Notes on Christianism

Still from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il Vangelo di Matteo (1964), via a blog called "El Primo de Marty Feldman".

So Cardinal Cordileone ("Lion's Heart") has excommunicated Speaker Pelosi, at least when she's in San Francisco—I don't suppose he can stop priests elsewhere from ministering to her—over her support for laws permitting abortion in a society that is 78% non-Catholic. 

Excommunication seems pretty crazy to me all the way around. It's not like shunning, where the criminal is sent into complete social exile. Excommunicated Catholics remain legally part of the community, they're even expected to attend Mass like everybody else, but they're barred from the sacraments, remaining in their seats while the congregation goes up to receive communion. It occurs to me that that is exactly the opposite of what happens in the Gospel narrative, as Matthew tells it: during the Passover seder service on the evening before his death, Jesus literally hears Judas's confession (though Judas doesn't realize he's confessing)

It's Complicated, Ross

 

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, has a new complaint, or meta-complaint, above and beyond the usual ones that liberals are too permissive about sex (1960s hippie edition) or not permissive enough (2010s feminism)—that we can't make up our minds between the two at all ("Can the Left Regulate Sex?"):

in its retreat from the Polanski era, its concession that sometimes it’s OK to forbid, cultural progressivism entered into a long internal struggle over what its goal ought to be — to maximize permissiveness with some minimalist taboos (no rape, no sex with children) or to devise a broader set of sexual regulations that would reflect egalitarian and feminist values rather than religious ones.

This tension is visible all over recent history. The mood in which liberals defended Bill Clinton’s philandering was an example of the more permissive option. The mood of the #MeToo era, which condemned cads as well as rapists, is an example of the more regulatory approach.

Taken for granted that "we" literally have to "regulate sex", because

Through Plague Eyes: David Brooks and Solidarity Forever

I was starting to worry about David Brooks, who's been filing his copy on time ever since he got married but didn't seem to have shown up last night the last time I looked, but my phone says his column went online by 8:00 PM, and he seems to have recovered from the sense of dread he was showing last week, of the world relapsing into Hobbesian savagery; now he's as jaunty as Mrs. Miniver getting the family ready for an air raid ("Screw This Virus!"):

While we’re at it, screw certainty. Over the past few weeks I’ve been bingeing on commentary from people predicting how long this is going to last and how bad it’s going to be. The authors seem really smart and their data sets seem really terrible.

I’m beginning to appreciate the wisdom that cancer patients share: We just can’t know. Don’t expect life to be predictable or fair. Don’t try to tame the situation with some feel-good lie or confident prediction. Embrace the uncertainty of this whole life-or-death deal.

Screw the grim data sets and the feel-good lies. Make it a threesome!

Cathedral

Parvis of the cathedral in 1699, via Wikimedia Commons.

As Twitter watched the cathedral burn, I was glued to it, teary-eyed sometimes, and found myself startled every so often by a message from some big head person offering condolences to the Roman Catholic church or to French Catholics in particular, generally from a conservative standpoint:

Notre Dame is an iconic symbol of faith to people all over the world – and it is heartbreaking to see a house of God in flames. Our thoughts and prayers are with the firefighters on the scene and all the people of Paris. https://t.co/5Pecbf02em

— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) April 15, 2019

I'm like really? That's the heartbreak?

And sometimes really offensively, as in the case of young Ben Shapiro, who had to be spoken to sharply:

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.

For the Record: Can you name one rightwing group persecuted by Hitler?

Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1883, The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer, via Wikipedia.

Yes, because Hitler was right wing who killed leftists and he can't name a single RW group the Nazis targeted. #TheBigLie

— 🃏The Joker 🃏🏴 (@ATrueJoker) October 5, 2017

Yes, I can! Hitler targeted the churches and imprisoned or killed innumerable Christians who resisted Nazism in the name of their faith https://t.co/SxzyEWz1Pz

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) October 6, 2017

I love that. "I can so!"

But can he? It's true that most of the 2,720 clergy imprisoned at Dachau (of 160,000 prisoners total, over 100,000 of them political prisoners) were Catholic priests, but I don't find any record of any of them being killed, while Nazis killed between 80,000 and 200,000 Freemasons and 2,500-5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses (because of their refusal to swear fealty to the Reich)...

Wait, you define Christianity as "a rightwing group"?

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":

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.

