Sex, lies, and Catholicism

Seventh-century icon of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, 4th-century martyrs who some believe united in a wedding-like ritual of "adelphopoiesis". Via Wikipedia.

The money grafs, for me, in the Times coverage (by Jason Horowitz, and really worth reading) of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò's lurid accusations that Pope Francis has been orchestrating a multiyear coverup of the sins of Cardinal McCarrick isn't the fact that Viganò was involved in a coverup himself, while he was serving as nuncio in the US in April 2014, when he ordered a halt to investigations of sexual misconduct with adult men and seminarians on the part of Archbishop John Niestedt of St. Paul, which I more or less knew, or that he was responsible for embarrassing the pope by arranging a meeting for him with Kim Davis, the gay marriage-license martyr town clerk from Kentucky, which I used to know, but the way he fought against being shipped to the US in the first place:

Throughout his power struggle, Archbishop Viganò had been writing urgent appeals to Benedict to stay in the Vatican.

He said he needed to stay because his brother, a Jesuit biblical scholar, was sick and needed care, and he accused Cardinal Bertone of breaking his promise to promote him to the rank of cardinal....

But Archbishop Viganò’s brother, Lorenzo Viganò, told Italian journalists that his brother “lied” to Benedict that he had to remain in Rome “because he had to take care of me, sick.” To the contrary, he said he had lived in Chicago and was fine and hadn’t talked to his brother in years over an inheritance dispute.

Viganò is really a big liar, a shameful thing to say about a 77-year-old archbishop. If you read his scabrous letter with the understanding that he's probably lying, it reads more coherently, and if conservative Catholics down to our own nuncio Monsignor Douthat are taking it seriously, it's because they really, really want to—Douthat shows he doesn't really believe it by offering his own fictional account of the McCarrick business in which Viganò's accusations are false but Francis is still sort of guilty:

For the Record: The Derp Penalty

Everybody else was out saying you wouldn't even have Christianity without capital punishment, and I appreciate that, but doesn't that imply that it's already served its purpose? If Christians don't need to avoid pork or shellfish or sex with women during their periods because their Redeemer has redeemed them from all that, why would they have to put up with executions, of all things? Ilya Repin, Golgotha, 1869, via Varvara. 

Disappointed that young Monsignor Ross Douthat hasn't come out formally to protest against Pope Francis's announcement that the death penalty is "inadmissible", though he has produced a pretty subtle Twitter thread where he wonders if the Pope has gone even further with this than he did when he suggested it might be OK to let divorced people take Communion sometimes, and how dangerous could that be for the future survival of the Holy Mother Church, though he's pretty sure the death penalty issue is less serious than the divorce one—

But the bottom line is that this is another example of how Pope Francis has consistently exposed the tensions in the post-Vatican II conservative position, and pushed the JPII synthesis into intellectual crisis.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 2, 2018

—it's one of his technical pieces, written to assure 12 or 13 of his readers that he's really as intellectual as he looks, and he's pretty careful not to have any feelings about it other than your "concerned kitten is concerned" frowny face, and not adjure to anything controversial like having his own beliefs about right and wrong.

Brooks on Trafficking

No, not that kind of trafficking, that would be too controversial.

Image via YoungInRome.

We may or may not have skirted the danger of war on the Korean peninsula, the situations in Yemen, Ukraine, Myanmar, and other places continue to degenerate, President Macron is trying to take over the Middle East peace process, Congress is about to attempt to provide a real appropriations process for the first time in well over a year of living from continuing resolution to continuing resolution, news is out that Donald Trump tried to shut down the Russia investigation about eight separate times, fearless federalist attorney general Jefferson Beauregard is declaring war on the 29 states where some kind of marijuana use is legal, and a new book is out (four days ahead of schedule after Trump's advance denunciation of it increased demand to an irresistable level) providing credible evidence of the president's diminished cognitive capacity, so naturally David F. Brooks ("How Would Jesus Drive?") is writing about how grateful we should all be that some people have good traffic manners.

