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

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.

It was mortifying

Cilice, via Daily Mail.

From the Washington Post, via Doug at Balloon Juice:

After all three Masses on the weekend of Jan. 19-20, parishioners of St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Springfield, Ill., were handed a statement written by Bishop Thomas Paprocki. The bishop explained that St. Aloysius’ pastor, the Rev. Thomas Donovan, “is suffering from a psychological condition that manifests itself in self-bondage as a response to stress.”

The statement was a response to a 911 call in November by Donovan from the parish rectory. In it, the priest tells dispatchers he had placed himself in handcuffs and asks police to help free him. After the recording of Donovan’s 911 call rocketed across the Internet, Paprocki was in a unique situation. His priest had not done anything illegal, and yet he’d been found doing something most people would consider bizarre. In Paprocki’s 1,038-word response to parishioners, he took the unusual step of delving deep into Donovan’s psychological problem. With the priest’s consent, the statement includes a description of what Donovan’s own clinical therapist had diagnosed as “non-sexual self-bondage.”

Well, that explains everything.

Donovan’s hands were cuffed behind his back with the keyhole facing up, so he couldn’t unlock himself, according to the police report. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and “a leather bondage-type mask with a bar in his mouth.” The officers uncuffed Donovan, and asked if he needed medical attention. The priest said he was fine, he was alone, and that he “does this from time to time.”

It was a non-sexual leather bondage-type mask. The kind you wear for your non-sexual bondage stuff. Like, with your buddies from work. When there's nothing good on TV.

What, exactly, “this” was must have been the topic of conversation when Donovan was summoned to Paprocki’s office 11 days later. During that meeting, the bishop learned that Donovan was “mortified” by what happened, but insisted he’d been alone “the whole time of this incident,” and “denied that there was any sexual component to this,” according to Paprocki’s statement.

OK, that's clear, then. There is not any sexual component to this, or "this".

The bishop said that after a review of Donovan’s “work and lifestyle patterns,” the diocese had found he “severely-compromised patterns of self-care with respect to diet, exercise, sleep, work hours, and unreasonable expectations of himself as a pastor.” Such patterns, the bishop continued, can lead a person to self-medicate. Sometimes that comes in the form of alcohol, drugs, gambling or pornography. In Donovan’s case, according to an unnamed therapist the bishop cited, stress reduction came in the form of self-bondage.

Oh, snap! Back up there a minute! Did you say "mortified"? As in "mortification of the flesh"? But that's totally normal, right? It's not sexual if it's theological. It's like the hair shirt and discipline, only hip. I mean, it's the 21st century, you can't expect a chap to go out to the desert and sit on a pillar. If he was mortified, that only means it was working, for goodness' sake!

Thaipusam, Georgetown, Penang, from RealMagick.

The life of the mother

Savita Halappanavar. Photo from The Irish Times.

On a Saturday night toward the end of October, Savita Halappanavar, 31, a dentist in Galway, found herself experiencing terrible back pain and other indications that she was having a miscarriage, in her 17th week of pregnancy. She went to University Hospital and asked that labor be induced, in effect asking for her pregnancy to be terminated, but the staff declined, saying that the fetus had a detectable heartbeat and that Ireland is "a Catholic country".

"They said unfortunately she can't because it's a Catholic country," Mr Halappanavar said. 

"Savita said to her she is not Catholic, she is Hindu, and why impose the law on her. 

"But she said 'I'm sorry, unfortunately it's a Catholic country' and it's the law that they can't abort when the foetus is live."

On the Wednesday the fetal heartbeat stopped, but by then it was too late; Savita Halappanavar died that Friday of the infection that was causing her miscarriage. There is little doubt that she would be alive if the hospital had done as she asked, possibly already looking forward to getting pregnant again—it was her first time, and her husband said she had been "on top of the world" about it.

Inquiries are ongoing, of course, as to whether anybody at Galway University Hospital was in fact in violation of Irish law, which has apparently become pretty complicated over years of priestly hypocrisy and cruelty (it seems to be an enshrined belief that prohibiting abortion does not interfere with women's rights because they can always get an abortion in England: I can just see Scalia selling that one to his colleagues, replacing England with Canada). I'm not at the moment interested in that at all.

What I'm interested in would be hearing from US Catholic bishops explaining to me their views on what happened here. Was it all part of God's plan that Savita Halappanavar should die so that the precious "life" of that "baby" could be prolonged for another four days? Should I focus on understanding that such regrettable events are "rare" and therefore don't need to be prevented? Or as an American should I rejoice that Savita Halappanavar died to protect the "religious freedom" of some hospital administrator to protect his (or hers perhaps, but I doubt it somehow) tender conscience instead of his patient?

All I can say is these people are lucky there's no afterlife with a vengeful Jesus in it, because if there were they would certainly be spending eternity in a very hot neighborhood.

From The Truth about Hell.

