not share the opinion that it is evil or who cannot rise to the extraordinary moral challenge of sacrificing themselves to an unwanted pregnancy.

With all of that as backdrop, the fortieth anniversary of the Roe decision marks an occasion to ask what Catholic pro-life activities have accomplished across four decades.  My reflections on that question began with this photograph that was tweeted to me this past week:

What was this tweeted photo meant to advertise?  Several things, of course.  At face value, it is advertising the television broadcast of the Mass and prayer vigil.  Its subtler advertisements are more interesting.  The photo features a large crowd, and the presence of many bishops is as obvious as the directing of our attention to the EWTN television network.  That confluence of the U.S. bishops, a television network, and a large representation of American Catholics bespeaks a powerful political movement, one whose broad and deep reach could rival the fabled Obama campaign machine.

This picture sends a powerful message, and it is meant to send that message: Catholics are a political force.  The bishops know that Catholics make up a powerful bloc in American public life. The proof that the bishops are conscious of this fact can be found by looking no further than the USCCB webpage, where catechists--teachers of the Catholic faith--are urged to sponsor a "lobby day," enlisting the faithful in political activity.  The bishops suggest that catechists should "Expand Advocacy Activities" and "provide opportunities for adults to join a diocesan legislative network.  Both young people and adults can learn a great deal from attending 'lobby days' sponsored by state Catholic conferences or from researching and writing letters to decision-makers about issues of justice and peace."

On its face, of course this is just fine.  Better than fine, it's great.  Social and political action is as Catholic as the Hail Mary.  Still there is something a little dissonant and ugly about the intrusion of a word like "lobbying" into catechesis, especially when it is proffered by our bishops.  The word suggests something other than the infusion of American public life with a Catholic perspective.  Rather, it drags the Catholic point-of-view down into the tawdry business of exchanging favors, showering officials with bribes cloaked as gifts, and the scurrilous way that lobbying organizations can thwart the machinery of sound public policy to favor the discrete interest they serve over the more broad interests of the common good.

Our problem goes deeper than just the lamentable presence of the word "lobby" on a webpage for catechists, though.  The full depth of the problem can be found in the fruitless and partisan religious liberty campaign that dominated the last year, an event that gives evidence of the considerable degree to which the Church and Church leaders have become excessively, distastefully corrupted by the desire to win a political or cultural war over (perhaps even at the expense of) spreading the Gospel.

That problem is not new.  It has been building for decades since the Roe decision, since the fateful 1976 meeting between then-Archbishop Joseph Bernardin and then-Governor Jimmy Carter that made clear the Democratic Party's commitment to Roe and sent the bishops to Gerald Ford and the Republicans.  More than thirty years of this increasing polarization among American Catholics has matched the political divisions in American life that grow deeper by the day.

Somewhere along the way during that march from 1976 toward today, a deep faith, rich prayer life, and good works stopped being enough to describe a person as "a good Catholic."  Instead, Serious Catholics must vote for particular solutions to difficult moral problems--as though there should be no room for a prudential judgment that sees different paths toward the same moral goal.  Catholic bishops distinguish Catholics from "Persons who claim to be Catholic"(212).  The answer to whether a Catholic college or university is "authentically Catholic" is not in the competence of the religious orders that sponsor them, and neither can it be judged by a curriculum or the lives of the students who graduate.  It is, rather, a competence claimed by self-deputized pressure groups who enjoy the sanction of at least some Catholic bishops. Much as Republicans are consumed by internal arguments over who is or is not conservative enough ("RINO's"), many American Catholics are absorbed in a battle for purity according to a scorecard.  Too many bishops also are absorbed in that battle.

The roots of that battle lie in Roe v. Wade.  Other issues are involved--birth control, the interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, etc.  But the forty-year campaign against Roe has given these divisions structure and shape, mapping the differences among Catholics on to the political and cultural wars that dominate American life.  As St. Paul drew a distinction between things of the flesh and things of the spirit, the Catholic eye has grown a bit too fixed on these temporal conflicts.  And, we have grown a bit corrupted by the desire to prevail in them.  After all, separating 'real Catholics' from 'false Catholics' does little to bring forth the Kingdom.  (Indeed, it suggests a lack of faith that Someone Else eventually will do that sorting for us.)   Such preoccupations are suited best to those whose main concern is keeping the power to influence public policy for themselves--as carnal a desire as any I can imagine.