Moreover, Pope Francis agrees with him on that, in his homily for the New Year's Eve Vesper service at the Basilica of Saint Peter:

Latest News on the Trump-Is-a-Liberal Front

Right, Ross. And when Francis denounces Trump's policies on immigration and refugees he's just trying to distract us. After all, the Vatican City already has a wall. Photo by Karen Olson of the Meandering Kiwis.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "The Trump Era's Catholic Mirror", New York Times, February 15 2017:

Forget about that Stephen Bannon and his relationship with Cardinal Raymond Burke and the other reactionary forces within the Roman Catholic hierarchy openly conspiring to unseat Pope Francis with charges of heresy if that's what it takes; the real Trumpista in the Vatican is the vulgar, populist Pope himself. I am not a crank.

The work of providence

Pope Honorius I, via skepticism.org.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("His Holiness Declines to Answer", New York Times, November 26 2016):

You think you Americans are having problems, with your obscene president-elect and all, you should see what we members of the One and Apostolic Roman Catholic Church are experiencing, where the Holy Father is refusing to come out and say openly whether he thinks it's lawful for some divorced hussy to receive Holy Communion, as appeared to be suggested in the encyclical Amoris Laetitia, how cutting-edge scary is that? Some say the Holy Ghost has sealed his lips on the subject and prevented him from saying what he really thinks because if he did that he would surely say something contrary to Church doctrine and God will never allow such a terrible thing to happen.

That last bit is for real, a reference to the official teaching of the doctrine of papal infallibility, with the implication that Francis doesn't really want to be forced into a position where what he says on the subject crosses into that almost never invoked territory (strictly speaking, it's only ever been invoked twice, once in 1854 before the formal proclamation of infallibility for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, whose parents conceived her, uniquely, without sin, and once in 1950 for her Bodily Assumption), but Ross pulls it all the way out for this colossally important issue, as usual not explicitly, but with a Trumpian "people are saying":

Is Douthat a better theologian than the Pope? Spoiler: No.

"Mosque in mourning" in St-Étienne-du-Vouvray, Normandy, photo by François Mori/AP, via San Angelo Standard-Time.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, is putting out another request for some magic words; not only does President Obama have to say the words "radical Islamic terrorism" in order to win the war against radical Salafi terrorism, Pope Francis has to refer to the horrible murder of Abbé Jacques Hamel at the end of last month as a "martyrdom" ("The Meaning of a Martyrdom"):

In theory, it should be possible (for a pope, especially!) to plainly call Father Hamel’s death a martyrdom while also rejecting sweeping narratives about Islamic violence or religious war.

"In theory"! What theory is that?

As a matter of fact, I think a theoretical standpoint requires you to say that Abbé Hamel was not a martyr, however much respectful attention you might want his sacrifice and suffering to be given, because it isn't, just like Father Damien or Padre Pio, in line with the classic three-point definition:

Update: Thoughts and prayers

Follow Igor Volsky of Center for American Progress on Twitter for constant updates on all the US congresspersons and senators who have taken campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association and voted against every kind of gun control legislation.

Every time some terrible thing like this happens they send out messages offering their "thoughts and prayers", but no apologies for the lack of action on their part that would help to put an end to it. Igor is there to call them out for it.

One religious leader who calls for thoughts and prayers and DOING SOMETHING:

Pope Francis has condemned “the terrible massacre that has taken place in Orlando, with its dreadfully high number of innocent victims”.

He released a statement through a spokesperson, who said the attack “has caused in Pope Francis, and in all of us, the deepest feelings of horror and condemnation, of pain and turmoil before this new manifestation of homicidal folly and senseless hatred.