Happy National Review Year

St. Jean-Baptiste Vianney (1786-1859), curé d'Ars, who wrote: "We cannot dwell upon the conduct of the Jews, my dear people, without being struck with amazement. These very people had waited for God for four thousand years, they had prayed much because of the great desire they had to receive Him, and yet when He came, He could not find a single person to give Him the poorest lodging. The all-powerful God was obliged to make His dwelling with the animals. And yet, my dear people, I find in the conduct of the Jews, criminal as it was, not a subject for explanations, but a theme for the condemnation of the conduct of the majority of Christians. We can see that the Jews had formed an idea of their Redeemer which did not conform with the state of austerity in which He appeared. It seemed as if they could not persuade themselves that this could indeed be He who was to be their Saviour; St. Paul tells us very clearly that if the Jews had recognised Him as God, they would never have put Him to death. There is, then, some small excuse for the Jews [Well, that's very white of you, Father, as they say]. But what excuse can we make, my dear brethren, for the coldness and the contempt which we [i.e., Christians] show towards Jesus Christ?" 

In the Kathryn Jean Lopez interview technique, as I understand it, there is no actual interview; the subject emails her a list of prepared things she wants to say and then Lopez writes a set of questions for each, to make it look as if an interview had taken place. What I like to do (well, what I did once, anyway) is just print (some of) the questions without answers, and then wonder what drugs she's on.

Today's is from an interview with Kathleen Beckman, author of Praying for Priests: A Mission for the New Evangelization (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2014):

Many are called, but few are Douthat

St. Ross, Pandit and Martyr. MockPaperScissors, August 2010.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is shocked! shocked! to find that the Roman Catholic Church is not a democracy like the Muslim ummah in which it's OK to toss out takfiri accusations, as he's been doing in the direction of the Pope recently, sometimes subtly as in that column, sometimes pretty out there on Twitter:

@DouthatNYT Please be careful throwing around a word like "heresy." That is an extremely serious accusation and in this case unfounded.

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) October 23, 2015

Pretty comical, considering that his complaint seems to be that the church may be heading down a path that's not authoritarian enough in its approach to sinners such as the divorced. Now a brief letter from 55 distinguished Catholic theologians at US academic institutions has appeared complaining to the New York Times about the conduct of their ill-bred and untrained employee, and today's column is a lengthy reply to that:

I have great respect for your vocation. Let me try to explain mine.

He has a vocation! Isn't that special! He didn't just fall into opinionating, he was called to it.

I believe the Blessed Virgin appeared to him in a dream: "There are many ways of serving me, Ross; yours is to kvetch about the decadence and depravity of the times in The Times, on a weekly or biweekly basis."

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.

TWDNAASPUOHNTDSC rights! The struggle continues!

Move over black people, women, people with religions requiring them to wear special head coverings or smoke exotic substances, persons with disabilities, there's a new victim in town, cruelly ostracized by an unfeeling, narrow-minded society.

Senate Democrats are pushing an Equality Bill that says it is meant to add two new categories to the protected classes under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, sexual orientation and gender identity, but Andrew T. Walker of Ryan T. Anderson's Public Discourse blog finds that the actual secret intent of the bill is the opposite: far from protecting one oppressed group, it takes protections away from somebody else:

How dishonest is Ross Douthat? A charitable view

Fernando Botero, Nuncio (1970). WikiArt. 

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, leaps as is his wont to the defense of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops against an affront by the sociologist Robert Putnam:

“Over the last 30 years,” Harvard’s Robert Putnam told The Washington Post, “most organized religion has focused on issues regarding sexual morality, such as abortion, gay marriage, all of those. I’m not saying if that’s good or bad, but that’s what they’ve been using all their resources for ... It’s been entirely focused on issues of homosexuality and contraception and not at all focused on issues of poverty.”

Worse, President Obama, speaking alongside Putnam at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown University, seemed to agree with him:

Maybe not *all* roads lead to Rome...

...but you could think of it as a theorem in Traveling Salesman math, the Douthat Conjecture, that you can find an 800-word route to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops from any subject, however remote.

Shorter Ross Douthat, "Checking Charlie Hebdo's Privilege", New York Times, April 18 2015:

If Garry Trudeau really thinks satirists ought to punch up at the powerful and not down at the downtrodden, how come liberals are always making fun of millions of aborted fetuses?

Image by Kate Tiedrich via AwkwardZombie.

Patron of copy editors

John XXIII was immaculately conceived?