Forty years of Catholic activism against Roe v. Wade have--so far as I can tell--done nothing whatsoever to reverse the ruling.  On that score, Catholics have failed totally.  Indeed, a recent poll finds that 63% of Americans would not like to see Roe completely overturned (a devastating blow, after forty years of effort, to the proposition that the evil of abortion is universally apprehensible through human reason according to the natural law).  The fortieth anniversary of Roe should first come as a reminder of that complete failure.  Where we have succeeded impressively can be seen in the way that the culture wars since Roe have brought the effectiveness of a Catholic voice in social and political arguments to nil.  We have defeated ourselves.

In the days surrounding the anniversary of Roe we surely will hear a full indictment of all the evil Roe has made possible.  Good.  But when you hear it, pause also to wonder where is the full voice of the Catholic bishops used against gun violence or on behalf of the poor and the marginalized in 2013?  Where is a publicity campaign on the scale of the "Fortnight for Freedom" toward those goals?

And, even if the bishops were to do it, who anymore would listen?

The Nixon Centenary

This blog posting at Esquire caught my eye.

For a long time I have lovedhated Richard Nixon a lot.  His overt crimes were exceeded only by his subtler ones, the abuse of power surrounding Watergate dwarfed by the enduring legacy of the divisiveness he imprinted on national politics with his 1950, 1968, and 1972 campaigns.  Yet he remains the most fascinating figure in American public life since Lincoln.  I don't want to make too much of the comparison--Lincoln deserves better.  But both men were riddled with contradictions that made them--against all probability--wildly successful at the highest level of political life.  For these reasons, Nixon remains a spectacle in our life--that thing we can't stop looking at.

In part that is why I have to take exception to Charles Pierce who, I think, has gotten it just wrong.  Pierce writes:

Nixon was not "us." Most of us don't kill Asians to prove to someone else how tough we are. Most of us don't cover our workplaces with shame and disgrace and then claim that somebody else, and there was always somebody else with him, was really to blame.

With Charles Pierce, I want to believe that Nixon was not One of Us, as Tom Wicker titled his book about Nixon.  But I think Pierce thinks a little too well of us.  I regret to say Nixon not only was One of Us, but he may have been one of the best of us in the ways he was most typical.  That is what makes him fascinating.

The problem with Pierce's blog posting is that he is writing during the same week that we're watching this:

I don't think Richard Nixon ever would have launched an angry rant about guns like this, though we know he launched angry rants.  It's difficult to imagine Nixon sneering at Morgan through an effete impersonation of him, but we know he could sneer at effetes in private.  We certainly know that Nixon hated elites like Piers Morgan and stoked the anti-intellectualism that long has been part of American culture and which accompanies the hatred of elites.

For Charles Pierce and anyone else who wants to dance on Nixon's grave and congratulate themselves that the bad man is dead and our political purity has been recovered, I recommend Nixonland by Rick Perlstein.  Here is Perlstein:

What Richard Nixon left behind was the very terms of our national self-image: a notion that there are two kinds of Americans.  On the one side, that "Silent Majority."  The "nonshouters."  The middle-class, middle American, suburban, exurban, and rural coalition who call themselves now, "Values voters," "people of faith," "patriots," or even, simply, "Republicans"--and who feel themselves condescended to by snobby opinion-making elites, and who rage about un-Americans, anti-Christians, amoralists, aliens.  On the other side are the "liberals," the "cosmopolitans," the "intellectuals," the "professionals"--"Democrats."  Who say they see shouting in opposition to injustice as a higher form of patriotism.  Or say "live and let live."  Who believe that to have "values" has more to do with a willingness to extend aid to the downtrodden than where, or if, you happen to worship--but who look down on the first category as unwitting dupes of feckless elites who exploit sentimental pieties to aggrandize their wealth, start wars, ruin lives.  Both populations--to speak in ideal types--are equally, essentially, tragically American.  And both have learned to consider the other not quite American at all.  The argument over Richard Nixon, pro and con, gave us the language for this war.  Do Americans not hate one another enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements?  It would be hard to argue they do not.

Happy birthday, President Nixon.  From all of Us.