Pope Francis joins the families of the victims and all of the injured in prayer and in compassion. Sharing in their indescribable suffering he entrusts them to the Lord so they may find comfort. We all hope that ways may be found, as soon as possible, to effectively identify and contrast the causes of such terrible and absurd violence which so deeply upsets the desire for peace of the American people and of the whole of humanity.

"Contrast" is a bad translation for Italian contrastare, meaning "oppose" or "prevent".

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Is Francis Berning?

Jeffrey Sachs in Toya, Mali, with school official Mahamadou Alamin. Photo by Sebastien Cailleux/Condé Nast, 2009.

Dr. Google and I stumbled into a couple of odd things while we were trying to figure out the Bernie-Bergoglio kerfuffle that seem, to me, to have some clarifying value, taken together.

1. Just a year ago, in April 2015, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences held a Plenary Meeting on Human Trafficking: Issues beyond Criminalization, to which the development economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited, and later in the month a panel discussion on sustainable development with the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, as a result of which the chancellor of the Academy, Mgr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, took a certain amount of heat from conservative Catholics, on the grounds that both Dr. Sachs and Secretary General Ban are known supporters of abortion rights.

Including some heat at the conservative Catholic website First Things from Stefano Gennarini, Director of the Center for Legal Studies at the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) in New York and Washington:

Douthat can't handle the truth

Clifton Webb in Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), with Gene Tierney's back. Via somebody's Tumblr.

It's Monsignor Ross Douthat, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, all hopped up about Pope Francis's new exhortation, Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love!), but there is no joy in Rossville. It's that danged modernity again:

MODERNITY has left nearly every religious tradition in the Western world divided.

The specific issues vary with the faith, but there is an essential sameness to what separates Reform Judaism from Orthodox Judaism, evangelical churches from mainline Protestantism, the liberal Episcopal Church from the conservative Anglican Church in North America.

The terror-caps are just an accidental feature of the Times style—because it's the first word in the piece. But it does look funny!

Actually what separates Reform Judaism (about 35% of Jews in the United States according to the 2013 Pew survey, plus 6% for Reconstructionist and other particularly liberal denominations) from Orthodox Judaism (about 10%, including the Ultra-Orthodox) is Conservative Judaism (about 18%), of which Ross appears not to have heard, together with the 30% who identify mostly as "just Jewish" (27%) or otherwise unaffiliated.

Eiron, the Goddess of Irony...

...as Tengrain always says, laughed so hard she farted.

This didn't happen. Who wanted us to believe it did? Image from Funny or Die via Advocate.

Curiouser and curiouser how the tale of the pontifical embrace of Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis (famous for her belief that her Trinity-denying Apostolic Pentecostal faith entitles her to collect an $80K salary while refusing to perform some the job's central duties) develops.

Yesterday Mr. Pierce came out with a horrifying construction of a story about how Pope Francis might have been ratfucked by Vatican conservatives into appearing to take a position on Ms. Davis when he hadn't in fact thought about the issue at all (and certainly wouldn't have wished to endorse in that form if he had thought about it):

Bubbling wisdom and self-emptying love

Great story I hadn't heard before, with meme, via TopekasNews.

Shorter David Brooks, "Pope Francis, the Prince of the Personal", New York Times, Septemer 22 2015:

I can't understand why all these people get so excited over the stuff the Pope says. Surely, when we encounter a person of such deep spiritual wisdom we should focus not on his ideas but on what a nice person he is.

And a (relatively minor) David Brooks Plagiarism Watch below the fold:

Enough Pope to hang themselves

"So Jonah Goldberg walks into a bar... Ouch!" Image via Advocate. 

Jonah Goldberg shows up to complain about the White House insulting Pope Francis:

a great editorial by The Washington Post. As Mona noted here earlier, the White House has no problem playing political games at the Pope’s expense. They’re inviting various activists — a gay episcopal bishop, abortion supporters, etc — to the White House event for the Pope. But…

Because National Review and its readers are so deeply respectful of the Holy Father themselves, don't you know. (Also all bishops are episcopal with a lowercase e, it's like saying "a royal king".) I had some fun in the comment section which I'll reproduce here (just in case I get banned again):

Better Catholics than Ross Douthat

Pierre Montailler, Works of Mercy, 1680 (via Wikipedia).