Cheap shots and chasers 4/6

Nun sequitur: According to Romney, Mrs. Romney

says that she’s going across the country and talking with women, and what they’re talking about is the debt that we’re leaving the next generation and the failure of this economy to put people back to work. She says that she talks to women and they’re concerned about the jobs that their kids are going to get. And they wonder whether their future is going to be prosperous and bright, as have been our lives. And that’s what they’re talking about. And the, my goodness, what the president has done, with regards to this issue on health care, he came in and said, look, under Obamacare, we’re going to tell the Catholic church that it has to violate its religious conscience… (Politico)

Because how are those kids going to get decent jobs if the bishops are all upset? What Romney is trying to do here is show his agreement with the postmodern feminist theory that logic is a patriarchal plot.

Nuns grading papers. From Upmag.net.

Incidentally, if you click the photo credit link you get to one of those hokey collections of kids' bloopers which are maybe too unsophisticated for you all, but not for me; it's purported answers to quiz questions on the Scriptures, and starts off

1. IN THE FIRST BOOK OF THE BIBLE, GUINESSIS. GOD GOT TIRED   OF CREATING THE WORLD SO HE TOOK THE SABBATHOFF.
2.  ADAM AND EVE WERE CREATED FROM AN APPLE TREE . NOAH’S WIFE WAS JOAN OF ARK. NOAH BUILT AND ARK AND THE ANIMALS CAME ON IN PEARS.
3. LOTS WIFE WAS A PILLAR  OF SALT DURING THE DAY, BUT A    BALL OF FIRE DURING THE  NIGHT.
4. THE JEWS WERE A PROUD  PEOPLE AND THROUGHOUT HISTORY THEY HAD TROUBLE WITH  UNSYMPATHETIC GENITALS.

"And opossu-umm in a pear tree". From Better Homes and Gardens Nature's Garden.

 I got some snail mail from Common Cause inviting me to join in (i.e., help pay for) a movement to "take back our democracy".  I do not really love this hysterically bipartisan organization anyway, and I was a little taken aback myself by the Republicanity of the expression. But I also couldn't help thinking, "I got this democracy on sale last week but it didn't really fit... I think I have the receipt..."

Librairie Libo, Luxembourg.

Amazon has reportedly been doing some tax dodging of its own in the United Kingdom, managing to make £7.6 billion in sales over the last three years without paying any corporate income tax.... 

Amazon was able to pull this bit of tax trickery by registering all of its corporate profits in Luxembourg, a notorious corporate tax haven, calling its UK business simply a delivery service. (Think Progress)

Right—UK customers were so fussy about making the drive to Luxembourg to pick up their copy of The Hunger Games...

Michigan governor Rick Snyder leaps ahead of stiff competition from Maine, Florida, and Wisconsin in the Republican gubernatorial fascism stakes with the news—broken last night by Rachel Maddow, it seems (via Eclectablog at Kos)—that the Michigan legislature has passed practically all of its legislation this year as emergency legislation with immediate effect, by ignoring a constitutional requirement for a two-thirds majority. It's the Midwest's first illegal dictatorship!

Cheap shots and chasers 3/23

Willard Mitt Romney on electric cars (I think):

We all like wind and solar, but you can’t drive a car with a windmill on it.

Actually gas is just as bad. We tried putting an oil refinery on top of our old car, but then there was no room for the dog. How about ammonia, though?

Los Angeles. Photo by Daughter Number Three.

Bishop trivia:
The Bishop of Vienna from 1541 to 1552 was named Friedrich Nausea, a latinization of the original German family name, Grau (from grauen, to inspire dread, and cognate with the root of English gruesome). In 1551 he went to the Council of Trent, where he stood proudly for the congregation taking Holy Communion in both kinds and revocation of the rule of priestly celibacy, but died there without making it home. In 1897, they named a street in the Ottakring after him, Nauseagasse.

Friedrich Nausea, from Austria-Lexikon.

OMG, he literally broke Breitbart's heart!

I can't blame you if you don't remember, but a couple of weeks ago I said something about how a movie about James O'Keeffe would have to be one of those teen implausible-schemes-for-getting-laid farces? This turns out to be so much truer than I could possibly have imagined! Down to the date-rape drugs and purloined panties to show the guys!

Click the link to get the full story, but I want to note that in his suit to prevent the publication of the emails documenting his antics, he alleges

The Information further includes proprietary ideas for future video work and e-mail communication of a highly private nature including those concerning Plaintiffs romantic relationships. Plaintiffs statements on Twitter claim that the material is so provocative that it caused Andrew Breitbart to suffer a fatal heart attack.

Attaturk got the scoop on this yesterday, the swine. My version has more emotional depth, though.

There's something about a bishop...

There's something about a bishop...
There's something about a bishop that is
comical but at the same time deeply unnerving.

From Flavius Josephus, at Byzantine, Texas. The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

Bulgaria's commission charged with announcing the names of people who collaborated with the country's former communist-era secret services announced on January 17 2012 that 11 out of 15 members of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church's governing body, the Holy Synod, had worked for State Security....

Galaktikon was agent Misho; Domitian, agent Dobrev; Ignatii, agent Penev; Yoanikii, agent Kirilevich; Grigorii, agent Vanyo; Yosif, agent Nikolov; [jump]