Mosaic from the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception of Pope Saint John XXIII https://t.co/bBbGNYViny
— Fr Lawrence Lew OP (@LawrenceOP) October 11, 2014

And is it "Pope Saint" or "Saint Pope"?

Hobbyist Lobbyists

Dobby Lobby pic.twitter.com/nvXsPsALSW
— Imani ABL (@AngryBlackLady) July 3, 2014

So much great stuff has been written about the Hobby Lobbyists—an awful lot of it at the sites you can visit by clicking over there on the right—that there isn't much left for me to say, but there are a few things.

1
Once again, as I've been patiently explaining for quite a while now, companies are not paying for contraception. They are saving the costs of unintended pregnancies, [jump]

The Devil his due

"Young Goodman Brown", from PowerPop Comics.

So remind me, Kathryn Jean, about where you stand on the vital importance of religious freedom in our exceptional country, where our Founding Fathers understood so deeply how important it is to protect the bishop/CEO from having any portion of any check cut by his accountant go to lowering the price on some nurse's aide's IUD?

Ah, yes, on the Black Mass planned for the Queen's Head Pub on the Harvard campus, as disapproved by Harvard Divinity Professor Father Francis X. Clooney:

Flourishing-Like-Ours and the Philosopher's Stones

Saint Jerome Extracting a Thorn from a Lion's Paw, second quarter of 15th century. Master of the Murano Gradual (Italian, active about 1430–1460). Tempera and gold leaf on parchment. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 106, recto.

Did you know that if you were a large and distinguished Roman Catholic educational institution providing health insurance to 1,700 employees and 9,369 students, and that insurance included coverage not just for family planning but also abortion, God might not instantly condemn you to an eternity of punishment?

Well, I thought so too (indeed I have sometimes thought it might be the other way around), but I didn't have any proof until I read in today's Times about Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a great Jesuit school whose trustees are currently debating whether to eliminate that abortion coverage (not the contraception coverage, which they must provide by law, thanks to Obamacare and no thanks to the US bishops).

“Part of the university’s mission is to promote justice,” Professor [Christopher] Kaczor said. “And in the Catholic tradition, abortion is considered a justice issue. So to say the university supports justice and then also pay for abortions is a contradiction.”

That certainly sounds pretty Jesuitical to me; it's true, though, that the Catholic tradition considers abortion a justice issue, if by "the Catholic tradition" you mean Christopher Kaczor's 2010 book

The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice (Routledge Annals of Bioethics)

because according to the publisher's blurb the idea of making abortion a justice issue is not what you might call a tradition but a whole new thing Appealing to reason rather than religious belief"; and a short version of the argument is nothing but the symbol-soup of philosophical Ratzingerism:

I develop a rational justification for the view that all human beings, including the unborn, should be respected and accorded equal basic rights by virtue of sharing in flourishing-like-ours with other normal adult human beings, because of our genetic orientation to rational agency, and in light of the kind of being that we are rather than simply the sort of activity we are capable of at this time or that. 

Just saying, New York Times, that even when interviewing professors of philosophical ethics you need to ask whether they have an agenda.

I hope the school does keep its benefits as they are, but even if they don't, it was a beautiful experiment in how to be Catholic in the original sense.

Chart by Google.

The Anti-Person Movement

Sunday morning spirituality:

Occurred to me listening to a beautifully done NPR story on the desire for death from the point of view of a hospice director: the "pro-life" movement in its coherent Roman Catholic form (opposing also death as a punishment for crime, as opposed to the incoherent redneck Protestant version which is only about punishing women) is really an anti-person movement, valuing the abstract property of "life itself" over the concrete living human.

Thus it doesn't just give preference to the fetus, an organism incapable of love or judgment hooked up to a natural feeding tube, over the woman carrying it; but also to the "livingness" of the person over the person him- or herself, regardless of whether it is of value to that person or not. The pro-life movement doesn't care how much you're suffering—it cares about whether God would be insulted by your making the decision for Him.

Boceto para la Muerte de San José. Francisco Goya, ca 1787. Wikipedia.

And it's of a piece with the great exception to the Catholic reverence for life, which is in the conduct of your "just war". Human life must take a back seat to something more abstract still, the lives of states (and states in turn should yield to the greatest corporate entity of the Church, the "mystical body"—i.e., not a real physical body—of Christ).

It's a coherent view, but it's wrong. And creepy. And informed not by charity, caritas, but contempt.