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, on why the US has relatively little moral obligation to take in Syrian refugees:

One answer is that nations that are directly implicated in Syria’s agony have more responsibility to accept refugees than nations that are not. The strongest obligation would belong to those countries — the Gulf States and Iran, above all — who have fed arms and money into the Syrian conflict. A weaker-but-still-meaningful responsibility would attach to the United States, because we too have sent arms and because of the links between our Iraq intervention and the region’s current chaos. Other countries would have more attenuated obligations, or none at all.

Spiritual Pron

Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson in Sam Wood's Beyond the Rocks (1922), via TheLoudestVoice.

Shorter David Brooks, "Fracking and the Franciscans", June 23 2015:

Pope Francis, author of a new encyclical on the protection of the natural environment, is the kind of ideal human being I've been talking about who radiates goodness, generosity, humility, spiritual awareness. What an idiot, huh?

As with the largely leftist cast of The Road to Character, George Eliot, Dorothy Day, Frances Perkins, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Brooks wants us to admire the Pope's deep spirituality while ignoring everything he thinks. Wonderful man, but unfortunately stupid on geological, biological, economic, and political issues; you should listen to a smart guy like Brooks, otherwise known as a narcissistic blowhard, instead.

The audacity of Pope

Image by FBarok via Ken's Birdhaus.

Buckleyist theologian Ramesh Ponnuru at Ten Miles Square:

“Inequality is the root of social evil,” Pope Francis wrote in a Twitter post yesterday, with words that thrilled the left worldwide more than anything he had said since denouncing “trickle-down theories” of economics. We could read the definite article in his latest statement as indicating that the pope believes all social evil has inequality at its root. The price of that reading, though, would be to render the statement absurd. (In an apostolic exhortation, Francis had called inequality the root of “social ills,” which also suggests that reading is mistaken.)

I don't know about the thrill among the worldwide left there, since I haven't heard about it in my own circle and Ponnuru doesn't offer any links, but I did think it was curious how he seems to think you could appeal to the tweet's English grammar as a window onto the Pope's thinking in what presumably started off in some other language, like maybe Italian.*

Sure enough, there's an original Italian tweet, and it seems pretty clarifying:

J'accusative

The Franciscum Revolution and Religious Liberty in America http://t.co/3PPgpxFeiV via @NRO
— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) December 3, 2013

To all you people who thought when they said

Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Bergoglio qui sibi nomen imposuit Franciscum

that meant the new pope's Latin name was "Franciscum": It isn't. When you are saying what his Latin name is in English you must say it is Franciscus (nominative case). You say "Franciscum" (accusative case) only when you are speaking Latin and he is the direct object of your sentence (Habemus papam Franciscum = "We have a pope, Francis") or of a preposition such as ante (before Francis), ad (toward Francis), circum (around Francis), contra (against Francis), and so forth. Or perhaps if you gave the name to something neuter rather than masculine or feminine, such as an egg ("This is my pet ovum, Franciscum"). It also has, to English speakers, unpleasant and distracting letter sequences inside it, such as "scum". Don't do it.

Gianlorenzo Bernini, Monument to Pope Alexander VII, 1671-78. Uncredited photo via Turn Back to God.

Lost in translation--accidentally on purpose

Medieval boy bishop. From Full Homely Divinity.

One of the happy bloggers (including James Pethokoukis) who spent the weekend trying to prove that Pope Francis didn't attack "trickle-down" economic theory in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium was Phil Lawler at CatholicCulture, who used Google Translate (!) to show that the Vatican-authorized English version of ¶54,

54. In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world...

was not what Francis meant, but an erroneous translation of the Spanish original